Ok, so after reading 20 pages of this thread, I seem to be experiencing the invisible segment issue.
I went straight from the download v1.0 install to version 18.14.
I have seen all entities and segments working correctly, including combined use of advanced shaders, post processing and blosser. But, when the issue starts to happen, I cannot find any combination, of reinstall, reboot, cleaner, setup.ini that gets me back to a working system. On the same GForce 6-series, I can run high quality lightmap with all shaders and the hazyglow/haze distance sharp front effect (#1 or #2 post process). But, I think the issue is the writing, re-writing, overwriting between limited preference choices and setup.ini. If each lightmap and shade option could be clicked on/off in prefs, the issue would be done I think.
I don't know how I experience the issue in v 14 since it appeared that people got it fixed from 13-to-14.
I have had the crash issues mentioned as well, but each time they happend I was able to solve with a reboot. The only time this was not the case, I had to clear up room on hard drives (ran out of processing cache! :0).
Anyway, not sure how I got the invisible lighting/shading thing in 14, I can confirm I have tried every variation of lightmap, shade, setup.ini, preferences, delete, overwrite, save, reload, reboot imaginable. I have hit on a few times where it all gets fixed, and a brief moment of success followed by a return of the issue.
In a perfect scenario, I can load ambient lighting with beautifully rendered shaded areas, colored lights around the room, and player hud/hands show change in light, shading, etc, and entities like wall decorations, room items, trash cans look full quality, and items like mirrors that reflect an effect and not just static, work perfectly, all of this without the haze/glow effect bc either blosser or post process are turned off or set to not engage.
I think, that the right combo of useeffectson (entity, statictextures, weapon), high end lightmapping, and old version of shadows turned off, fix the issue, but the combo is impossible to maintain bc prefs. over-write the correct combo if made in setup.ini with FPSC turned on or off.
My thoughts about some other things in the thread, are that I am happy to be testing this on what I would consider a decent all-purpose machine. I am sure there will be gamers on used laptops and 1-2yr old desktops that are interested in a great looking 3d engine that do not have the latest card, but I also like knowing the trade off in high end performance versus usefulness. The best market for a current game could easily have the same options I do: if the control menu does what most games have done from 2003-ish to present, with a nice choice of video settings. Example something like Need for Speed, which can render full world map, lighting, shading, shadows under vehicles, sharp textures, deep 3d field, 2d anims, etc, but everything can be turned on/off to optimize speed, from street reflection to car detail.
In some ways it is more useful as a developer/tester to need to configure for optimization, since in my case, I knw that I 'can' run the newest engine choices with all things blazing at the cost of slow frames. but, with the haze/shine effect turned off everything looks remarkable and performance is fast. I imagine just 3-4 menu options inside the FPSC could be the same options for the final game player, and the latest card/cpu/ram can add all things, and the guy using the 1-2yr old dinosaur (lol ok maybe 3 yr old) can get nearly perfect gameplay at almost no quality hit. Sounds like the perfect engine builder to me!
