Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: TopAce on May 16, 2004, 04:29:20 am
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I saw the releasal of the newest MediaVP in the news. 'OK, why not give it a try?', I said. After downloading the actual files, I wanted to unextract the zip(or whatever) file into a .vp. Suddenly, instead of WinZip, a self-unextracting something came. I gave it the 'C:\Games\FreeSpace\' as destination. It put a .vp and a readme file into the destination folder.
'OK, let's see what this .vp contains!'
I opened vpview and started to cruise throught the files. I clicked on one of the nebulae by chance(which was neb11, as far as my memory takes). I saw no change on the image itself if we disregard it became a 24-bit file. 'Why was this change necessay?' I asked. 'OK, let's open some more files', let's see the planets!'. Yes, these are definitely new. But ... what? 2048x2048 and 24-bit??. Launcher: I set the -glow and -spec flags.
'Let's see how this works in use'. I started the game. I noticed the lighting dots on the Ulysses. 'It's and overkill!' I said. But this one was enough to inspire me to cruise the tech room a bit. I opened the GTC Fenris entry, and I was pretty apparent it had new textures. 'But is this the hi-poly one? Will see.' I opened the mission simulator and run one of the Renegade Ressurgence missions. The first thing that became apparent is the EXTREME loading time. It took at least 45 seconds for the game to load up. Without the MediaVP, even FSO can load a mission in 10-20 seconds. Then, I started the mission. Here came to my mind the first thing I forgot: Displaying the FPS value! The game had an EXTREME slow-down, the FPS value may have been between 10-30 in most cases. The game was so slow that it became impossible to hunt down any of the fighters on my own. 'I think I'd better quit and erase this .vp. It has no use!'. I pressed ALT-J, but I changed my mind miliseconds before jumping out. I quickly slapped on ESC, and I said: 'Wait! There is something else I am curious about!'. I continued the mission. My wingmen took down all Mjolnir cannons, which allows a Leviathan-class cruiser to enter the area. I was curious if this .vp contains the newest Fenris/Leviathan model. It did. FreeSpace Open was so kind to quit at once I turned on that cruiser.
'Let's do some changes!'
Launcher: Video: Oh, got it! It must have been the problem: The resolution was 1024x768x32! I changed it to 1024x768x16. I was hoping that it would make the FPS values higher. What a blunder! It didn't. The same happened in the mission I previously described.
After all these, I decided to throw this .vp into the recycle bin. So I did. I was quite certain that not my machine configuration was obsolete. With HTL, I never had problem with the performance(merely with some of the SWC ships, but that's another pasta).
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err, punctuation, a spelling checker, and more paragraphs are your friends...
Aside from that, what are you're systems specs? What exact build are you using? What file did you download? What are the flags in the launcher?
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err, punctuation, a spelling checker, and more paragraphs are your friends...
I know you don't like me, you don't have to confirm it. :)
My machine is:
2 GHz Pentium IV
GeForce 4 MMX440, default settings
384 Megs of RAM
I used the 03_05_04 build, with the -spec, -glow and -mod RR flags. The file I downloaded was the newest MediaVP, which I found by the link in the news.
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This just confirms it...........SCP is no longer within the reach of the common gamer.
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My note about the style in the post has nothing to do with me liking you. It's just a ***** to read this way.
I think you meant the Zpack. Well, the Zpack has every file, everything meant for the fastest of the fastest. Download the seperate files, and not the ultra high res planets, and I geuss you'll like it more that way.
As for the game crashing when looking at the high poly Fenris, that is odd. I have a slower system then yours, and I can run it fine.
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Originally posted by Singh
This just confirms it...........SCP is no longer within the reach of the common gamer.
Err, no, it only means some os the data used with the SCP might be a bit too much for certain systems. I am running a P3 800, with a Radeon 7000. Aside from a problem with Spec lighting, which seems to be very much caused by my card, the SCP runs fine.
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Originally posted by Singh
This just confirms it...........SCP is no longer within the reach of the common gamer.
I run everything as everybody is supposed to ... Launcher, using HTL and the new mod switching system(which is convenient, if we disregard FRED always wants to look for missions in the Document folder).
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needless to say, the crash shouldn't have happened. but, as has been previously said, the massive slowdowns will be from the ultra high res stuff and the rest on an MX card.
bughunting: so, did you actually see any of the cruiser? or did it crash as soon as it entered the mission? if it crashed as soon as the fenris would have come on screen, without seeing any, that usually indicates a texture error. if it crashed while the thing was entering it is often a docking path error.
either way, d/l the latest merged textures version and try that independantly from the media vp.
http://www.sectorfiles.com/ti-file-dump/VasudanAdmiral/HTL-Fenris-final.zip
that one definitly worked very well on my system, which is only slightly better than yours.
