Author Topic: Ships in mission look different in techroom database?  (Read 3668 times)

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Ships in mission look different in techroom database?
Came back after a while to see my favorite community project is still making progress (and what progress it is) after all these years! There's one problem (and I don't thik it's related to the current build, as it happens going back in Knossos, too):
The ships in the database look moch more refined with bump/displaement plus sheen&reflections than the models in mission. Am I just missing a flag in my config or is this a limitation of the engine?

 
Re: Ships in mission look different in techroom database?
The two places use very different lighting settings, missions in general get affected by many more factors while the tech room is relatively inflexible. Could you post screenshots of what you mean? Otherwise we can only guess at the reasons for what you're seeing. Depending on how severe it is, it may be a bug.

 

Offline Nyctaeus

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Re: Ships in mission look different in techroom database?
Techroom has top-down, single light source and several nebulae around. It's actually very old setting. You should be able to reproduce the effect if you set a single sun on top of background. In majority of missions of fanmade campaigns sun is on the side.
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Re: Ships in mission look different in techroom database?
I know it's a different setting, old or not, they look better in the Techroom than in game. These are screens from the original campaign TR vs in game. You can clearly see more pronounced displacement, bump and reflections on all the surfaces which gives them a mor "3D" feel in thetechroom while "game engine" look in game.

[attachment deleted to save space]
« Last Edit: February 11, 2021, 06:10:54 pm by quadrophoeniX »

 
Re: Ships in mission look different in techroom database?
2 moire. I am aware it is not the exact light setting but I never do get this kind of shininess in game.

[attachment deleted to save space]

 
Re: Ships in mission look different in techroom database?
Yeah, I know its likely a mistake on my part, but the new Orion model looks oddly colored for the same reason with my settings.

 
Re: Ships in mission look different in techroom database?
Largely what I expected to see. I expect that is mostly due to the higher ambient in missions, although the tech room does bring out some details, that harsh contrast can be detrimental in gameplay circumstances. Lighting is a very personal thing, and https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/Command-Line_Reference#Lighting has some options for the command line that can let you tweak things, including the lighting influence from suns/weapons/beams and ambient lighting.

 
Re: Ships in mission look different in techroom database?
Thanks for the reply. Yet I don't understand why not a single mission will give me that 3dimensional reflections on the greebles that are so prominent in the techroom and the only time I got close to that was with the experimental defferred lighting and  shadow buiold (that I preferred over the regular releases for quite some time) I agree that high contrast/deep, extreme shadows are a matter of taste and increase the challenge especially for multiplayer, but who said fighting in space would be a walk in the park and it makes things so much more immersive. Anyway. I will paly around with the flags another round. just, would tweaking the light settings not also affect both, tech room and missions?

 

Offline den5

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Re: Ships in mission look different in techroom database?
I could be wrong, but post - processing doesn't seem to affect techroom. Try the -Disable post-processing checkbox under the Graphics option in your launcher and see if you're happy with the result.

 
Re: Ships in mission look different in techroom database?
I was wondering if that might be the case as well, as it does kind of look like it has no tone-mapping, but I don't know for sure. The tone-mapping definitely brings down the contrast by a lot, in my opinion in a good way, but disabling post processing also disables several other graphical features, such as bloom. I think there has been discussion on configuration of the tone mapping, but it's not really my area of expertise.

 

Offline The E

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Re: Ships in mission look different in techroom database?
This is correct. The techroom is the last holdout of bespoke model rendering code in the engine, and it doesn't use the post-processing pipeline. What you are seeing there doesn't have tonemapping applied to it; I am personally not all that happy with the current tonemapping operator we use as it tends to flatten out lighting a lot, unfortunately, I haven't found one I like better yet.
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Re: Ships in mission look different in techroom database?
 the postprocessing flag definitely was the missing link. Now, I'm torn in between as it gives that dark moody, 3dimensional feel but of course also disbles other goodies like bloom as mentioned. Hoping for a future patch / switch that will enable tone mapping while keeping the other post pro features enabled. Thanks again to everybody!

 

Offline wesp5

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Re: Ships in mission look different in techroom database?
Sorry for hijacking this thread, but while updating my Unofficial Patch to improve compatibility of The Babylon Project with FSO 23.0.0, I noticed that the Whitestar ship looks completely different in the technical database view compared to inside the game. Like it looks greenish instead of purple-white. Is there anything I can do in the patch to fix that?