[AV8R]

After posting a screen cap of a Herc in the new Arcadia fighterbay last week (and summarily made fun of for all of the jagged edges showing on every surface edge) I decided to see what affect increasing the anti-alias and ansiotroptic filtering settings in the launcher would do for image quality. After cranking them both up to 16x and entering a mission and going back into the Arcadia fighterbay I didn't notice a lot of difference (diagonal edges had smaller, more frequent "jaggies" but they were just as noticable as the both setting set to None).

So exiting the game and setting the launcher settings back to None, I set the video driver settings for anti-alias and ansiotropic filter to max (instead of " Use application settings") and tried again. This made edge jaggedness for less noticable - at the cost of not being able to see any stars or nebulae. I tried other missions and adjusted the driver settings to various levels above None but always got no stars or nebulae. I finally narrowed it down to the anti-aliasing setting - setting AA to anything but "Use application settings" kills stars/nebulae but the AF setting had no effect - stars showed no matter what the setting was.

Rig is as follows:

Pentium G860 3.0Ghz
2GB RAM
ATI FirePro 3D V4800 1GB GDDR5
Latest ATI drivers

This should easily be able to handle the OpenGL requirements of FSOpen - even with all of the image post-processing cranked up. It just doesn't seem to like the driver's anti-aliasing setting hard-enabled. Any suggestions?

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[MatthTheGeek]

A debug log and a few screenshots of the issue wouldn't hurt.

[AV8R]

Ok, I did a little more digging and foud this is not as big as a deal as I thought - turns out the only thing this affects are the single mission simulator missions in FSOpen - all of the campaign missions I peeked into (FSPort, FSOpen 2 and ST:R) were fine with the driver's anti-aliasing turned on. Also, Eve of Destruction ReDeux (included as one of the single missions in FSPort) was ok with AA turned on. Only the original single missions have the issue.

I'll include the log and screen shots anyway. Log was created with AA On in the driver.

EDIT: And I'm using version 3.6.18.

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[Yarn]

I have a Radeon HD 6870 and can also reproduce this by forcing AA on. Oddly, it appears to happen only in missions that specify FS1-style nebula backgrounds. Only skybox models are affected; nebulae and planets still appear if the mission specifies them (the ones that you had problems with do not).

In any case, FSO unfortunately does not support antialiasing properly under Windows, so you'll just have to play without AA.

[The E]

*Ahem*

If you look closely at your launchers' Graphics options, there are two you should activate, "Enable Postprocessing" and "Enable FXAA Antialiasing". You can customize the effect to your liking by adding the "-fxaa_preset" optional argument followed by a number from 0 to 9. You can also preview those by going into the F3 lab from the Mainhall, selecting a model, and pressing the 0 to 9 keys.

While this is not as good a solution as hardware MSAA or SSAA, it is still a noticeable improvement over no AA at all.

[AV8R]

I already have Post-Processing enabled but was under the impression that FXAA was an nVidia-only option (it has no affect with ATI/AMD cards).

[The E]

That would be wrong

FXAA was developed by an NVidia engineer, and is an option available in the GeForce drivers, but the basic technique is platform-agnostic and will run anywhere.

[AV8R]

Yeah, I just did some reading in the Wiki about it - maybe I'll give it a try with the default 50% value (-fxaa_preset I believe it was).

Thanks, E.

[The E]

As I said earlier, you can go through the presets using the F3 lab and see which one works best for you.

[AV8R]

BTW, are both flags necessary to turn the feature on (i.e.:  -fxaa and -fxaa_preset) or will just the latter suffice?

[The E]

-fxaa alone is sufficient. -fxaa_preset alone does nothing.

[AV8R]

Works like a charm - and looks great to boot.

You guys are the best!