Hi there!
I know this has already been announced by jcl in the "Update 6.4 Remarks" thread, however I think this definitely is a bug!

Since I own a Geforce 6800 GT with 256 MB of VRAM, the card can display textures up to 4096x4096 pixels. However, the bitmap I'm trying to use in a shader (also posted here but got washed away more or less ) is 3072x512 pixels in size. I'm using a similar texture as a skycube and it seems to work without any problems, however, if I try to use the skycube texture for the shader as well, it is also announced as being "too big for 3d card"! Both textures are TGA, RLE compressed (removing the compression didn't help, btw) and about 1.2 MB in filesize.


Here are my specs:

P4 2,26 Ghz
512 MB RAM
Geforce 6800 GT 256 MB
Windows XP Professional
A6 Commercial 6.4

If needed, I could also provide you with the shader code and the bitmaps that are causing me problems.

At first, textures consisting of several parts normally can't be too big. So please make sure that the texture name is correct for a sky texture.

Second, check whether your 3D card really supports 4096x4096. You'll find the real limit in the caps viewer.

Third, do not use a >1024 texture at all except for animated or sky textures. Such a texture won't run on a normal PC, otherwise. And some ATI drivers can't display environment cubes bigger than 256x256 at all - see bug list.

Thanks for replying, jcl.
I checked SiSoft Sandra to be 100% sure my card supports 4096x4096 textures. It does! Additionally, the texture I am using _is_ named as "cube+6.tga". It is nothing but a normal 6-sided skycube TGA which is not used on a sky entity but as a cubemap for my watershader.
Maybe this has something to do with the dx9-effects compiler because whenever I use the file as a skycube, it works and is rendered without any complaints. This is additionally strange as the texture is "only" 3072x512 pixels in size so that the card shouldn't have any problems with it even without the "+6" at the end of the filename.

Hmm, I can not reproduce a problem with 512x512 cubemaps on any GeForce system here. Can you send the project to support1(at)3dgamestudio(dot)com? I'll look into this.

Thanks a bunch, I send you a link to the project (my provider doesn't permit attached files bigger than 2 MB...).
I hope you don't mind it is unpublished because I was unsure about the effect of warn_level in the published version of A6... Without it, you might not even notice the error

EDIT: Woops! Here I am talking about warn_level and just now I noticed I set it to 0!
I'm sorry you will have to set it by sourself errr wait a moment... Yep here it is: system.wdl, line 419!

This is getting more and more strange. I found out a way to have the engine display the cubemap just as it should though there's no logic in it at all

You might want to try the following (this corresponds to my project):

-Open "0.wmb" in WED
-Run with the following parameters: "main.wdl -nx 30 -stable"
-Press TAB and enter "world(load,sephis)"
-Press 0 (zero) and fly around a bit, whatever...
-Again, press TAB and enter "world(load,mainmenu)" and voilà! There it is!

Weird isn't it o_O

Thanks, I can reproduce the problem. This will be modified.

This is interesting, JCL can you say what the reason for this is?

The warning message had an incorrect text and a wrong description in the manual.

It's issued when a texture exceeds 2048 pixels or a cubemap exceeds 256x256, indicating that you'll get problems with that texture on some older systems.

The warning message still exists, but will only be issued with a warn_level of 2 or above. And textures that are too big will now automatically be reduced in size, so the error won't be serious.

oh, i see..