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PII 466 here, no probs with the Fenris, me thinks that what the biggest slowdown causes is the new explosions and some other ANI's, some are enlarged and this will suck up RAM like dryed squarepants.
However, you do have a point with regards to replacements that were only given a larger colordepth (which is still sadly a large part)
@VA: there is a small glitch in the nameplates, when viewed in ModelView, both sides seem to either miss a triangle or it ducks under the surface texture. If this is indeed a glitch, a longer name than GTC ORFF might get some clipping
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Originally posted by Singh
This just confirms it...........SCP is no longer within the reach of the common gamer.
Not at all. Technically you should be able to run the SCP with systems that ran normal FS2.
THE NEW FEATURES ARE NOT OBLIGATORY. They're ALL optional. :)
Geez, people can't expect to run everything on full detail with a low end machine. Obviously it's the GeForce.
Although, looking at those specs it *should* be running faster. Hmm...
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I got this wierd 'Man in the Moon' thing pop up on Surrender Bellesarius! Don't know whether that sneaked into the VP or what, but it scared the hell out of me! :D
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Man in the Moon?
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sure you didn't use that weird cheat with faces that move around?
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Originally posted by Lightspeed
Not at all. Technically you should be able to run the SCP with systems that ran normal FS2.
THE NEW FEATURES ARE NOT OBLIGATORY. They're ALL optional. :)
Geez, people can't expect to run everything on full detail with a low end machine. Obviously it's the GeForce.
Although, looking at those specs it *should* be running faster. Hmm...
It should have even lower requirement, that is if you have a T&L video card. :)
But something is wrong in this case. Try a complete reinstallation... And perhaps new drivers for... everything.
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The textures cannot be a problem. I could see the Fenris in the tech database and rotate it around.
That increase in the visual quality does not worth a complete re-install.
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Obviously it's the Geforce4 MX since my system which is inferior overall except for the GeForce4 ti4200 performs quite well.
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The Geforce 4 mx is not that bad.
It should be fast enough for high qulality setting, unless you activate AA, or AF.
Or is it a 32 MB Mx ?
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It is a GeForce. 'nuff said. :D
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Originally posted by Flipside
I got this wierd 'Man in the Moon' thing pop up on Surrender Bellesarius! Don't know whether that sneaked into the VP or what, but it scared the hell out of me! :D
Ahh. the test DDS that RT asked us to try. To see if backgrounds supported dds properly. :lol:
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Originally posted by DaBrain
The Geforce 4 mx is not that bad.
It should be fast enough for high qulality setting, unless you activate AA, or AF.
Or is it a 32 MB Mx ?
No, as I said, it is 64 Megs.
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One thing that helps is to stay away from that effects vp; most of the stuff in this file is a far cry from the quality of the things in the other vps and in its current state, this vp is not worth using. Those nebula files you mentioned are not only over twenty times the filesizes of the originals, but they look much worse ingame, and it's not limited to just the nebulas; the missile trails, beams, and numerous other things have the same problem. Some items, like the beamglows, are enormous but have no increase in quality at all, making them a big waste of memory ingame, while others, like the suns, look great but take up only a small space in huge image files, resulting in not only another waste of memory but also suns that look tiny ingame. Actually, about a week ago I ran into a thread about the FS2 nebulas looking bad while searching for something, in which there was a screenshot of the original FS2 nebulas. I know that they aren't exactly great, but they are not totally horrible either, but that's how they looked in that screenshot and I could immediately tell why; the guy was using the effects vp.
If you are ready to do a little a bit of work, you can remove the good files from it (some of the thruster files, the laserglows and the newglos) and keep those only. I think this is also the largest of all the media vp files, so removing it will free up lots of memory.
The other vp files are awesome, though; it's a real pity that this one bad file is bundled with the rest in the zpack file, which is what most people will be getting.
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Originally posted by TopAce
I know you don't like me, you don't have to confirm it. :)
My machine is:
2 GHz Pentium IV
GeForce 4 MMX440, default settings
384 Megs of RAM
I used the 03_05_04 build, with the -spec, -glow and -mod RR flags. The file I downloaded was the newest MediaVP, which I found by the link in the news.
