[1.12.x] Parallax - PBR Terrain and Surface Objects [2.0.8]

[Fizz]

I've updated to the latest version, and i have a better sense of the crashing issue now.

If i start a brand new game, Parallax 2 seems to be working properly.  If i resume my career game, it gets to the KSP screen properly.  But the moment i try to do something from the main KSP menu (go to any building, load any game, etc), the screen goes blank except for the loading icon in the bottom right, which does not spin, and the game ultimately crashes, sometimes locking up the entire machine.

But starting a new game (at least a sandbox game) does not have this issue- i can create a ship and launch and see the awesomeness of the Parallax 2.

So what in my saved career game could be causing it to crash?  My career game works fine under Parallax 1, but locks up if i use Parallax 2.  What could be causing this?  Please advise and help me fix this.  Thanks!

 

-Fizz

[Brigadier]

1 hour ago, Fizz said:

I've updated to the latest version, and i have a better sense of the crashing issue now.

If i start a brand new game, Parallax 2 seems to be working properly.  If i resume my career game, it gets to the KSP screen properly.  But the moment i try to do something from the main KSP menu (go to any building, load any game, etc), the screen goes blank except for the loading icon in the bottom right, which does not spin, and the game ultimately crashes, sometimes locking up the entire machine.

But starting a new game (at least a sandbox game) does not have this issue- i can create a ship and launch and see the awesomeness of the Parallax 2.

So what in my saved career game could be causing it to crash?  My career game works fine under Parallax 1, but locks up if i use Parallax 2.  What could be causing this?  Please advise and help me fix this.  Thanks!

When you're asking for help resolving a problem, always post a link to your log file.  It helps the diagnosis.

Read this post on how to do this.

Edited July 2 by Brigadier

[SpacedInvader]

14 hours ago, Gameslinx said:

The rewrite won't be backwards compatible - that is the main reason why I'm releasing it separately. Too much of the underlying architecture has changed to support backwards compatibility without another copy of the code (essentially, the old mod). For mod authors I have included tools that will convert the old configs to almost usable new configs, but they will need to add a few extra things to them that I can't predict in the config upgrader. For authors, documentation will be available on my github.

Are you expecting the re-write to be hot-swappable in a save, or should we be planning on starting over?

[Gameslinx]

18 hours ago, SpacedInvader said:

Are you expecting the re-write to be hot-swappable in a save, or should we be planning on starting over?

Short answer: Yes, you can hot-swap. Saves will not corrupt or be altered in any way.

**However**, the positions of scatters will be different. If you're landed in a region where rocks can generate, be careful. You can always turn off colliders, make sure your bases are safe, and reposition accordingly.

[ShadowMC2]

The settings.cfg link in the Troubleshooting section is invalid

[SpacedInvader]

7 hours ago, Gameslinx said:

Short answer: Yes, you can hot-swap. Saves will not corrupt or be altered in any way.

**However**, the positions of scatters will be different. If you're landed in a region where rocks can generate, be careful. You can always turn off colliders, make sure your bases are safe, and reposition accordingly.

Good to know since I was planning on a colony heavy career next so it sounds like that would just end up being a massive headache. Seems like the best bet for me at least will be to hold off until the release. New question though is will this same re-rolling of the scatters happen between different versions of the beta / release or is it really just a one-time thing when moving from 2.0.7 to 3.0?

Edited July 4 by SpacedInvader

[Gameslinx]

7 hours ago, SpacedInvader said:

Good to know since I was planning on a colony heavy career next so it sounds like that would just end up being a massive headache. Seems like the best bet for me at least will be to hold off until the release. New question though is will this same re-rolling of the scatters happen between different versions of the beta / release or is it really just a one-time thing when moving from 2.0.7 to 3.0?

I'm aiming for the scatters to be consistent between beta/release but I can't guarantee anything because changes I make from feedback could change them again

[SpacedInvader]

1 hour ago, Gameslinx said:

I'm aiming for the scatters to be consistent between beta/release but I can't guarantee anything because changes I make from feedback could change them again

That's fair. Speaking of colliders, will the new scatter system improve on the way colliders match up with the scatter models? The current system is pretty solid, but there were more than a few times I got small rovers stuck on invisible rocks while trying to maneuver through particularly busy areas on the Mun.

Edited July 4 by SpacedInvader

[ryan2390]

I seem to be having issues with Parallax. Specifically, I am getting shadows from what appears to be plants, at the launchpad but there are no plants. See bottom of post for a screenshot. I have turned all the graphics sliders etc up as far as they'll go without success. This is a fresh install. Everything else works so far save for KSC Extended which I have removed.

