Visual bug (Broken lighting and rotating yellow planes)



  • Hi everyone! Since I have started playing Screeps I occasionally get some odd visual bug. I was wondering if anyone knows how to deal with this bug.

    • What happened?

    From time to time the lighting in all rooms breaks and at the same time slowly rotating yellow planes show up in rooms with turrets. See also these examples:

    0_1540307710315_Screeps_bug.png 0_1540307717837_Screeps_bug2.png

    These yellow planes seem to be rotating around the location that turrets are placed (the turrets itself are invisible). Also, when a turret suddenly rotates (for example when repairing something), then the plane also rotates.

    Restarting the game fixes the issue for a while, but this isn't a feasible permanent fix.

    I already tried reinstalling the game and I also recently upgraded the driver of my graphics card. However, these things did not have any effects on the issue.

    Making any change to the WebGL renderer changes the behaviour of the issue (although most settings make it worse). Changing the renderer to the legacy SVG renderer fixes the issue (but everything looks far less pretty). So it seems to be an issue with WebGL.

    • What should have happened?
      Normal lighting behaviour and no rotating yellow planes.
    • How can we reproduce this?
      Unfortunately I don't know. It just happens occasionally when I am playing the game. I also do not think that it happens after a fixed amount of time has passed
    • Which shard is affected?
      It happened on both Shard 3 and on my private server. I don't know about the other shards. For me it only happened within the steam client. However, someone else on Slack also reported that it has happened to him in the browser.

  • Dev Team

    1. What is your OS and GPU model?
    2. Do you have display drivers updated to the latest version?
    3. Can you confirm it doesn't happen with web version to you at all?
    4. Please enable "Display metrics" in the renderer options and attach a screenshot with it.


    1. OS is Windows 10. GPU is NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050
    2. Display drivers as in the drivers for my GPU? If so, yes I updated those a few days ago to the latest version (but it didn't have any effect on the issue)
    3. I cannot confirm that, because I don't use the web version often, but the few times I did use it I did not have any issues.
    4. 0_1540310747193_Screeps_with_metrics.png

  • Dev Team

    It may be very possible that it can be reproduced by replaying the same game tick in the room history. Please try to go back to that tick when it happens again, it would greatly help us in debugging.



  • Sure! I will give that a shot when it happens again!



  • It just occurred again. I took a look at the display metrics, but none of the values are significantly different from metrics in the screenshot I previously sent you.

    It happened while I switched from the shard map to one of my own rooms (W19N24). Note that the bug affects all rooms including the rooms of others. It also affects the replays (see screenshot below).

    0_1540331537180_Screeps_bug_again_other_player.png

    I didn't get the exact tick that happened, but the bug started around tick 586700. I also tried to trigger the bug again by looking at the replays, but that didn't provide any results.



  • I've got the issue too. And it seems to be reproducible. It has started to appear when ever I enter my own room, then either going to upper room, or left most room. Using the arrows at the room edges. I have to restart the game to fix the lighting issue.

    NOTE: The light issue only happens when the shading of walls and svamp is gone. And the shadows at the edges of walls, and everything looks dull and washed out. The colors/shading usually only fucks up if I change room.

    I'll make sure to grab a picture when I see the "washed out" colors again: EDIT: Actually, this is exactly how the colors look before the yellow rotating planes appair: 0_1586706612714_55d7b5fc-f19a-4d61-9333-89138acb4a12-image.png

    The rotating yellow planes NEVER appear if the colors/shadows are "normal" like in the pic below.

    Here's a pic of how it's normally looking: 0_1586640768720_c84d0a05-5e52-4b64-996e-d4d3957974ad-image.png

    My room is Shard3/Room W27S13.

    Picture of the lighting bug with the rotating yellow light. 0_1586640054767_178bb96e-5317-49c9-ade8-f01c19e47554-image.png



  • I has been too encountering this issue quite a bit, mostly when left the computer hibernating for a while and relog in. It's been one and a half years since I first encountered this bug.