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Sep 26, 2001, 5:46pm

After downloading 3.2, I went immediately to my homebase on Mars to see how
things looked. When all the "items" had been reinstated, I looked around &
was stunned: many, many objects were invisible. I went to a dozen other
locations, & even GZ: the same, lots of missing or partially visible objects
(not little black triangles--you can select them, but you can't see them).
Even the Mars Ground was invisible.

So I went to Meta, to compare. Same problem, but weirder, because a lot of
building objects started out visible, yet, as "items" continued to load,
disappeared, or left only smeared ceilings or walls. (At least Meta's ground
was visible, even if a lot of its objects weren't.)

Following hallowed AW tradition, I exited & erased the Cache. No luck. Same
things went wrong again with both Mars and Meta. I went to the old Mars
Object Yard, & waited out the "items" loading: about 50% of the old Mars
objects were all or partially visible--most rocks, most air ships, most
tanks, most pipes, etc. Same at the Meta OY, except that some objects
appeared & then later disappeared or partially dissolved.

I'm running Windows ME, with a GeForce 2 Ultra card, 384MB RAM, set at
1024*768*16 colors: a typical setup these days. I didn't even have time to
fiddle with the 3.2 defaults. Did this happen to anyone in Beta? Are the
old-style Mars and Meta objects now obsolete?

Sep 26, 2001, 6:27pm

I also have a GeForce 2 Ultra card, and noticed this problem yesterday when
I was looking through AWTeen's object yard to see if any objects needed to
be changed. When using Direct3D, some objects were invisible, but under
OpenGL they were fine. After discussing the problem with Mountain Myst, who
could see things fine, I investigated and found out that the problem was
twofold: first, when I installed 3.2, DirectX was corrupted in some way.
Second, Nvidia released version 21.8 of its Detonator drivers on September
10. I reinstalled DirectX 8a and upgraded the drivers and the problem was
solved. The new drivers are even faster than the old ones.

-Brant

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Sep 26, 2001, 11:16pm

Nvidia cards = use OpenGL
3DFX cards = use DirectX

These are the interfaces that the cards were written for.
--
SW Chris
Eagle Scout, Philosopher, Peacemaker, and... Kung Fu Master?
http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame1.html

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Sep 27, 2001, 12:18am

Actually, with DirectX, I get framerates almost twice as high as OpenGL.
Using my GeForce 2 at AWTeen GZ with visibility set to 85 meters:

3.1: 10-12 fps
3.2 with directX: 20-22 fps
3.2 with OpenGL: 9-11fps

As you can see, using an Nvidia card, I get worse framerates with OpenGL
than I did even using 3.1.

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Sep 27, 2001, 12:29am

By the way, 200 meter visibility is most impressive when standing at AW GZ
(since it has a normal data limit, it's possible to set it to 200), and
panning around the entire immediate GZ chat range.

Don't try this unless you have at least a 1.5 GHz processor :)

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Sep 27, 2001, 12:34am

Thanks, Brant. I upgraded from DirectX 8.0 to 8.0a, but that didn't
help--maybe made things even worse. I'm using the Spring '01 release of the
Detonator Drivers for the graphics card, mainly because the latest release
makes it impossible to play a lot of current VR games. So I tried switching
to the OpenGL option--and the invisibility problem went away. Plus all the
textures reloaded a lot faster.

The GeForce Ultra series cards were famous for their ability to load vast
amounts of textures onto the card, instead of competing for access to
general memory like previously. I wonder if the new system is handling
textures right on the Ultra. Also, should texture-mipmapping be a default?
3.2 was supposed to make things easier for general AW users, not force
everyone to be computer geeks.

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Sep 27, 2001, 12:45am

For comparison, I'm getting 40-80 fps on Mars, mostly 50-60 fps, using the
OpenGL option.

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