Trying to decipher obscure nvidia error messages

[Justin Couch]

Compared to developing shaders on ATI cards, the nVidia development is starting to drive me nuts. The error messages are some of the most unhelpful that could be devised. The worst bit that I've been finding is that in one run of the application I'll get no errors, in the next, with no changes in code, I'll get a collection of errors. Googling for the exact phrases doesn't return any results.

I'd appreciate some suggestions on nVidia-specific forums to peruse. Ideally, some pointers to a complete documentation of the shader implementation would make life much simpler.

For example, here is one message that I sometimes get during the program link (the compilation step produces no errors):

Vertex info
-----------
Internal error: assembly compile error for vertex shader at offset 0:
-- error message --
line 1, column 1:  error: invalid vertex program header
-- internal assembly text --

[jra101]

Internal errors are bugs in the NVIDIA GLSL compiler. If you get any of those please email the problem shader to GLSL-Support@nvidia.com and we'll get it fixed in a future driver release.

[Justin Couch]

Ta. Not sure it is going to help though. What I'm finding though, is that the bugs aren't repeatedly reproducable Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Once, I'd gotten everything working, committed the files to CVS and then they immediately stopped working - didn't change the code, recompile or anything. Exceedingly frustrating, as you can imagine.

What's the complexity level we're allowed to send? To get to reproduce this, the code is completely in Java and requires a rather complex setup (it's actually an implementation of the X3D Humanoid animation nodes within the Xj3D browser). A minimal installation is around 5 megs of binaries. It's not exactly a trivial setup required to get even a demo of this code running as I know there's at least 4 different bugs in the code, each dependent on the others. Somehow in all of this, it is resulting in the compiler crashing internally generating a null output stream (at least that's what the output of the NVEmulate mods are doing).

[jra101]

For internal compiler errors, all you need to send us is the GLSL shader. For rendering errors, we'll most likely need a copy of the app (5mb is no problem) with instructions on getting it up and running.