GSB 2 Beta - Most glaring issues

OK, so after lurking on these boards for nearly half a decade, I thought it was finally time to make an account and get stuck in with helping to smooth out the beta. I was going to play around with it a bit longer before posting these first impressions, but there were a couple of issues which so jumped out at me that I had to come here immediately.

First of all, the first time I initiated a battle, the loading screen stopped. Just… stopped (while claiming to be caching a particular type of ship). Alt-tabbing gave me an error message that a particular class of ship ( I forget which,but it was the one it was caching) had not been “drawn”, and I had to close the game and boot it up again to get to the same place. This time, the loading screen did the same thing, forcing to restart the game yet again. Thing is, the game claimed to have loaded a couple of percent more than the first time, and complained about a different type of ship, and, indeed, after about ten or so attempts, the battle actually worked, and never did the same thing again (for that specific battle). Moving on to the next battle, the same thing happened, but not nearly as many times and, crucially, did NOT have to crash for any of the custom ships I’d made, whereas it DID for the tutorial ships given to me for the first battle. It seems the game just doesn’t like the preset ship designs.

The other thing is that the lighting effects are, quite frankly, bizarre at this stage. Having the bloom effect on turned any custom ships I made glow permanently, and while turning it off fixed that, it did not change the fact that when zoomed in on an exploding ship, the screen-whitening effect lasts about ten seconds too long. Finally, the shadows don’t seem to be working properly, as they appear as big ugly boxes, as if every inch of available space on the visual editor were filled in.

On a more positive note, the game appears to be very promising for a beta, and I have every confidence that these issues will be resolved by full release.

Hi there! thanks for the early feedback :smiley:
That loading bug you mention is of course all my fault :frowning: If you run the game as administrator it wont happen. basically when saving out the AI ship visual data, it has to write to the program files folder (it shouldn’t have to, this is my bug), and non-admin rights wont allow that. Once thats all been done, it doesn’t happen again, and its fine for player ships.
Sorry about that :smiley:

You can edit the in-battle bloom up and down to your tastes using [ and ]. It should look like the screenshots and videos. if it doesn’t, please post a screenshot here for me to scrutinize for possible engine bugs.

The shadows sound like they are just broken for your setup, again could you post a screenshot, along with video card specs, and it possible, a dump from \my documents\my games\gratuitous space battles 2\debug\drawdebug.txt

Hope you can still enjoy it! (you can also turn shadows off for you if they are bugged).

First of all, an apology - more astute observation on my part would have revealed that only the preset ships have boxy shadows, as shown here. My custom bismarck gunships look fine, but the tutorial fighters have gross square shadows.

This next one is what happens for ten whole seconds when a ship blows up, with the bloom turned off.

I would have uploaded the debug file you requested, but I’m apparently not allowed to just upload the raw .txt, so if you’d let me know the preferred format, I’ll get on it.
As for my GPU:
AMD Radeon R9 280
Clock speed 827 MHz
Turbo clock speed 933 MHz
Memory clock speed 1,250 MHz
Effective memory clock speed 5,000 MHz
Memory bus 384 bit
Memory 3,072 MB
Memory type GDDR5
Shading units 1,792
Texture mapping units 112
Render output processors 32
Compute units 28
Pixel rate 26.5 GPixel/s
Texture rate 92.6 GTexel/s
Floating-point performance 2,964 GFLOPS

Thank you very much for the rapid response - it is very much appreciated, I can assure you.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention - going to the ship editor by right-clicking a ship on the deployment screen and selecting ‘edit’ causes the crashing problem I mentioned in my first post. However, this crash happens every time I use it, apart from when running the game as an administrator, which fixes both crashes.

Hi, could you email me at cliff AT positech dot co dot uk, and attach all the files in that debug folder?
Also, if you know the name of the ship that has a broken shadow, and you look in
\my documents\my games\gratuitous space battles 2\composites
you will find a file called (for example)

problematicship_shadow.dds

Could you add that to the email too?
Thanks

Have you got anywhere with the weird overlong white screen on explosion I mentioned? I just realise that it’s possible it got forgotten about what with all my other issues.

Are you maybe fighting with ships that are just hulls and have no added components?

No. It was just something I slapped together to test the shadows, but it was still a functioning hull with crew, power, engines, weapons and a carrier bay. I didn’t bother with armour or shields, and it was a dreadnought hull, if it matters.

But was it just a basic hull without you adding visual components in the visual editor?

OK, I fiddled about with the graphics settings for a bit and I’ve discovered that this only happens when bloom is turned OFF. And it’s not a problem that’s particular to any specific ship; it happens just about anytime something gets hit if the camera is more than 50% zoomed in. Anyway, this can afford to be low priority for now, as I can work around it by having the bloom on but setting it to minimum.

As a suggestion for the interim until Cliff can squash this bug, I suggest that you place a widget on the hull (any widget)

For Example:
If the Core Hull ship does not have any lights to flicker the hull will appear bright and flicker. But once you add any widget the hull brightness and flickering disappear (even when Bloom and light flicker is enabled)

In this image, it is the same hull each time, the only difference in the design is one has wings and the other has a crew deck. (I did not change the colour)

Hi, thanks for spotting it happens only with bloom off, that will be a great help in fixing it. I can well imagine I screwed something up there :smiley:

Yeah, but look at this: the dreadnought is covered in a whole bunch of guff and parts of it are STILL glowing weirdly.


That F1_complex5 is rotating at top speed, if it matters.
Could it have something to do with the darkness of the colours? As shown here, the white bits are still ludicrously bright, the yellow bit is abnormally bright and the blue almost looks like it’s supposed to.

I encountered this bug with a fleet completely full of frigates that had just modules, with no visual upgrades on the hulls.