Closed Screen Resolution/Zoom Issue

At what seem to be random and sporadic times while running fullscreen or maximized window, my game screen will hang, and then black out, and then attempt to resize the zoom level, and the game window, at the same time. Sometimes this is a smooth loading type of transition and the screen shows the game again, but more often the game window will cycle over and over between a very small window at 3x Zoom and the original resolution/zoom. Sometimes this is recoverable if I wait it out, but at other times the window will just completely close out, (though the game process will continue to run as seen in the task manager.)

I say random and sporadic, but it appears to occur during some form of loading, like when I open the Starmap, teleport up or down, finish mining a rock, walk forward right after teleporting, and also occurs minorly when engaging in combat, but it only happens every so often during a loading phase, and the severity is highly variable from a simple lag hang to a complete close-out. The root cause may actually occur every single time something loads, but the severity most of the time is highly minimal to completely unnoticeable.

I run normally at 1200x800 fullscreen with 2x zoom, on Windows Vista, and if the game recovers, the settings never actually adjust from what I set them for, even though the screen shows something completely different.


On another note, just now I somehow made my UI completely disappear - the game continued to run fine and I could switch hand items and do everything normally, but I couldn't see my UI or mouse anywhere on the game screen.

 

This is a video driver issue, more likely than not.

Specs?

 

This is happens to me to, it's getting very annoying.

 

Driver issue? I'm not so sure.. I can't imagine a driver automatically changing a game setting, and never have this problem with other games - lag certainly, but not this.

How do I find my specs?

 

Run a dxdiag, save the report, attach it to a post.

 

ok, like this?

 

If you haven't, try the OpenGL version. It *may* work slightly better.

Your videocard is just below the minimum requirements -- 256mb video memory required, 250mb available, and it is an older Intel card - it has an OpenGL 2.0 driver, but not OpenGL 2.1 (the Linux driver for the card has OpenGL 2.1 support, I don't know why Intel chose to do this).

I can't say it will never work well, but it may not work well until they start working on optimisation.

 

Eh, it's a 5+ year old laptop that wasn't that great to begin with. I'm always having troubles with it, but it's never been gamebreaking before.

Someday I'll be buying a new computer...

I heard the OpenGL version causes severe lag - my computer already lags beyond sanity, I'd rather not have to deal with worse.

 

Additional Info:

When teleporting down to the planet, when this issue occurs, the game music cycles through the first few notes of all the planet musics (day/night and I think rain), while it tries to forceably reset my screen resolution, window mode and zoom level to something else. After a time the window just closes out but the process remains. I'm pretty certain this issue has to do with the method by which the game loads things.

 

This problem happens to me a lot as well and its very annoying. I cant play the game anymore because of this problem. I don't know what causes it either.

 

Additional Info:

I noticed that when I die or teleport to my ship at night, when I teleport back down, besides the planet returning to morning, this is when the game starts to cycle through all the planetary music, which seems to be related to the loading issue of resetting my window size and zoom level to something more zoomed in.