I got those kind of results with 256 MB of memory, and the -pcx32 + -jpgtga command line options. And I'm using a Duron 1.6 :wtf:
At the moment, your system isn't using any of the of tga files or planets, so I'm not sure what is causing the slowdown. Maybe -spec; a lot of people have had trouble with it.
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I had the -spec on. And rushed to remove the MediaVP!
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It works very well for me as long as that effects file is removed, even though neither of my machines is exactly top of the line (Athlon 1400, 512mb, GF3 64mb and Pentium M 1700, 512mb, R9000 mobility 32mb). I use 1024x768x32, 2xAA, -spec, -glow and -d3dmipmap on both computers and still get 50+ framerates at almost all times. The only issue I have noticed was a sudden choppiness when certain effects are display onscreen for the first time. Maybe it is an issue with loading mission resources ingame rather than at the start of the mission.
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if that file is a cause of massive slowdowns you probably should remove it from that pack, to avoid to scary new players who have heard about FSO for the first time and want to try it
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If I wanted to show FSO to somebody, I would make sure everything works. So I would remove all these 'Uber' effects.
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RTFW. :doubt:
The "uber-effects", the ones that seem to cause heavy performance loss, I placed in "hieffects.vp".
However, since people don't seem to get that if "all the enhancements from every VP" are in the zpack, and one of the VPs says it might cause severe performance loss, they may experience severe performance loss...I will add such a warning to the zpack.
If I sound annoyed, it's because it takes a long time to compress and upload the VPs.
BTW, did you try it with -spec off? Like I said, a lot of people were having trouble with that.
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if that file is a cause of massive slowdowns you probably should remove it from that pack, to avoid to scary new players who have heard about FSO for the first time and want to try it
It's not just the slowdowns, but also the fact that a lot of graphics in there actually look worse, and considerably so, than the originals. I have been railing about some of those things for a while now and am a little surprised that the offending effects are still in there.
However, since people don't seem to get that if "all the enhancements from every VP" are in the zpack, and one of the VPs says it might cause severe performance loss, they may experience severe performance loss...I will add such a warning to the zpack.
Well, the problem for me is that nothing was said about graphical quality loss (and probably not intended either), which is what is happening. Just get rid of most of the files from the mv_effects package (if you want I can give you a list of the problematic ones) and everything will be good. :nod:
Also, I forgot to mention, some of the glowmaps on the new Ulysses model look kind of weird. I would recommend removing the two large white ones altogether, making the others a bit smaller, and having the flashing ones turned on for very short amounts time only. It seems that the beamglow images look slightly nicer for glowpoints than the laserglow and thrusterglow ones due to their smoother fade-outs at the edges, so try changing to those and see how it looks.
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Erg, alright. Just give me some names and what their problem is and I'll look at 'em before the next release.
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This thread, :no:
C'mon I wouldn't sue Mcdonalds because I got fat on thee burgers :p
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Ahh, but in Soviet Russia, McDonalds Sues You!
...or not. :nervous: :shaking:
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Also, the media VP is designed to show stuff off, but technically it's not the SCP. Note SCP stands for "Source CODE Project"
The media VP is the result of alot of hard work by alot of people, but, the SCP enables that, so, if you think you can do better, go for it ;) I, however, am damn glad I have something like this to show people to brag about this team.
I also know that the mediaVP has alot of hi end stuff in it, but if you need lower spec stuff, someone needs to make it.
That being said, give WM some specifics (file names, more detail on what was crashing) and give us some more detail on your machine (driver release numbers, DX version, things like that) and we might be able to address some of these things.
Also, for specific bugs, Mantis is the best way to get that information to us, then we can figure out who and how we can fix it.
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Sorry if I came off a bit harsh earlier, but I would like to see the media package (and of course all the SCP things) become as good as possible even though I don't work on it directly. This whole effects issue has been around for some time now; I have commented on it quite a few times in the last several months but was mostly ignored earlier, so I thought I might as well try bringing it up again.
Erg, alright. Just give me some names and what their problem is and I'll look at 'em before the next release.
Sure. These files are the bad ones and should be removed altogether. They reduce detail due to their blur, although a few make no difference at all aside from having a larger filesize. A few months ago I posted some screenshots comparing the new and old nebulas for example; I don't have those anymore but could retake them if you want.
