Bug: Text disappears

[SoeldnerJack]

Since the last update I get the problem that all text disappears
I can play a mode normal, but after going back to the menu, all text is gone, even when I get to a new mode, no text on anything
I have to restart the game to play normal again

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/258209380333494547/8828E1726D57DDA410DD9F771A9174BAC91F6E25/

System: Win 7 64bit, I7 4790K, 32GB Ram, GTX 980 4GB VRam

Sry for bad english

[[RUST]Grumplestiltskin]

Yikes. This feels like an engine bug.... I will look into it.

[Morten]

Same. Happened after being in the indoor range, going back to the menu, then into the breaching prototype.

[CukyDoh]

Similar here, often see it with something like going to a map, back to menu, then to a map again, e.g. the breach prototype. Text disappears from the main menu and the gunplay map. Might be 100% reproduction, I havent spent much time testing this patch as I was waiting for a fix for this. :)

Note: I don't recall seeing it before the latest patch (Fri 10th), and I play the game pretty regularly.

[[RUST]Grumplestiltskin]

This is so confusing... I can't seem to repro it on my machine, but its happening for a bunch of folk.... *tears hair out*

[CukyDoh]

Still persists with the latest update as far as I can see. Saw it this morning - Booted up, went into the breach scene and killed a couple of Clunker waves then returned to the menu and a couple of option texts were missing. Used a few guns, used a few addons, tweaked sight ranges,"died", etc.

I'll try again later today and see if I can nail a 100% repro. Don't think its relevant, but pc and install details as I didn't post them last time:

Fairly fresh install of Win 10 Pro x64
GTX 980 on 368.39 driver
i7-3820
16gb ram
*Not* opted into SteamVR beta
Verified H3VR local game cache through Steam

Happy to run any kind of debugging or logging builds you want to throw out, feel free to shout me on Steam. Possibly my favourite title on the Vive right now so want to see this fixed! :)

[CukyDoh]

I've made a video with a 100% (8/8 tries) repro for me, I'll upload it to Youtube and edit this post when it's up. My guess is something to do with pooling the floating text widgets? It seems to only happen when I made and destroy a lot of scopes, adjust their ranges etc and eventually strings stop appearing from that limit onwards. I have no doubt a lot of steps in my repro are unrelated and its just the act of doing anything that's causing whatever leak/limit to be hit but want to include all details just in case.

EDIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WakZazAh1Fg

So what I do in the video is:
1* Start the game.
2* Start the breach level.
3* Spawn a UMP45.
4* Spawn both holo sights and all three red dot sights.
5* Put the tall red dot sight on the UMP.
6* Adjust the sight range to 10m, then back to 5m.
7* Drop the gun.
8* Spawn Clunk patrol.
9* Back out to main menu.
10* Repeat steps 2 to 9.

At this point part of my main menu disappears, then just about anything afterwards has all text missing too. Hope this helps track it down, good luck! :D

[[RUST]Grumplestiltskin]

Hmm... I'm wondering if this is a driver issue. I'm on a TitanX on 361, and I can't manage to repro this in editor, local build, or downloaded Steam build. I followed your instructions to the letter, and even did some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ things like spawing 40 amplifiers, and putting them on guns til my framerate died, then backing out to menu. No dice....

I will talk with my gfx programmer friend when he returns from a trip this week. The occam's razor is that this problem has _something_ to do with the attachements that were added. Perhaps something like a stencil buffer isn't getting reset.

Thanks for your help on narrowing a repro. I will have others test this set of steps.

[CukyDoh]

I'll try some other drivers when I get a chance and see if it makes a difference. If I dont report back it didnt :D

Opinion: You should update your drivers as 361 is about 5 months old! A lot of more recent games rely on the updates so I'd hope most users will be on recent versions as games like e.g. Mirror's Edge give you an update prompt on startup. You can always give the default PC gaming advice of "Make sure you're on the latest driver" but near impossible to say "Use this specific one for this specific device for this specific game". That said if there's a bug of course it'd be good to know so Nvidia can address it! :)

[CukyDoh]

So I tried running with 361.91 and still had the issue with the same steps. I did have to run one additional loop versus earlier, but that might be any assortment of issues :)

After having no luck with drivers I grabbed a RenderDoc[renderdoc.org] capture before and after the corruption and a quick skim of the events tells enough to chase this down I think:
http://imgur.com/a/8GVNJ

Analysis/thought process:

• We can see that in the third launch the string glyphs dont actually draw, but the draw event is still issuing 264 vertices, so it still made and draws string, but it's failing to generate the quads.
  
