Slitherine

Pandora: Eclipse of Nashira 1.5.1
Debian GNU/Linux "Sid" amd64
Radeon HD 6670 with radeon free driver 7.4.0 (+ non-free firmware)

When a Kraken is displayed on screen, graphical glitches occurs.
They stop as soon as the unit is not on screen anymore.

In the .zip linked, you’ll find a savegame, the lines of log after the apparition of the Kraken (nothing significant in there) and a short video showing the glitch:
http://www.keepandshare.com/doc2/46933/ ... 3-meg?da=y

The glitch happens with 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, in release version (1.5.1) and beta version (1.5.2).

On my system with Radeon HD6670, OpenSuSE 13.1, the Kraken from your savegame looks like this:
I see no issues with the picture. I am however using the Fglrx driver, version 14.10.2. It is most likely a bug in the free driver. Installing Fglrx seems to be the most pragmatic solution.

dmantione wrote:I see no issues with the picture. I am however using the Fglrx driver, version 14.10.2. It is most likely a bug in the free driver. Installing Fglrx seems to be the most pragmatic solution.

I’m quite sure using fglrx instead of radeon would fix this glitch, but I won’t do it
I use a free system for many reasons, and won’t stray away of this road for one glitch in one game…

Thank you anyway to help trace this glitch to the video driver I’m using!

Aside from the driver, there must be something in the game code as well, seeing as it is the only unit I know of triggering this glitch.

If you take a look how the 3D engine works, you see that there are meshes defined in:

Data/Video/Meshes/Units/Kraken.xml

...animation data in:

Data/Video/Animations/Units/Kraken/Idle.xml

.. that consist of pure numbers. I doubt the Kraken has any special properties compared with other units in the way it is defined. At least I don't see any deviation from other units.

In:

Data/Video/Shaders/Unit.xml

... there is a vertex shader defined that probably processes these numbers. Now, a vertex shader needs to be compiled by the OpenGL driver. A compiler is an extremely complex piece of software where a few corner cases that the compiler does not process correctly are almost certainly hidden. You are probably hitting such a corner case here.

I see a graphical glitch with the Kraken on my Win8.1 system.