Ship models become huge, covering the whole system

[Tronski]

At seemingly random points in the game, it appears that a ship model is suddenly rendered at such a huge scale that the whole system is covered by it. If I restart the game, it gets fixed, but it happens so often (every couple of turns) that it basically becomes unplayable.

See for example the screenshot here[i.imgur.com]. I've also had it happen a couple of times during battles.

I found this bug mentioned in the list of known bugs[wiki.spaceempires.net]:

Resizes: When one ship spawn in a new system, after it went throught a warp point, it´s bigger than the system and cover all.

Is what I experience what this bug refers to? Is there any way to fix it? I've played around with all kinds of graphics settings already (NVidia control panel), to no avail.

[Jambie Lionheart]

I got lotsa questions for ya.

First of all, What Version of Space empires V are you using? My own current version is 1.79 and most other players should be too. I noticed the bug is from patch 1.74.

Second, what are you system specs? Are you using a lappie or a desktop? What is your brand, graphics card, make and clock speed of your CPU, sound card and graphics card. Need all of that, also include OS make and version, (EG I have a windows 10).

Third, are you running any compatibility settings? If yes, include exactly what compatability settings you're using for Space empires V. All of them, no matter how insignificant.

Also, have you tried playing around with the games settings? You might be able to solve the problem by changing the T&L graphics settings for the game (Can't promise, but sounds like problem might be related).

[Tronski]

Thanks for your reply.

I play 1.79 indeed, as installed by Steam.

I play on a desktop with a Core i5 6600 and an NVidia GTX 970 (all running at stock settings), using Windows 10.

Following the advice from here, I did turn on Windows XP compatibility initially, but in my attempts to fix this graphics bug, I disabled it since and noticed it doesn't seem to make any difference (except there's no more UAC prompt when starting the game). I had also checked the box to deactivate fullscreen optimizations before when I still used compatibility mode.

I tried both the T&L and standard Direct3D HAL, made no difference either. I even went so far as to use the DirectX to OpenGL wrapper from here[fdossena.com], which I saw recommended in this guide. But using the suggested approach to replace the DirectX 9 DLL made no apparent difference, and when I tried wrapping DDraw.dll, I could indeed select new devices in the SE V setup (WineD3D something), but that came with another graphics problem where about half of all captions were missing.

Last night I made one last attempt with a lower screen resolution and I already thought it had been fixed since it didn't reoccur for almost 10 turns during which I only issued a few commands to speed things up. But when I then played for real again, it happened after only 2 or 3 turns. One difference was that I didn't discover any new sectors in my test run, and the bug appeared just after a ship had entered a new sector. Maybe I'm overinterpreting things here because I didn't verify yet that it _never_ happens while not entering new systems, but that seems to be in line with the bug description I quoted above.

[Jambie Lionheart]

If you tell me your game set up settings for sight and exploration, I can recommend a few settings that'll help you test your theory accurately.

A lot of those people giving online suggestions are using pcs with different hardware/software and therefore different specs. So a solution for one isn't always or even often a solution to all.

I recon though that if you've done all of that research on the problem and still come up short, then I highly doubt the problem is either your pc or game settings. It probably has something to do with the way the game engine interacts with you graphics card/adapter; even perhaps your compie screen (though doubtful). It's prolly not the OS since it's degree of function and buggyness varies greatly from different users of the same OS.

I had similar issues on my older pcs with various games including SEV. On my old Windows seven, it purred like a kitten, no problems at all. Then on my windows 8.1 I'd get that infamous flicker of light on my screen. Could never get rid of that. On a different windows 8.1 though I never had an issue with the flicker, but the game was unplayable because in the ship designer, I could never see the components in the left side menu or any of the writing in the ship designer menus. Everything else about the game was perfect though as far as I knew >.> Not that I got far past turn 3 with no ship designer.
I could change the game T&L settings to make all of that visible, but in exchange it would cause different issues, such as the physical structure of the design would be invisible along with the placement hexes; similar to the change in issues with some fixes you experienced.

It couuuld even be something as simple as your anti-virus program getting gittery about that one process during game play.

If you want the problem fixed and are particularly fond of this game then I'd recommend changing your compies hardware, possibly even the CPU (which means a new motherboard at least)
Not always a possible option because of expense, obviously, buuut I currently have a windows 10 operating system with an i7-8750H cpu
and a Nvidia 1060 with max-Q design.
I'm not quite techy enough to know what that stands for exactly but they're all on stock settings too and my SEV runs beautifully for me on my Dell G7 7588 lappie.

If you can't or won't do that though then perhaps we can try and find a work around through testing out your game.

[Tronski]

I played on for some more time, prepared to restart frequently (I didn't mention before yet: when that graphics glitch occured, merely reloading the game wasn't possible anymore because the whole system display still remained screwed after that). Eventually, I reached a point where it did not occur anymore at all for several dozen turns. Due to trades with other empires, I had revealed most systems then. So *maybe* there is a link here.

But I have to admit that I did give up on the game for now anyway: while performance in general is just fine for me, opening the planets or systems list with a much larger number of known entries is a real test of patience. I haven't discovered even half of the quadrant yet, but it already takes like 5-10 seconds. I can only imagine that this is due to some DirectDraw problems, too. :-(