  
• The mesh preview shows that on vertex 154 it orignally has decent position and uv data so that it's reading from the correct letter in the font cache texture, but after a few launches that data becomes a default mid value and the quads disappear. This happens for the entire second string's verts.
  
  
• So the real potential clue is the font cache texture itself, it's looking pretty full after multiple launches and I assume needs some sort of flushing for the strings no longer in use, defragging or perhaps just a periodic full redraw when multiple strings pass through the GC.
  
  
• Matching up the data we can see that the missing strings are likely because they couldn't add themselves to the cache and so what seems to happen is that when it fills in the string quad data it just sets a default position to draw on a single point - Drawing effectively no string (actually infinitely small) because it couldnt get all its character data correctly.

So that's what I guessed earlier when I suggested some sort of pooling/leak issue. It seemed a bit too reliable to reproduce for a specific-version driver issue and definitely hinted at something filling up and running out with the way it manifested. Always being the same strings disappearing in the same order suggested creation orders to me. Seems likely this was going to happen as more unique items were added rather than the sights specifically in the end, they just happened to be a good case because of the range adjust text in there too.

Actual error:

I'd have expected a pretty hefty warning or error when this is happening, and heading back to the game's log once I'd realised this, I indeed found the error being spammed:

Originally posted by output_log.txt:

(Filename: Line: 1655)
Failed to update dynamic font (AILERON-BOLD) texture; all the needed characters do not fit onto a single texture (max size 4096). Try using less text or a smaller font size.

(Filename: Line: 501)
Failed to update dynamic font (AILERON-BOLD) texture; all the needed characters do not fit onto a single texture (max size 4096). Try using less text or a smaller font size.

In hindsight, looking in the log should have been step one! I wasn't aware there was one being written until I went hunting.

I'm wondering if that's just an inefficiency of the method being used though as its duplicating letters between font sizes amongst other things, so thats pretty wasteful especially for such closely related sizes. There'd be little wrong with scaling such a small amount and even less so with a decent filter in place like the SDF method published several years back. More than anything it just needs flushing or run-time sorting in some form.

Anyway, hope my analysis helped to some degree. :)

[[RUST] Wrstscrnnm6]

https://m.popkey.co/87529e/kdk5l.gif

[[RUST]Grumplestiltskin]

Hoooooooooooly ♥♥♥♥. You are my hero Clunkydoh. I typed that error in, and immediately found other folks running into this problem. You know who's fault this likely is? The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who wrote NGUI who Unity hired for a while to write their newer POS GUI system.

At least I know how I can approach this problem. I will add to my todo list lowering the scaling on all gui text (or possibly just replace non-changing text with fing textures).

GAH, this is so infuriating I almost shattered my glass in my hand.

Seriously though, thank you SO much. I would have never guessed this was the issue, and I've never used anything like RenderDoc, so would have never found the problem on my own. You are a life saver. Can you plz ping me on reddit (rust_anton) with your name (and proof that it's you, in case someone pretends to be you in a reddit message), so I can put your name on our eventual 'hall of thankyous' that's going to contain the name of everyone who's helped out along the production of the game?

*bows*

[CukyDoh]

Heh, no need to thank me. This is my most played Vive game by a long shot so helping track an awkward bug is the least I can do to give a little back. That said, the day I can hear this sound in H3VR will be a dream come true ;) https://youtu.be/aoBWUs8poYU?t=14

[Based Chadman]

Hell yes, we need the M1 Garand and the K98 in H3VR as quickly as possible with a WW2 themed range.