Something wrong with graphics

[nickrulercreator]

When I launch the game, it works fine for about 5 minutes. Then all of the sudden for no reason, the entire background (basically the stars and space) looks like it broke. There are random things everywhere and it affects about half the screen. It turns the background blue, green, orange, red, etc. nothing happens to the planets, and it's just very annoying. Any solutions? (And yes I tried restarting the game, and my computer. Didn't work).

[C7]

As a potential fix, go to the Menu, Select Settings, got to the video tab, and select the Texture Resolution drop down menu. From that list choose low, and restart the game.  If it works fine on low, you can try increasing it to medium and see if the problem comes back.

It would be helpful if you could provide a screenshot of what it looks like when the issue happens.

Without seeing it, what you're describing is corruption of the GPU's texture memory. That can happen on some cards that either have a hardware issue with the upper regions of memory, or when the card does a bad job of handling memory requests. In rare cases a GPU will start doing this if it's overheating.

 The colors you're seeing are a representation of the otherwise random data that is now filling up where the skybox should be stored.

[Physics_Hacker]

This sounds very similar to an old bug in Space Engine...

[C7]

It's not really a bug in a specific game, and can happen in any 3D program. Just look up "Texture Corruption" on Google images for some more examples.

It just tends to happen in a game with either a lot of textures, or a very large texture (such as a skybox, or cube map, like we use for the background in US²)

[Physics_Hacker]

Hm...I guess that could've been the problem in Space Engine, also, then, I suppose...