Hello there!

Can you please file a support ticket with all the information (server, location, screenies)?

Thanks!

Can you attach your DXDiag file and any error messages you're receiving? Also, please file a support ticket so we can track it.

Thanks!

Hello all!

Rusty's made a thread to comment on the video card issues. Please read and then if you need, respond with the information he's requesting. Thanks!

Video Card Problems - The One True Thread

Hello all!

Rusty's made a thread to comment on the video card issues. Please read and then if you need, respond with the information he's requesting. Thanks!

Video Card Problems - The One True Thread

There have been a lot of different threads discussing video card issues, which makes it difficult to keep up with all of them. So we're going to start using this thread exclusively to track down video card issues.

Here's our current state:

Problem

1) Crash to desktop (especially severe on the Open Sea) - caused by a memory leak that's being fixed as I'm typing this.
2) Textures disappearing, goes to white - code problem that was fixed yesterday.

The first two issues have other symptoms as well, and a lot of these are going to go away when we deploy this build. The fix for issue 1 will be in shortly (as in, before we leave tonight), and we'll be doing a build and putting it through the process to get it out.

3) Flashing ocean texture on 8xxx cards - to the best of our knowledge, this is caused by Nvidia's 169.25 driver, and is still being researched.

Why do we think issue 3 is a driver issue instead of our issue? A number of reasons, but none more compelling than the experiment we just completed. We went back and grabbed a beta build from the beginning of December and tried it out. And sure enough, it had the exact same issue as the current build under the new driver. I realize that a number of you have stated that it only started happening when we released the latest patch. Our best guess is that the 169.25 (which was released on 12/20) started showing up on users's desktops around the same time that our patched rolled out. Maybe because it was deployed with windows update? We don't know, but given that an old build manifests the exact same symptoms, we're pretty sure that it's not any changes that we made recently.

That's not to say that we're not still trying to fix it. We're still working with Nvidia to understand what's going on, and will continue doing so until we have a solution.

In the meantime, here is what has helped a number of people:

1) Running in windowed mode instead of full screen.
2) Rolling back to the driver right before 169.25.

If neither of these solutions helps you, please report it on this thread, and include your DXdiag.

As this problem seems to be resolved, I'm unstickying the thread. Any further problems should be reported using the support system.

Happy sailing!

While I am interested in learning why Spybreak can't access our support site, I'd like to let you know that this situation has be remedied. Thanks for your reports.

Spybreak, what happens when you try to log into support?

Best,
Aether

Decals are overlaid on top of the sail texture -- exactly the same as you'd get with default layers in Photoshop or similar programs. So alternating white and transparent stripes could be colored

Since sails are complex pieces of equipment and we already provide a high-resolution sail texture for them, keep in mind that with sail coverage of about 50% or more, you'll want to make large decals somewhat transparent -- typically around 70% opaque.

You can preview this directly in your graphics program or using the 2D Content Previewer. NOTE: The previewer has a transparency slider, which is not a supported game feature. While this means some color will show through if you layer e.g. a red decal on top of green sails, the effect is usually minimal in practice.

More info about what we're looking for in Flags & Sails can be found in the 2D User Content Guidelines.

Happy drawing!

Why does the report site not work for you?

We found another video memory leak, probably the source of this error. Brendan is currently working on closing it up.