Mod list: https://pastebin.com/UpiNixxK

Log file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f3TaDgWHbSsZm4819aBWLfyZ64OstH31/view?usp=sharing

 

[Manul]

17 minutes ago, ryan2390 said:

Specifically, I am getting shadows from what appears to be plants, at the launchpad but there are no plants.

Looks like scorch marks from a RUD

[Gameslinx]

21 minutes ago, ryan2390 said:

I seem to be having issues with Parallax. Specifically, I am getting shadows from what appears to be plants, at the launchpad but there are no plants. See bottom of post for a screenshot. I have turned all the graphics sliders etc up as far as they'll go without success. This is a fresh install. Everything else works so far save for KSC Extended which I have removed.

Mod list: https://pastebin.com/UpiNixxK

Log file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f3TaDgWHbSsZm4819aBWLfyZ64OstH31/view?usp=sharing

 

You're running OpenGL by using "-popupwindow -force-opengl" in your launch arguments. This is an OpenGL related issue that I'm looking into, but for now, please go back to DirectX by removing "-force-opengl" from your launch args. Or, if you're desperate to use it, try -force-glcore instead

[ryan2390]

5 minutes ago, Gameslinx said:

You're running OpenGL by using "-popupwindow -force-opengl" in your launch arguments. This is an OpenGL related issue that I'm looking into, but for now, please go back to DirectX by removing "-force-opengl" from your launch args. Or, if you're desperate to use it, try -force-glcore instead

HI Gameslinx,

That was fast! I had experimented with this but removed the launch option after seeing it made little difference as far as I could tell. I've just double checked and can confirm the launch option was removed, but it's still launching in open GL mode so I shall see to that.

Thanks for the quick reply again - amazing mod.

[Rulingmoss55]

 

On 7/1/2024 at 7:32 AM, Gameslinx said:

Thanks for the report. Your FPS drop is caused by parallax seemingly spectacularly breaking for reasons I'm unsure. The last lines of the log before the errors is "Active Vessel is about to crash. Cannot save". The vessel didn't crash because the log doesn't contain anything about parts being destroyed, so I'm assuming this is just caused by pressing F5 below 500m above the terrain and isn't related to the error.

This should be fixed in the rewrite I'm working on which majorly simplifies the process that's failing here. I noticed you're using the lifeless Eve patch and some textures couldn't be found according to your log. The best thing I can recommend is reinstalling Parallax and foregoing the lifeless eve patch and seeing if that stops the issue.

Thank you so much for the reply. After I tried it again using your suggestion, fresh parallax install without the eve configs, I unfortunately got the same issue. I should mention this is on one of the Kcalbeloh mod planets, but its fully compatible and no one else reported this bug in the mod. 

KSP.log

As for the log itself, the issue started at 13:29 in the logs time.  As soon as the freeze starts there's a ton of log messages about "Parallax Grass". I even tried hiding the grass that appeared in the ctrl+p config but it still after ~20 minutes of flight the game did the same thing.

I was wondering if it would be possible to outright disable the grass that's being mentioned in the logs? I can live without it and the grass seems to be the only thing that's caused this issue for me so far. Thank you for your time.

[Gameslinx]

Hi all, I've been meaning to write a dev update to show off the improvements I've made since the last one back in May. Today isn't quite that day, but I do have a short video that shows off the amount of detail Parallax will be able to achieve! I'm currently going through each of the planets and updating the scatter configs because I'm almost done reaching feature parity with current day Parallax. This video was taken on Tylo's mid/highlands

While I've not tested how the detail holds up on RSS-scale planets yet, I'm confident they'll be able to hold their ground and achieve similar if not the same amount of detail provided the configs are set up correctly. It won't be long until I'm writing documentation for mod authors (I will do better this time  )

[CosmicDreams]

Is there a version of this that retains Duna's redness? It's a bit jarring to see it get so much lighter and Mars-like when decending from orbit. I don't think other planets have such a jarring transition.

[HK-47]

Hey Gameslinx, was just curious regarding the upcoming rewrite. By chance will this have any effect on the ability for macOS to use the scatter system?  I'm assuming not considering the situation hasn't changed with OpenGL but figured I'd ask. 

Thanks for all the work you're doing!

[Gameslinx]

7 hours ago, HK-47 said:

Hey Gameslinx, was just curious regarding the upcoming rewrite. By chance will this have any effect on the ability for macOS to use the scatter system?  I'm assuming not considering the situation hasn't changed with OpenGL but figured I'd ask. 

Thanks for all the work you're doing!

Thanks for asking, but if nothing has changed on the OpenGL compute shader support side, I don't think it'll be possible for MacOS to run parallax.

