I have a specific problem with the This Hallowed Gound module. When I try to load it, the screen that opens looks like a modern art painting, a pot pourri of Vassal images from other module screens. I have tried dumping the Java cache, installing the latest video card drivers, and updating Vassal to the latest version just released today, all to no effect.
I’m running windows XP media edition on a desktop with 2 gigs of RAM. ATI Radeon X600 graphics card.
Also, look in Preferences for an option labeled “Disable DirectX D3D
pipeline?” Try checking that, and then restart VASSAL. Does it make
any difference for you?
Thanks for the replies. I can’t get to the preferences in this module - I can’t get to anything. The attached screenshot shows what appears as soon as I open the module.
This problem is Video Card/driver related. Java 1.6.0_11 (JRE6) on windows started trying to use Direct3d to directly drive video card hardware. If your video drivers are not up to date, it may now work. If there are unfixed bugs in your up to date video drivers, it may now work. If the moon is in the seventh house…
It’s some combination of bugs in the JRE and bugs in the video drivers.
It’s hard to track down where exactly the problem is since Windows video
drivers are in almost all cases closed source. The best you can do if
troubleshooting is try to verify that the JRE is doing exactly what the
spec says it should. Additionally, video card makers tend not to care much
about older cards, so even if you could conclusively demonstrate that the
video driver was at fault, it’s not clear that you’d gain anything beyond
a feeling of superiority for having done so, since the manufacturer will
likely just fob you off.
If the original poster is still reading: Try upgrading to Java 1.6.0_12
(a.k.a. Java 6 update 12), and turn D3D back on. That might also solve
your problem.
I have it in the back of my mind now that it might be worthwhile to create a
little tuning app, which does the following:
Shows you some images in a window, and asks “Does this look ok?” in order
to find for the user the best display settings he can use on his machine.
(Note that we could do this for Linux, too, since there we could turn on the
OpenGL pipeline.)
Finds the amount of physical RAM you have and sets a sane default maximum
heap.
As we get deeper and lower-level in our graphics work, this starts to sound like a good idea. I bet it would pay for itself if we go to JOGL. I wonder if it would be possible to make it part of the installer?
Then it should detect that, and format your hard drive.
That’s another good reason why something like this should be run when
VASSAL is first started, and then available from some menu in the MM
in case you reconfigure.
