I just started playing VO again and on my main computer there are some strange things going on with the graphics:





The background is discontinuous. In fact, it seems like the background consists of hexagons and there are clear colour differences between the different hexagons.

Also, some textures are just strange, e.g. the roids. I've tried fiddling with some of the graphics settings but that doesn't really seem to make a difference...

I run VO on a linux computer running Ubuntu but with the xmonad tiling window manage and Vendetta in window mode but occupying the whole screen. (the windowed mode is to allow 'alt-tabbing')

Kernel: Linux 3.5.0-17-generic x86_64
Distro: Ubuntu 12.10
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU 650 @ 3.20GHz
4 cores/threads
3201.00 MHz
RAM: 11.66 GiB
GPU: Gallium 0.4 on NV96
OpenGL 3.0 Mesa 9.0
GLSL 1.30

It seems like you're missing parts of the media.rlb.
I dunno, that's pretty trippy.

Bork City Online

Hmm, I'll just remove VO and reinstall, I guess that could solve some issues. Thanks for the tip.

back it up first. I want a copy! Moldy stations and glitch ice mod!

In all honesty though, it's probably your video drivers. See if there's any updates to the kernel or Mesa available for your distro. Nouveau is still kinda wonky. You could also try disabling shaders in the game.

I would say gallium is the source of the issue. It is something old hardware support for ATI/NV stuff which are not too old, but lost support from the HW vendors. try the older drivers, or the workaround with the downgrading of your x.org.

OK, since you guys are liking the pictures, here's two from my laptop, from the same system at two different time moments:

(this is different hardware but comparable software from the above)

Seems like a Nvidia issue under Linux.

When you restart the game next time the roids will prolly be another colour.

Hmmm, I will have a look. Red is annoying because it is the same colour as targeted enemies; other colours are okay I guess. I will make sure to update everything and see if the problems still occur.

Seems like a Nvidia issue under Linux. OMFG Stop blaming the drivers for this! It happens with Intel, Nvidia, AMD on both Linux and Mac.

It only shows up when you're playing VO using OpenGL (Mac and Linux) with shaders turned off.
It's this issue

try the older drivers, or the workaround with the downgrading of your x.org.
This is two points of very bad advice. Older nouveau drivers are going to be much worse.

I play VO on an ATI Radeon HD5670, Mesa 9.1 (r600g, Gallium 0.4), Xorg 1.14 with the texture, distance LOD and all that set to the maximum at 1280x960 and 8xMSAA and consistenly get good framerates (>40fps) even in busy sectors. Even FGLRX bogged down when I turned on 8xMSAA with this card.

At this point I'd recommend doing one of two things:
1. Try to find newer packages for the Linux kernel (the modesetting/hardware code for video is in the kernel), and the latest Mesa and Xorg available for your distro.
2. Install Nvidia's proprietary drivers. (In this case, using an older driver might be appropriate. You'd have to do some reading to find out which version is right for your GPU)

Just to be clear here since my two posts in this thread might seem self-contradictory. The problem in the first screenshots seems to be related to shaders (station bump maps and shiny ice gone haywire)
That is a driver problem. Try a newer one.

The second problem of the black/colored ice roids only happens when shaders are disabled and has to do with the way VO tries to make the ice look shiny without shaders. That's not a driver problem.

It only shows up when you're playing VO using OpenGL (Mac and Linux) with shaders turned off

Well, I'm running Linux with shaders turned off (can't enable it) and the roids look normal all the time. (Mint, Intel HD3000)

Yeah, it only does it sometimes, but the devs and some other players have had it happen on Mac too. It's not just the open sores drivers on AMD cards.

It happens even with shaders on, but you don't notice it as much since it only appears on the little ice bits in the new mining beam FX. I've had them come up all kinds of wonky colors even when i have shaders turned on.

If you can't enable shaders, make sure you have libtxn_dxtc installed. For some reason VO disables all shader support if it doesn't find S3TC texture compression.

ARF, thanks for your detailed reply.

I'm now on the machine with the first issues (sorry for causing confusion by posting two essentially different problems in one thread). I upgraded both vedetta (with a complete re-install) and all ubuntu packages with a dist-upgrade. This didn't help. Then I purged nouveau and installed nvidia, and it worked. (I'm not a gamer and use a very low-tech desktop so I don't normally pay attention to graphics drivers as long as I get pixels on my screen).

I will see what I can do with the laptop that caused the droids, will try to put the shader on (although the computer had lots of trouble rendering the screen in ion storms as is, hopefully that won't get worse. The laptop is 5 years old or something so high performance is not exactly expected...)