Lighting issue on Mac?

[Chrisrwedwards]

Hi

When I try and play the new leafcutter levels I get a bright light effect which makes the game almost unplayable, changing graphics settings doesn't seem to shift the issue. See screenshots

I am on MAC OS Mojave 10.14.3

Has anyone else had this problem? Know a fix?

 

[MikeSlugDisco]

I'll point Matt (our Mac guy) at this. Thanks for the report.

 

[JohnSlugDisco]

We have had this before on linux. First thing to say is make sure your graphics drivers are up to date then let us know if the issue still persists

 

[Seally]

We have had this before on linux. First thing to say is make sure your graphics drivers are up to date then let us know if the issue still persists

I think Apple manages the graphics drivers for you on MacOS. Unless you're using a Hackintosh or eGPU, out-of-date drivers aren't usually a concern on MacOS as long as you're using the most up-to-date OS release. With that said, the current stable for Mojave seems to be 10.14.4, while the OP is using 10.14.3 so....

I cannot reproduce the lighting issue on my Mac. However, I did notice a weird issue when scrolling in the overworld formicarium. Scrolling down to the bottom in the formicarium overworld leads to a black screen but with UI elements intact (scroll from "normal-scroll.jpg" to "black-scroll.jpg").

Another graphics issue I see on a Mac seems to be a transparency issue. See comparison between "formicarium-tank-macos.jpg" and "formicarium-tank-windows.jpg". The tank borders are completely black on Mac instead of the blue-green glass on Windows. I haven't tried the game on Linux yet, though.

In any case, here are the specs for my MacOS machine:

MacBook Pro (15" 2017)
Core i7 2.8GHz
16 GB RAM
Intel HD Graphics 630/Radeon Pro 555

Side note: My Windows machine(s) isn't my MacOS machine, and my primary Linux machine is another one, just to be clear.

Edit: Anything outside the formicarium's edge background for formicarium overworld #1 seems to be completely black on MacOS, so if there's a "suddenly visible" glass while scrolling down to the bottom edge of that map (formicarium-borders-macos.jpg), it's probably the same issue.

 

[MikeSlugDisco]

Thanks for the detailed report Seally - really useful. Matt will have a look over it and see what can be done.

 

[Chrisrwedwards]

Hi - I looked into updating the drivers and apparently The graphics drivers are built into the Mac operating system and that updating to the latest OS release will install the latest drivers. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201541

Specs for Mac are:

MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012)
2.3 GHz Intel Core i7
8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Macintosh HD
Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB

Any other advice on fixing the lighting / brightness issue i've been having?

 

[Rayalot72]

For a temporary fix, you may want to try inverted colors. It won't fix any of the weird blocky bits, but most of the game might look normal that way.

 

[Rayalot72]

 

[Rayalot72]

View attachment 123

 

[Chrisrwedwards]

Hi Rayalot72, thanks for the tip, any advice on how I can implement the colour inversion?

 

[Rayalot72]

No idea tbh. You'd either need to find some program that inverts colors everywhere or in a particular tab/window.

 

[Seally]

Try System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Invert Colors. I don't know whether it also affects the colors in-game though, since I've just refreshed my Mac install and most of the stuff I had installed is gone.

I have a vibe that this is a driver problem, but apparently the mid-2012 model still has Metal support, so I'm not sure. Is this the 13" or 15" model? Only the latter has a discrete graphics card and some brilliant Apple engineer thought it was a good idea to not include that particular detail on the standard specs page (you'll need to dig into System Report > Graphics/Display to get the discrete graphics model, if it's there at all).

 

[robodino3]

Same problem here on Linux.
OS: Linux Mint 18.3
Graphics: GeForce GTX 770
I'm using the latest proprietary driver from Nvidia

When I start a game, there seems to be a 50/50 chance that the graphics on the surface glitch like this. Best solution is to completely close the game and start again. Seems like it can happen on any level, but I have not observed it happening underground. The leafy jungle of the leafcutters does seem to be worse than other levels (or maybe when it happens its just harder to ignore because of the environment). It isn't always the same. Sometimes the problem is minimal and just a nuisance, othertimes you can barely see anything. But the problem seems to target dark textures the most, which will instead light up with colors. Sometimes it's mostly normal and only few spots on leaves or certain bugs.

 

[robodino3]

Just had a graphics glitch underground for the first time. It's like the ground texture disappeared and I just see the light that would have been behind it.

 

[MikeSlugDisco]

Where possible (Linux) I highly recommend you update your drivers - these issues do look like textbook driver problems. Where not possible (Mac) we'll see what we can do on our end, but it is looking like some older Macs might be falling out of compatibility.

 

[robodino3]

I'm hoping that whatever help you can provide for MacOS will work for me too, since I'm in the same boat. I'm running everything mainstream and supported and recommended by Steam, and I'm seeing the same thing the MacOS users are seeing. I wouldn't consider 2017 for MacOS or 2018 for Linux as older models. I'm open to testing any possible solutions.

I just spent the greater part of the day upgrading my OS to see if it supported a later version of the Nvidia driver, but it doesn't look like it helped. I upgraded to Mint 19.1 / Ubuntu 18.04, just released about a year ago. I'm on the latest certified proprietary driver from Nvidia(390.116).

I'm not saying a later driver doesn't work for someone, but this is as mainstream and supported as a Linux setup can get. This setup works for all my other games, but just this game gets the graphical glitches. Just to see if a later driver could work, I installed a later proprietary driver from Nvidia, not certified by Ubuntu, but it broke the desktop environment. So I rolled back to the latest version supported by Ubuntu.