Author Topic: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear  (Read 86802 times)

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Offline Admiral Nelson

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RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
The FSPort team is proud to announce the release of Cardinal Spear.

Quote
In the tenth year of our war against the Vasudans, humanity had attempted one last desperate strike to end the war outright - a spear in the dark.  The Cardinal Fleet had been laid ruin, and the crew of the GTD Agamemnon was being hunted by a Vasudan general.  It was too late for victory, but not too late for vengeance...

The campaign includes high poly planet models, Lightspeed Nebulae backgrounds, full voice acting, and a metric boatload of exploding Vasudans!  Defend the Earth at its greatest need:



Credits:

Concept and Original FS1 Campaign: Adam "Ace" Rorabaugh

High Poly Planets / High Rez Planet Textures:  Herra Tohtori
New Suns: m2258734a

Hard Light Voice Actors:

freespacegundam   
Darkblade
Killfrenzy      
sphynx
azrael15
Getter Robo G
neoterran
Ransom Arceihn
Goober5000
Mongoose
Admiral Nelson

Download the core package (FSMods)
Download the voice acting package (FSMods)


If you are having problems with planet textures and have a low end computer, download the low rez planets kindly provided by Jeff Vader, with invaluable help from Herra Tohtori and Admiral Nelson.

Low Res Planet Package


« Last Edit: August 18, 2012, 10:40:23 pm by Goober5000 »
If a man consults whether he is to fight, when he has the power in his own hands, it is certain that his opinion is against fighting.

 
Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
I am soooo playing this right now! :yes:

EDIT: Or not... I grab the voices and then when I try to grab the main campaign it says FilePlanet is down for maintenance...  :doubt:
« Last Edit: May 28, 2007, 12:18:34 am by Dark Hunter »
"You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?" -DEATH, Discworld

"You can fight like a krogan, run like a leopard, but you'll never be better than Commander Shepard!"

 

Offline Admiral Nelson

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Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
Fileplanet did work for me now.  I have also added Filefront mirrors.
« Last Edit: May 28, 2007, 09:07:26 am by Admiral Nelson »
If a man consults whether he is to fight, when he has the power in his own hands, it is certain that his opinion is against fighting.

 

Offline Jeff Vader

  • The Back of the Hero!
  • 212
  • Bwahaha
Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
Ah, 'twas an enjoyable campaign  :yes:. Just had that something that demanded to play it through straight away. And I especially liked the voice of the squadron leader, or whoever it was who was giving the mission briefings. Had a certain degree of authority in his voice.

Now, again with my disturbing graphical issues, this time involving planets. The screens should speak for themselves.
Screen1
Screen2
Screen3

Any ideas what might be causing this? It didn't ruin the whole experience, but was slightly annoying to look at.
« Last Edit: September 02, 2007, 03:37:51 pm by Lobo »
23:40 < achillion > EveningTea: ass
23:40 < achillion > wait no
23:40 < achillion > evilbagel: ass
23:40 < EveningTea > ?
23:40 < achillion > 2-letter tab complete failure

14:08 < achillion > there's too much talk of butts and dongs in here
14:08 < achillion > the level of discourse has really plummeted
14:08 < achillion > Let's talk about politics instead
14:08 <@The_E > butts and dongs are part of #hard-light's brand now
14:08 <@The_E > well
14:08 <@The_E > EvilBagel's brand, at least

01:06 < T-Rog > welp
01:07 < T-Rog > I've got to take some very strong antibiotics
01:07 < achillion > penis infection?
01:08 < T-Rog > Chlamydia
01:08 < achillion > O.o
01:09 < achillion > well
01:09 < achillion > I guess that happens
01:09 < T-Rog > at least it's curable
01:09 < achillion > yeah
01:10 < T-Rog > I take it you weren't actually expecting it to be a penis infection
01:10 < achillion > I was not

14:04 < achillion > Sometimes the way to simplify is to just have a habit and not think about it too much
14:05 < achillion > until stuff explodes
14:05 < achillion > then you start thinking about it

22:16 < T-Rog > I don't know how my gf would feel about Jewish conspiracy porn

15:41 <-INFO > EveningTea [[email protected]] has joined #hard-light
15:47 < EvilBagel> butt
15:51 < Achillion> yes
15:53 <-INFO > EveningTea [[email protected]] has quit [Quit: http://www.mibbit.com ajax IRC Client]

18:53 < Achillion> Dicks are fun

21:41 < MatthTheGeek> you can't spell assassin without two asses

20:05 < sigtau> i'm mining titcoins from now on

00:31 < oldlaptop> Drunken antisocial educated freezing hicks with good Internet == Finland stereotype

11:46 <-INFO > Kobrar [[email protected]] has joined #hard-light
11:50 < achtung> Surely you've heard of DVDA
11:50 < achtung> Double Vaginal Double ANal
11:51 < Kobrar> ...
11:51 <-INFO > Kobrar [[email protected]] has left #hard-light []

 

Offline Admiral Nelson

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Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
I'm glad you enjoyed it. :)

I suspect that your graphics corruption is again related to the graphics subsystem of your laptop.  The planets have big dds files for textures, that perhaps are too much for the shared memory subsystem.  One option might be to halve the size of the textures, and see if the issue goes away.
If a man consults whether he is to fight, when he has the power in his own hands, it is certain that his opinion is against fighting.

