[General Battuta]

That problem may have come to the MVPs along with the same BP2 data that provided flaming debris and beam piercing. Blame BP2 not FSU. I believe it is in particular related to the flashy deaths script, yes?

[Fury]

It's not a problem in either BP2 or MVP, but in FSO and scripting.

If you check events window in a mission, you will notice that a ship is considered destroyed even before it is completely gone. This is when FSO wipes the ship off from its list of living objects. This is also when flashy death script triggers. There's nothing that can be done except improve scripting and FSO engine.

So for example, a fast moving fighter receives that one last hit and goes 0% hull, game considers it destroyed and triggers whatever is supposed to trigger when it dies. But you still see the same fighter doing its death roll even after it has been "destroyed".

[Zacam]

I think having separate patch .vps for each the main vps is actually a very good idea, and probably the best middle ground, especially when subsequent patches are presented as rollups of all previous patches.  That is, you end up with the original release .vps and zero or one patch .vp for each of the original .vps.

This. It is about to happen soon by way of apology for the unified 3613_Update.vp file. As a result, it'll have a few more goodies in it that I hope folks will enjoy.

More news as it happens.

[Zacam]

To all a good holiday season,

[Zacam]

And to all a good night.

If you downloaded MV_Assets_Update prior to 05:30pm Pacific Time (UMC -08:00) then a thousand apologies, but you'll need to re-download it.

Somebody was late to the party. Not entirely their fault, I didn't send out invitations.

[dANGER boy]

So 3612_Update.vp should be deleated from MVPs folder?

[Macfie]

The FreeSpace Open Installer doesn't appear to be working correctly.  I tried using the installer to update the media VPs but it only got as far as Checking 3612_Ant-cache.vp and hung up.

[Hades]

The FreeSpace Open Installer doesn't appear to be working correctly.  I tried using the installer to update the media VPs but it only got as far as Checking 3612_Ant-cache.vp and hung up.

Don't use the installer, then. It's pretty much been broken for a couple of years now.

So 3612_Update.vp should be deleated from MVPs folder?

Yes.

[Zacam]

Or, delete the Ant-Cache VP, any previous Update vp and try again. (And I think you mean 3612_Update.vp unless you decided to rename it)

[Mongoose]

The FreeSpace Open Installer doesn't appear to be working correctly.  I tried using the installer to update the media VPs but it only got as far as Checking 3612_Ant-cache.vp and hung up.

Don't use the installer, then. It's pretty much been broken for a couple of years now.

Nnnnope.  It's been (essentially) fixed for some time now.

[Hades]

It won't matter either way, for long, with Desura on the way.

Also, I'd like to mention, the MV_Assets patch vp has numerous ships with fixed thrusters, gunpoints, and added gunpoints. If anyone has any feedback on them I'd certainly love to get some.

[Kolgena]

Do we have a comprehensive list of changes so we tell what we're looking for?

[Hades]

Alright

Ursa - Downsized engine sprite
Zeus - added two extra points for each engine and downsized the already placed points to better fit the engines
Orion - fixed the multipart firing points to fit the barrels
Hatshepsut - resized and redid engine placement
TAC 1 - added glow-points
Deimos - Resized thrusters
Sobek - resized and recentered thrusters
Fenris - I think some modifications to the glow-points (size, most likely)
Aeolus - resized, recentered, and added some more points to the back-most brigine (brick engine! )
Mentu: Added 6 more thruster points so I could give it thruster points that fit the texture
Amazon Fighter Drone: resized the thrusters to better fit
Hermes: Added six glow-points and downsized the thruster to better fit the engine (sorry, not the HTL yet )
Ra: downsized the thruster to better fit the engine
Dragon: Downsized all thruster points and recentered them
Hercules 1: Downsized and recentered thruster points
Thoth: Downsized and moved the thruster points to better fit
Basilisk: Added four thruster points (two per engine)
Loki: Downsized the thruster points to better fit
Aeshma: Added another thruster point
Mara: Resized and moved around the thruster points
Hercules II: Resized and added a couple of points or so
Perseus: Dwnsized the thrusters a bit
Myrmidon: Downsized thrusters
Serapis: downsized and added two points and positioned the firing points for both missiles and primaries to where the model/texture has them
Tauret: downsized thruster points
Bahka: downsized and moved around thruster points, only one I know I'm not happy with due to unavoidable clipping issues, we really need modeled thrusters.
Poseidon: added numerous thruster points to correspond to the texture, not sure if Zacam modded the table to fix the length of the plumes. Damn I hate thruster plume sprites. Also, I added some glow-points and some blink!
Satis: resized thruster points and added some more to better fit, also gave it some glow-points
Ma'at: Resized thruster points
Triton: Resized and recentered thruster points.
Bes: Resized thruster points to better fit the model, also another work I wasn't happy about, would need modeled thrusters (and then a high-poly model, which I am thinking about doing)
Zephyrus: resized thruster points
Anuket: resized thruster points, and centered.
Nephthys: Resized and moved thruster point
Elysium: Added 3 glow-points and redid te thrusters, wanted to add more glow-points but didn't have the time, I'll do that later for the next MVP patch/release
Azrael: moved thruster points

[Kolgena]

Oh wow. That's... a lot. Well, I'll try and find time to let you know what I think of the changes. Looking through the pack, I also noticed that the HTL Seraphim made it in, but the HTL Knossos didn't.

