[-moose-]

are supposed to be green wireframe, correct?

i wasnt sure if i was missing out on something, because everything else looks spectactular

[Fenrir]

Yups, that's what they're supposed to be.

Jump nodes don't have a physical appearance and the green wireframe is a HUD artifact so you can actually tell where one is.

[BlackDove]

Maybe we should...update the green wireframe into something cooler.

And by we, I mean people with skills.

[Prophet]

How can you make something cooler out of a HUD artifact?
It's just a computer generated nav! It's supposed to look dull and simple!

Ofcourse it could be a cool colourful animated flashing sign: "jump here"
But every craft that gets in range of it would suffer critical systems failure when their CPU and nav systems try to display the "HUD artifact". Its not a laughing matter when the graphics processor attached to the navigation system overheats and causes a fire alarm on a space ship!

[BlackDove]

.......right.

It wouldn't hurt for it to look snazzier.

[Taristin]

Actually, IIRC it would... because jump nodes have a different kind of renderring pass which is more intensive for some reason.
Not sure if it's been changed but I doubt it.

[StratComm]

I think the wireframe rendering has been optimized lately, but in reality you don't want it getting any more complicated than it already is.  So long as it's a collection of green lines, the only way to make it recognizable at all is to keep the number of lines to a minimum.  If they get too numerous then they run together an you can't make out anything more than the basic shape.

[WMCoolmon]

Jump node models use the same rendering function as any other model, so you could conceivably make a model that just uses normal textured polygons and such. I'm not sure why you'd want to though.

[Trivial Psychic]

How about making some of the portions between the green lines, covered in a transluscent green texture?

[Taristin]

Why does it need to be changed at all?

[bfobar]

I think adding just a few more poly shapes to the wires would be nice. Just enough so that it doesn't look like a potato when you're viewing it from some angles. Nothing too fancy.

[StratComm]

I guess that what you're wanting changed is that the side pieces are three-way instead of four way, so from certain angles one side looks more "full" than the other.  I'll be honest, I prefered the FS1 node to the FS2 one for that.  But the FS2 one looks cooler.  I'm of the opinion that the node needs to stay as close as possible to the FS2 retail node if a replacement is going to be in there at all, so I would vote against a "revamped" or "HTLized" jump node.  It's one of those things that should stay simple.

[Prophet]

I think adding just a few more poly shapes to the wires would be nice. Just enough so that it doesn't look like a potato when you're viewing it from some angles. Nothing too fancy.

Its a sphere! Its gona look lika a potato no matter wich direction you look it from
I agree with StratComm. It has to be kept clean and simple.

[Mongoose]

Definitely another vote against changing it.  The wireframe look really fits what the node display is supposed to be: a simple graphical indicator generated by your HUD.  If you've ever seen the HUD of an actual fighter, the graphical overlay there is pretty much the same style.  The node display does exactly what it needs to do without any frills attached; plus, and above all else, changing it at this point would be incredibly strange, given how we're all completely used to the original one.  Spending polies to make ship models look better is one thing; spending them to make a wireframe HUD representation of an invisible singularity in space look better just seems like overkill.

[WMCoolmon]

There should already be a high-poly version in the mediaVPs anyway.

[bfobar]

I think adding just a few more poly shapes to the wires would be nice. Just enough so that it doesn't look like a potato when you're viewing it from some angles. Nothing too fancy.

Its a sphere! Its gona look lika a potato no matter wich direction you look it from
I agree with StratComm. It has to be kept clean and simple.

Sphere =/= potato. 

Anyway, the node is 44 polygons with 2 stars with 3 points at the poles and 3 stars with 4 points around the equator. The mv_models version is 204 polys but the same layout. I'm just saying that making the layout a little more spherical wouldn't hurt. I would just make an icosahedron and stick the 3 point star wire thingy (but smaller) at each of the 12 verticies. That's 252 polys with the hi-res node wireframe 3 point star.

[taylor]

Not wanting to really get in on this conversation I'll just add this...  jumpnodes still go through the old non-HTL line drawing code.  The wireframe code was redone to work properly in HTL mode but it only works for texture mapped polys, which the original jumpnode is not.  The original jumpnode isn't rendered as wireframe in the more basic sense but is instead basically just a bunch of points connected by lines.  The original jumpnode cannot be drawn properly using HTL code because of this.  The more complex the jumpnode model is the slower it is to draw because it's always non-HTL lines and is always rendered one line at the time.  Making a more detailed jumpnode model which can actually draw fast would require code changes that are incompatible with the retail jumpnode model.  I know, I tried it already.  It was just far too messy to try and handle both the retail model and more fancy ones properly.

Personally I'm happy just sticking with the retail jumpnode.  The mv_models version is at least 3 times slower to draw (depends partly on video card/driver, could be much slower) and the extra polys just aren't worth it to me.  Perhaps in the future the code will be reworked to allow for multiple jumpnode types that can work with both the retail version and hi-poly/textured models without sacrificing speed in either case.

[Taristin]

^^ see! I thought so!

[BlackDove]

"^^"?

"^^"?

The penalty is death.

....at any rate, the green wireframe looks a good eight years old. A way to change it should really be found.

[Taristin]

"^^" as in up arrows. Grow up.

And they don't look old at all. They look standard. They look correct.