Strange Graphics Bug

There are 3 effects of the bug:
1: Unit icons on the map get a thick, black, blinking border.
2: Shots, explosions, burning, smoke, tree details when zoomed out and shields blink or even become invisible.
3: Nano smoke blinks or becomes invisible.
Sometimes only some effects appear, but usually all or noone. If a higher numbered effect appears, lower numbered effects usually appear too, but not always. Wheter the effects appear also depends on the zoom (effect 1 is usually better at mid zoom, 2 when zoomed out), but usually it appears on every zoom.

The bug can be fixed by deleting Spring/LuaUI folder or all zk_... files in Spring/LuaUI. Then all GUI customization is deleted, too. When I start to reconfigure my GUI, the bug returns pertinaciously after short time. The bug also returns in the second game, when GUI is not changed.

While certain sets of units are selected, the bug doesn't appear temporarily. The required size of the set varies. Sometimes even a single unit is enough, but not every unit. It seems as if an eco structure must be selected. I could probably fix the bug by definig a mex as a unit group and define a MouseButton as (Ctrl+[number of the unit group] - Ctrl+LeftMouseClick) and use this button to select units + a mex by default.^^

After some time there was also a game with only effect 2 in a very strong way (mostly disappearing instead of blinking), that could not be avoided by selection.

Do you know a better solution to this problem? Probably just reinstall.. I didn't change any hardware or drivers, when the problem occured. Thx for replies.

Projectiles and their trails don't render properly when maximum particles are set too low. Maybe check if that's the cause?

I've had problems with black borders too once. They sometimes appeared wide, sometimes thin. I don't remember what fixed the problem, but it's gone now. I suspected a widget to toggle something as it usually triggered while I was doing something, but couldn't confirm the theory.

Did you ever experience a quarter of your gamescreen blinking occasionally? I had that about the same time as the problem with unit icon borders, it would only occur when /water was set to a specific value though (I think it was /water 0).

Now I have found a configuration where effects 1 and 3 are solved and 2 is weak (still things (actually not projectiles itself, but beams and projectile trails and so on) disappear at low zoom and sometimes blink at high zoom) by deleting a file in LuaUI folder and reconfiguring options.

1 seems to be correlated to Outline widget. (Once I turned it on and off several times without changing anything else, and effect 1 appeared exactly only when it was activated.) However I have it activated now without effect 1 and I guess I didn't have it activated, when it appeared for the 1st time.

quote: Projectiles and their trails don't render properly when maximum particles are set too low. Maybe check if that's the cause?

I changed maximum particles to several values, but it has no impact on it.

quote: Did you ever experience a quarter of your gamescreen blinking occasionally? I had that about the same time as the problem with unit icon borders, it would only occur when /water was set to a specific value though (I think it was /water 0).

When I change my point of view as a spec, the upper half of my screen updates at another time than the other half. But I guess that's normal. I didn't experience any other blinking of whole gamescreen quarters.

GoogleFrog yes, I have showeco activated and see it properly.

quote: Try changing between default settings levels. They disable large amounts of graphcial effects that live in LuaUI, and figuring out at which level the problem starts to appear will help chasing them down.

If you mean ZKL's default setting levels, they only affect springsettings.cfg and lups.cfg.