(And for something completely different, I remember bringing up the fact that the current Orion's turrets doesn't make much sense with its FS2 loadout. I actually have a version that put Trashman's turrets on Galemp(?)'s Orion that Droid(?) made for me. Is it possible to make this the MVP standard without breaking FSPort in the process?)

[Zacam]

Hatshepsut maps got re-done up as well. Tauret has cockpit now, the new Seraphim is in play. All the cache files needed for running on go_faster builds are built in. The explosion script has a fix in it. Updated blur and post-process shader files. Herra's Hammerhead and Ravens Squadron Logo's. Fiction viewer artwork now properly present. The strings LCL file now has German translations (Thanks to _Angelus_). CoOp missions have some fixes. Single Player Missions have some fixes for Persona Indexes.

A note on the Installer: It does work. It just will blindly do exactly what it is told and if it is told to do stupid, it will unfailing DO stupid.

It wasn't deleting 3612_Ant-Cache.vp because I wasn't aware that each file to be deleted had to be specifically prefaced with DELETE, I thought it handled it by Section.

And I just corrected it NOT downloading the MV_Assets_Update.zip becasue the word "Update" was put in as "update" and so people were not getting the MV_Assets.3612.vp file like they should have been.

[Kolgena]

AAAAAAAHHH

Now I really need to go through my directories and clean out single files I had grabbed that are being replaced by the patch.

As for Hades' feedback:
Overall, it's excellent. Lots of the ship thrusters look much better. I have gripes about a few of them though:

Myrmidon could do with bigger thrusters for its inner two engines.
Aeolus could do with bigger thrusters for its rear engine block. It looks a bit like a bundle of zippos right now.
Zeus is weird. At certain angles, the white part of the engine plume is much longer than the bomber itself. It looks silly, but I'm not sure why it behaves differently from the other ships.
Deimos rear engines could be bigger.
Amazon suffers the same problem as the Zeus. At certain angles, the plume's just right. At others, it looks a fair bit longer than the fighter.

[Hades]

Myrmidon could do with bigger thrusters for its inner two engines.
Aeolus could do with bigger thrusters for its rear engine block. It looks a bit like a bundle of zippos right now.
Zeus is weird. At certain angles, the white part of the engine plume is much longer than the bomber itself. It looks silly, but I'm not sure why it behaves differently from the other ships.
Deimos rear engines could be bigger.
Amazon suffers the same problem as the Zeus. At certain angles, the plume's just right. At others, it looks a fair bit longer than the fighter.

Thanks! For the Zeus and Amazon, I had noticed this too, I have no idea why it does this however.
The Aeolus rear engine block was the only part I was never really satisfied with, I was trying to make it look less like one big thruster plume and make it fir the four smaller parts better, however I feel this is impossible without modeled thrusters.

As for the Deimos and Myrmidon, I'll need to take a look real quick to see what I think but I'll definitely take that into consideration. Thanks for the feedback.

EDIT: I looked at them in game and for the Myrmidon, I think they're fine, and probably could be a little smaller. Any bigger than they are they'll clip more than they already are. As for the Deimos, I might make them a bit bigger but I think they fit well enough as they are.

[Kolgena]

Just to make sure, which of these files should I be removing after patching?
Freespace\mediavps_3612\data\effects
blur-f
brightpass-f
main-f
main-v
post-f
post-v


I took at look at the remapped Hatshepsut: mad props for fixing the maps. It was something that had been bugging me pretty much since the model's release.

Not a fan of some of the thinner beams. Most are okay, though LReds look kinda flimsy. Terslash could be a bit bigger, since its impact explosion is no longer big enough to "hide" some clipping when it sweeps across hull. I didn't get to looking at LTerslash yet, but it may suffer the same problem. Previously, the beam/explosion were big enough so that on most sweeps, the explosions chained together quite nicely too look like a continuous trail. It still clipped, but didn't look as bad because each explosion was big enough to link up nicely with its adjacent explosions. Now, it definitely looks like it's skipping across the hull, which sucks. Perhaps size up the explosions so that the problem's gone, then size up the beam just enough so that it doesn't look queer?