2_laserglow03.tga
beam-blue.tga
beam-blue2.tga
beam-dblue.tga
beam-green.tga
beam-green2.tga
beam-orange.tga
beam-orange2.tga
beam-purple.tga
beam-purple2.tga
beam-saph.tga
beam-saph2.tga
beam-white2.tga
beam-white3.tga
beam-yell.tga
beam-yell2.tga
beam01.tga
contrail.pcx
contrail01.pcx
dneb01.tga
dneb02.tga
dneb03.tga
dneb04.tga
dneb05.tga
dneb06.tga
dneb07.tga
dneb08.tga
dneb09.tga
dneb10.tga
dneb11.tga
dneb12.tga
dneb13.tga
dneb14.tga
dneb15.tga
dneb16.tga
dneb17.tga
dneb18.tga
lightning.tga
missiletrail01.tga
missiletrail02.tga
missiletrail03.tga
missiletrail04.tga
neb01.tga
neb02.tga
neb03.tga
neb04.tga
neb05.tga
neb06.tga
neb07.tga
neb08.tga
neb09.tga
neb10.tga
neb11.tga
neb12.tga
neb13.tga
neb14.tga
neb15.tga
neb16.tga
neb17.tga
neb18.tga
newglo9.pcx
newmiss1.pcx
newmiss2.pcx
newmiss3.pcx
newmiss4.pcx
newmiss5.pcx
warpglow01.tga
warpglow02.tga
These objects should be kept at their existing sizes, but with the borders removed. You will notice that these have lots of empty black space around the main picture; this both wastes a lot of memory and makes the effects look very small ingame, since the game scales the entire image to fit the appropriate size. These look awesome otherwise though and would make great additions to the media package.
sunblue.tga
sungold.tga
sungreen.tga
sunred.tga
sunviolet.tga
sunwhite.tga
sunglow01.tga
sunglowblue.tga
sunglowgold.tga
sunglowgreen.tga
sunglowred.tga
sunglowviolet.tga
thruster03-01.tga
thruster03-02.tga
thruster03-02a.tga
thruster03-03.tga
thruster03-03a.tga
thrusterglow02.tga
thrusterglow02a.tga
thrusterglow03.tga
thrusterglow03a.tga
These are good but too blurry to justify such large images. Their dimensions should be cut in half as the blurriness would mean that no quality would be lost. These can actually also be reduced to 8-bit pcx images (at least with the PSP octree method) with almost no loss in quality, especially the last two, so that's worth considering as well.
beamglow1.tga
beamglow2.tga
beamglow3.tga
beamglow4.tga
beamglow5.tga
beamglow6.tga
beamglow7.tga
beamglow8.tga
thrusterglow01.tga
thrusterglow01a.tga
For this one, remove the large spaces at the top and bottom and crop off a little from the sides; with a little work it should be possible to reduce it to 1024x340 or thereabouts.
sunsathanas01.pcx
A note on the nebula backgrounds (the nbacks) would also be in order here. I always had reservations about these in FS2, mainly because if you looked from the side view while moving forward, you could see bits of the nbacks behind the nebula poofs. Not only were the seams between different colors visible due to the small 8-bit images wrapped around the entire sphere, but these backgrounds were still relative to the nebula poofs and your ship, so it looked pretty strange to see something in the background that was far enough to look stationary while you were moving but still visible in such a dense nebula. This whole problem is hard to notice in the current builds, but that is due to the nebula poof brightness problem which will probably be fixed soon; you can try it in the original 1.2 to see what I mean. The new ones in mv_effects help with the first problem (the seams) to some extent, but the other issue is still there. I have found that it looks much better to just have one uniform color for the nbacks, so the player cannot make out stationary stuff in the background while still having everything else look the same, and this has the added benefit of not requiring large image files.
The last thing I should mention is that there seem to be two distinct versions of thruster graphics in here; which one is used depends on whether or not -jpgtga is set. Is it supposed to be like this? I personally like the trails from the pcx version and the main glows (although they are currently too small) from the tga version, but that's just my preference.
That's about it. I might be able to make those changes myself if you are short on time or anything.
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For some very strange reason, my system can handle the hi-poly stuff without any trouble, but when looking at a Triton class freighter docked with it's cargo container will sometimes cause a huge slow down.
When I tried the lightning marshall SCP release, the nebulas killed the framerates.
One thing that I did notice was that now it starts crashing randomly at the ends of missions.
The last thing is that now the collossus won't fire all the beams it used to. When it first showed up it would only fire a Terslash and a BGreen at the Hawkwood. During the mission to wax the NTD Repulse it wouldn't shoot at it PERIOD. No beams, no lasers, no flak, nothing. The Repulse actually went inside the collossus and exploded.
