Remember kids, dont tab out during loading or your ground textures are gone

I wrote my own name tho

anyway this little thing happened to me when i tabbed(alt+tab) out during loading. this both happened to me on startup and joining sas server.
A quick restart fixes it tho

This happens to me too. You don't need to restart the game to fix it btw. You only need to reload the map. So hopping back to lobby and loading the save/rejoining the server should be enough.

thats good to know, thank you

Sometimes also helps if you have an open browser - just alt+tab a few times or/and click to another tab in the browser.

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mmh, i had it again today, only this time not when loading. i was forcefully tabbed out by an update. and when i came back the ground textures were gone...

Is there a trick with alt-tab and loading screen to getting that surface effect layer fill the ground that way so that you can poke holes in it?

I can't get it to happen myself in full screen with starting a quick match and alt-tabbing away when the loading screen appears and going back when the game has loaded. Same with continuing a quick match.

Does this happen consistently to you guys if you just alt-tab from the loading screen?

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The issue with losing the ground effects while playing when leaving fullscreen by something else than alt-tabbing is another thing. Ogre3D reports the window having lost the render texture content due to leaving fullscreen but there's no provided way of getting notified about it before it is about to happen, so the previous saved state of the ground effect texture might be quite old even. Fetching the texture content from GPU for saving on disk takes too long to be done periodically, you'd see even more annoying stalls every now and then, so it is saved only when you quit the game session or do alt-tab specifically. A better way would be to hook up with some window events to get it to work with e.g. ctrl-esc and any other focus lost reason like a popup window, but there's a bit of more effort to get it done, and it needs to be handled separately for Windows/Linux/Mac.

Granted, there is a problem that you don't get back to even the very initial state of the effect layer if it hasn't been saved once when this happens. This is easiest to notice in Fridge Valley where the top layer snow is made with premade content on the effect layer.

I have no idea what you were saying but if i get the gist of it: you lose the ground effect layer with alt+tabbing because the layer is only saved when I alt-tab specifically, and when I quit the game-session, and when this doesnt happen due to some reason The ground effects would be gone?

Wouldnt the problem be solved when it saves on startup then? If i tab out and it doesnt save, or i get tabbed out by a popup, it could get the saved startup version of the ground effect so it doesnt dissapear in a whole?


Maybe its hardware specefic? if thats the case here is what i am using
Nvidia Geforce GTX 550 Ti
AMD Athlon II x4 640 processor
4gb's of RAM (cant find the specefic things of this)
Windows 8.1 Pro

I dont think I got the latest driver update so that might be the problem (but i doubt that since i never had this problem)
It doesnt seem to be happening again for me now either.

Yes I forgot to mention that this

is something that can be easily fixed.

The hole poking fill issue I'm not sure how that gets to happen and indeed sounds like it doesn't happen all the time for you either. I'm thinking now it's some specific combination of having been in a winter map previously (that filled stuff I believe to be the snow layer, it's just black in a non-winter map) and somehow getting the game to load a saved effect layer from a previous map when getting to the next one, possibly campaign related or online, with alt-tab involved. Hmm, didn't try that one actually.

I made some changes in the whole thing to get it a little bit more robust, at least it avoids the cleared effect layer issue in the cases I tested it with.

Wait, the hole poking is an issue? Well now that i think about it it does seem rather strange to get dirt stuff on a beach...
(granted i wrote my name on a beach, i dont remember anymore :S)

well, if i still get the gist of what you said, wouldnt that be fixed by having save states per map, so it wouldnt get messed up?

What I mean is that this http://i.imgur.com/hVx0Hc4.jpg is an issue - the beach isn't supposed to be black initially. The beach, in it's normal sandy appearance, is however supposed to have darker brown holes made when you walk on it, but the whole beach shouldn't be black to start with.

Storing effect layer states per map could fix it, sure, if it is coming from what I said, still haven't tried if that's the way to reproduce it. The changes I made should also fix that case, given how the surface gets properly reset (if it can't be saved because of window not being active) when starting a new scenario in a map.