(resulting in one team member receiving disciplinary action from the workplace )
Srsly?
Yeah, seriously. And that would be me. It's all good though. :-)
Missile Trails: Yes. They are grey. A default upgrade Effect was intentionally selected rather than sort through all of the available effects (which were not seriously all that great to begin with as they looked to be straight DDS conversions of retail like effects, not Upgrades) to have something that at least WORKED and didn't have display or color issues. Who wants a puke green trail from firing a Cyclops? I don't.
We are more than happy to resolve this by creating a more diverse set of effects, but frankly, we wanted people to have something that worked as advertised with as little potential aesthetic issue as possible.
Ship Names: The inconstancy between calling a ship "GTD Something" in one mission and then in the very next calling it "Something" bothered the hell out of me. And since more missions than not followed the "GTD Something" they ALL got Class type prefacing the Name. Plus, the nameplates already document the Class followed by the Name as established in previous VP sets, so it just made for a better overall consistency factor as well.
Flickering/black Nameplates: Could be resolved in the fragment shaders, but it breaks them by doing so. This is an issue that will have to be resolved in another way. At the least, the effect is less pronounced than it used to be as far as I can tell.
Shaders: SM3.0 is required. SM2.0 MIGHT work, but yer on your own. OpenGL will work, but SM3.0 and OpenGL 2.0 are the current supportable recommendation. OpenGL 1.5 is when GLSL was introduced and it may or may not support everything that SM3.0 wants. If you don't have SM3.0 support on your card and you insist on not Disabling GLSL, then the artifacts are all yours. Until the engine can support the full dynamic range of SM's and do it well, this is the current compromise to at least getting it working in some fashion so that it can be improved. This isn't to say that nothing about the shaders isn't being done or tried, because that is not the case. I hate this problem and other related problems with a passion because they make NO SENSE and I want them gone so bad I can taste it. If it really comes down to it, we may have to separate and define the shaders based off the hardware being used by first diversifying them into "ATI Shaders" and "nVidia Shaders" to start and going from there.
-height: There are no height maps any more. The cost of having them and their loading outweighed any benefit of the results and it was collectively decided to have away with them. Should this change, they can be reinstated or made available separately. The only real use they have is in making the normal maps.
Mod's and Mediavp's: Done right, any table edit will over ride the MVP's. So, for example, if you have an issue where you have to specify different secondary load outs to have shivans use other than the MVP secondaries, guess what? That is what you do. It is what we had to do to see to it that Campaign missions where a "default" load out not being specified maintained consistency by still using those shivan secondaries. The other option: Editing every mission that assumed a default load out into using a specified load out. If you make your table and it over rides the MVP ones, the default will now be the ones you specified in your table. If we left it up to having to edit every shivan load out in every mission to use a shivan secondary, you wouldn't have shivan secondaries except as models and textures. Or certainly not in this release.
Shockwaves: Okay, I am stumped. This completely blindsided me. I knew changes occurred in the code handling to accommodate some stand alones, but I did not figure on it doing this. We're working on it as quickly as we can. Right? Right?
Torrents: I provided pages for the demonoid for those that had registered access, and DIRECT "this will open in your torrent and download whether you are a member or not" links and I URGE people to host in other trackers and let me know so that I can update the Seed. It worked for the TBP DVD release, I fail to see how it cannot work here as well. (And this torrent hasn't been active for weeks, not even a full day as of now)
Cain/Lilith swap: Actually, this is a correction to what it was supposed to have been to begin with, but it just hasn't been corrected until now. Sorry for the confusion folk, but it is as it should be, even if it is not entirely expected.
And finally: Thank you in any case for your patience and your feedback here. Thank you for the thank yous, thank you for the issue reports and just in general thank you for being here and keeping things going.
(Note: I am not attempting to single out any individuals in my outlining of the issue above, but the issues themselves directly. So please, don't take the above as a personal direction against you, but rather at the fact that the problem exists. If you still feel that how I have outlined or addressed them is in some way a little abrupt, personal (or too impersonal) then accept my apologies as this is not my intention.)
Except for these parts:
I notice my 3 additions (Countermeasure, Elysium, Watchdog/Cerberus) are nowhere to be mentioned or credited.
(S'okay though, the credit list is pretty long and I'm sure there's other omissions. I won't sue for any takedown.)
(Or will I?)
Uh....HTF did that happen? Anybody? So'kay, me missed crediting Galemp as an FSU Staff member and credits for the hornet. The excerpt in the release post was updated, but the read me had already been uploaded and distributed. Noted and corrected.
One small bug[I think it is, anyway] I noticed is that the Hectate is missing its nameplate. Is this intentional?
Are you referring to a Hecate in Blue Planet, or in a mission in the FS2 Campaign? If FS2 Campaign, no, not intentional, moar details please!. If Blue Planet: may not have been included or using texture replacement in the mission to show one.
and Finally (redux): Sectorgame mirrors added, everybody say "thank you Hunter!"
**EDIT: No idea how the crap this happened: MV_Music.zip. You will need this even if you have MV_Complete.