[ChronoReverse]

Well, I'm not sure if it's really slower or anything.  But I really think that a flag to allow loading everything before the mission starts would be very good.

Example:  Surrender, Belisarius!

I start the mission.  It's going at about ~84FPS.

I fire my Subach (I always do this now to get it over with).  It lags for a moment and two bolts are fired.  Subsequently, firing the Subach no longer causes this lag.
79-82FPS

I look at my wingmen (I also always do this now).  It lags for a second or two (@@) and then smooths out.  Wingmen no longer lag me.
73-80FPS

I center my reticle on the transports and Vasudan fighters.  It lags for a second or two... etc etc
69-75FPS.

The Hercs jump in.  It lags... etc.
~65FPS


By the time both the Belisarius and Psalmtik are on the screen at the same time, there's a total of 8 craft: me and my wingmen's Myrmidons, the two Vasudan fighters, the two transports, the Belisarius and the Psalmtik.  The FPS is about 40FPS now.  Very decent speed, very smooth too.  But whenever anything appears for the first time on my screen (or jumps in) it lags for a second ><
Explosions also do this; the first time it appears, it'll lag.



Now for the good parts.

I love RT's new gamma system.  It works wonderfully and everything is not way too dark now.

Shine-mapping is beautiful.  It isn't too harsh but appears enough to remind me how much better it looks now.  Asteroids and Boedicia still looks odd, but I don't mind too much.

Glow maps.  The two transports looks great from the dark side.

No ambient lighting.  In my sensors, I can see the ship as if there was ambient lighting.  In the normal view I don't.  This is very good.  It gives great atmosphere and I have no trouble seeing stuff in the Volition missions (except when I'm in the dark side of a really large object like an installation, in which case, it SHOULD be dark).

Engine glows.  The glows are now fixed due to Lightspeed's mastery.  The Beam Glow effect isn't too bold and is actually very nice.  Especially the Vasudan glows.  And while green afterburners felt weird at first, I began to appreciate them.

Engine thrust trails.  Spectacular.  Especially in conjunction with the glow effects.  Watch a Vasudan fighter flying in circles around the transport it's guarding is very nice.

And all this at a framerate that averages about 25-33FPS in a more hectic battle, to about 45FPS in a more calm situation.  Very nice.



Note:  I am using the 12_05_r (which I assume is the release build).
My specs are:
Windows XP
DX9.0b
Celeron III OC'd to 1.33GHz (basically a P3 since the L2 cache is 256k)
256MB PC133 CAS3 SDRAM ()
GF4 Ti4200 128MB



Finally, the ugly part.  As I am writing this with FS2_open in the background, my page file usage sits at 655MB.  I have only about 40MB RAM free.  Mind you, the usage dropped a bit when I switched out (from looking at the time graph).  What's making FS2_open use so much memory anyways?


Oh yes, one more thing.  Great job making the stars and jump nodes show up again.  It's rather nice to have those back =)



Hmmm.   Okay, now I've run into the problem.  I forget the mission name, but it's the first one where you see the Knossos Portal.  Throughout the mission, it has various lags as new fighters jump in.
Finally, when the orion arrives, the game slows down to 10 FPS whenever I face it. @@

And here's a little tidbit that may or may not be useful:  In the armament select screen, if I click a button, it's animation will start, but there's a lag just before the sound plays.  Could it be possible that the lags are caused by sound effects loading rather than graphics?

[RandomTiger]

The one off lag when you fire is the textures being cached.
What we need to do is cache them before the mission starts.
Doesnt look like a trival code change though.

The interface lag is the same thing (however in this case its loading the hilight graphics for that button), I'm looking into that.

[ChronoReverse]

The graphic already changed; it's before the sound plays when it lags.  I was like O_o when I noticed that.

[RandomTiger]

I might have to disagree with that but I'll take another look.

[ChronoReverse]

And you are right.  I've replicated this several more times and have come to the conclusion that it's not the sound loading that causes the lag.  Rather, it's the next screen that's lagging.

When I go from briefing to loadout for the first-time, it lags.  Then if I go to ship-select, it'll lag, but if I go back forth after that, it doesn't lag anymore XD

In any case, I ought to be more attentive next time...

[edit] Added some pretty screenshots.  It's only going to be a link though to save those poor people on dial-up.

The Lysander fades into the mist

It's painful, but pretty


Now for a few more things.

It's all very strange, but if you select any ship besides the default, the cool new thruster effects don't show up.  Not only that, but the old ugly thrusters don't even have the glow and all you get is the pof ><

And as you can see from the screenshots, the ship in the left bottom corner sensor is solid black for some reason.

Note that the colouring of the Lysander is perfectly fine despite the lack of ambient light.  As a matter of fact, so far, the Volition missions do not suffer but rather benefits from the lack of ambient lighting.  HOWEVER, I do believe that allowing ambient lighting to be set via FRED to be very important.

BTW, the warp.pof doesn't have edges in the nebula anymore.

Another thing:  The Y targetting bug is still around.  Doesn't occur a lot though so it's better =)
I just got it while trying to target the Colossus while it was jumping in (hence not targettable yet).  It targetted a piece of debris behind it and then crash to desktop (of course, this was the release build so I didn't get anything in terms of messages).
[/edit]

[ChronoReverse]

Decided to put this in a new post.

