I've been having problems with every modded skirmish game I play: inevitably some section of the map texture disappears during unit combat and never returns! Sections turn solid black. Even saving the game and reloading it makes no difference. Having mods present is the obvious trigger, but I don't know how. It's a huge visual distraction, though it doesn't seem to affect game play. I used to see this less frequently when playing skirmish with mods in Supreme Commander:Forged Alliance.

What can cause these texture dropouts, and how can I fix it?

Less frequently in FA? That shouldn't be happening at all. It sounds like an issue with your video card or drivers that's being exacerbated by the presence of more textures/meshes in graphics memory. Make sure your drivers are updated, etc.

If your using a ATI card that would be why more than a few people reported this problem nothing really can be done to fixed it, Its a problem with how ATI drivers renders the game.

In my view, in SC-FA, with exactly the same versions of the mod (not a first alpha release, but a mod worked and tested) there is no problem of this kind.

With SupCom2 (for steam) you get to play 4v4 with no problem (our configs are new)
When you throw a party mods with different or inconsistent, the desynchronization comes from the start.
With some mods (eg [REL] [SC2] Experimental Towers Defense) that works very well.
But with others, or even 1v1 2v1ia and few units, desynchronization happens after 8 or 10 or 12 minutes ...


I do not understand how the renders can function fully for 500 normal units
But for 2 or 3 additional, it crashes ... §?

I'm talking more about this


Mods that increase the unit cap or scale down units some ATI cards cant render the texture that's applied after a units died.

It's an Asus GeForce 8800 GT card with 512MB and periodic driver updates. It ONLY happens when mods (or some specific mod) are active; the vanilla game(s) never caused it. SC2 was fine even with DLC addon, but not one or more mods.



So it's specifically likely to be the Revamp Expansion (v1.05) mod, which does both? *sigh*

Its mite be a memory usage problem with your card then if its only 512mb, i've been in games when its used up to 940mb, There is a way to stop the glitch you have to remove the scaling for the wreckages.

How do you manage to know exactly how much of the dedicated RAM on a video card is being used? If you were referring to system DRAM, that is not a limitation in this system and neither game comes close to using all of it.

If I actually had a clue how to mod this game at all, I'd do what I used to do with TA and remove all wreckage entirely. Of course if getting another graphics card with twice the RAM would truly also solve the problem, it's not that expensive to get a modest step up from an 8800 GT and might be worth it to keep using the Revamp mod. Both the scaling and unit cap increase make the game more playable for me.

I have a G19 keyboard and also run MSI Afterburner which tells me how much memory is being used when i'm in game, And i did make a mod that removed the wreckage http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=52166

I've heard of Afterburner, even downloaded it, but never used it. I was just rummaging for cheap alternative cards, and it looks like it might be more expensive than I figured, not to mention they don't seem to be any more energy efficient. Four years of new designs since the 8800 GT and I can't get a card with equivalent horsepower but slightly lower power draw and more RAM? Maybe I don't know where/how to look.

I will have to drive around the block with this no-wreckage mod and see if it still feels right in SC2. It will play nice with Revamp, I assume?

Yes is just a simple mod will work with any thing , You cant really get a high end card that doesnt suck the power maybe some thing like this ? http://www.evga.com/products/moreInfo.asp?pn=02G-P3-1568-KR&family=GeForce%20500%20Series%20Family&sw=

That one is a step up in horsepower (that I might not even need) and of course RAM, but it draws more than 50% more power and might force me to upgrade my power supply. I was just looking at the Radeon HD 4870, which still draws more than mine but not as much as the GTX 560, and there's a local guy selling one used with an aftermarket cooler for a good price. If I have to spend $200 to make the textures come back, well... I'll just have to get comfy playing with no wreckage.

Hello,
First: A really good mod!
But i have a problem: Everytime i play this mod in multiplayr with my friend (We both have the same units installed) after 20min the game detected an loss of synchronism.
How can that be?x(We play vs AI)

I wound up buying a Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 card for $140 (rebate), which has 1GB of RAM onboard and only consumes at most 27 Watts more than my 8800 GT. It also has considerably better specs, but that wasn't really a goal of course. I was a bit worried about its power requirements because it said it needed a 500W power supply AND 75W on the 6-pin connector... which was not info provided about my 500W Seasonic power supply. A guy at Seasonic even offered to send me a free 650W power supply if the Sapphire proves too demanding.

BTW, your no-wreckage mod didn't work for me: it did nothing at all. It didn't make the game fail in any way, but had no effect. Since I use a few other small mods in addition to Revamp, it might have conflicted, though I don't know how considering it's a simple iterative LUA script. I won't need it if the Sapphire card solves the texture dropout.

Did you use it with mithys mod support and the DLC ?

I did have the DLC active, but I just checked and the Mithys mod wasn't present. I have it, but must have removed it at some point. That must explain why the no-wreckage mod didn't work, I take it.

The new video card is on a truck for delivery this morning....

