Screen Coordinate Offset Problem?
by Matt McCracken · in Torque Game Builder · 03/14/2006 (5:25 pm) · 9 replies
I packaged something up today and sent it over to someone for testing and the first thing they noticed was that there were no images(dynamic ones...the background and tile map were there). I had them go through and change the image types over and over to see if it was a rendering problem on their end. Nothing seemed to help, until they were playing around and saw an image in the very top left corner that was supposed to be in the bottom right corner. It turns out that all the images were being rendered, but they were rendered very far off of the screen.
Has anyone ever expierieced this? I thought maybe the moveto coordinates might be off, but it seems to be interacting correctly with the tile map and other collision objects on the screen. It draws perfectly on my machine.
I've heard via a friend that physics are dependant on the clock speed of the computer and cant be relied upon to be 100% accurate all the time, but I would think that screen coordinates would be fairly stable across machines. I normalized the resolution on both computers so I'm fairly sure that it wasn't a resolution problem.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Has anyone ever expierieced this? I thought maybe the moveto coordinates might be off, but it seems to be interacting correctly with the tile map and other collision objects on the screen. It draws perfectly on my machine.
I've heard via a friend that physics are dependant on the clock speed of the computer and cant be relied upon to be 100% accurate all the time, but I would think that screen coordinates would be fairly stable across machines. I normalized the resolution on both computers so I'm fairly sure that it wasn't a resolution problem.
Thanks in advance for any help.
About the author
#3
03/15/2006 (9:04 pm)
Matt, thanks for the offer, I'm going to wait until I can actually get to the computer in question and take a look to see if its the problem that Johan linked. Unfortunately the user of the computer isn't a very savvy computer user(that's why I picked em) so I have to wait until I actually get to the computer(300 miles away) to debug the problem. I'll try the stuff that was mentioned in the thread above and if I'm still having a problem I'll post again or send you the source.
#4
03/15/2006 (11:02 pm)
Maybe if you could them to send you the console.log file. I think it says in the beginning which chipsets etc are identified.
#5
03/19/2006 (11:31 am)
So my user does in fact have the Brookdale-G chipset, same as the other users that experienced this same problem. I didn't see any resolution in the other thread that johan mentioned. Is this now being considered a T2D bug and being worked on or should I try to fix it on my end? 
#6
Only Intel extreme have real 3d side driver support (especially only those have a working OpenGL support).
So its a "bug" in T2D with transformations as it does not take care of the "correct setup". I've seen similar issues on other apps using OpenGL and know that it can be solved. Will see if I can find the informations on it again so anyone at GG can iron out this bug.
On the other side: only people that have no 3D card (Intel Extreme and higher are the only 3D cards by Intel) are affected by it ... and I would never suggest them to try to use OpenGL based games ... because everything would need to be calculated on CPU and not their "graphic card" ...
03/19/2006 (10:46 pm)
This is a known problem with Intel cards thats caused by some transformation setup situation.Only Intel extreme have real 3d side driver support (especially only those have a working OpenGL support).
So its a "bug" in T2D with transformations as it does not take care of the "correct setup". I've seen similar issues on other apps using OpenGL and know that it can be solved. Will see if I can find the informations on it again so anyone at GG can iron out this bug.
On the other side: only people that have no 3D card (Intel Extreme and higher are the only 3D cards by Intel) are affected by it ... and I would never suggest them to try to use OpenGL based games ... because everything would need to be calculated on CPU and not their "graphic card" ...
#7
03/20/2006 (11:27 am)
Part of the Torque Game Builder system requirements is a 3D hardware accelerated video card, so no, this isn't a TGB "bug", just outside of the system requirements.
#8
I've ran starwars SWG, everquest, world of warcraft, and several other intense graphical, 3d games on the machine in question, all with no problems at all. You can't tell me that there is nothing I can do to correct this problem other than suggest a video card upgrade. There has to be some solution.
03/20/2006 (5:27 pm)
Is there anything that can be done in the source to correct the problem then? I'm writing games that won't specifically target hardcore gamers, but people who may be relying upon onboard graphics to do the trick(which is why I chose a relatively simple 2d platform rather than a hardware intense 3d platform). Being that this is a standard chipset that is shipped in many "off the shelf" computers, I can't imagine deploying a game with a known bug that may affect 10% of my target audience or more.I've ran starwars SWG, everquest, world of warcraft, and several other intense graphical, 3d games on the machine in question, all with no problems at all. You can't tell me that there is nothing I can do to correct this problem other than suggest a video card upgrade. There has to be some solution.
#9
My personal encounter with it was on an on-board SiS video chipset with the latest (but still ancient) drivers.
Edit: One forgotten "didn't" can change the entire post's meaning. :)
03/20/2006 (8:05 pm)
The only frustrating thing about this problem (which has also been discussed here and here) is that the very first public release of the shooter demo didn't exhibit this behavior. 1.02 had the problem as have each subsequent release since. My personal encounter with it was on an on-board SiS video chipset with the latest (but still ancient) drivers.
Edit: One forgotten "didn't" can change the entire post's meaning. :)
Torque 3D Owner Matthew Langley
Torque
mattl (at) garagegames.com