[redmenace]

thats it someone shoot him.

[Nico]

Originally posted by redmenace
thats it someone shoot him.

hmm? no, I like the occasional arguments I have wth him, so spare him

[KARMA]

well i'm not going to buy a cheap gpu for a pc that will remain anyway good just to warm the room during winter, and i don't have the money to change it soon.
Those are obviously my problems, not yours, and i don't think you should complicate your life just because one person, but it will be hard for me to make models w/o being able to test em (not to mention to play with what i make ). Well maybe i'll be able to find a solution for the time the new engine will be implemented

[mikhael]

Originally posted by Venom


hmm? no, I like the occasional arguments I have wth him, so spare him

Um... thanks, I think.

[aldo_14]

What about supporting Bezier curves?  That would look ****-hot for the fighters & vasudan ships, inparticular.  Not sure how you'd integrate it with the existing code, though....it wasn't written to use any OO tricks, was it?

[RandomTiger]

Originally posted by KARMA
well i'm not going to buy a cheap gpu for a pc that will remain anyway good just to warm the room during winter, and i don't have the money to change it soon.
Those are obviously my problems, not yours, and i don't think you should complicate your life just because one person, but it will be hard for me to make models w/o being able to test em (not to mention to play with what i make ). Well maybe i'll be able to find a solution for the time the new engine will be implemented

Look, I understand your concerns and I dont want to shut anyone out of this that I dont have to. But Im no were near finished so lets worry about that when we come to it.

EVERYONE ELSE, stop going crazy, Im not going to implement a Geo mod or true curves. Please take this to another discussion.

[Nico]

well sorry for being senile, but I wanna repeat: FS2 clipping is an insult to the game and fixing it should come first.

[phreak]

venom: any tnl upgrade should fix the clipping probs

[CP5670]

By clipping do you mean this sort of thing?

While we are on the topic of graphic enhancements, how difficult would it be to implement "detail mapping?" This is the effect where if you get very close to a textured polygon, instead of the texture becoming blurry, a new stencil-like overlay bump-map gradually gets displayed and makes very fine details appear. This system is used in the Unreal and Unreal Warfare games for example.

[IceFire]

Originally posted by RandomTiger


Im not sure what you've talking about. As far as I know texture sections are simply used to display textures bigger than 256. I've taken them out because Im restructuring the texture module and they were making life difficult.

At the end of the day they could always be put back in and remember fs2_open is always here and back compatiable and I suspect if it ever goes HT&L Inquisitor will insist voodoo owners (if there are any left) are thought of.

Ok...maybe it has no relevance at all.  I just thought I'd throw it out there and see if it was something overlooked or not.

Just to be certain...what I was talking about is the FRED2 feature where you can take a background bitmap and divide it into 2 or 4 for instance (I think the limit is 4).  The purpose of this is to reduce the tearing on the background bitmaps as you spin your ship around.  In particular, it makes a large planet on the background look more circular and less oval/wonky like (see for yourself ).

I have no idea if these two things are linked or totally separate entities but unless the skybox system gets reworked and there is no need for dividing the bitmaps...having that would still be a useful feature.

Again...may be a total non-issue in which case, ignore all that I have said and I'll go and sit in my corner

Everyone should be able to afford a cheap GPU nowadays.  For $20 you can buy the card im using or better (GF2 GTS) which would do the trick and more (and I spent $450 Cdn on it in the first place, bah!).

[RandomTiger]

Originally posted by IceFire

Ok...maybe it has no relevance at all.  I just thought I'd throw it out there and see if it was something overlooked or not.

I still dont know what you are talking about but if its linked to texture sections it may well be broken. Could you give me any info you have on it and which missions (if any) in the FS2 files use it. Or supply me with an example mission.

[Nico]

Originally posted by CP5670
By clipping do you mean this sort of thing?
 

I mean that:

look at the thruster flames, that's a good exemple. the polys are not even intersecting or anything, but still you can see the thruster flames throught the hull structure.

[Eternal One]

A classic example what will happen if you use a 16-bit Z-buffer without any kind of range adjustments.

[KARMA]

Originally posted by Venom


I mean that:

or maybe those (no interceptions present):

[Nico]

yup, same deal.

[Inquisitor]

In-laws in town, brother graduating from Harvard Law tomorrow, this is what I get for having a real life

This owuld be something we could do after the bug squashing and after the mucking about we have to do with multi, but we have been talking about T&L for a while (see the stickied summary thread).

I think it would be great to have a completely updated graphic engine, openGL and DX8 have been a fun ride, but i think worth it.

There will be a concious effort with this, though, to up the system requirements, so we will begin to rapidly loose the older cards.

I would think that so long as we have a stable release of the current system, that that release and any new release would continue to be mod compatible and interoperable in multiplayer (not sure how realistic that is, but, hey, we can try, right) that we could just STOP progress on the current 3.x series after say, 3.6 or so, and dev folks could move on to new and interesting if they wanted?

Just thinking about this out loud, ignore my ravings

[phreak]

just to add:

once we get multiplayer set in 3.6 we may look at doing these things for 3.7 and up (my opinion)

update graphics engine
upgrade ai
optimize netcode (possibly 3.8)
new physics stuff (possibly 3.8 or 3.9)

the second last one i will be of no use on until i can find a good networking tutorial

[redmenace]

How is the bug hunting going? Are we any closer to nailing the model read and crash to the desktop problem we are getting? Hey after the T&L stuff maybe we can get our turrets to have other default positions other that straight up or straight down.

[RandomTiger]

Still to do:
-------------------------
HT&L
-Transformation
--Sort out viewing matrix
--Change object readin and render system      
--Fix clipping planes

-Lighting
--Fix locations
--Set sun as directional
--Fix beam illumination

-Textures
--Cache in animations
--Add support for 32 bit TGA's

-Misc
--Stop projecting explosions and engine / beam glows
--Fix engine glow order problem

Search for and fix general bugs
Search for and fix card and system specific bugs
----------------
This will likely will take months. Currently Im a bit stuck on understanding the exact working of View_matrix. Any useful help from a coder who knows what they are talking about would be welcome.

I know what *a* view matrix is, what I need to know is how *the freespace* view matrix works.

Currently I use the View_matrix as a world tranformation and the actual D3D view matrix is the identity matrix (or 0). It doesnt work the other way around.

Also the view matrix is a 3x3 transpose of the 4x4 matrix required, its used for many different things, even in the sound code. I need to fully understand how it works before I can sort it out safely and I need to sort it out before I can get anything really useful done on the HT&L scheme.

Any thoughts #UP#, Phreak?
Dont suppose Daveb is out there?

[redmenace]

well one option is to contact volition([email protected] ) this way and have them forward this to daveb, second you could call them directly. third you could send him an e-mail through the forums. forth a admin could e-mail him directly for you.
[email protected]