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Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

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Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby japreja » Sun Mar 19, 2017 5:43 am

The menu text keeps disappearing and reappearing in FG 2017.1.2 on Windows 10 - 64Bit Home edition. I don't know if there is a setting to prevent this but I have included a video of what I am talking about. Hope it is clear enough, if not click the gear icon (on youtube and increase the quality).

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Re: Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby Thorsten » Sun Mar 19, 2017 8:04 am

AMD/Radeon graphcis card?
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Re: Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby japreja » Sun Mar 19, 2017 11:02 am

Thorsten wrote in Sun Mar 19, 2017 8:04 am:AMD/Radeon graphcis card?


Yes, and I also forgot to post some other things. Here is what dxDiag says


Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit (10.0, Build 14393) (14393.rs1_release_inmarket.170303-1614)
Language: English (Regional Setting: English)
System Manufacturer: HP
System Model: HP Pavilion Notebook
BIOS: F.19
Processor: AMD A10-8700P Radeon R6, 10 Compute Cores 4C+6G (4 CPUs), ~1.8GHz
Memory: 8192MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 7628MB RAM


Its an HP 17-g121wm laptop from Walmart :/ and I dont imagine its optimal for flightgear.
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Re: Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby Hooray » Sun Mar 19, 2017 11:12 am

have you tried changing your GUI style ?
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Re: Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby Thorsten » Sun Mar 19, 2017 11:16 am

That's (unfortunately) a fairly regular problem seem with these graphic cards. The way FG handles the rendering of the old GUI (PUI) and the more modern 3d stuff somehow lead to resource conflicts the driver doesn't manage gracefully - and the menu flickering seems to get worse when more demanding 3d is run (such as the ALS and Rembrandt renderers).

There's been a few tricks around to mitigate the problem - changing to a different gui style for instance seems to help. Also, if you search the forum for pui2canvas, you'll get an experiments script which renders (parts of) the dialogs as canvas widgets which do not suffer from this problem.

Being an nVidia user, I can't tell much more from personal experience.
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Re: Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby Hooray » Sun Mar 19, 2017 1:31 pm

Thorsten wrote in Sun Mar 19, 2017 11:16 am:There's been a few tricks around to mitigate the problem - changing to a different gui style for instance seems to help. Also, if you search the forum for pui2canvas, you'll get an experiments script which renders (parts of) the dialogs as canvas widgets which do not suffer from this problem.


As far as I am aware the pui2canvas parser does not currently handle the menubar, which is something that Jabberwocky was originally working on a long time ago - also, the dialogs it renders need to be using a subset of PUI/XML using a handful of widgets and layouting primitives - so for the time being, it's not a suitable replacement for PUI for people not sufficiently familiar with Nasal and Canvas to extend the system for the features currently not implemented (i.e. end-users vs. contributors).

So my assertion is that it's of little use in its current form if people are not also able and willing to tinker with the underlying FlightGear scripts to make it work for cases not implemented, which means that it's up to aircraft/fgdata developers to either adopt/extend the system or just leave it in its current form, and as long as that's the case, it won't be too useful for end-users wanting a functional non PUI-UI

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Pui2canvas
Image
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Re: Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby Thorsten » Sun Mar 19, 2017 2:51 pm

For some users, the flickering is so bad the menu is unusable - so even a hackish solution is better in these cases...
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Re: Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby Hooray » Sun Mar 19, 2017 4:12 pm

Thorsten wrote in Sun Mar 19, 2017 2:51 pm:For some users, the flickering is so bad the menu is unusable - so even a hackish solution is better in these cases...


I wasn't aware of that - and as a matter of fact, the menubar can be implemented "as is", i.e. there are no missing widgets/features at all if I remember correctly.
As far as I can tell, the original code is still there - but it's just a protoype that lacks features, which should still be easy enough to add.
Fortunately, the PUI menubar is rather archaic, so it would be pretty straightforward to take that code and add missing bits.

Regarding the screenshots shown below, those are using the window decoration for troubleshooting/development purposes - i.e. so that you can easily close/reopen the menubar while developing/extending its functionality (that also applies to the popups shown, which are using the technique used by the tooltips):

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Making ... as_Menubar
Image

As can be seen, what is primarily missing is looking up the correct xml tags (Nasal hash keys) and using those to look up the localized string - all of which Nasal can do readily.

Image
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Re: Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby dilbert » Mon Mar 20, 2017 1:38 am

Had similar problem with menus flashing like Christmas tree lights on an AMD 8 with Radeon 5 on board graphics laptop, which was a Dell purchased
on sale last September. Initially blamed the box, but at some point the flashing completely disappeared. The only thing I can attribute it to is that I did a lot of installing, uninstalling, and updating of aircraft. Am also running WIN 10 and 2017.1.2. Speculate problem was caused by an aircraft
that was later updated or replaced. It might be worth disconnecting your personal hanger, uninstalling all the add-on aircraft, restarting, and then running the 172 to see if the flashing quits. Don't recall running the 172 while my menus were flickering. Not sure, but probably used the F14, which has since been updated. Currently have F14, F15, A6, 777, F104, DR400, PC-9, and Ercoupe installed with no menu flickering. Best Regards
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Re: Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby japreja » Sun Mar 26, 2017 11:44 am

I added these settings to the start up and it seems to have fixed it. I did also download fgdata and set the branch to 2017.1 instead of using the included fgdata.

Code: Select all
--disable-random-objects
--disable-random-vegetation
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Re: Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby Thorsten » Sun Mar 26, 2017 12:08 pm

Great. So the theme seems to be to relieve the GPU of as much load as possible...
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Re: Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby dilbert » Mon Mar 27, 2017 11:34 am

Makes sense. The question now is what caused the overload. Thought it AMD (threading?)/aircraft related in my case, as made no program changes to fix. Never happened on Intel Celeron N2830 running 2016.1.2 with same installed aircraft.
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Re: Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby V12 » Thu Jun 01, 2017 6:27 am

For me problem solved by disabled antialias in the launcher. When enabled, menus and buttons random disappeared. System - LUbuntu 14.04, graphics AMD FirePro with original AMD Catalyst driver. I observed this bug on Win 7 too.
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Re: Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby rico001 » Thu Oct 01, 2020 9:53 pm

I can confirm this still occurs on 10.1.2020
I think its an rx580 graphics card
amd ryzen 5 1600 cpu
windows 10 home.


It still has weird lag issues on version2018 3.6 64-bit

info for nasal script: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Nasal_scripting_language



Flightgear 1 may work with flickering, as a workaround.
Unofficial flightgear portable 1.0 windows 32-bit gpl2
https://sourceforge.net/projects/flight ... -portable/
A FlightGear Newsletter: https://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear_ ... tober_2023
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Re: Menu text disappearing randomly on Windows 10-64Bit home

Postby V12 » Fri Oct 02, 2020 5:26 am

This is not FG related problem, but AMD problem in the driver. Disable all antialias and test again, all should work normal, Then turn on AA in FG and test again. If menu items will be missing, turn off FG AA and try AA in AMD driver. I had AMD GPU in laptop 2 years ago with same problems :( I don't remember which AA has been disabled for correcttly displayed menu items.
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