Yesterday ScorpionTail figured out one of the most strange mysteries of SoaSE: Rebellion, why lasers and other particle effects do not show up at times. Turns out the culprit is anti-aliasing; setting this to "None" ensures that Sins renders all particle effects, and also appears to be resulting in better game stability, useful in particular during MP matches. As such, I must say that everyone should turn off anti-aliasing and I once again thank ScorpionTail for his discovery and insight into something that's been boggling me for over a year now.
Anti-aliasing: The Elefant in the Room
Turn off anti-aliasing to ensure particle effects like lasers show up, and for better stability.
Posted by Lavo on
ARE YOU ******* SERIOUS??
awesome. now i just need to the the damn mod to actually work on my game and i can play.
That could explain the crashes I had while trying to play multiplayer. Although I really can't stand jagged edges.
I can't say I've really noticed jagged edges after disabling it.
Such a good game but such a bad bug. I expected more from the Sins creators.
I wonder if turning off AA in game but then forcing it through your GPU will allow you to have both AA and particle effects.
Might be cool. Can you try it?
I have tried this, and unfortunately it applies the same effects as enabling AA in-game. It doesn't appear to make the game less stable as enabling the option in-game does, however.
Good to know. Thank you!
Is this something that may help other mods with crashes and lag, or just this one?
High probability of helping out other mods as well.
I have disabled all anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering but most of the time weapon fire is still not visible.
You shouldn't disable anisotropic filtering, set it to max.
Either way I set it, particle effects rarely render at all. I also have my external effects disabled (catalyst Control Center). The only thing that's different about my system is I have a solid state drive, hence no paging file on the drive Sins is installed on. I do have a paging file on my secondary drive, and I have made Sins Large Address Aware. It rarely ever crashes but particle effects not rendering is disappointing. Rotating the camera wildly will get them to show up sometimes, or if I sit watching a fight without going away for a minute or two some will show up, but thats it.
From what i have found troubleshooting the problem myself is that it is related to the number of mesh file references present in the "skybox.manifest" file.
What i did to test the theory was replace the manifest file with the stock sins manifest.
The mod now runs with all particle effects displaying even with anti aliasing enabled.
Hope this helps
If you're running without a paging file, there's a chance that might contribute. I'm not going to recommend turning on a paging file on an SSD, though you might want to give moving Sins to your secondary drive a shot, even if it's a bit slower on start up.
This new info about skyboxes is entirely new to me, and quite interesting as well. I might have to look into this.
Hi Lavo,i am actually running sins on a regular hard drive which has a large page file enabled so no issue there..
From my own experience i can definitely say the issue is related somehow to the skybox meshes,turning off anti aliasing did not fix the particle effects issue for me but changing the skybox manifest file immediately fixed it and also enabled me to play with anti aliasing enabled with no performance or stability issue encountered yet.
Yep, you've certainly hit a nail on the head. The upcoming hotfix will patch out the colored skyboxes as well (note, not the background skyboxes, but the ones that make your ships look like they're a different color).
Great news,glad the info helped :)
Tried hotfix R1090 version with AA disabled but most of the lasers seems to be invisible (according to firing sound played), or can only be seen from certain angles or certain distances. Tried in the medium-large -random map.
Getting the same problem. Changing the anti-aliasing settings before the patch worked for me. Now it's no longer working.
Did you guys increase the maximum particle limits in your usersettings file? If not there's a good chance that is the source of your ills.
It seems that "vanilla" values related to particles are
MaxParticleCount 7200
MaxParticleSimulationsCount 2400
so what are the recommended values (and does the latter value even matter)? It's odd that I have to tweak SoGE this much as I don't have to do anything "extra" when I play Star Wars: Requiem mod. I wonder what are the technical differences between these two aside own skyboxes and longer fighting distances.
Requiem is an entirely different beast from SoGE. The two mods, other than both being SW mods and sharing a number of models, are otherwise incomparable. Requiem simply adds to vanilla Sins. SoGE is a total conversion, meaning virtually all of vanilla Sins is thrown out, in particular with reference to planets and ship rosters. As for which values to increase, personally I just add another one or two zeros, does the trick.
I must note however, one possible source for a bunch of particle rendering issues, storm/cloud "planets", has recently been fixed on the beta. There was an issue that their particles were allowed to replicate themselves infinitely, which might very well have been eating up a lot of the resources Sins sets aside for particles.
i have everything on max graphics and the only problem i have is my game keeps on crashing
SOSE:R doesn't seem to be too stable when graphics are maxed. I have seen plenty of suggestions that people should use "high" settings as default maximum. I have used these "recommended" effects settings with 3-4 different mods and not a single crash has occurred.
Planet : Detail - High
Ship : Detail - High, Extras - Medium, Bump - Low
Building : Detail - High, Extras - Medium, Bump - Low
Good recommendations here.
would turning on FXAA in nvidia control panel and disabling AA help?