Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Taristin on October 09, 2003, 07:31:44 pm

Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Taristin on October 09, 2003, 07:31:44 pm
(http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/us/images/screen00.jpg)
(http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/us/images/screen01.jpg)
(http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/us/images/screen02.jpg)

It's 13,609 polies with nothing but this LOD and the turrets, and claw! :D:D:D

Imagine! And it ran smoothly on my AMD Duron 600, and GeForce 2 MX 400, 32 Mb PCI video card, with textures in excess of 2000 x 2000!

This was amazing! I wanna convert all of my subdivided Vasudan models!
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Flipside on October 09, 2003, 07:36:43 pm
That is awesome! :)

Couldn't have too many on screen at once unless you had some high spec card, but it's a perfect example of what the SCP is capable of :) Could you post a bigger one of it? :D

Flipside :)

Edit : Oh, no of course you cant, the in game stuff needs a little work before you can do lvlshot on it :) Still, looks great :D
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Taristin on October 09, 2003, 07:49:18 pm
I do have an image of it, but the claw is rotating in a wierd way. Plus it's not a real good high-res image. Would you like a copy of the pof? To play with on your system?
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Bobboau on October 09, 2003, 07:58:34 pm
wait, you have a PCI card!
wow, this is working even better than I thought it would, all the geometry must be getting stored on the card, otherwise you would be getting quite a slow down with a PCI card, what was your frame rate?
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Taristin on October 09, 2003, 08:11:51 pm
Well, in most missions it's 25. If I look at a sun, it's 6, and if I do the mission with the Anuket alone, it's 37. :)

Edit: That ship there runs smoother than the Hathespsut does without smoothening.
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Sticks on October 09, 2003, 08:12:22 pm
I think this is also the problem with missions crashing on cards with little memory (32Mb or less). I think we're storing every buffer in video memory for each ship, so if we can't allocate a buffer, there doesn't seem to be graceful error checking in place.
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Taristin on October 09, 2003, 08:15:49 pm
I do intend to buy a new card. I wanted to get an AGP version of the Radeon 9200, but when I moved, the side of my AGP socket cracked, and I have to finnagle the card to get it to work properly, otherwise the whole system makes a funny beep, whirrrrr, beep, then nothing.

Would it be wise to spend $100 and not know if it'll work?

I have the card set to use up to 70 Mb of system memory, but I doubt it does it.
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Starks on October 09, 2003, 08:36:13 pm
That is one beautiful Zepthyrus!
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Taristin on October 09, 2003, 08:39:21 pm
Quote
Originally posted by LLivingLarge
That is one beautiful Zepthyrus!


*smacks LLivingLarge *

That's an Anuket!!! :hopping:
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Starks on October 09, 2003, 08:54:34 pm
I always mix those two gas miners up... Both have such exotic designs.
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Taristin on October 09, 2003, 08:55:41 pm
The Zephyrus isn't so exotic...  But I would love to see more Vasudan vessels like the Anuket.

I loooove the scoope behind the gas chambers, they are so teh siht!
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Drew on October 09, 2003, 09:35:04 pm
:yes: :yes: :yes:
someone needs to put together a tutorial telling us how to put these together

BTW what build Fs2 build did you use?
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Taristin on October 09, 2003, 09:37:56 pm
FS2_open_htl.exe  it's the one in that bug reporting thread, I think
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Drew on October 09, 2003, 09:43:50 pm
but in your picture the anuket is spec mapped....
my FS2_open_htl.exe didnt spec map.........
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Taristin on October 09, 2003, 09:46:45 pm
Odd, mine did...
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Bobboau on October 09, 2003, 09:47:27 pm
it should

what is your hardware
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Drew on October 09, 2003, 11:56:48 pm
pent. 4 2.0ghz
256megs DDR
Radeon 9k 64mb
(the latest fs2_open_r.exe build spec map just fine on my machine
EDIT: Is HT&L implemented in fs2_open_r.exe?)

BTW, did you actually see this in a mission???
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Setekh on October 10, 2003, 04:23:25 am
Snipes, that's awesome. Great work - see if you can get some closer shots and really show off that detail, it might be good for a news post. ;)

Quote
Originally posted by Drew
but in your picture the anuket is spec mapped....
my FS2_open_htl.exe didnt spec map.........


You did keep your flags in the launcher, right..? Specular worked fine on my HT&L build.
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Lightspeed on October 10, 2003, 05:45:56 am
hmm, i kinda prefer the original model. I dont see much apparent change in shape, and the textures applied look weird (especially that color thing at the bottom).

