So any news on orbital and mex icon fix for old AMD cards?

I suppose before strategic icons (same for old selection boxes and Patrol/exit point prints) were rendered by Coherent to texture and then it's was used by game. Is this changed now?

Can confirm that I'm using a HD4850 and getting these error (metal spot/orbital) as well. I'm also getting some more additional errors:

1. The zoomed out strategic icons don't appear unless I have a radar with power. Commander strategic icon doesn't appear at all.
   
2. My Radar only gives strategic icon vision of enemy units that are not in the Fog of War. When I tested this online agaisnt a friend, I would receive a notfication of enemy detected after building the radar but the radar doesn't show anything beyond that.
   

Could anyone else in the thread with the error (and some spare time) test to see if this is the case with their game aswell?

edit - added logs

Edit 2 - Well I'm an idiot. after looking at the logs myself, I found one mod that was still loading, one file genocide later and the radar issue is fixed.

Occasionally, I am missing the green mex icons and other stuff like that as well. However, I don't have AMD or Windows for that matter, so the workaround I found will probably not work for you guys, but just in case, here it is:

• Download the Debugger.
• Join a game and start playing. You'll see a planet without mex icons.
• Start the Debugger and press "Go". You should get a list of Inspectable Pages.
• One of the pages is called "Icon Atlas". Click on that.
• Move you mouse of the html code. You don't need to click anything.
• Hopefully observe metal spot icons...?

@bgolus already said those aren't rendered by Coherent anymore.

True, they do look different too, but I still need this workaround to get them to display at all. I just tested it while I wrote up the above workaround and went from no icons to icons.

I still have problem with cursor on FOSS drivers which caused by same issue.

Though as far as I understand Windows AMD legacy drivers problem with cursor can't be fixed this way so possible icons won't be fixed too. Anyway it's worth to try everything, might be on Windows debugger will work better than "-software-ui".

Yeah, that's why I started with the disclaimer that it will probably not work, but you never know. Computers are weird.

Strategic icons have always been rendered in the game's graphics engine and not part of Coherent UI. However we use Coherent UI to build the icon atlas texture which the game uses.

Oops, I shouldn't use word "rendered" because it's isn't what I mean.

Linux version on open source drivers have problems with those atlases when they remain empty (or filled with random colors) and it's looks exactly like problem with missing cursors/icons on AMD legacy drivers.

For Linux it's helps to use "--software-ui" or just reload Coherent icon atlas view's after menu loaded so I think it's worth try to do that on Windows..

Question: Is the north pole billboard using the same shader ? Because I can see it's icon, but I can't see any south pole icon (and the north pole icon diseappear when the dot product of the position of the north icon x viewing vector < 0, I'm not sure if important). I may be able to fix the shader on my side (I've wrote simple GLSL shaders before when experimenting with webgl and XNA). I did some experiments yesterday:

* Forcing the output color to a bright green in the fragment shader) to be sure it hasn't to do something with transparency.
* Removing the occlusion constraint
* Forcing the position of the icon to a zero vector, instead of looking in the position buffer.
* Forcing the transformed position to the center of the screen (but I may be made an error on this).

My primary goal is to be able to show something on screen. I don't care if I break the rendering for some times.

If bgolus could give me some hints or directions? Or maybe give me the old version of the shader (it was working a long time ago, but I can't give you a version number for sure...) so I could compare both shaders and check what's different?

The North Pole "N" shader I is not the same shader as the strategic icons. Also there is no "S" anymore, I took it out to try to minorly reduce the amount of stuff on screen.

There are two major types of screen space icon shaders in the game, those rendered at game resolution (and effected by resolution scaling) that interact with the scene depth and those rendered at the UI resolution do not interact with the scene depth.

The shaders that interact with the depth are those like the pole indicator arrows and "N" as well as the orbital unit position lines and and line formation drawing. These are the shaders with "screensize" and "line" in their name. They render into the game world and get obscured by the planet and units just like anything else. They don't need the mathematical occlusion approximation because they are actually occluded.

The strategic icons and status bar shaders are rendered after the screen resolution scaling and any FXAA to make sure the can be pixel perfect. This is also after the depth buffer has been thrown away by the renderer so we have to do the occlusion approximation in the shader.

The test shaders I posted previously proved to me this isn't a shader issue. More likely it's a driver bug or some issue with how we're telling the drivers to render those particular icons. The icons and status bars are separated into groups of feature, radar blip, planetary and celestial, or ground and orbital for status bars. We can turn each of these off based on parameters in settings and each camera. For some reason on the Radeon HD 4000 series cards either they're not turning on, or more likely when we hand the data from these groups too the driver it's only rendering certain ones.

Actually, one test. Does turing off metal icons make strategic icons disappear?

I'll test tonight, I'll keep you posted.

Yes, it does. Disabling metal spots icons also disable unit icons.

edit: tested with "always" and "range dependent", the behavior is the same.

Just want to share some information there because possible is's will be useful for investigation.

Since long time ago there was issue with cursor in fullscreen on AMD legacy and Vista drivers: PA#2098
Few months ago I find out that problem not affect players who using AMD legacy drivers on Windows 8.1.
Possible it's related to issues with icons so might be it's worth to check if there anyone affected on Win8.1 or not.

Just a point on this: if you look the planet when the north pole is occluded, as you don't have anymore the south marker, you can be easily lost. As it's impossible to get north and south icons at the same time, it would be cool to add it again.

The pole market is still there, just not the "S". They're also much further away from the planet than they used to be which means you can only see them when zoomed out.

I liked the bigger ones more. Just make the tansparency work again.

Well I'm not getting any south pole marker. Only the north pole and "N" is missing. Also I have recently realized that spawn numbers weren't removed and that I can't see those either.

Same here, I only have the north pole marker, without south marker, without N.