I know I was told this issue will probably never be fixed, but earlier today I found out that my Card is indeed capable of rendering/drawing/what-ever-you-call-it of the shader, but only in orbital layer. I found out that for me orbital units display health bars, progress bars as well as weapon reload bars. I find this strange because if in fact my card was incapable of showing these because of outdated drivers that aren't supported, then why do these appear on orbital layer? Additionally what shader files do I have do took at to try fixing this? I may not be a computer guru, but I can still try looking at a file and screwing about with values. Maybe I'll fix it, probably I'll end up accidentally detonating someone's secret stash of nuclear weapons, but still if Uber can't afford to dedicate man hours to fixing this, then I'd be willing to play around with it.
(Assuming you've checked all your icon, range, and terrestrial settings) The icon coloring and sizing are in the particle_icon shaders. The .vs calls out to isIconOccluded in particle_common.vs, which actually sounds like a promising place to look.
So me and @SXX Were testing this (he was brains and I was the brawn) and we managed to "fix" the following: "N" above north pole arrow south pole Numbers on starting spots Ping. We will continue working on this when he gets back form lunch. Also we managed to confirm that the problem is indeed on the OpenGL Drivers. How we fixed those will be left to SXX.
So basically about what was done: First I captured GL trace using APITrace on my Win7 laptop. Then I asked @zweistein000 to replay it. We find out that he still missing icons, so I just make sure this is actual GL problem which isn't related to Coherent at all. We know that all icons handled by GPU particle so problem somewhere there. Now when I know it's not GL problem related to GPU I find out what effects work for him and which isn't. As result he have projectiles effects and path lines working, while icons don't work. After number of tests I find out that "particle_transparent" work properly while "particle_transparent_screensize_nohdr" (used by North and South symbols, ping, start position ID) not working. In this case fix is easy, those particles might just be set to use "particle_transparent" instead of "particle_transparent_screensize_nohdr" which might cause some issues, but anyway. Unfortunately mex and units icons use "particle_transparent_nohdr" which have different techniques called "icon" and "status" which have their own shaders (particle_icon, particle_status_icon). My first guess was that "isIconOccluded" not working properly, but it's not that. Continue my little research for now
My current working belief is it's nothing to do with the actual shaders. Which ones are and aren't working are simply the luck of the draw ... order. The data that the particle system uses to get data (position, color, etc.) is essentially a giant texture, or rather lots of giant textures, that data is then read out of. There's a bug we know about already that may or may not be caused by something we're doing that's "bad" which some drivers handle and others do not which causes texture data to get out of sync with what slot it's supposed to go into. This would mean some set of particles might get a unit texture, or the UI, or some other random texture and try to use that to get their positions, which will result in very unintuitive results. The fact that people are able to see any strategic icons at all, even though they're all the same shader, is why I think this is the problem. Also the fact if you turn off metal spot icons in the options you lose some of the strategic icons you were getting tells me it's an every-other type problem.
This was also my first guest; I also did remove the condition to test it, then bgolus told me that wasn't a shader problem (there is another thread on this bug here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/so-any-news-on-orbital-and-mex-icon-fix-for-old-amd-cards.60194/ ).
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. As far as I understand many particle effects are rendered properly. So I just want to ask do you see any hack that can be used as workaround for this issue? I understand that at moment icons use own shaders designed to work with them best, but might be there is easy way to render them differently? Any advice? And yeah I don't mean include it in builds, but at least guys who affected will able to play. At least it's was my original idea when I start to dig into this problem.
