Flickering background in main menu on Intel 945G

[rambomedic]

In the main menu of Alpha 14, the foreground (what look like athenians, image attached) is flickering. I have attached images of what it looks like when the foreground is visible, and what it looks like when it is not visible. Linked, is a video of the flickering, recorded with fraps. Notably, the flickering seems to slow when recording with fraps. Attached is a dxdiag (directxdialog) log containing hw information, and directx/opengl version information.

Video: ​http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDAk_yoeNc4

To summarize my setup at a glance (full information is in attached log):

Windows 7 SP1 32-bit Core 2 Duo, 3 Gigs of RAM, Intel Integrated GPU

[rambomedic]

(once, again sorry for jpeg) image where foreground is not visible

[rambomedic]

(sorry it's a jpeg, filesize limit) this is an image where the foreground is visible

[historic_bruno]

Hi, I have similar problems with an old Intel GPU. I suspect it's because the background texture is so large that the GPU is having trouble dealing with it, or it could be a driver bug. You can try making sure you have the latest drivers just in case. My other advice would be to upgrade your GPU if you can, it's very old and won't have good performance with 0 A.D. :)

[historic_bruno]

The other thing I would add: maybe we should have an option to disable the fancy background on lower end hardware, but they will struggle with everything so it's not a high priority.

[Marcio]

its possibly we can a Alternative with Background ?

[historic_bruno]

Ha, it was much simpler than I thought :) It's a z-order problem, all the background sprites are defined at the same depth in the GUI XML, so there's no indication that they should be layered on top of each other by the renderer (see GUI_-_Properties). Apparently most drivers handle this, because I've never seen the problem except on these crappy old Intels. Anyway, manually setting the z values in increments fixes this for me and it shouldn't break for anyone else.

BTW, performance is unchanged (70 fps) with or without the animations and doesn't seem affected by texture size, so I'm leaving that alone.

[ben]

In 15220:

Fixes flickering in main menu backgrounds on old Intel GPUs, by manually setting the z-values for each layer, fixes #2143

[fabio]

I reported a similar issue on my radeon graphic card, a texture flickering on Persian CC: ​https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44126

Do you think it can be fixed as well?

[historic_bruno]

Replying to fabio:

I reported a similar issue on my radeon graphic card, a texture flickering on Persian CC: ​https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44126

Do you think it can be fixed as well?

I don't think it's too similar, this ticket was specific to the GUI :) You should make a new ticket for that issue. The "easy" fix would be adjusting the model (or its prop points, if those are props). I don't know enough about the renderer to know if we could do much else.

[fabio]

Filed as as #2630.