Additons: I'm thinking that the Zeus should probably get completely redone thrusters. I remember it having huge plumes even before the patch. Perhaps make more plumes, but make each of them smaller? (I just found out that the Ra escape pod also suffers from this. At certain angles, it looks more like it has a missile trail than a ship thruster. Might hold some clues as to what's going on) Aeolus could aim for something with Triton-sized thrusters.

Also, browsing through, I noticed that the Meson bomb has a weird part on its glow map. See attached image.

Moar:
Mentu also suffers from zippo thruster syndrome. Furthermore, a couple of the vasudan ships and the Triton have thruster overload... It might be a performance concern for some.
You didn't say anything about the Typhon, but its thrusters look terrible. Maybe I just never noticed from before.

Basilisk still has 2 plumes, unlike you reported. Ditto with the Aeshma. Mara looks weird with its new thruster configuration. I think I'll get used to it and like it though.

Boanerges looks bad with half its engine rear face naked. It doesn't make sense visually to me anymore.

Everything else looks great, as far as I can tell from the quick skim.


[attachment deleted by admin]

[Hades]

Not a fan of some of the thinner beams. Most are okay, though LReds look kinda flimsy. Terslash could be a bit bigger, since its impact explosion is no longer big enough to "hide" some clipping when it sweeps across hull. I didn't get to looking at LTerslash yet, but it may suffer the same problem. Previously, the beam/explosion were big enough so that on most sweeps, the explosions chained together quite nicely too look like a continuous trail. It still clipped, but didn't look as bad because each explosion was big enough to link up nicely with its adjacent explosions. Now, it definitely looks like it's skipping across the hull, which sucks. Perhaps size up the explosions so that the problem's gone, then size up the beam just enough so that it doesn't look queer?

The LRed and all Shvan beams in particular are more 'focused' and stuf, so they're a bit smaller than the Terran or Vasudan counterparts, not to mention if you make it any bigger it'll look silly coming from both the Ravana and Lilith (well, sillier than coming from spikes already looks)

As for the explosion hit effect, I knew they weren't big enough for the modes but I was never able to get enough feedback on them to fix it, but I can make it a bit bigger for both the Terslash and lterslash.

Additons: I'm thinking that the Zeus should probably get completely redone thrusters. I remember it having huge plumes even before the patch. Perhaps make more plumes, but make each of them smaller? (I just found out that the Ra escape pod also suffers from this. At certain angles, it looks more like it has a missile trail than a ship thruster. Might hold some clues as to what's going on) Aeolus could aim for something with Triton-sized thrusters.

Frankly, for both the Aeolus and Zeus (and most ships in general) modeled thrusters are the only way to actually handle them well, 2d sprites are only decent for circular objects, and barely.

Moar:
Mentu also suffers from zippo thruster syndrome. Furthermore, a couple of the vasudan ships and the Triton have thruster overload... It might be a performance concern for some.
You didn't say anything about the Typhon, but its thrusters look terrible. Maybe I just never noticed from before.

Zippo thruster? What do you mean by that?

Anyway, I just put the points to match its texture. As for the Typhon, I haven't touched it yet because there's a HTL model on the way, not to mention one of the engine flaps has a mesh error.

Basilisk still has 2 plumes, unlike you reported. Ditto with the Aeshma. Mara looks weird with its new thruster configuration. I think I'll get used to it and like it though.

Boanerges looks bad with half its engine rear face naked. It doesn't make sense visually to me anymore.

Everything else looks great, as far as I can tell from the quick skim.

I dunno about the Basilisk, I added four more. The Aeshma should have two as well, though these are two more ships that would SERIOUSLY benefit from modeled plumes (as would the mara). Because to fit 2d sprites to the shapes which they have will require a hell of a lot of points.

As for the Boa, I disagree, I just added them to how the texture had them represented. Making them big bigger might not hurt but still.

[Kolgena]

Are you sure the basilisk and aeshma updates made it into the patches? I don't have anything that would be overriding the vps, and those ships definitely only have 2/1 thrusters respectively.

Zippo thrusters means that I feel the plumes look so small that they could be coming from a bunch of zippo lighters. Probably has to do with the way thrusters round out and look less like cones when they get smaller.

Anyways, I completely respect all your changes/justifications. It's impossible to satisfy everyone, but overall, I feel the changes are for the better.

(As an aside, can someone tell me which of the .sdrs I can safely remove now? I know the -f fragments are in the mv_assets patch, but I'm hesitant to kill the -v vertex ones as well. I don't know what they're for. Also, you've mentioned modeled thrusters twice Hades. Does that mean that it's a feature that we can expect to see in a few months?)