I have been playing Vendetta Online (beta) for a few weeks now. On the whole, the client has been very stable. However, on three occassions, I have encountered corruption of the graphics textures, leading to some very weird displays. On the first occasion, I kept playing and eventually the client crashed. On the second and third, I was able to land and quit before it crashed.

The "pattern" seems to be that I jump into a system with a station, and notice one or more asteroids with weird textures on them, such as the vendetta alphabet. It's very matrix-like. The textures cycle at roughly 1 Hz between the alphabet, station textures, asteroid textures, obviously corrupt memory textures, etc. On the first occasion, the texture corruption extended to the station itself before the client crashed.

I have a couple of screenshots I would like to submit, but know not how/where to do that.

FYI, I'm running under Mac OS X 10.2.8 with an ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 (64 MB). The system has a 1 Ghz G4 CPU and 1 GB of RAM (not shared with video) and has been running for over 2 years with pretty good stability (i.e. I don't suspect bad RAM or HD). I'm playing Vendetta full screen at 1280x854x32bit.

Do you have Texture Compression enabled? Because their compression algorithm is very screwy.

Email the screenshots to me.

Ray: I have emailed the screenshots to you.

RogueLazer: I'm not sure how to tell if I have texture compression enabled.

Here are some snippits of my config.ini that might help:

[refgl]
illummap=1
envmap=1
bumpmap=1
tc=0
minfilter=9987
maxfilter=9729
specular=1
windowmode=0
textureresolution=0
texturequality=32
gamma=8
def_freq=0
tfactor_hack=0
doshaders=0
dovertexbuffers=1
doindexbuffers=1
do_compiled_vertex_array=1
do_env_combine=1
do_extensions=1

[Vendetta]
Username=Screwball
AudioDriver=Mac sound driver
VideoDriver=OpenGL Reference GKGL driver
xres=1280
yres=854
bpp=32

What happened is that the video card is using the wrong texture to apply to objects.
Did you switch between fullscreen and window mode?
If not, try that to see if it fixes the corruption.
If you did, then that may be the cause of the corruption.
Heh, that'll cover both bases. ;)

I haven't been switching video modes, so that didn't cause the problem. However, I will try that next time to see if it helps.

Hmm, just a thought: The problem happens when going into a sector, which is just after the "loading" screen. Is it possible that the loading screen is switching to/from a different resolution than my normal full screen.

no, the loading screen uses the same resolution as the rest of the game.

This was a problem with OS X 10.2.x
Go to the "binds" thread (page 6) and paste the "osxfix" alias into your wgaf.cfg file (don't forget to set a value for your background restoration). Bind a key to it and use it.
(this is the only work-around I'm aware of...unless you update to 10.3.x which fixed the problem)

Thanks, RelayR.

It's a pretty infrequent bug, so it's hard to test, but I'll give the binds a try next time it happens.

Question for the Devs: Is it possible to detect when the textures are screwing up in the client (such as detecting the ~1 Hz texture flipping I see, or doing a simple checksum on the memory)? If so, would it be possible to program in the workaround? I am just imagining that as more and more people join the Retail version, the occurrances of the problem will increase.

Not really. It would be really really slow to verify the textures. It's a bug in the OS and there's nothing we'd do to work around it.

So here's what I've learned since my last post:

For whatever reason, the texture corruption problem is happening a lot more frequently post-Beta. (average every 2-3 hours of play)

I added the osxfix alias/bind and it doesn't solve the texture corruption I am seeing, probably because it doesn't usually spread to the space background. It did spread from asteroids to space to the station last night and osxfix would cause a brief flicker of change (background only and not actually fixed) and then it was back to the weird cycling.

The one thing that seems to reliably correct the problem is to force a texture reload by changing resolutions or something similar. Is that something that can be done via alias/bind? I don't see resolution listed in the CVARs in the Vendetta documentation (which I realize is out of date).

I'm sure someone will come up with an alias to do that but, in the meantime, it's easy enough to do.
While in space (a safe place, please) hit "Esc" / Options. Go to Video and change your resolution to the setting below the size of your screen. Also, set it to Window. Hit Apply and you're changed after the textures load.