 

Offline Jeff Vader

  • The Back of the Hero!
  • 212
  • Bwahaha
Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
K... I'm a bit out of my league in these things. How do I fiddle around with textures?
23:40 < achillion > EveningTea: ass
23:40 < achillion > wait no
23:40 < achillion > evilbagel: ass
23:40 < EveningTea > ?
23:40 < achillion > 2-letter tab complete failure

14:08 < achillion > there's too much talk of butts and dongs in here
14:08 < achillion > the level of discourse has really plummeted
14:08 < achillion > Let's talk about politics instead
14:08 <@The_E > butts and dongs are part of #hard-light's brand now
14:08 <@The_E > well
14:08 <@The_E > EvilBagel's brand, at least

01:06 < T-Rog > welp
01:07 < T-Rog > I've got to take some very strong antibiotics
01:07 < achillion > penis infection?
01:08 < T-Rog > Chlamydia
01:08 < achillion > O.o
01:09 < achillion > well
01:09 < achillion > I guess that happens
01:09 < T-Rog > at least it's curable
01:09 < achillion > yeah
01:10 < T-Rog > I take it you weren't actually expecting it to be a penis infection
01:10 < achillion > I was not

14:04 < achillion > Sometimes the way to simplify is to just have a habit and not think about it too much
14:05 < achillion > until stuff explodes
14:05 < achillion > then you start thinking about it

22:16 < T-Rog > I don't know how my gf would feel about Jewish conspiracy porn

15:41 <-INFO > EveningTea [[email protected]] has joined #hard-light
15:47 < EvilBagel> butt
15:51 < Achillion> yes
15:53 <-INFO > EveningTea [[email protected]] has quit [Quit: http://www.mibbit.com ajax IRC Client]

18:53 < Achillion> Dicks are fun

21:41 < MatthTheGeek> you can't spell assassin without two asses

20:05 < sigtau> i'm mining titcoins from now on

00:31 < oldlaptop> Drunken antisocial educated freezing hicks with good Internet == Finland stereotype

11:46 <-INFO > Kobrar [[email protected]] has joined #hard-light
11:50 < achtung> Surely you've heard of DVDA
11:50 < achtung> Double Vaginal Double ANal
11:51 < Kobrar> ...
11:51 <-INFO > Kobrar [[email protected]] has left #hard-light []

 

Offline CKid

Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
Nice, as soon as I start getting bored of Freespace, a new campaign is released. Sweet :)
If I agreed with you, we would both be wrong

 

Offline Admiral Nelson

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Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
K... I'm a bit out of my league in these things. How do I fiddle around with textures?

If you look in the data/maps subfolder of the vp, there are a punch of files labelled planet01.dds etc... If you open these in an editor such as irfanview, you can resize them by half.  Such huge textures might be a problem for integrated graphics cards.  We may need to put out a patch for such users.
If a man consults whether he is to fight, when he has the power in his own hands, it is certain that his opinion is against fighting.

 

Offline CKid

Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
Quick question, do I put vp files in the FS1_port folder, or do I create a new fodder?
If I agreed with you, we would both be wrong

 

Offline Admiral Nelson

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Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
It meant to sit in its own folder if you are using FS Open.  A mod.ini file is included.  This files assumes that the Port is installed in a directory called "fsport".  If you have installed the port someplace else, just change the mod.ini file accordingly.
If a man consults whether he is to fight, when he has the power in his own hands, it is certain that his opinion is against fighting.

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

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Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
It looks like something that happened to me when I was experimenting with planets that were a lot bigger and further away. Are they kinda flashing around, kinda alternating different areas on and off frame by frame?

Perhaps different graphics cards have different limits or something, I dunno... :nervous: What kind of system are you using? It could indeed be due to too big textures. But then again, if my card encounters a texture too big (I've tried that purposefully) it just doesn't use a texture. At least that applies for skyboxes. Meh, I dunno.