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The things that will have the biggest impact on performances will be the high res maps and effects.
I'll take an exemple:
OTT ( my old xcampaign which runned on vanilla FS2, no HT&L, nothing, I just thew the source code in at some point for the self ilu maps ): it featured quite high poly meshes, and exclusively 512*512 maps. All that on an athlon 900 ( and radeon 9700 pro, ok :p ). unned like a breathe. Then I had the marvellous idea of making my new explosions ( 512*512 anis, loded, tho ). Catastrophe. Those ani on their own ruined my FPS in drastical proportions. Put a high res background for some effect I wanted. Same deal. Anything not related to ships will have a huge impact on performances. To some extent, maps do the same. I've made my ezechiel with a 2048*2048 map, but on default it will use a 512*512 one ( the high res one will be availabele, but one will have to thrown it in the maps folder if he wants to use it ). Polys are fine. Higher limits seems fine too. Most effects are fine ( but will impact on performances because spec, self ilu, etc use more maps ), but high res anything WILL hurt.
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Originally posted by DaBrain
The Geforce 4 mx is not that bad.
It should be fast enough for high qulality setting, unless you activate AA, or AF.
Or is it a 32 MB Mx ?
The GeForce MX was NEVER a good card, not even when she was brand new, and now it's a very very old card, even the casual gamer can easily afford a Geforce 4200ti now, and that it's a entry level card today...
Trying to use exessively big textures on such card is foolish, and some texture in this pack ARE too big, what the point in making 2048x2048 textures that don't even look any better than the old ones? :doubt:
Not even brand new commercial games have this exagerated resolutions...
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Originally posted by CP5670
For this one, remove the large spaces at the top and bottom and crop off a little from the sides; with a little work it should be possible to reduce it to 1024x340 or thereabouts.
sunsathanas01.pcx
I don't think it would be a good idea to do that CP. IIRC the game scales everything up to power of 2 anyway so croping it wouldn't save any memory at all.
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During the mission to wax the NTD Repulse it wouldn't shoot at it PERIOD. No beams, no lasers, no flak, nothing. The Repulse actually went inside the collossus and exploded.
I first thought that this might be related to the dreaded repeat/chain bug, but that mission seems to just use a simple event with a beam-free-all for the Colossus. The only thing I can think of is a table related problem; try removing any custom tables you have and if you are using the speffects vp file, see what happens without it.
I don't think it would be a good idea to do that CP. IIRC the game scales everything up to power of 2 anyway so croping it wouldn't save any memory at all.
I know; its current size is 1069x514, which is just barely over 1024x512 but uses up four times as much memory. It would be easy to crop it slightly to get it within those dimensions.
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That on the other hand would make sense :)
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I downloaded the entire zpack one. Is that the one with everything new and improved? For some reason, I thought I read somewhere that updates would be done to the individual packages and no the big one. Why?
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CP: That is the kind of specific feedback people can act on.
Thank you. I am sure people wouldn't mind a hand with it, if you were looking to get directly involved?
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Originally posted by J3Vr6
I downloaded the entire zpack one. Is that the one with everything new and improved? For some reason, I thought I read somewhere that updates would be done to the individual packages and no the big one. Why?
Because it takes a lot of time to compile (over 150 MB of data), compress (Down to 38 MB) and upload (At 20 k/s).
That's along with the time for the other packages. Those are lots smaller, though.
I'm hoping future SCP releases will be frequent enough for it not to be a major problem. If that isn't the case, well, I'll jump that node when I come to it...
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Strange. I don't get such problems with my Duron 600Mhz and GeForce4MX440 of 128 Mb.
I don't use the -glow flag because the model jumps awfully out.
And the Holy moly Fenris looks wonderful!. good job for whoever did it.
EDIT,PS: And the MX is the only thing I can afford.
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try removing any custom tables you have and if you are using the speffects vp file, see what happens without it.
Thanks. I'll give it a shot this weekend (have a midterm tomorrow).
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Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Because it takes a lot of time to compile (over 150 MB of data), compress (Down to 38 MB) and upload (At 20 k/s).
That's along with the time for the other packages. Those are lots smaller, though.
I'm hoping future SCP releases will be frequent enough for it not to be a major problem. If that isn't the case, well, I'll jump that node when I come to it...
So how do we know that the individual packages have been updated? Has there been any updates to the individual packages that aren't in the zpack one?
