Invisible ships and stations in demo

[AWOL_Joe]

A friend of my introduced me to Star Empires yesterday, and in addition to downloading the shareware versions of Star Empires 3 and 4, I also downloaded SE:StarFury (then again, why else would I be posting here?). However, when I started my game, my ship was invisible, as was Freeport Station. I noticed the invisible object bug mentioned in this forum, and tried the save-reload attempt, but that didn't work. Anyone have some advice?

[Phoenix-D]

Exit the game, then reload. Its a random bug that's been a huge pain to hunt down.

[AWOL_Joe]

Sorry, Phoenix, but that didn't work. It's consistent each time, my ship and the station are the only things that are invisible, as far as I can tell. Could it have something to do with my video card (GeForce MX 4000)?

[Instar]

What drivers are you using?
Have you updated them lately?

[AWOL_Joe]

It's the latest driver, I'm thinking that the card might be bad, since I've been getting a lot of graphics anomalies (mostly texture/lighting related) recently.

[Gandalf_greypilgrim]

While these anomalies are almost always somewhere in the game for me, with my GeForce 440MX I find that it works best with older drivers. With the latest drivers the invisible ships and even problems in other games are almost always there, but if I use driver version around 44.03 it works best for me. I would suggest properly downgrading your driver(i.e., use Detonator Destroyer to properly remove).
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?s=820a873d3b1dea5f5162724c73bb9b03& threadid=67799
That site has a good howto guide to properly remove the drivers. Sorry if you already knew that, but it is *extremely important to properly remove the drivers, especially when downgrading.

[AWOL_Joe]

Thanks for the suggestion, Gandalf. One question: where do I get older drivers from?

[TheDeadlyShoe]

The pfficial sites will generally still have them, though you might need to search around a bit.

Despite that they are supposedly universally compatible, the new doodads in newer drivers often mess up older cards.

[AWOL_Joe]

Alright. DeadlyShoe, is your avatar from one of the Homeworld games, or what?

[Gandalf_greypilgrim]

If you go to nvidia's driver download section, the older drivers are available by a link on the left side of the page, something like "Windows XP/2000 driver archive", assuming, of course, that you are running XP/2000.