SRB contrails appear as thousands of overlapping black squares

[adsii1970]

For some reason, the STEAM portal is not allowing me to share my screenshot, but what is happening is that when I launch anything with an SRB, instead of the normal contrails I have with the LFO mixture (and have always had with the SRBs until now), I get thousands of black squares. It kind of reminds me of the movie 2010, but these things ain't full of stars! Does anyone have any suggestions?

Edited January 20, 2015 by adsii1970
It was answered and the problem solved!

[Janos1986]

It happened to me as well, mainly with BACC boosters, but I just installed HotRockets for better effects.

[adsii1970]

It happened to me as well, mainly with BACC boosters, but I just installed HotRockets for better effects.

Thanks for the recommendation; I am assuming that this is the mod you are talking about? http://www.curse.com/ksp-mods/kerbal/220207-hotrockets-particle-fx-replacement/2216934

I'm going to install it now and try it to see if it solves the problem!

[klesh]

You could always try to validate the integrity of the game cache. Thats a pretty good start when you're using Steam.

Edit: Careful with HR, it shows as not being for .90.

Edited January 15, 2015 by klesh

[Greenfire32]

It could be limited to something within the game (and is likely the cause), but from my experience, visual artifacts like that are usually foretelling doom at the hands of a dying graphics card.

Verify your steam data first, like klesh said, and maybe do a re-install if the problem continues. If it persists after you've reinstalled, it's probably your graphics card and not the game.

Alternatively, use less boosters. It could be the graphics card is fine, but using so many boosters is causing it to run out of memory and feed you those gross artifacts. This is pretty rare, but again I've seen it happen from experience.

[klesh]

True, is this happening when you have 2-4 boosters, or like 48?

[adsii1970]

Just two boosters - nothing obscenely powerful

- - - Updated - - -

True, is this happening when you have 2-4 boosters, or like 48?

Just two. The video card is good, according to 3DMark (video card testing software). When I ran the Steam verify, it said that 48 files are missing...

[Greenfire32]

When I ran the Steam verify, it said that 48 files are missing...

Sorry, I didn't even consider missing resources as a potential problem. The game was probably just using temp/missing textures and those black artifacts was the result. After you've downloaded the necessary files, you'll probably experience no issue.

I knew I was forgetting something...

[klesh]

When I ran the Steam verify, it said that 48 files are missing...

Thar she blows, I bet that fixes it. Do let us know.

[adsii1970]

Sorry, I didn't even consider missing resources as a potential problem. The game was probably just using temp/missing textures and those black artifacts was the result. After you've downloaded the necessary files, you'll probably experience no issue.

I knew I was forgetting something...

Thar she blows, I bet that fixes it. Do let us know.

Yes, actually it did fix that problem, along with a couple of other small problems I had noticed with the beta release of KSP (one was that it took several clicks to select parts). Once I ran Steam verify, it automatically reinstalled KSP beta version and my SRBs now have contrails again. Thanks, folks, for helping me fix this problem.