Display problems

[morkalg]

I am loving this program but I have some strange video issues when I select some systems with planets. It seems that when I try to view a planet everything goes black and I have to do some serious juggling with the sidebar to get the star system back.

I researched some troubleshooting tips for this and was glad to read about disabling hardware acceleration on my video card thinking that would solve the problem... the issue is though that when I go to disable it Windows reports that "Your Current Display Driver Does Not allow changes to be made to hardware acceleration settings."

Its an Intel Mobile 965 Chipset driver, the latest version and I'm running Vista Home Premium.

Any suggestions on what else to try?

Thanks

[Ed_NBOS]

Which build of AS2 are you running? If you havent already, try this one:
http://www.nbos.com/nox/index.php?action=1001&id=102
as it had a number of tweaks to help work around video problems like this.

[morkalg]

ED,

I am currently at that build. Any other ideas?

[Ed_NBOS]

Display problems like this are difficult to narrow down. Disabling hardware accelleration would force Astro to use software-based opengl rendering. That would let you know if its a video driver thing, or something more related to Astro's functionality.

You can also try changing your color depth/desktop resolutions (temporarily). People in the past have reported that sometimes 'blackout' problems like this go away when the deskop color depth is changed, and then changed back.

You can also check if there's an updated driver available for your video card. Sometimes downgrading also solves the problem.

[morkalg]

Tried all that with no luck at all.

So... whens Astrosynthesis 3.0 coming out and will it handle video in the same manner?

[Ed_NBOS]

Astro3 should be out next summer, but it will still be an OpenGL based application. I may look into a way to force it to use software rendering for cases like this.

[morkalg]

Any chance of an update to AS2 to force software versus hardware acceleration?