Sometimes, the glowmaps are "off" until you get close enough.  I took a few screenshots to illustrate.

Who turned out the lights?!?

and then when you get closer, they suddenly turn on:

All systems operational sir!


And just for fun, beauty shots of the Sathanas.

The Sathanas cruises by

The Sathanas displays signs of weakness



@lightspeed
Currently, the thruster glows for Shivan ships look... awkward.  Since the flames swirl isn't animated, it's really not very nice and you can also easily tell that it's flat.  The thruster trails and colours are really nice though.

[Drew]

bob made thos trails...

Originally posted by ChronoReverse
Since the flames swirl isn't animated,  [/B]

LightSpeeed?

[ChronoReverse]

Bobbeau made the original trails.  Lightspeed improved them and made the Shivan ones IIRC


Oh one more thing.  For some reason, if you play the FS2 main campaign, in one mission, and only ONE mission, the planet in the background has a black square around it.  In all other missions this isn't true.

The mission I'm referring to is the one where you have to escort the Bastion to the jump node where it'll detonate all the meson bombs on board to collapse the node.

And here's a screenshot

[WMCoolmon]

Hmm, it looks like all the planets Lightspeed did don't have a transparent background.

I'm not quite sure if I can fix that.

[ChronoReverse]

Actually, only this one is like that XD  The other ones turned out fine.

[Trivial Psychic]

Actually its the same for any mission with his new planets.  I saw the same thing in the mission where you have to escort civilian ships to the EP node, right before "Dunkerque" (sp?).  Lightspeed says that it only happens when the planets were added AFTER the nebulae.  I'm hoping that when DDS gets implimented, we can get versions in this fomat that could potentially fix this problem (and possibly cut down on filesizes and system loads).

Later!

[ChronoReverse]

Ah yes, that's right, LS said that if the mission was made so that the planets are not placed before the nebulas are the boxes appear =/

I guess that one mission is the only Volition one that has the nebulas placed before the planets XD

[Lightspeed]

Bobbeau made the original trails. Lightspeed improved them and made the Shivan ones IIRC

that's correct. The glows & the shivan thrusters are completely redone from scratch.

Oh one more thing. For some reason, if you play the FS2 main campaign, in one mission, and only ONE mission, the planet in the background has a black square around it. In all other missions this isn't true.

I know of the bug. You need to place the planets BEFORE the nebulae in the background editor, or it will not be able to blend. For some reason 32-bit alpha tgas do not work, and nobody made the code to automatically alpha blend backgrounds.

Hmm, it looks like all the planets Lightspeed did don't have a transparent background.

I cannot, and the code using the tga's is scripted to paint them opaque and then blend any other tgas over them. It just happens when the planets appear last in the background editor.


as I said, it works with most, but not every mission.

I think DDS supports transparency so that should fix the problems. It will also help to speed things up.

@lightspeed
Currently, the thruster glows for Shivan ships look... awkward. Since the flames swirl isn't animated, it's really not very nice and you can also easily tell that it's flat. The thruster trails and colours are really nice though.

really? it kinda flickers around a bit here. Ah well, i'll see what I can do.

[Goober5000]

Does that mean the planets will appear behind the nebulae?  They're supposed to appear in front; they're closer.

[Lightspeed]

yeah they will be blended behind, but there's no other way to do it, since TGAs with an alpha channel will not be displayed at all, and 02550 transparency is not suitable.

That's why i asked for someone to fix it so planets work with 32-bit TGAs as well

[Flipside]

Heres another odd bug, the main build is crashing about 2 minutes into the game, and when I ran the Debug Build I got.....

Assert: hull_percentage_of_hits > 0.0f
File: E:\Languages\Visual Studio Projects\Visual C++\fs2_open\code\Ship\Ship.cpp
Line: 2521

Call stack:
------------------------------------------------------------------
    parse_shiptbl()    ship_init()    game_init()    WinMainSub()    WinMain()    WinMainCRTStartup()    kernel32.dll 77e814c7()
------------------------------------------------------------------

The game didn't even get as far as starting with the _d build. To an uneducated eye, I would say it looks like I've given a subsystem 0% hull somewhere, but I've looked, and can't see one

Flipside

[IceFire]

I get some minor graphical bugs with this build.  Rotating components have a texture flickering effect and laser bitmaps show right through ships.

Not sure if those are common accross the board or limited to a certain configuration.

Running a Radeon 9700Pro...Cat 3.7's.

[Flipside]

I get the lasers visible through ships as well.

Running GeForce MX440

[MadProf]

Flipside.  The assert is saying that the sum of all subsytems
e.g. weapons + comms + engine + ...
is greater than or equal to 100% leaving nothing for the hull.

[Flipside]

Ah! I know which ship that is, I thought you could get away with destroying a ship by knocking out enough subsystems Ah well, Back to the Drawing Board Mind you doesn't explain the sudden crash error, but at least I might be able to get there now

Flipside

Hmmmmmmm... Ok, I've altered things so that the subsystems total less than 100% and it's still doing it
Maybe a reset'll fix it