Fixes for Firestorm issues

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Ozwell Wayfarer
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Fixes for Firestorm issues

Post by Ozwell Wayfarer »

There have been a number of issues crop up over the year(s) that seem to be fairly common that people have mentioned to me or asked and I have had no answers for. Well, now I do! :D

I cant promise these fixes will work for everyone, but they have worked for me in the past or for friends and acquaintances.

Please note - for most of these fixes you need the developer menu and advanced settings enabled. To enable these, go to "Preferences", "Advanced" and tick "Show advanced menu" and "Sow developer menu".

1. Blinky/flickering water
Problem - at certain camera angles, the water surrounding the sim seems to blink rapidly in and out of existence. Its a horrible effect and if you ever experienced it you know what I mean.

Solution - Go to "Developer", Rendering" and untick "object-object occlusion". This will fix the water with no noticeable side effects.

2. Lossy Textures/Textures not loading right or re-loading.
Problem - Textures do not load and get "stuck". Textures that already loaded reload randomly.

Solution - Go to "Advanced", "show Debug settings". Type "TextureDiscardLevel" and set this to 0. This is a fix I recently applied myself and really saw a difference. Default seems to be 3.

3. Terrain Texture Scale
Problem - The texture scale you see on your sim is not the same as your visitors see it. You see textures applied to terrain as larger or smaller than your visitors.

Solution - This is actually an unknown viewer setting. Go to "Preferences", "Graphics" and hit the "Rendering" submenu. The very last row in the menu allows you to set the texture scale. Keep this menu open, it relates to my next tip! :)

4. Shadows cause crashes/low FPS.
Problem - As above.

Solution - There is no real "solution" for this one. Shadows are a notorious hardware killer. Even my fairly modern desktop struggles in some sims. Laptops dont stand a chance really.

But you can improve performance by going to "Graphics" and hit the "Rendering" submenu. Second line from bottom is called "quality of the shadows". Set that to 1.

Previously (with this setting at 3) my FPS would half. So 60 FPS with no shadows would become 30 with shadows. 30 becomes 15 etc. With the quality set to 1, my FPS drops -5 on average. So much better.

5.Missing Suitcase Folder
Brayla Sana gave me this info. Many thanks to her for this one!

Sometimes you cant see your "my suitcase" folder in your inventory. This is where you put items you want to take with you when you travel using Hypergrid.

If the folder is missing at the top right of the inventory window, you see a dropdown that says "All Types." Click the arrow and select "custom" at the bottom. Click the checkbox that says "Always Show Folders." Then you can see the Suitcase.

So there you go, hopefully this will help you to have a less buggy, more pleasant Kitely experience! :mrgreen:

Do you have a useful firestorm fix? Please post it here!
Last edited by Ozwell Wayfarer on Fri Mar 25, 2016 4:32 pm, edited 6 times in total.
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Re: Fixes for Firestorm graphics issues

Post by Ozwell Wayfarer »

I put this in "General" because I think its useful for everyone to know. But I wont be offended if people feel it belongs in the "viewer support" subforum. ;)
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Re: Fixes for Firestorm graphics issues

Post by Ozwell Wayfarer »

Chic Eon posted a good question in the G+ group about terrain texture scale.
"so on the terrain scale issue and you seeing different than others --- isn't that going to be like many things (Windlight comes high on the list)? The only way you will "match" someone else's view is to have the same setting? So safest to leave it on the default (seems to be 12 as I didn't know that was there) "
Basically, yes.

But its good info to know, because it seems to vary even between versions of firestorm. The way I discovered this is myself and +Dot Matrix were in a sim once and she noted the terrain textures didnt "match up" with some of the meshes around, but they looked fine to me. We were both using firestorm. Just different versions. Then I tried with singularity and saw it was RADICALLY different.

For Kitely users, I recommend checking this value in your viewer after you design your world, then recommend it on your world startup page.
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Re: Fixes for Firestorm issues

Post by Jinjer Rojjers »

Problem: the game will not load it goes about 3/4 and freezes.
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Ilan Tochner
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Re: Fixes for Firestorm issues

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Hi Yanesh,

Do you have an Intel onboard graphics chipset? If so, install and use the 32bit version of Firestorm instead of the 64bit version: https://www.firestormviewer.org/os-operating-system/
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