Invisible Units... ??

[:1]Hello Everyone,
I have having the worst problem with this game. I am a huge fan of TA and SC so I finally got good internet to play this game (on Steam) and now it doesn't even run well. I could run SC on full settings no problem and now when I run SC2 I notice that most (if not all) of the buildings and units I create are invisible!! The health bars are still there and the units can fire at targets but there is no unit!! This is really upsetting and completey ruins the game. At the start the commander and two engineers show up fine, but nothing else does.
Is anyone else out there having this problem? If it keeps happening with no solution then I just wasted money on what I thought would be one of the best games :/|||Evergleam|||I have heard that as well, however that is under debate as I have never actually really had the chance to play it. I think it depends on each person. If I can get this problem fixed then I'll let you know what I think. Until then... somebody help!!
The videos and trailers looked awesome when it was released so I'm hoping it's decent.|||LayZboy|||Yeah exactly. I appreciate his response but it doesn't help with my question.
I reinstalled the game and downloaded the Steam Updates last night but crashed out before they were done. I didn't have time to check the game today so hopefully that fixes it.
I have an ATI X1900 XTX, 3GB PC 3200 RAM. The only thing that may slow me down is the AMD 3000+ Processor but SC worked perfectly fine and I hear that this game runs even better than that on same systems. I will be fixing my computer with better specs soon (I'm using one I built for my mother right now) but the game runs fine minus the invisible units.
I can't think of anything else and I haven't found any other topics that talk about this. If the reinstall doesn't work then I can't be the only one experiencing this.|||With high graphics settings on single-core systems, sometimes it takes 5-15 seconds for each new unit mesh to load the first time you see it. Doesn't do it at all for me on medium detail, but it usually happens quite a bit at the beginning of the game on high.
Presumably it loads resources with a background thread to prevent hitches, which is why it only happens with single-core CPUs. So, get used to a little load time, run on medium detail, or get a multi-core CPU.|||Evergleam|||It runs fine for me on a 2.2ghz single-core, so I'm sure he can run it on medium detail or lower. Just don't expect everything to be perfectly smooth on high detail, or to be able to run 4v4 AI games.
(For what it's worth, it does actually run really smoothly on high with my CPU, until there are 1500+ units or more than three AIs. The loading issue is usually present, but that's not a big deal after the first few minutes.)|||Could be the ATI X1900 XTX card. Specs show only 256MB on that board. Turn down a lot of the extras (AA, etc) and see what happens. Also it never hurts to make sure the most recent driver version is installed.|||Dymo|||Mithy|||Evergleam|||first thing i'd try updating video driver to the latest release.
if that does not help, then driver that is supplied with the card.
then try different year releases, whichever you can find, 7.1, 8.1 and so on, where 7.1 is Jan 2007
both Nvidia and Ati/Amd do not care about bugs with older vcards and sometimes they even introduce bugs for old cards while fixing some bugs for new cards.|||B08AH|||This is not a driver issue. I have an Nvidia 8800 GTX (a pretty comparable card to the X1900) using the latest drivers and I still get it on high detail. I am 99.9% certain it's a background loading issue with single-core CPUs, as everyone I've talked to that has the problem has a single-core. The rarity of the issue also coincides with the rarity of single-core CPUs in gaming these days.
An X1900 is definitely good enough for SC2, as it's much better than the Nvidia 7-series card that is in the Xbox 360. The fact that the game runs the same with a card of that level at high resolutions and with AA/AF on also supports that the card is plenty, and the CPU is the issue.|||it makes sense.
well, it's just my biased opinion. i had a lot of issues with video drivers, and it was never an issue with CPUs.
and, after all, it costs you nothing to check different drivers, so that is what i always check before doing any hardware manipulation.
btw, there might be tweaks in some config files to disable background loading and such.
at least such option exists in a number of games, TES Oblivion for instance.
will increase load times but no problem with not yet loaded textures or models.|||Hmm, interesting idea.
Nothing in game.prefs for pre-load settings, but I did some comprehensive searches of the lua and found /lua/sim/prefetchOther.lua, which pre-loads a bunch of important projectile/beam meshes, emitters, and textures (for antinukes, tmd, etc). This table could probably be expanded to include basic units, mexes pgens, and factories, but it'd probably be a sim mod, meaning everyone would have to have it or the game would maybe desync. Not sure about that.
The game also pre-loads any pre-created units (neutral civ armies, pre-built units in player bases, etc) from the same sim file (/lua/simInit.lua), and this could also be expanded to look at additional unit bps with maybe less effort.|||B08AH|||Evergleam|||Dymo|||The reason it can be 10 minutes after game start is because you may not have stayed zoomed in on those particular types of units early enough / long enough for their meshes to be loaded yet. When you're zoomed way out, no meshes are rendered at all for mobile units (although I think some large structures still have their LOD2 meshes displayed at max zoom).
I'm not sure how the background loading system handles LOD meshes, if it loads all LOD levels at once, or if it loads them separately, meaning you could have the way-zoomed-out LOD2 meshes loaded, but when you start to zoom in, you get nothing. I have strategic icons always on, so I can't really see when small units transition to LOD1 from LOD0, nor could I tell if the LOD1/2 meshes are displaying at all (the icon covers the entire unit until you hit low LOD1 / high LOD0 range).|||i think its funny it happens to every 1 its real funny if your foe can't see them either then you can us this to your advantage a EZ win the only way for your enemy to see them if it stop or you start loading your foes base with lead(if Cybran lazers)(if aeon werid write stuff that make the sound bang,Boom!,ecd)