Parallax relies on compute shaders to generate scatters and the generation part could be changed to use unity's Jobs system, but compute shaders are pretty much a requirement for rendering them at a playable framerate. It's still an avenue I might explore, but not something I'm going to prioritise yet unfortunately. I think there are ways to get later OpenGL versions running on MacOS, but I'm not experienced with the os at all so I couldn't tell you how

[HK-47]

16 hours ago, Gameslinx said:

Thanks for asking, but if nothing has changed on the OpenGL compute shader support side, I don't think it'll be possible for MacOS to run parallax.

Parallax relies on compute shaders to generate scatters and the generation part could be changed to use unity's Jobs system, but compute shaders are pretty much a requirement for rendering them at a playable framerate. It's still an avenue I might explore, but not something I'm going to prioritise yet unfortunately. I think there are ways to get later OpenGL versions running on MacOS, but I'm not experienced with the os at all so I couldn't tell you how

Figured as much! I know the OpenGL depreciation has been a huge pain for developers on the mac side of things. I have no clue if it's even possible to utilize something like Metal in a mod through Unity when the game is running through OpenGL, but it seems like perhaps native Metal could handle it? 

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/metal_sample_code_library/mixing_metal_and_opengl_rendering_in_a_view
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/performing_calculations_on_a_gpu

Anyways, bigger fish to fry but it would be cool to see someday if it is in fact possible!  Shame since modern mac hardware is relatively capable nowadays.

[Cyrian]

Hey! I've been getting these errors when playing with Parallax/Scatter. When the error appears the game screen freezes. However, I can still hear the game continuing playing and physics, vehicle crashes etc are still happening while the screen doesn't seem to update. I can also pause/unpause the game etc. so it seems like only the rendering of the game is stopped.

[LOG 22:04:54.846] [ParallaxScatter] [Exception] Async GPU Readback error! (In GeneratePositions())

It's quite random but has happened alot while flying over Kerbin. The game doesn't recover until I manually force-quit and restart the game. I thought at first that it could be related to my GPU underclock but reverted it to stock and are still getting the issue so am out of ideas.

Here is my log file

and here is my mod list

Thanks for the gamechanging mod and awesome work.

[Gameslinx]

13 hours ago, Cyrian said:

It's quite random but has happened alot while flying over Kerbin. The game doesn't recover until I manually force-quit and restart the game. I thought at first that it could be related to my GPU underclock but reverted it to stock and are still getting the issue so am out of ideas.

I honestly couldn't say. In Unity, when requesting a 'async gpu readback' (getting the data back from the gpu), the request has a 'hasError' property which Parallax checks against to see if the data was received. It looks like in your case something went wrong (unity conveniently does not say why) but at a guess, the data was cleaned up before the request was completed. This could be related to vram speed or integrity but more likely than not, it'll be on the mod side.

Sadly there's nothing you can configure to get around it besides disabling scatters completely

[Kazako]

just wondering, does anyone happen to know if there's a downscaled version of the textures for this mod anywhere? i love it very much, and it's fantastic on my PC, but i'm trying to stretch the limits of what i can do with KSP on my steamdeck and i think i'd be able to get this to work on my steamdeck with lower res textures.

 

edit: actually, better question, is there a way for me to disable or delete the planet texture maps for parallax but keep the scatters enabled? that would probably work for what I need.

Edited July 16 by Kazako

[Turbo49_]

16 hours ago, Kazako said:

just wondering, does anyone happen to know if there's a downscaled version of the textures for this mod anywhere? i love it very much, and it's fantastic on my PC, but i'm trying to stretch the limits of what i can do with KSP on my steamdeck and i think i'd be able to get this to work on my steamdeck with lower res textures.

 

edit: actually, better question, is there a way for me to disable or delete the planet texture maps for parallax but keep the scatters enabled? that would probably work for what I need.

you can change the resolution of the textures in the config, it should reduce vram usage at least

[Cyrian]

On 7/15/2024 at 12:01 PM, Gameslinx said:

I honestly couldn't say. In Unity, when requesting a 'async gpu readback' (getting the data back from the gpu), the request has a 'hasError' property which Parallax checks against to see if the data was received. It looks like in your case something went wrong (unity conveniently does not say why) but at a guess, the data was cleaned up before the request was completed. This could be related to vram speed or integrity but more likely than not, it'll be on the mod side.

Sadly there's nothing you can configure to get around it besides disabling scatters completely

Ah that sucks. I will see if it's infrequent enough that I can live with it as I would rather not uninstall. Thanks for the response!

[Kazako]

11 hours ago, Turbo49_ said:

you can change the resolution of the textures in the config, it should reduce vram usage at least

I've tried this, and unfortunately it didn't seem to work, which I think is because the configuration says that the texture settings don't work right now.

[Turbo49_]

On 7/17/2024 at 10:49 AM, Kazako said:

I've tried this, and unfortunately it didn't seem to work, which I think is because the configuration says that the texture settings don't work right now.

oh sorry i didnt notice