Mac: Graphics Issues Of Note

GSB2 Gratuitous Support [Official content only]
1

I haven’t taken the time to fully explore everything people have voiced so I apologise if any of the issues I note here haven been spotted, I’ve omitted the ones I’ve seen scanning the forum.

  1. A primary point of frustration for me as someone who enjoys the spectacle element of watching the battles unfold, is the fact it’s very apparent the turrets don’t appear in battle. IMPORTANT: Before this point is dismissed, I am aware the turrets issue seems to have been fixed for user ship designs saved using update 1.29. However the default enemy ship designs in the missions still feature this issue; no turret layers appearing - although any lighting effect elements do appear if it helps narrow it down. I thought originally it might have something to do with an issue with the rotating sections however this seems to have been fixed. I’m not sure how feasible it is to apply a fix to designs the game is using for enemy ships or if it’s better to start over.

  2. There has been in previous releases an issue with the exhaust components beyond the angle they’re rotated not transferring (which I see has been mentioned.) The issue I point out is some exhaust components apparently cease to appear once selected, and it seems to be connected to the number of exhaust components which appear in a design. You can select one and it functions normally, include a second and the exhaust graphic seems to “die out” - almost as if it’s jumping to some sort of process it’s supposed to one a ship becomes stationary. Again - if it’s fixed, I wonder if there is the possibility the issue will still remain for existing enemy ship designs, as they already look a little daft with only one side of their engines firing.

  3. Lost save designs is still a thing - not sure how much progress is being made on this.

  4. I think it would be very nice (within whatever prescribed limits the game is able to handle) to be able to design both opposing sides and formations and pit them against each other as opposed to having to do it just using single player with missions. Maybe I’m being insular in not wanting to go head-to-head with other people’s, but I think it’d be an interesting feature that shouldn’t be too hard to do.

Anyway - that’s it, fantastic piece of software - hope it goes from strength to strength.

2

Hiya, are you playing on PC mac or Linux? I’m pretty sure that in general the turrets on all ships are rendering correctly on PC, or I haven’t heard anyone else mention that this is not the case. i think it used to be an issue on mac, which AFAIK is fixed now?

3

Oh sorry I should have specified, this is being encountered on Mac - which as you say has been fixed as far as user-designed ships saved after the most recent updates. However, for the default enemy ship designs used by the game in the missions, (I imagine designed and saved prior to this fix) the turrets don’t render (save for lighting effects) displaying the same issue as before - so I don’t know if that’s helpful.

Also as an aesthetic point; I remember in GSB1 all the turrets regardless of ship class were a uniform size, whereas in GSB 2 the turrets seem to be proportional to the size of ship, so things like frigates have tiny little guns.

Maybe it’s just me, but I liked how plucky it made some of the smaller ships in GSB1 look having the same size guns as cruisers - that’s just me! ; )

4

Sorry: It’s also very apparent in the Mac version that enemy ships only target the dead centre of user ships. This means you’ll have a ship getting destroyed with only one tiny spot of visually represented damage right in the centre.

I remember in the previous GSB1 you’d varied the points at which fire would (be it beams or missiles) stop on the ship and where a damage texture would appear. Obviously it’s a little different for ships you’re letting other people design however it seems clear to me you at least made it possible for other points on the basic ship hulls to display damage textures in other places than the centre.

I don’t know if describing this is helpful or if should post screenshots.

5

Thats definitely a bug. Screenshots would help a lot. It sounds like when the game is saving out designs its not allowed to save out the target locations, which sounds to me a bit user-permissions related…
Its definitely working fine on PC.

6

I can verify that all targeting of ships on either side is only hitting the center of ships in the Mac version. I can clearly observe this even in the initial tutorial using the unmodified sample ships, so I am not sure that it is user permissions related unless the game needs to do some sort of writing out of even its sample ships. I felt like the game was missing something in the “gratuitous” aspect, and this is probably it. I just took a few screenshots using the button in the combat UI to show this.

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My machine stats: iMac 27" (late 2013), 3.5GHz Core i7 x4, GeForce GTX 780M 4GB graphics, 16GB RAM, OS X 10.10.3

I’d be happy to help in any way to debug this issue, as I’d very much like to experience the game as it is designed to look.

7

Yikes. Ok, I need to work out if its something about in-game code doing this, or the files getting written correctly.
If you look here

\gratuitous space battles 2\data\sampleships

There shouyld be a file called sample frigate.txt.
In there, is a section marked ‘targets’

It should look like this:

[targets]
0 = 0.1250,0.3750
1 = 0.1250,0.6250
2 = 0.3750,0.3750
3 = 0.3750,0.6250
4 = 0.3750,0.8750
5 = 0.6250,0.3750
6 = 0.6250,0.6250
7 = 0.6250,0.8750
8 = 0.8750,0.3750
9 = 0.8750,0.6250

Does it?

