Factorio Forums

There is a bug with the Deconstruction Planner on older Mac Pros with discrete video cards that has been mostly a cosmetic nuisance but with recent releases is now a serious bug.

Here are some brief particulars of the Mac platform I am using:
Running (according to Get Info) Factorio 0.16.51
Mac Pro 4,1
ATI Radeon HD 4870 (512M VRAM)
Mac OS X 10.11.6

Yes, this is all a bit out of date, but still runs the game fine and this recent change is a breaking bug. Here are steps to recreate:

1. Right click Deconstruction planner in dock
2. Click the Trees/Rocks Only checkbox
3. Dismiss Deconstruction planner config dialog
4. Left click Deconstruction planner in dock

At this point, the screen inverts and all tiles disappear (black) except for portions of the trees. In the past, this effect would reverse itself if you deselected the deconstruction planner. Now the inverted effect is permanent, and cannot be reset short of quitting Factorio completely and relaunching. See the associated screen shots for details:

What happens if you turn graphics settings down?

What happens if you turn graphics settings down?

Well, the poor little card only has 512M of VRAM, so the settings are pretty much at their lowest all the time. This seems to be related to some sort of inversion effect (OpenGL?) that isn't handled correctly by this card or OpenGL version. Dunno if that is really what is up or not, but the card gets put into a mode that persists until the application is terminated, so it seems likely that it is a hardware/OpenGL quirk that didn't used to cause a problem, but now something isn't getting reset by the game so the weird inverted state is permanent.

There is a major graphics rewriter coming for 0.17, so maybe that will fix it.

Try solutions 1, 3, 4 until it works: viewtopic.php?t=9300.

Why did this get moved to the support forum? It's not a support issue. It's a reproducible bug with specific hardware/software combinations. The exact same game, settings, etc. (from a shared hard drive) when run on a 2017 MacBook Pro don't happen. Maybe it's going to be fixed in a future release, but there's no way to know if it doesn't get logged as a bug so someone can do proper regression testing for that release.

cshotton wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 29, 2018 3:07 pm

Why did this get moved to the support forum? It's not a support issue. It's a reproducible bug with specific hardware/software combinations. The exact same game, settings, etc. (from a shared hard drive) when run on a 2017 MacBook Pro don't happen. Maybe it's going to be fixed in a future release, but there's no way to know if it doesn't get logged as a bug so someone can do proper regression testing for that release.

Because that's not how bugs work in Factorio. The game logic doesn't do anything differently based off the graphics card you have or the software version you have and it works correctly when you use different hardware and or software. That means that the issue is not Factorio but the hardware/software you are using.

Specifically what you're seeing as a known indication that you don't have enough VRAM on the graphics card you're trying to use.

It looks like alpha blending got disabled, possibly OpenGL state reseted somehow or got corrupted.

The reprosteps are fascinating, because nothing special happens when you do that. Log file from user data directory might help clarify which operation caused the error.

Entire OpenGL backend was rewritten in 0.17, so I'll say it's fixed, but can't actually confirm it, as I am not able to reproduce the reported issue in the first place.