[Vasudan Admiral]

Uh, what?

And yes, the typhon, like the zephyrus before it was removed because it simply broke too many things and would have been too much time and effort to fix for relatively little gain. IIRC it caused a couple of inexplicable crashes from time to time, and to be totally honest none of us thought it was an improvement on the retail one.

[sfried]

Uh, what?

Oh sorry, didn't know you were talkigng about something else entirely.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Oh well now you've removed your post it makes me look silly.

[Narvi]

What did the HTL Typhon look like?

[Grimper]

It was very shiny and had pictures of fishes on it.

[Droid803]

I thought the HTL Typhon looked decent.
Better than the retail one at any rate. At least it looked smooth. Of course, it could be better, but it does the job as a stand in.
I guess its a matter of preference.

[sfried]

I'm still as to which build of 3.6.10 had normal mapping support for Shader Model 2.0. Was it this or this?

taylor's test build seems to have solved the cutscene problem. Hope the newer builds implement that code.

[Commander Zane]

I'm still as to which build of 3.6.10 had normal mapping support for Shader Model 2.0. Was it this or this?

taylor's test build seems to have solved the cutscene problem. Hope the newer builds implement that code.

Is "this" supposed to be the exact same post as "this?"

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Am I right to say that HTL is not the same as normal maps?

[ARSPR]

Am I right to say that HTL is not the same as normal maps?

Yes, they're not the same.

HTL comes from Hardware Transform and Lighting. It refers to complex lighting and models which rely in GPU display processing rather than only on CPU one. But as a simplification, all the people use HTL as a synonym of "hi-polied" and therefore more detailed than original, specially when speaking about ship models.

Normal maps are special textures used to get that effect (tweaking light/shade per pixel you can get nearly 3D detail on a fully flat 2D surface). Mediavps include a lot of these textures even for low-poly retail models. These textures are not displayed, but they are just used to tell the normal map shader how to evaluate this effect on every "common" texture pixel.

(But, as you can suppose, normal map effect is done through GPU, not CPU. So in fact, normal mapping is a HTL one  )

[Vasudan Admiral]

Calling them 'HTLed ships' and pretty much all varients of that is technically nonsense. They're more accurately described as high detail rebuilds or something, but we've just pinched the 'HTL' term to neatly abbreviate that concept into a distinctive upgraded vs not-upgraded tag. As long as I'm around the term will stick too.

Watch as the definition of 'HTLed' changes over time to include normal maps - just as it absorbed glow and shine maps before it.

[pecenipicek]

I'm still as to which build of 3.6.10 had normal mapping support for Shader Model 2.0. Was it this or this?

no. keep searching.

[sfried]

Is "this" supposed to be the exact same post as "this?"

My bad. There was another normal map issue build. I was wondering if that supported Shader 2.0...

[chief1983]

I think that was not entirely correct.  The new shaders in the final MediaVPs do have some tweaks, to slightly lower the requirements among other things, but I don't believe it was dropped to SM2.0.   The way GLSL was implemented just could not work well at that level from what I understand.  All the OpenGL fixes Taylor and Echelon have been tinkering with in the last couple of weeks should be in a test build within a couple of days and in SVN within a week I hope.

[larryboy]

New poster here, played the original FS2 back in 1999 and love that its updated! Great work!

Having issues getting normal maps working with 3.6.10

Im running iMac running XP under Bootcamp
GFX is ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro

I have the 3.6.10 mediavps (mv_complete)

Im using the latest Nightly build (fs2_open_3_6_10r-20081231_r5024.exe)

I made sure the -height and -normal tags are present

I tried no shader vp, sdr1119.vp, shaders.vp, and sdr003.vp in the mediavps folder

As far as i can tell, no normal or height maps on the models, i use the F3 model viewer in the game, and the option to turn normal or height maps are nonexistant.

The only time i've seen normal maps work is if i use an old build from 2007 (fs2_open_3_6_10-20071028T.exe) but its slow as molasses and unplayable...

any ideas?
 Thanks!

[Jeff Vader]

I tried no shader vp, sdr1119.vp, shaders.vp, and sdr003.vp in the mediavps folder

The "no shader vp" option is (in any case) the correct one, since shaders are included in the MediaVPs now.

[Herra Tohtori]

Yeah, you probably have things set up correctly based on your description, it's just that macs have issues with the shaders (I have no further knowledge of the nature of the problem, the shaders just tend not to work AFAIK - I don't know if anyone exactly knows why they won't work).

You could try windowed mode (which apparently sometimes helps), or just not use them for now...

EDIT: Strike that, you're using WinXP... dumb me.

Try using a debug build, then post the debug log that it generates at ..\FreeSpace2\data\fs2_open.log. Thats should tell us what's going on with the OpenGL initialization phase...

My gut feeling still says it might have something to do with your computer having "Mac" in it's name. Perhaps Apple GPU BIOS is wreaking havoc on the card's capabilities when you use XP drivers on it... or something. I dunno. POst the debug log and we'll know more.

[larryboy]

Wow.. thanks for the quick replies... yeah i removed the shader.vp file. Still no normal maps... granted even without normal maps, the game looks great, but after seeing a few shots of the ships with normals using the old 2007 build i mentioned.. man.. it looks AMAZING!

[larryboy]

My fs2_open.log is attached... can anyone discipher why normal maps arent loading?

[attachment stolen by Slimey Goober]

[Herra Tohtori]

You seem to have the game set up correctly, but there is something weird going on...

First, I notice this...

Code: [Select]

-mod mediavps,mediavps
  -loadallweps
Building file index...
Found root pack 'C:\Program Files\Freespace2\mediavps\MV_Complete.vp' with a checksum of 0x31df7754
Found root pack 'C:\Program Files\Freespace2\mediavps\mv_music.vp' with a checksum of 0xbbd92e16
Found root pack 'C:\Program Files\Freespace2\mediavps\MV_Complete.vp' with a checksum of 0x31df7754
Found root pack 'C:\Program Files\Freespace2\mediavps\mv_music.vp' with a checksum of 0xbbd92e16

since you have the mediavps as both primary and secondary mod, it's finding and apparently loading the two VP's there twice.

I don't think this should cause problems but it's wrong and should be fixed; either you have a mod.ini file on your main FS2 folder and you have also specified mediavps as a mod in the MOD tab of the launcher, or custom command line... Try selecting No Mod, or rename the mod.ini on the FS2 root directory as mod.ini.disabled or something like that so it doesn't interfere with anything for now.

Secondly, it seems FS2_Open isn't even attempting to compile the shaders as you run it. Normally, you would get a list of "compiling shader X" and whether or not it could do it, then it would tell if it's using GLSL or not. Usually this points to lack of shaders present or the GPU/drivers having missing extensions or something. However, as you have MV_Complete in your system, you do have the shader files so that isn't the issue... and indeed it seems there are two missing extensions, however I am not quite sure if they are crucial for the shaders to work or not (probably are and regardless of that it would obviously be preferable for them to be not missing)

Are your graphics card drivers up to date? Aside from that, I'm afraid my ability to help further is rather limited.


Also... for future reference, editing posts is preferable to double posting. These threads tend to get long enough without such help.

Addendum: You would also do well to drop the -height flag for now. There shouldn't be any data that actually uses it in the MediaVP's - the height mapping doesn't seem to provide enough visual goods for the performance cost, so the height maps were dropped from the VP's. Normal maps are more than enough for all the ship models there are currently; height mapping works better on things such as terrain models and stuff like that...