Ships don't vanish quite right.

@Mace

I visited the AMD website and now i am a bit confused. I remember that the Omega drivers was a package from 3th party developers, not a officially driver package. But AMD calls his current Catalyst package as "Omega" drivers!? Do i misunderstand anything or have the wrong memories?
 
The omega drivers suite was done by a single person who tweaked the latest official drivers for both Nvidia and AMD, like the "rage underground" group did for ATi cards late 90's/early 2000's.

Omega drivers made itself a household name, like 3dguru or 3dfxfiles back in the day.

From what I understood, AMD has simple named named their software suite omega, and AFAIK there is no link to the oldschool omegadrivers.net site, and was actually mentioned by the webmaster that he did not build this driver set: http://omegadrivers.net/index.php?o...mega-drivers-1412&catid=54:amd-news&Itemid=84
 
Quarto said:
Well, I've experienced trouble in many cases with ATI cards - however, I'm not referring to difficulty with commercially available games (that hasn't happened for years), but rather with games in the course of development. When working on Dogfight 1942, each time we produced a build with any new graphical features, the programmers had to produce a special alternate executable and DLLs for me because of my ATI card. It goes without saying that the final release version was able to handle both NVidia and ATI, but in development, this wasn't a given. Most of the team used NVidia cards because that's what's most common. So every new feature was coded on an NVidia, and would either work or not work on ATI, we usually wouldn't know until somebody actually tried it. And of course, our graphics programmer was very experienced, and the moment a problem came up, he would usually figure out a solution very rapidly.
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I can verify this is a common issue. Generally speaking it's less of an issue with DirectX than OpenGL, but until alternatives like Vulcan come around it's awfully tempting to opt for OpenGL to share code between PC, Mac, mobile etc. Sometimes it's programmer error, whereas DirectX provides a new interface with each iteration, in OpenGL it remains possible to mix and match legacy code with new feature sets. The behavior in those circumstances is undefined, but nVidia drivers invariably tend to handle such cases far more gracefully.
That said I've also encountered ATI issues that are most definitely bugs. There's always a work around, but we've opted to use nVidia cards exclusively because our PC/Mac build is never likely to see the light of day.
 
Nearly a year since I started the thread, and I believe I discovered a workaround.

If you create a shortcut and add "-no_glsl" to the target line (without quotes) it seems to alleviate the symptoms, the only side effect seems to be a minor drop in framerate in populated missions such as the asteroid base mission.

I found this little gem on the Hard Light forums, some poor soul trying to run Freespace SCP on an intergrated Intel chip (in my experience that's ATI issues x1000)
 
The Crank said:
If you create a shortcut and add "-no_glsl" to the target line (without quotes) it seems to alleviate the symptoms, the only side effect seems to be a minor drop in framerate in populated missions such as the asteroid base mission.
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Very interesting. I will point MajorSpawn to your post.

Thanks for this information!
 
Hi Everyone

So a few years have gone by and I always come back to a problem, so after a little research over the past couple of days I think the case is properly solved.

I borrowed another recommendation from HL Forums, the tricky part was finding where "main-v.sdr" was in Saga's game files (it's in "Hermes_effects.vp" FYI) So they recommended removing "#ifdef __GLSL_CG_DATA_TYPES" and the following "#endif". So I extracted it, removed the aforementioned lines, recompiled the .vp with the new .sdr and it works as it should, GL shaders intact.

I'm no modder, so I have no idea how to turn this into a user friendly patch of sorts, but here's the file, you can use VP Mage to open "hermes_effects.vp" and replace the old "main-v.sdr"

Happy Saga-ing once more AMD/ATI users 😁
 

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Out of curiosity, (I have NVidia so It was never a problem for me), but is it an issue if you run saga with the latest Freespace Open? I would think the best way to get it now would be to install it through the Knossos.NET app. The old installers are running a fork of some really ancient code by now.
 
wcnut said:
Out of curiosity, (I have NVidia so It was never a problem for me), but is it an issue if you run saga with the latest Freespace Open? I would think the best way to get it now would be to install it through the Knossos.NET app. The old installers are running a fork of some really ancient code by now.
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It all works fine on the FSO version of the game, that bug disappeared years ago and while it looks pretty, theres a couple of tiny things I find distracting, like my Hellcat flying at 424KPS, silly I know. That being said, I have come back to a problem I had 8 years ago because things didn't blow up the way I wanted them to 🤭

Call it a personal project, I like the odd thing to tinker with and if anyone else likes the original WCS experience I figured I'd share my tinkerings with the community.
 
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