Black screen

[andylegate]

I've had a couple of people who have tried out my training age, complain about nothing but a black screen. One said that they could hear themselves running around, but that they can't see anything.

No one else is having that problem and have been able to link and explore just fine.

Anyone know what might cause this? I know I made a mistake with my spawn point in my very first Age, and got a black screen, but not with this Age.

[Chacal]

Maybe you forgot a file in the ULM upload?

[andylegate]

Ooops. *ahem* I did not explain well.....

The files for my training age are NOT on the ULM database. I have a link, you down load the zipped file. Extract the files and follow the directions in the Read Me file I made.
Basically I have the copy the Age and PRP file to the Dat folder and the Python file to the Python folder.

Then load up the ULM, and the Age should be under the Personal Ages tab.

So far this has worked with everyone else but these 2 guys, both of whom said that they have other fan made Ages that just load up fine. So they do seem to know what they are doing.

The only thing that I can think of is that, both of them have some fan made age that is conflicting with mine.

[Aloys]

Arg, black linking. I've seen that problem before but I can't remember how to solve it.
Does that Age include some Python?
Have you registered its Prefix Squence ID? (I can't find your name or the GoMa on the list )

[andylegate]

Ah, now would be a good time to mention this. Doing a pre-register of your sequence number over there? Sorry, I've lost count of how many times I've tried to register with the wiki, and never get any email confirmations. Someone else was telling me about that they too where having problems.

Camp Bravo's number is 5101, and last I looked, there were no other Ages with that number.

And yes, there is a python file, but like I said, no one else is having problems with it, hehe, just these 2 guys.

[Aloys]

From the top of my head the best to know if it is a conflict with other Ages is to ask them what other Ages they have installed and see if there's anything strange..
Even better would be to ask them to uninstall all the other Ages they have and see if they can link in yours..

[andylegate]

They say that they have, and now I have a 3rd person suffering this too.

BTW - I just went over to Alcugs and registered my number. I'm the only on LISTED with the number 5101.

I'll see what is going on I guess.

EDIT: I just had a thought. In the python file, I have the self.id number as 51011........ I'm wondering if that might cause problems with some people. I just changed it to 51010001 instead.

[andylegate]

Okay, I had someone tell me that they had this problem before, and the cause turned out to be, lack of memory. Problem being that the Age used some very high resolution graphic textures or vertex painting. Basically, their computer was running out of memory to properly display the graphics. So what they got was a blank screen, but could hear sounds of their foot steps running around, etc.

So I've gone back and looked. I didn't do any vertex painting, but YIKES I did have a few textures who's image sizes were huge. Some of them over 2000 x 2000. That was for my note book covers. Any smaller and they become not readable. But they are just eye candy any ways.

I also had several textures that were over 1024 x something. So what I'm doing is going back and lowering the image size of some of these so that they are no bigger than 512 x 512. Hopefully that will cure the problem.

I don't have a high end machine myself. Mater of fact, I only have 512 MB of ram. But, even though my nVidia graphics card is old (it's a FX 5500) it has 256 MB DDR Ram built on to it.

[Aloys]

I have never heard of this memory issue, but it is worth checking out.
Just make a copy of your Age and strip it down to create a 'minimal age': just the book, a plane with collisions, a linking point. And send them, if they can safely link, then it's something inside the Age. In which case you might try to lower the resolution of your textures.

Anyway using a 2k*2k texture for a book cover is way too much. Most people playing Uru use a screen resolution of 1280*1024 or less; so a texture of over 2000 pixels cannot be fully displayed. You should only use a texture of 1024*1024 or bigger for very large surfaces. (for instance in the Great Zero the map on the floor around the GZ rotating device is made up of 4 separate 1024*1024 textures)

You should also ask your guys to remove the Age's python PAK file, I don't think that's the problem, but it's worth trying.

[andylegate]

Okay, I went back and resized my huge textures.

In truth, it acutally made the Age look BETTER! Made the District Textures file a LOT smaller too. It was over 12 MB, now it's only about 6.9 mb now.

I've taken a look at some of the Uru Ages textures. It seems that the biggest they ever use is 512 x 512. Of course I haven't looked at everyone of their Ages, so I could be wrong. But all the ones that I've imported to study how they did things, the texture files never get huge.

I just reposted and asked people who are having the Black screen problem to redownload the Age and give it another go. If this fixes it, I'll let y'all know.