Also, is there any way to enable some kind of pop-up to announce arrival of private messages? The small number tends to go unnoticed by me... :rolleyes: I'm sorry for not being more active on the chalk lines of the project. :blah:

There's some weird stuff on my part - for example, all the planet models except the ringed one are centered on their north pole, and thus their placement varies slightly from the original, but that's a minor issue (although I should've spotted it...). But those screens about weird planets look like a possible indication of some more serious issue. I don't know if this is media issue, hardware issue or code issue (or more than one of those) but I'll see what can be done to fix it.


One thing you could try yourself is this: The old, low-poly and very chunky planets that came with original Cardinal Spear are still included in the VP pack. Aside from the ringed planet, the new textures should be compatible with them. So what you can do is to extract the old planet models from the VP - they do not have the _HTL -ending in the filename - and put them into your ..Freespace2\Cardinal Spear\data\models\ directory, and rename them to have the _HTL.pof ending.

Example - take planet01.pof, copy it into the mentioned directory, and rename it to planet01_HTL.pof, and it should replace the higher poly Earth in missions that have it.



...By the way, I have to say at this point that not all textures are my original works:

-Earth texture is based on Don Edwards' Realistic Earth texture set on Celestia motherlode, with clouds added by me and shinemap derived from that by me. The glowmap is based on generic satellite imagery that I have actually forgotten the original source of, but it's also heavily edited by me to achieve the brightness and contrast I wanted to get.

-Moon texture is based on Clementine imagery, originally made by someone called Hermes, and they are also from Celestia Motherlode. Some small edits are made by me in an effort to reduce the mosaic effect in some areas of the texture, otherwise it's pretty straight rip-off.

-Planet03 is essentially a Mars texture, because it was like that in the original Cardinal Spear and I ended up not having the time to replace it with an original texture... It also comes from Celestia Motherlode originally, and I believe it was also one of Don Edwards' textures (Mars Surface). The clouds are done by me, however, as well as some minor colour-toning.

-Planet04 has a similar story; it's a colour-toned Jupiter texture because it was a colour-toned Jupiter texture in the original Cardinal Spear. It is, at it's current state, a complete rip-off of the Colour-enriched Jupiter texture by gradius_fanatic on Celestia Motherlode.

Just thought I'd better clear that up at this stage. I did, however, take care to pick textures that did not ask for any kind of request to be used publicly, and also that I would add at least something my own to the images (actually the Jupiter-like texture is the only untouched one).

Planet05 is, however, completely my original creation in it's renewed form. Same applies to Planet06. Originally I had the intent to also make original textures for planets 03 and 04 (in the same way the Planet06) but because I'm a lazy bum I didn't do it when I had the chance and then I went through two Windows re-installations and a data-scavenging operation for reasons unrelated, so these ended up in the release... And also didn't notice the recent PM in time to check through the stuff once more. Oh well, mea culpa. :rolleyes:


Perhaps if the problems with the models are more widespread and some kind of patch is required, it would be fitting to also include new, original textures for the planets #03 and #04, but I'll leave that to project leader to decide.
« Last Edit: May 28, 2007, 04:33:06 pm by Herra Tohtori »
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 

Offline Admiral Nelson

  • Resurrecter of Campaigns
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Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
And I thought you had become offended... :)  I don't see any reason to create new textures unless you are so inclined.

He can also just edit the CS_SCP-shp.tbm file to remove the _HTL suffix, and he'll get the hideous retail planets back.

I suspect that the texture size used is just too big for his funky integrated graphics card.  They look perfect on my 768 MB card. :)
If a man consults whether he is to fight, when he has the power in his own hands, it is certain that his opinion is against fighting.

 

Offline Jeff Vader

  • The Back of the Hero!
  • 212
  • Bwahaha
Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
Ok, I got it working. I did what Nelson suggested. Extracted the planet dds files, resized them down to half from the original (used Paint.NET btw), threw the new ones to cardinalspear/data/maps and... BOOYA! It works! They aren't as pretty as in the screens you posted but at least they're not tearing up anymore.
Thanks for the tips. I'd go out with you this instance if I was a woman or gay.
23:40 < achillion > EveningTea: ass
23:40 < achillion > wait no
23:40 < achillion > evilbagel: ass
23:40 < EveningTea > ?
23:40 < achillion > 2-letter tab complete failure

14:08 < achillion > there's too much talk of butts and dongs in here
14:08 < achillion > the level of discourse has really plummeted
14:08 < achillion > Let's talk about politics instead
14:08 <@The_E > butts and dongs are part of #hard-light's brand now
14:08 <@The_E > well
14:08 <@The_E > EvilBagel's brand, at least