Also, my movies aren't working with the zpack. I thought it was the latest builds (the one from kazan or goober), but others say they have the movies work w/ those builds.
Lastly, I think it should be suggested to create a new folder w/in Freespace directory to put the media files. I think karajoma was the one that told me to just make a new folder called fs_open (in this case I called it open3.6 and put the media and effect files in there. That way if you ever had to go back to stock, you have everything in that one folder.
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Originally posted by J3Vr6
Lastly, I think it should be suggested to create a new folder w/in Freespace directory to put the media files. I think karajoma was the one that told me to just make a new folder called fs_open (in this case I called it open3.6 and put the media and effect files in there. That way if you ever had to go back to stock, you have everything in that one folder.
Yeah. I mentioned that quite a few times and advised it on the Wiki. FS2_open now has support for multiple mod dirs. Once FRED and the Launcher have been updated to take this into account there won't really be any good reason to have anything except the original .vp files in the main FS2 folder.
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Originally posted by CP5670
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These objects should be kept at their existing sizes, but with the borders removed. You will notice that these have lots of empty black space around the main picture; this both wastes a lot of memory and makes the effects look very small ingame, since the game scales the entire image to fit the appropriate size.
Well, given the way they are scaled in-game I think I prefer them more this size than the size of a super trooper at 3ft distance...?
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CP: That is the kind of specific feedback people can act on.
Thank you. I am sure people wouldn't mind a hand with it, if you were looking to get directly involved?
no problem, I will start doing that stuff if you guys have no objections, as I can't do much with PI right now anyway due to the somewhat unstable FRED2s and that repeat/chain bug. I need someone to tell me what's going on with the multiple thruster sets though.
Yeah. I mentioned that quite a few times and advised it on the Wiki. FS2_open now has support for multiple mod dirs. Once FRED and the Launcher have been updated to take this into account there won't really be any good reason to have anything except the original .vp files in the main FS2 folder.
I have been doing this ever since FRED2 started supporting the -mod command. It keeps things quite a bit cleaner. :yes:
Well, give the way they are scaled in-game it is I think this or like standing next to a super trooper at 3ft distance...?
:wtf: sorry, I can't understand the second half of that. Their ingame dimensions are between 30% and 50% of their original sizes, so they look much smaller than usual. You can test this easily in any mission; just try it with and without the VP.
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maybe you should make those *.vp files as self extracting exes directly on a new dir with their number version
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Originally posted by CP5670
I have been doing this ever since FRED2 started supporting the -mod command. It keeps things quite a bit cleaner. :yes:
Didn't say I invented it. Just that I evangelise about it :D Most of us who understand the way FS2 looks for files probably do it.
Not only does it keep things neater but it also prevents the possibility of getting a conflict with campaigns like TBP which don't use the FS2 ships. I've never tried it but Mimbari ships with vasudan thrusters would probably look quite odd :D
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um... I downloaded the newest zpack and I was having trouble with it. 15fps and such.
So I went and messed with the launcher and am I just running what I want to and I am back to 75 fps no problem.
See if everything can be made fast by just turning off something. (I think it was d3dmipmap that mad everything slow) I am currently running C:\Games\FreeSpace2\20040503_fs2_open_r.exe -spec -glow -pcx32 -jpgtga -fps and it is amazing!
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I thought mipmapping was useless anyway? :wtf: :confused:
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Okay, I have been working on this for the last three nights and just finished everything. I put the file in a zip and uploaded it here (http://www.3dap.com/hlp/hosted/procyon/misc/mv_effects.zip) for now; you can put it into a rar sfx or whatever. I did everything I listed earlier as well as several other things I noticed:
I redid most of the laserglows and newglos with somewhat weaker blurs, as many of them had excessively strong blurs.
The sunglow designs were not good for their purposes. Their brightness levels and shapes/sizes caused them to heavily discolor the suns behind them. An appropriately colored and scaled simple lens flare is all that is needed here, which is what I did. I found a different use for those sunglow graphics though; see below.
Most of the suns were very blurry at their existing sizes, so I shortened them a bit, enough to fit in 256x256 images, without losing any quality. The red one is the only one that makes use of the higher resolution, so that one is a 512x512 image.
I was going to just size the beamglows back but then decided that these didn't look much better than the originals. I instead made some modifications to the sunglows and used those here. I think it was a few hours well spent, as these look much better now. It also turns out that no quality is lost by converting these to 256 colors, so that was done.
