Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Elukka on August 18, 2007, 09:02:10 am

Title: Flickery lights
Post by: Elukka on August 18, 2007, 09:02:10 am
I wasn't sure where to post this, so sorry if it's in the wrong place.

Anyways, lights are very, umm, flickery, for a lack of better words when observed from far away. This pretty much makes ships like the Orion look like a big mess of flickering lights from a distance. If memory servers, this was also the case in FS2 before SCP.

Is there anything that could be done about this? It's not really that big of a problem, but it'd be nice to see it "fixed".
Title: Re: Flickery lights
Post by: Snail on August 18, 2007, 09:41:04 am
Try anti-aliasing.
Title: Re: Flickery lights
Post by: Elukka on August 18, 2007, 09:52:32 am
I have 16x antialiasing on. Things still look.. flickery.
Title: Re: Flickery lights
Post by: Tolwyn on August 18, 2007, 09:53:13 am
it should not happen if mip maps are enabled. That should be the case by default though. (And obviously dds textures must be used)
Title: Re: Flickery lights
Post by: Elukka on August 18, 2007, 10:00:43 am
Well, it's still happening to me. I have tried enabling mipmaps in both driver and launcher options. And if i recall correctly, this also happened on my old computer. 3.6.9, by the way.
How do i check if i'm using dds textures?
Title: Re: Flickery lights
Post by: taylor on August 18, 2007, 11:58:20 am
The flickering is mostly a problem when you mix mipmapped and non-mipmapped textures on the same model.  A lot of maps simply haven't been converted yet, so you would get this kind of problem with the current MediaVPs and older models.

The trick, as already mentioned, is to make everything use mipmaps.  But it's not as easy as simply using -mipmap, since that only has an affect when you also use -img2dds.  So, try both options and see if that fixes it for you.
Title: Re: Flickery lights
Post by: Elukka on August 18, 2007, 12:06:07 pm
Tried both, i still get the same flicker. Curiously, the Knossos seems to have less of it.
I'm playing through the Freespace2 campaign (mediavps, of course) and haven't downloaded any extra models. Do the default ones not support mipmapping?
Title: Re: Flickery lights
Post by: Flipside on August 18, 2007, 12:36:20 pm
Some of the older model textures haven't been converted over yet, and it may be that some of the .dds files that are in place were saved without Mipmaps, depending on when the model was made, but I can't be certain of that.

Oddly enough, I sometimes find that turning Anti-Aliasing down or off can sometimes remove the 'jittery' effect in some games.
Title: Re: Flickery lights
Post by: Elukka on August 18, 2007, 12:51:19 pm
Examples of ships that are very flickery are the Orion, Hecate and Iceni. Actually, most of the capital ships, if not all. I'm not sure about that.
Changing the antialiasing setting didn't seem to make a difference.
Oh well, guess i'll just live with it. Thanks for the help, everyone.
Title: Re: Flickery lights
Post by: G0atmaster on August 20, 2007, 01:43:15 am
the sides of diemoses look like blurred white streaks.  They move diagonally until I get close.  I get a similar effect with engine glows regardless of distance, esp. on capships. Faustus and larger.  Oh, and escape pods too.
Title: Re: Flickery lights
Post by: Elukka on August 20, 2007, 08:35:20 am
Well, i checked, and i think anything big besides the Arcadia station is rather flickery.
Is there anything being done about this? The models are generally great from close up, but really suffer from far away because of the flicker.
Title: Re: Flickery lights
Post by: taylor on August 20, 2007, 09:00:53 am
It's just a data problem really.  Unless you want to spend hours fixing all of that stuff yourself, just wait for new MediaVPs since they should fix pretty much all of those issues.
Title: Re: Flickery lights
Post by: Cobra on August 22, 2007, 12:23:32 am
Actually, if he's talking about the shimmer effect, I'm wondering if that has to do with anti aliasing.
Title: Re: Flickery lights
Post by: Jeff Vader on August 22, 2007, 04:31:20 am
Actually, if he's talking about the shimmer effect, I'm wondering if that has to do with anti aliasing.
Well, that idea has been presented, with the following results:

I have 16x antialiasing on. Things still look.. flickery.
Title: Re: Flickery lights
Post by: Cobra on August 22, 2007, 11:11:18 am
Bah. I read that as anisotropic. My bad.