Stars get pixelated and stop animation

from Sins Forums

Simply put, over the course of the game the animation on the surface of stars gradually slows down and stops, and the texture takes on a pixelated look.

When watching a replay, within 30 minutes the animation appeared to move at about normal speed only when running on 8x, so it slowed down to about 1/8.  Not sure if the animation itself is what's wrong, or if the pixelation of the star just makes it appear to vanish.

After several hours the surface of stars are static aside from the occasional colored pixel turning white, or white pixel becoming colored.

This is what it looks like at the start (One) and later (Two and Three):

One
Two
Three

View the first and second at maximum size and switch between them to get a feel for what's happening to the texture.  The third shows the pixelated star closer than the second.

Browsing through people's screenshots on Xfire I see a lot of stars in a state that looks much like mine eventually get to, so it's probably a common problem.

 

Specs:

NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT (Dual with SLi, 185.81 drivers currently & issue happens with others)
Intel Core 2 Duo T9300, 2.50 Ghz
3GB RAM
Vista 32-bit

3,297 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Prob has something to do with utilizing resources. Ie. reduces the quality of stars in order to maintain performance as a the number of ships, buildings, planets, mines etc. increases.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Hmm is there any way to edit when or if that kicks in?  I tried playing with these values in the user.setting file:

MaxParticleCount 6000
MaxParticleSimulationsCount 2000
MaxAsteroidCount 10000
MaxDustCloudParticleCount 5000
End of quote

But it didn't seem to have any effect.

Also I loaded up a savegame from just before it finished (Medium, Single Star), finished off the last enemy, and then scrapped every single thing I could and evacuated every planet....all that was left were the explored-but-not-visible planets, star, and the capturable extractors with their systems visible.  Star still acted the same, i.e. pixelated and no animation. :annoyed:

 

If there is no way to change this, is there any way to disable the animation?  It's pretty much my favorite animation but I'd rather go without it and keep the star's original texture, than to have it go all pixelated.

Siege of Centauri