The positions of some ships in sunsathanas01 were changed to have them all face the center of the image; their centerpoint used to be somewhat offset to the right. There is still one issue though: the six Sathanas in the center area look quite crappy compared to the rest. I don't know how to fix this however, as it looks like the central six were done by just taking screenshots in Modelview while the others were rendered using some antialiasing technique.
For the thrusters, I settled on what I had suggested earlier with some changes. Most of these images had lots of problems with sizes and scales and many were either too blurry or too grainy, so that is now corrected. I used almost all of the originals that weren't either very blurry or too small when scaled properly, and all the slots were filled up in the end.
I will fix up the Ulysses later today and post it when I am done.
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I think that's a job well done.
And my shield ani is inside ;)
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I think it's good for those with low spec systems, but looks worse for others.
The suns don't have that 'black space' for nothing, its a very smooth gradient of a huge size (i.e. the lower colour values extend to quite a big part of the image). The size reduction youre speaking of was a benificial side effect so I could finally make smaller suns (as the minimum value is 0.1, and theres no upper limit).
Well, the laser glows are good. Beamglows look a bit odd (lines look pixelated?), no idea how they'll look ingame.
The NBacks probably look significantly worse in-game.
But as I said, it's the ideal solution for those that experience performance problems with the effects VP.
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I get a constant 75 when maybe a couple of ships/caps doing nothing are sitting infront of me. I start moving and thinks start to get crazy and it'll be around 37 fps. The worse it will get is like 17-23 fps when a colossus shows up and beams are going everywhere.
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I think it's good for those with low spec systems, but looks worse for others.
You should have said all this stuff earlier when I was asking for comments. :p But seriously, let me explain some of the things I did.
The suns don't have that 'black space' for nothing, its a very smooth gradient of a huge size (i.e. the lower colour values extend to quite a big part of the image). The size reduction youre speaking of was a benificial side effect so I could finally make smaller suns (as the minimum value is 0.1, and theres no upper limit).
The problem was that it was screwing up the suns in all the existing missions, particularly the main campaign missions, which is mainly what this is for after all. loop2-2 (Into the Lion's Den) is a good example; they used a nebula graphic to depict gases moving from one star to another, but the decreased sizes of the stars meant that the gas image looked way too large for the suns.
The gradient did take up a lot of additional room but it was definitely much less than the whole picture. The sunblue one for example had 0-0-0 colored pixels everywhere outside of a 704x704 square centered on the sun and this number became much larger if single figure RGB values were dropped. In any case, the gradient was hardly visible (actually, I never noticed it at all even when facing the suns directly unless they were being used at 8+ scales) and it wouldn't have been worth having everything smaller, even if the performance costs were not considered.
I wouldn't recommend going down to 0.1 scales though even with the normal sizes, because the intensities of the sun's glare and specular effects remain exactly the same (unless you are going to be changing the tables, but anything with that will have to reserved for speffects), so it looks strange to have a tiny sun that still causes just as much glare and shine as a similar looking but much larger one.
Well, the laser glows are good. Beamglows look a bit odd (lines look pixelated?), no idea how they'll look ingame.
I thought that might be an issue as well, but they look fine ingame. I might try messing around with these some more and see if I can get anything better, but at any rate they are much better than any of the previous ones, so that's good enough for the moment. :D
The NBacks probably look significantly worse in-game.
Actually, that's what they are supposed to look like, because then you cannot seen things on them through the poof clouds, making the poofs look more dense. See my remarks on the nebulas earlier; unless you are making a nebula without any poofs (which would look funny, since you would still get fog on ships), this will end up looking better in the game.
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Originally posted by CP5670
The sunblue one for example had 0-0-0 colored pixels everywhere outside of a 704x704 square centered on the sun and this number became much larger if single figure RGB values were dropped. In any case, the gradient was hardly visible (actually, I never noticed it at all even when facing the suns directly unless they were being used at 8+ scales) and it wouldn't have been worth having everything smaller, even if the performance costs were not considered.
Well, I can see the gradient :)
and I know it only fills ~800 pixels of the image. However, I aligned it to 2^n so the next stop is 1024x1024. I still think the game should 'mipmap' the background images (looking up which size was used and downscaling them if the size is not needed) - this would give best looks and quite a performance boost.
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Thanks CP. I still haven't gotten around to going through the mediaVP, but, well, TGIF. :D I'll try to get around to it this weekend.
I've got finals coming up, which tends to increase one's workload somewhat.