Maybe if we'd have a closer view shot -- i'd really like to see where all those polies have gone.
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Taristin on October 10, 2003, 06:37:10 am
Quote
Originally posted by Setekh
Snipes, that's awesome. Great work - see if you can get some closer shots and really show off that detail, it might be good for a news post. ;)

Absolutely. In game shot here. The claw's missing (well, not missing, you can see it off behind the main body, doing it's thing. :p) because rotation is funny in HT&L, but here you go. I made the mistake of trying to fire a laser at it, and it crashed, but that's probably like Bob said, small memory amounts.

(http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/us/images/screen05.jpg)

Quote
Originally posted by Lightspeed
hmm, i kinda prefer the original model. I dont see much apparent change in shape, and the textures applied look weird (especially that color thing at the bottom).


:wtf:  You see no difference between that model up there, and this one here?

(http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/us/images/anukorig.jpg)
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: J3Vr6 on October 10, 2003, 08:56:07 am
So Raa Tor'h, you gonna do this for all the Vasudan ships? :D  While you're at it, why don't you do all the FS2 ships to take advantage of HT&L :p
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: SadisticSid on October 10, 2003, 10:29:24 am
That's not really a fair comparison, taking a variably-lit shiny ship and comparing it to the old, drab, uniformily lit one. But the new model is definitely nicer. The rotating thingumy, especially, is smoother.
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Flipside on October 10, 2003, 01:12:49 pm
I wouldn't suggest doing it for all ships, I don't think Raa is even suggesting that he do it for all Vasudan ships, it is a 'Party piece' really, upping level to massive amount on all ships would still cripple lower spec cards. I think the best bet would be to up the polys on the ships that need it, rather than everything, although poly counts mean less in HT&L, as Bobb's Perseus shows, sometimes it will have virtually no effect on the shape of the model at all, so it's really being a bit silly to do it to ALL the ships and putting unneccessary strain on systems when the free cycles could be used for other stuff :)

Flipside :D
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Galemp on October 10, 2003, 02:19:35 pm
Just remember to SEPERATE BY SMOOTHING GROUPS!
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Flipside on October 10, 2003, 02:28:01 pm
Well, part of the problem is that a lot of these subdivider functions will transform a flat surface into a very gradual curve, thus using about 120 polys to display what previously took 2 if you over do it, and makes your model look overweight if you under do it, so the side of an orion not only starts to look 'curvy' but uses up a much larger number of polys.
As far as smoothing groups are concerned, never even figured out what the were to be honest, I makes the ships, bung em through PCS, chuck em into modelview for other little bits and away you go, or more commonly, debugging you go! :)

Flipside :D

Edit : The worlds shortest modelling tutorial :lol:
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: diamondgeezer on October 10, 2003, 02:36:41 pm
That Anuket's ****ing beautiful, to put it bluntly
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Taristin on October 10, 2003, 05:44:04 pm
Quote
Originally posted by J3Vr6
So Raa Tor'h, you gonna do this for all the Vasudan ships? :D  While you're at it, why don't you do all the FS2 ships to take advantage of HT&L :p


Actually, the Vasudan vessels of FS2 do beneift from it, but alas, I can't convert them. I had no slowdowns when running a mission with it, in fact, it was actually a higher framerate than with original FS2 models...

The problem is, that PCS is woefully horrid on my PC. When I attempt to convert the cob to a pof it crashes. And after I got the converted pof from Bob, and imported all of the data from the orginal, it crashed on each and every save. Oddly enough, though, it did save...
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Bobboau on October 10, 2003, 07:33:42 pm
that is odd

get an extreem close up, like filling the screen with the ship
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Setekh on October 11, 2003, 03:01:08 am
Yeah, that's what I had in mind - that shot you provided isn't very close to the Anuket. :)
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Taristin on October 11, 2003, 08:32:11 pm
I would, but my new Radeon 9200 won't do spec in HT&L. Spec works in the non HT&l though...
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Setekh on October 12, 2003, 12:36:23 am
*raised eyebrow* Wierd, even my GF4MX still renders specular... well, just wait for the next build, then. Either that, or try and fit the however-many-thousand-poly Anuket into the non-HT&L build. ;)
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: ChronoReverse on October 12, 2003, 01:55:22 am
=( to that Raa Tor'h

On the other hand, it does it fine on my GF2MX (albeit not very quickly, but still playable as long as it's the HT&L build)
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Bobboau on October 12, 2003, 02:15:52 am
I would like to see the regular build vs the HT&L build, if the regular build was capable of suporting such an oversized POF
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Taristin on October 12, 2003, 12:04:53 pm
It's not... And my Card just got broke. Have to try and return it...
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Bobboau on October 12, 2003, 12:08:08 pm
how'd that hapen?
Title: The power of HT&L
Post by: Taristin on October 12, 2003, 12:16:36 pm
My AGP slot is cracked on the far thin end, and the card moved out of alignment. 2 prongs touched, and one of the gold-plated contacts completely melted.. :( :hopping: