Have you tried the texture streaming option? Checker boards probably mean you have tipped over the limit of your VRAM -- perhaps some change in build 216/217 put it over the limit. You might also try putting your texture quality on medium instead of high (if that's how you have it set). I'm working towards reducing our VRAM usage in future patches.
My textures are already in medium, the strange thing is that setting everything in low doesn't solve the problem in full screen mode, while playing in medium/high works fine in windowed mode.
The first time I start building something my game freezes for like 5 secs since 216. Disabeling the texture streaming option fixed that. But neither this option nor lowering the texture quality to medium or low is solving the checkerboard plague. Also running the game in windowed mode isn't fixing the problem for me.
Well, sometimes the bug still shows up, but after an hour of playing in windowed mode instead of showing up after 5 minutes (or less) when I'm playing in full screen mode. So right now I can enjoy the game even if there's a few problems.
I'm still getting the checkerboards and its quite annoying. It seems it happens even faster than in the previous versions. At least the performance went up a little.
I'm not sure if anyone here getting these bugs is familiar with overclocking but you should try OC'ing the memory on your graphics card. MSI Afterburner is great for this, I only play NS2 OC'd because of the FPS boost, but it might also make the game playable for the people with this bug. (If of course as most suspect it is caused by maxing out your vram. This could also prove that theory.)
just played the 219 build for about 10 minutes. Not sure if the performance went up, but it might have been a little (didn't get far into the game as we rushed the hive and killed it, so can't really tell yet)
However the checkerboards still do appear... . Will keep on hoping it will be fixed soon:(
I have the problem in this build as well. Didn't I read that they plan to make this game run on a geforce 8800? I had the card myself and it was fast, but I doubt it will handle the game when even the ati HD 4000er and 5000er series can't handle it since build 216.
At least in low and in window mode tha game doesn't crash all the time. It still crashes more often than before 216 but I can play some rounds if I don't go comm or if there aren't Exos in the field. The comm ui and the Exo fire animation seem to "overload" my pc :( 4 builds in a row with problems. I hope the players with weaker PCs won't get forgotten for the sake of the release. I wonder how many NS2 Players don't have an über-pc :P
GISPBattle GorgeDenmarkJoin Date: 2004-03-20Member: 27460Members, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Squad Five Gold, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Onos, WC 2013 - Gold, Subnautica Playtester, Forum staff
<!--quoteo(post=1979269:date=Sep 18 2012, 01:28 AM:name=Supi)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Supi @ Sep 18 2012, 01:28 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1979269"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Quick question, has the issue been checked or researched at least a tiny bit by the dev team ?
Thank you!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Yes. Devs are aware. <!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->[ 3388 ] - <b>'Checkerboards' showing in place of textures/the entire view.</b><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Soul_RiderMod BeanJoin Date: 2004-06-19Member: 29388Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue
edited September 2012
You can't increase your vram capacity by overclocking your graphics card. I will still only have a 512mb card after the overclock. My CPU is overclocked from 2.93GHX to 3.6Ghz, and my gfx has its max stable overclock, but it doesn't make a difference. A couple of builds ago i could game at medium settings, now I'm down to low. Soon I'll need a new card :P
Yes, still here as well. It even got worth. Now the textures appear even in low settings with window mode on. Adding also more crashes when I fire the shotgun or the minigun makes NS2 unplayable for me. As sooner the release comes the more frustrated I get, nice timing :P
swalkSay hello to my little friend.Join Date: 2011-01-20Member: 78384Members, Squad Five Blue
edited September 2012
Confirmed, still in 220. This still happens very often for me. Here is a screenshot of the console after this bug happens, I disconnected to get to the menu. Same situation as WILDMAN. <img src="http://i.imgur.com/XvkUQ.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" /> Clearly it's a problem with the UI, hope we can get this resolved very soon. ATI Card(HD5770) here as well.
