No Render After vid_restart Using VS 2005 Express

[jitspoe]

So here's a crazy bug. I was testing some Paintball2 (Quake2-based engine) stuff on my laptop (Inspiron 700m with a crappy integrated video card), and noticed that, after a vid_restart, the world completely stopped rendering. HUD/text/menu/etc. still work, but the world is completely blank.

I bounced back and forth between different builds until I tracked down which version the issue started with: build 30. Looking at the code, I couldn't find anything suspect, but that was the version where I switched compilers. I didn't really think that would cause it, but I tested it, just for kicks. I grabbed the source from an old build that worked, built it with VS2005 express, and ran it on my laptop. Low and behold, vid_restart made the world stop rendering!

What in the world would cause this? It doesn't happen on other graphics cards that I'm aware of. I'm not sure if it's due to the graphics card or CPU instruction set... it's just really weird. Any ideas?

[Barnes]

[jitspoe]

I'm afraid to update again -- seems every time I update, the binary gets more bloated, runs worse on old hardware, and apparently introduces weird bugs...

[revelator]

Been having the same probs :S seems the 2005 to 2008 compilers had some odd stuff going about for them. After upgrading to 2012 everything seems to Work ok Again though. But then Again you will get incompatibilities with earlier Windows like XP unless you explicitly set the build to XP compatibility in the project properties (and you need to update 2012 to the latest servicepack for that), it Works fine for XP builds after that though.

[jitspoe]

It's really strange that the problem only exhibits itself after a vid_restart, though... I wonder what that would do to anything. What's even stranger is the rendering behavior:

HUD, text, and other 2D elements render fine.
World does not render at all (it's not that it's rendering black - it just doesn't render. If gl_clear is 0, 2D rendered elements will accumulate)
gl_showtris works.

[jitspoe]

[jitspoe]

[jitspoe]

[revelator]

If you get that crystal ball working i would'nt mind a heads up been dealing with strange stuff like that for some time now, but newer found out what causes it.
The ztrick stuff is weird though i agree.

[jitspoe]

What video card do you have? This was happening on my Dell Insprion 700m (Intel Extreme Graphics 855 GM video card, I believe). You could try adding the glClearDepth(1.0); if you're experiencing the same issue.

[r00k]

hmm i thought it was always a good idea to use clearbits = GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT; glClear (clearbits);
in r_clear anyways on modern gpus?

[Spike]

r00k, glClearDepth specifies the value to write when clearing the buffer, but does not actually do the clear.
noone's using ztrick by default here (yes, ztrick is generally slower on modern gpus), they're only noticing that it still works when ztrick 0 does not.

make sure you're not scissoring during the clear or something? :s
you have glDepthMask(GL_TRUE) set I trust?

as you're q2-based, I assume your vid_restart is a full context destruction+recreation?

[jitspoe]