Make sure use the mod manager it wont let you use mods with out other mods it needs, hope your new card fixes it .

Works with Mithys mod in place! And the Radeon card arrived, so I have some Nvidia surgery to do.

I won't say I wasted the $160 buying this HD 6850 card, but I didn't have the budget for it and it didn't actually solve the problem for which I bought it. The map texture dropouts still occur, even though this card has 1GB of GDDR5 RAM on it. In one setup (keep reading), it even happens now WITH the no-wreckage mod in place, so if anything the new card has somehow made things worse, perhaps because it's ATI architecture.

Having the new card with completely different drivers inspired me to reinstall Windows from scratch, which I desperately needed to do for other reasons. I kept a copy of the original partition, though, and Windows 7 is very forgiving about underlying hardware changes, so I had the chance to experiment with the old install, too (after some initial fits and having to use a BCD editor).

After reinstalling SC2, I discovered that the dropouts still occur even with the new card. What's even worse, when I tried the original install of SC2 after booting into the original Windows 7 setup, which still had the no-wreckage mod active, the dropouts occurred there in spite of the no-wreckage mod. The no-wreckage mod might not have completely solved it with the 8800 GT card, since I only played a couple games with it before the new card arrived.

So neither doubling VRAM nor the no-wreckage mod were complete solutions for me. Could the fact that it's still happening have something to do with the architectural differences between nVidia and ATI/AMD cards, even though I have all that extra RAM? Should I have bought a newer power-sucking nVidia card instead?

Now I have to decide whether to return this card. Liveordie, you said something about altering the Revamp mod to remove the scaling of wreckage; could I expect that to solve the dropouts if I kept this card? In terms of nVidia architectures, the G92 chipset might be 4 years old but it was high-end at the time, and it still beats out all of the current low-end nVidia cards; it looked like I would have to spend more for an nVidia card with better specs than I did for the ATI card, and it would wind up drawing significantly more power. What do I do here?

[Completely aside, it turns out this card is way more efficient with power in basic 2D operations and the system draws about 20W less at the desktop than it did with the 8800 GT, even though this card's maximum draw is more than the 8800 GT. The HD 6850's cooling system also doesn't whine like the fan on the Asus 8800 GT, which was a real irritation; I have yet to notice the fan on the new card. Of course it will take many years of that power savings to pay for the cost of the card, so if I keep it it will be for a very long time. Also aside, based on this and the reading I did while trying to decide how much upgrade would be upgrade enough, it seems that ATI cards might be more specialized than nVidia cards, perhaps specialized for FPS games?]

Is it possible that what I need is a card with more texture units? The HD 6850 has 48 compared to the 56 on the 8800 GT card, even though its effective texture fill rate is supposed to be a little better. Might that be the cause of these dropouts more than the amount of VRAM?

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=544&card2=636

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=544&card2=641

Maybe if I could unlock those disabled texture units on either card... but I dunno if that's possible.

Its probably not the wreckages more the Decal they create, Here try this if this works i can add the wreckages back in if you want, I'm not sure why this happens but i my self and my group of friends have never seen this problem it seems to be only a very small group of people that get it.

LINK REMOVED

I just poked into the SCD file; that looks to be an "upgrade" of the no-wreckage mod that excludes these decals, too? I'll give it a try. Would there be any sense or point in just disabling the decals alone?

This has been rather frustrating having it happen in SC2 now; at least it was understandable that it happened sometimes in SC:FA, because it was an earlier system that might not have even had the 8800 GT at first (8600 GT before that), I used a crapload of mods, some of them added serious overhead, and then I'd only skirmish on 20x20+ maps with 3 or more AIs. It was bad enough that I needed the infamous Windows XP /3GB switch to be able to play the the game at all without having the 'sim"(?) freeze. And now it's happening every game with SC2 since I started using Revamp when I don't think it's nearly as taxing. Is the scaling used in Revamp really that much overhead?

Hope this works.

Yes all decal splats for deaths should be disabled if it works then ill add the wreakages back in if it doesn't then what's the point , But yes scaling does increase the load also if you have the unit cap set high, To me sounds like it cant render the decals thats applied when a units died, This problem mite not show for the normal game because of the capping on the AI units also it would have a lot less to render.

I was able to play a short game with it in one Windows install, and it did stop the dropouts. I still need to try it in the other install. I don't believe the unit cap or total unit count has anything much to do with causing it on my system, because it happens almost without fail during the first skirmish involving more than just a few AI units, and that happens inside of the 10-minute game mark; there are nowhere near enough units to even begin to threaten even the default unit cap. That's in games with just 3 AI opponents, so just not that many total units when it happens.

What are these "decals"? In all these years of playing the Taylor games and even modding them a bit (modding the mods, really), I think this is the first time I've heard that term. I might have heard it once relative to Sword of the Stars game internals, not sure. How do they affect game play or visuals?

Decals is just what they call them but there just scorch marks im not sure why they wouldn't render correctly its understandable late in game but not at the start of a game its just odd to me sounds like some type of bug.