It's still appearing for me as well (in max resolution fullscreen mode). However if I lower the resolution just a little bit and play in fullscreen windowed mode(can barely notice it's not fullscreen (got a 27" monitor so it doesn't really matter)) the bug never shows up, the game is stable and fps never drops below 30, it's very playable and lots of fun finally in the late game as well. (it showed up once when I was playing like 2 hours straight(could have been 2+ hrs) - I jut switched it to fullscreen and back to windowed fullscreen right afterwards and it was gone)
My game never crashes anymore, not even with bunch of onoses, exos and cysts everywhere.
swalkSay hello to my little friend.Join Date: 2011-01-20Member: 78384Members, Squad Five Blue
Any official update on this problem? Hope 1.0 doesn't go live with a problem like this. People will get soo turned off from the game if they are getting bugs like this every 15mins. At least thats how often it happens to me, on a rough scale.
Have you guys tried disabling steam cloud and then validating files, perhaps re-installing after, keeping steam cloud disabled? Steam cloud errors a lot for me in NS2 so I disable it for this game.
DghelneshiAims to surpass Fana in post edits.Join Date: 2011-11-01Member: 130634Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
Why would Steam Cloud have to do anything with missing textures? It stores the configuration file, which doesn't really have more in it than what is available in the menu.
swalkSay hello to my little friend.Join Date: 2011-01-20Member: 78384Members, Squad Five Blue
edited September 2012
I did all the usual that you would do when you encounter such a problem. Went on the forums to discover that lots of other people are having the same problem. Just hoping all ATI card users dont get this when 1.0 hits steam, that would be sad. But it definitely seems like a VRAM issue, like Max said. The game starts normally, but suddenly you begin getting checkerboards squares on players and structures. This happens for both teams. Like in this shot: <img src="http://i48.tinypic.com/8xvssh.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" /> Then after some time playing like that, the full screen becomes a checkerboard(when spawning as a marine, never happens as alien). Like this shot, after this the game is obviously unplayable: <img src="http://i.imgur.com/IVVrx.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" /> The bug have been around since.. ..216 I think? Where the new UI went in.
I want to report that I have the same exact problem since 217. I get the checkered textures after around 5-10 minutes of playing.
Also, everytime there's a lot of marine shooting, especially exo, I get IMMENSELY HUGE amounts of lag. My FPS drop to 0 for like 3-4 seconds sometimes, until the shooting stop. It even occured to me that the shooting went for a longer time, and the game completely crash. I can shoot fine without problem, it's always when somebody else is shooting. 1 or 2 marine is fine, more cause problem. Exo are the worst, whenever they shoot, the game freeze for like 1-2 seconds.
My specs: CPU : AMD Phenom II X4 840, 3.2 Ghz RAM: 4 Gb GPU: Sapphire Radeon 6850 1gb OS: Windows 7 32 bits
I've disabled ALL the graphics settings that I could, put the textures to low and reduce the resolution to something like 1280x760, and the problem persist. I get the same message error "could not lock file .dds" in console that others have shown.
I've been playing for around 6 months now, and I got those huge problems only since 217(at the exo release?). The game is unplayable for me right now.
I could play a few matches yesterday till the bug appeared. If you enable r_stats, change into an Exo and start firing, the draw cell count and the displayed effects sky rocket as expected. And as a result, in the match my fps dropped to around 1.5 when two Exos fired. Shortly afterwards the checkerboard textures appeared and I was forced to quit the game. When I first encountered the bug in 216, this happend when 3+ marines were firing at the same time.
I also met a 2nd person with an Geforce 8800 that could play the game without this bug, but with low fps. The 8800 has max 768MB memory, but every card that had this problem had 1GB memory, right? Maybe the firing effects+ are causing a bottleneck situation in another context. So, even if the devs minimize the use of vram, the bug could still appear? I really hope they will just check what was changed from 215 to 216...the bug is getting old now.
I am having this problem as well, my graphics drivers are up to date. I also only get the full blue checkerboard screen as a marine and only while alive. It doesn't happen every game, just every few games.
AMD FX-4170 4.2 GHz DDR3-1600 ASUS Radeon HD 7770 DirectCU 1 GB 8gigs Kingston HyperX DDR3 windows 7 32 bit.
I play with medium textures on a medium res can't quite remember and am at work.