01:06 < T-Rog > welp
01:07 < T-Rog > I've got to take some very strong antibiotics
01:07 < achillion > penis infection?
01:08 < T-Rog > Chlamydia
01:08 < achillion > O.o
01:09 < achillion > well
01:09 < achillion > I guess that happens
01:09 < T-Rog > at least it's curable
01:09 < achillion > yeah
01:10 < T-Rog > I take it you weren't actually expecting it to be a penis infection
01:10 < achillion > I was not

14:04 < achillion > Sometimes the way to simplify is to just have a habit and not think about it too much
14:05 < achillion > until stuff explodes
14:05 < achillion > then you start thinking about it

22:16 < T-Rog > I don't know how my gf would feel about Jewish conspiracy porn

15:41 <-INFO > EveningTea [[email protected]] has joined #hard-light
15:47 < EvilBagel> butt
15:51 < Achillion> yes
15:53 <-INFO > EveningTea [[email protected]] has quit [Quit: http://www.mibbit.com ajax IRC Client]

18:53 < Achillion> Dicks are fun

21:41 < MatthTheGeek> you can't spell assassin without two asses

20:05 < sigtau> i'm mining titcoins from now on

00:31 < oldlaptop> Drunken antisocial educated freezing hicks with good Internet == Finland stereotype

11:46 <-INFO > Kobrar [[email protected]] has joined #hard-light
11:50 < achtung> Surely you've heard of DVDA
11:50 < achtung> Double Vaginal Double ANal
11:51 < Kobrar> ...
11:51 <-INFO > Kobrar [[email protected]] has left #hard-light []

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

  • The Academic
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  • Bad command or file name
Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
Yeah, reducing texture size tends to linearly reduce the visual quality, but at least it works now. Might be patchworthy for those with graphically challenged systems (in the era of political correctness I can't say crappy integrated graphics... oh wait I just did).


And I thought you had become offended... :)  I don't see any reason to create new textures unless you are so inclined.

Worry not... I'm definitely not offended. Just a bit disappointed and frustrated at myself. ;7 And the new textures for #03 and #04 would be way better than having Mars and Jupiter cloned and toned on distant corner of the universe, which makes no sense at all, although it definitely stays true to the original Cardinal Spear spirit... Your call, really.


By the way, what is the flatearth stuff in the VP? And why does it have a shinemap, too? :nervous:
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 

Offline Macfie

  • 210
  • If somebody made a campaign I've probably got it
Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
Now, again with my disturbing graphical issues, this time involving planets. The screens should speak for themselves.


I'm having the same problem with the planets.  I don't have an integrated card but am running an ATI 256 meg card.

also I'm curious why didn't you use the angel scout fighter from the port?

Lobo would you post a copy of the resized planets?
Normal people believe that if it isn't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it isn't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
The difference between Mechanical Engineers and Civil Engineers is:
Mechanical Engineers build weapons.  Civil Engineers build targets
An optimist sees the glass half full; the pessimist sees it half empty. An engineer sees that the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

Offline Admiral Nelson

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Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
The Angel is a two gun fighter, but the missions were created and balanced for a 4 gun fighter.  Presumably the campaign was created before any Angel model actually existed.
If a man consults whether he is to fight, when he has the power in his own hands, it is certain that his opinion is against fighting.

 

Offline Herra Tohtori

  • The Academic
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  • Bad command or file name
Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
I'm having the same problem with the planets.  I don't have an integrated card but am running an ATI 256 meg card.

It seems it may be more widespread then... :( I didn't think that 4096x4096 resolution textures wouldn't be supported by some cards, although in retrospect it seems kinda obvious. :sigh:

Quote
also I'm curious why didn't you use the angel scout fighter from the port?

For historical reasons.

More specifically, Cardinal Spear was originally either made before Nico whipped up the Angel Scout fighter model that is used in FSPort, or it simply chose another approach. Either way, original Cardinal Spear simply used the Valkyrie mesh and that choice was decided to be retained in the renewed version of the campaign.

Much in the same way the choice to retain 3D model planets was made.


Anyway, if Lobo (or someone else) hasn't posted the files by tomorrow I'll do it myself.
There are three things that last forever: Abort, Retry, Fail - and the greatest of these is Fail.

 

Offline achtung

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Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
FreeSpaceMods.net | FatHax | ??????
In the wise words of Charles de Gaulle, "China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese."

Formerly known as Swantz

 

Offline Admiral Nelson

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Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
Hey thanks!
If a man consults whether he is to fight, when he has the power in his own hands, it is certain that his opinion is against fighting.

 

Offline Mad Bomber

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Re: RELEASE: Cardinal Spear
The original Cardinal Spear was released back in '98, long before the Angel scout fighter had a model of its own.

In fact I think CS:Vega represented upwards of 50% of the non-[V] ship models that were available in the community at the time.
« Last Edit: May 28, 2007, 08:42:21 pm by Mad Bomber »
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