J3Vr6: Can you localize the problem? I had a similar problem and I found that if the background wasn't moving and a sun was onscreen, my FPS would hover around 60. I could fly forward and back without any performance loss. Once the background changed (If I turned my ship or something), it would dip down to 30 or so.
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CP, are you sure you used the latest version of the mediaVP? I've been looking through the copy on my computer and the nback* graphics are very different from the ones in your VP. Was that on purpose?
Your changes, esp. the beams, look pretty good though. :nod:
I'll be checking them out in-game soon...
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CP, are you sure you used the latest version of the mediaVP? I've been looking through the copy on my computer and the nback* graphics are very different from the ones in your VP. Was that on purpose?
I guess nobody read the big post I made. :p Yes, that was intentional. The idea is that the lesser the color fluctuation in the nbacks is, the harder it will be to see them through the poofs from the side views, making the poofs look more numerous and the nebula look denser, so a single uniform color (an average of all the existing colors) would be the best solution.
As I said, this is not noticeable right now due to bugs with the hardware poofs, but try playing a nebula mission with -2d_poof or with the original FS2 1.2, use the previous (or original) nbacks and look through the side views while moving forward to see what I was talking about earlier. After doing this for a little while, it becomes clear that the poofs are only around your ship and nowhere else; while this is of course true, it is a developer trick that probably shouldn't be so obvious. :D The ones in the effects vp were better than the originals with their smoother gradients but still had that side view problem.
Your changes, esp. the beams, look pretty good though.
Thanks. I might change those a bit though, as I'm still not perfectly satisfied with them, but they should work for the time being.
and I know it only fills ~800 pixels of the image. However, I aligned it to 2^n so the next stop is 1024x1024. I still think the game should 'mipmap' the background images (looking up which size was used and downscaling them if the size is not needed) - this would give best looks and quite a performance boost.
yeah that would be very nice, although I think it would only work for background images. (since those will not be changing size during the mission)
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Hmm, I'm a bit hesitant about replacing those since I got the impression that 2d_poof was a temporary fix. At least, IMHO it should be. :p
I tried them out, and didn't see much difference... (In the mission w/ Actium and Lysander)
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I think -2d_poof is supposed to change it back to the way it used to be with the original version. The hardware-rendered nebula poofs are having various problems (too bright and too large), so it seems that this was added in as a workaround, although for some people 2d_poof doesn't fix the problems either.
You can try it in the original 1.2 though, as I know it can be seen there. It's certainly a pretty small thing, but it looks a little strange through the side views especially when you are turning as well. In any case, since these at the very least look identical to the previous ones but have filesizes a couple thousand times smaller than those, it would seem to be an easy choice. :D
There is a more pressing issue though that I only noticed last night, a bug in both the last effects vp and my own. It appears that in the default tables, the Shivan beams and anti-fighter beams do not use the beamglow files but rather the thrusterglow01 one. This worked okay with the original graphics as the thrusterglows looked very similar to the beamglows, but with Lightspeed's new thruster files the Shivan beams look really wacky (thrusterglow01 is the Terran one, which is now dark blue and a different size from the original).
A solution to this might to be to use your new addon table file feature to change all the affected beams' muzzleglows to the beamglow files. Otherwise, it looks like we will have to settle with putting that thrusterglow01 image into the speffects package, which has a weapons.tbl that can be appropriately modified.
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This attachment should fix that...all Shivan beam weapons besides LRed and BFRed use glow4(red), BFRed and LRed use glow1(white), the targeting laser uses glow5 (purple), and the rest uses glow5 (blue). You need to rename the extension to .tbm, of course.
On nebular stuffs: I'll need to check and see if 14 MB is worth it. Your effects VP is roughly 7% of the mVP 3.6 one, so size will be less of an issue. TGAs also seem to compress pretty well... :D
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still think it should be fixored properly...you just don't go and call a beameffect thrusterXX. if you want to use the same effect just copy the file and rename it proper, at least that way mucking with thrusters doesn't affect other things that should be MODdable separately...
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Check the file that's what I did :nod: When I said glow, I was referring to the beamglow file. I just didn't want to type it out each time.
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Originally posted by CP5670
The positions of some ships in sunsathanas01 were changed to have them all face the center of the image; their centerpoint used to be somewhat offset to the right. There is still one issue though: the six Sathanas in the center area look quite crappy compared to the rest. I don't know how to fix this however, as it looks like the central six were done by just taking screenshots in Modelview while the others were rendered using some antialiasing technique.
I took a picture in fred :D sorry I didn't have photoshop so I did it in paint