<!--quoteo(post=1984421:date=Sep 29 2012, 05:26 AM:name=Crusher)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Crusher @ Sep 29 2012, 05:26 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1984421"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Checkerboards are still appearing in the new patch. and it seems they're appearing even faster than in the previous (220) patch:(<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Comments
Mine was already off when the bug showed up.
It has been happening since 217 for me. But now is not occurring until I turn my graphics back up..
Not sure if the performance went up, but it might have been a little (didn't get far into the game as we rushed the hive and killed it, so can't really tell yet)
However the checkerboards still do appear... . Will keep on hoping it will be fixed soon:(
At least in low and in window mode tha game doesn't crash all the time. It still crashes more often than before 216 but I can play some rounds if I don't go comm or if there aren't Exos in the field. The comm ui and the Exo fire animation seem to "overload" my pc :( 4 builds in a row with problems. I hope the players with weaker PCs won't get forgotten for the sake of the release. I wonder how many NS2 Players don't have an über-pc :P
Thank you!
Thank you!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yes. Devs are aware.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->[ 3388 ] - <b>'Checkerboards' showing in place of textures/the entire view.</b><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I have an NVidia card.
PS : Patch 220, the bug is still here.
Here is a screenshot of the console after this bug happens, I disconnected to get to the menu. Same situation as WILDMAN.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/XvkUQ.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Clearly it's a problem with the UI, hope we can get this resolved very soon.
ATI Card(HD5770) here as well.
My game never crashes anymore, not even with bunch of onoses, exos and cysts everywhere.
Hope 1.0 doesn't go live with a problem like this.
People will get soo turned off from the game if they are getting bugs like this every 15mins.
At least thats how often it happens to me, on a rough scale.
Went on the forums to discover that lots of other people are having the same problem.
Just hoping all ATI card users dont get this when 1.0 hits steam, that would be sad.
But it definitely seems like a VRAM issue, like Max said.
The game starts normally, but suddenly you begin getting checkerboards squares on players and structures. This happens for both teams.
Like in this shot:
<img src="http://i48.tinypic.com/8xvssh.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Then after some time playing like that, the full screen becomes a checkerboard(when spawning as a marine, never happens as alien).
Like this shot, after this the game is obviously unplayable:
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/IVVrx.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
The bug have been around since.. ..216 I think? Where the new UI went in.
Also, everytime there's a lot of marine shooting, especially exo, I get IMMENSELY HUGE amounts of lag. My FPS drop to 0 for like 3-4 seconds sometimes, until the shooting stop. It even occured to me that the shooting went for a longer time, and the game completely crash. I can shoot fine without problem, it's always when somebody else is shooting. 1 or 2 marine is fine, more cause problem. Exo are the worst, whenever they shoot, the game freeze for like 1-2 seconds.
My specs:
CPU : AMD Phenom II X4 840, 3.2 Ghz
RAM: 4 Gb
GPU: Sapphire Radeon 6850 1gb
OS: Windows 7 32 bits
I've disabled ALL the graphics settings that I could, put the textures to low and reduce the resolution to something like 1280x760, and the problem persist. I get the same message error "could not lock file .dds" in console that others have shown.
I've been playing for around 6 months now, and I got those huge problems only since 217(at the exo release?). The game is unplayable for me right now.
When I first encountered the bug in 216, this happend when 3+ marines were firing at the same time.
I also met a 2nd person with an Geforce 8800 that could play the game without this bug, but with low fps. The 8800 has max 768MB memory, but every card that had this problem had 1GB memory, right? Maybe the firing effects+ are causing a bottleneck situation in another context. So, even if the devs minimize the use of vram, the bug could still appear? I really hope they will just check what was changed from 215 to 216...the bug is getting old now.
AMD FX-4170 4.2 GHz DDR3-1600
ASUS Radeon HD 7770 DirectCU 1 GB
8gigs Kingston HyperX DDR3
windows 7 32 bit.
I play with medium textures on a medium res can't quite remember and am at work.
Same..
in full screen mode (i had switched from windowed to full screen in the RR if that is of interest)
i have a GTX 660
options =
double buff
high
amb occ, refl, tex str OFF,
rest ON.
... deleting local & reinstalling ...