8

No, it doesn’t.

First off, my version of GSB2 was purchased from gog.com. The actual directory that seems to correspond to what you listed is nested within two packages, and ends up being located as follows:

/Applications/Gratuitous Space Battles 2/Contents/Resources/game/GSB2/Contents/Resources/data/sampleships

Assuming that is the correct location, the “sample frigate.txt” file within that folder (dated May 6 2015 7:45 AM) contains the following [targets] section:

[targets]
0 = 0.5000,0.5000

That’s it … just one line. The same thing is true for the sample fighter and sample cruiser files. The sample destroyer and sample dreadnought do contain more targets, but I was using neither of those types in my last tutorial battle … I will give the game a quick load right now and retry the tutorial using only those two ship types to see if there is an observable difference in the hit locations.

By the way, I also poked around in the default_ship_designs folder, and there seems to be some strangeness in there as well. For example, every single ship design in the zyrtari folder (from fighter up to dreadnaught) seems to have the same five targets:

[targets]
0 = 0.1667,0.5000
1 = 0.5000,0.1667
2 = 0.5000,0.5000
3 = 0.5000,0.8333
4 = 0.8333,0.5000

Meanwhile, in the yootan folder, every ship design also seems to have the same target list, albeit a much longer one (which seems strange for the fighters in particular):

[targets]
0 = 0.1875,0.4375
1 = 0.1875,0.5625
2 = 0.1875,0.6875
3 = 0.1875,0.8125
4 = 0.3125,0.5625
5 = 0.3125,0.6875
6 = 0.3125,0.8125
7 = 0.4375,0.0625
8 = 0.4375,0.1875
9 = 0.4375,0.3125
10 = 0.4375,0.4375
11 = 0.4375,0.5625
12 = 0.4375,0.6875
13 = 0.4375,0.8125
14 = 0.5625,0.0625
15 = 0.5625,0.1875
16 = 0.5625,0.3125
17 = 0.5625,0.4375
18 = 0.5625,0.5625
19 = 0.5625,0.6875
20 = 0.5625,0.8125
21 = 0.6875,0.5625
22 = 0.6875,0.6875
23 = 0.6875,0.8125
24 = 0.8125,0.4375
25 = 0.8125,0.5625
26 = 0.8125,0.6875
27 = 0.8125,0.8125

I’ll be back once I try a battle with sample dreadnaughts and destroyers.

9

Yep, these files are apparently involved to at least some degree … see the following screenshot of a sample dreadnaught being sacrificed for the greater good, with hits and fires all over the place:

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I didn’t get a screenshot of the destroyers burning because they died too fast thereafter, but they also were hit in a number of spots rather than just the center. I don’t know what ships the opponents in the tutorial are, so I can’t tell you if they have the same issue in their targets list. However it seems possible, since it is clear that my ships are only hitting a single center spot on them as well (as you can see from the earlier screenshots).

10

Moving bug thread to Gratuitous Support forum, where it should have originally been started.

11

We are currently investigating this…

12

Great to hear that … thanks much, and good hunting!

13

Ok this should be fixed, but it might be related to left over composite images.
If you find the user folder for Gratuitous Space Battles 2, you will find a folder in there called composites. Just empty the whole folder (its full of cached images). That should fix it.

14

I’m assuming that you mean the folder should be emptied in conjunction with applying a forthcoming patch that will contain other fixes for this, right? Just now I tried emptying the folder located at ~/Library/Application Support/GratuitousSpaceBattles2/composites and then reran the tutorial battle with my same version 1.29, and it didn’t make any difference (other than forcing the cache to be reloaded at the start of the battle).

In any event, thanks much for chasing it down … I am looking forward to having the full GSB2 experience on my Mac soon.

15

To hopefully close out this thread, 1.30 was posted to Gog.com today, and I have confirmed that it resolves the issue in the tutorial battle graphics. Thank you for the beautiful, wanton destruction!

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16

I think when you’re porting to or selling using any platform, you’ve got to equip yourself to make sure there’s parity in quality for them - otherwise it’ll bite you in the arse. Case in point; this fix doesn’t work for all.

Users with Macs purchasing through steam shall not find folders in their steam contents storing this sort of cached information that has to be gotten rid of. I don’t know whether to give up on this issue or not frankly - I can’t give you a financial incentive having paid for supposedly checked kit, and as much as Steam’s user agreement flies in the face of UK consumer law this is way too small an issue for anyone to be bothered.

Could you get someone with a mac machine to download this using Steam so you can verify it works to yourselves, see if there’s anything people can do on their machines to access the offending user files?