Hard Light Productions Forums
Community Projects => The FreeSpace Upgrade Project => Topic started by: Siegfried262 on February 11, 2009, 08:23:37 pm
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So I've recently become reacquainted with Freespace after beating it years ago when I found this whole deal. (I believe I stumbled across it through Google) and it's been great. (Derelict being my favorite so far)
So I have everything installed and everything works and looks great but is there anything I can do to tweak it even better?
I remember reading that fiddling with lighting tags could make things darker and fancier but for the love of me I can't find the page again.
So what would you guys suggest? And while I'm thinking about it, even though I have ASF & AA maximized I'm still seeing some jaggies. It's not a big deal by any means but is there anything I can do?
Danke.
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Anti-aliasing does not have as much effect on normal map aliasing, though it does reduce it a bit, but edges are generally smoothed pretty well by 4xAA and higher.
As far as lighting tags go, this (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Command-Line_Reference#Graphics_2) would probably offer all the information you seek.
Except that it appears that the smaller the -ogl_spec value is, the brighter the light is, and the higher the value, the "flatter" specular reflections become. I use
-no_emissive_light -ambient_factor 35 -ogl_spec 30 -spec_exp 15 -spec_point 1.2 -spec_static 1.5 -spec_tube 1.5
on the Custom flags field.
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I assume you do have the MediaVPs enabled?
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Mmhmm, the MediaVPs are enabled. (Very fancy looking, the Orion actually looks rather imposing. Though I think it'd look better bigger, haha)
I'll give those a shot though.
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Post your existing command line and a screenshot and we'll know what you're looking at and what you should be looking at.
If the two match, all is fine and dandy. :D
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Will do. How do I take a screenshot though?
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(http://www.umbc.edu/oit/images/printscreen-keyboard.jpg)
Then look for the ../FreeSpace2/screenshots/ directory and the TGA files within. :)
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Ah, I see. Back in a jiff with a screenshot.
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Graphics-wise I've got all the features checked. (Barring Disable Motion Debris and Disable scale-to-window for movies)
and the only thing I have going custom flag-wise is this. (Prior suggestion)
-no_emissive_light -ambient_factor 35 -ogl_spec 30 -spec_exp 15 -spec_point 1.2 -spec_static 1.5 -spec_tube 1.5
Screenshot #1
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v253/Vash262/Untitled-1.png)
Screenshot #2
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v253/Vash262/Untitled-2.png)
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Right... It looks like you've got everything rolling now as far as FS2_Open is concerned, but you don't have anti-aliasing enabled.
...and at this point it might be good to say that the anti-aliasing setting in the Launcher doesn't do anything, it's there for future use. You need to enable driver level anti-aliasing from your driver control panel.
Additionally, my personal experience is that the anisotropic filtering setting on the Launcher is crap as well, and driver level AF setting does a much better job at least on my rig.
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Right... It looks like you've got everything rolling now as far as FS2_Open is concerned, but you don't have anti-aliasing enabled.
...and at this point it might be good to say that the anti-aliasing setting in the Launcher doesn't do anything, it's there for future use. You need to enable driver level anti-aliasing from your driver control panel.
Additionally, my personal experience is that the anisotropic filtering setting on the Launcher is crap as well, and driver level AF setting does a much better job at least on my rig.
IMO, it looks better without the driver forced settings, my FPS hit a huge wall when I tried STR with driver settings cranked to max.
EDIT: Scratch that, looks awesome! Highly recommend it, however make it an app specific setting or your other games may lagz0rus
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Interesting, I'll have to do that.
When selecting the .exe for the specific program to force driver settings upon. I presume I'd select the latest build .exe (r5063.exe in this case)
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IMO, it looks better without the driver forced settings, my FPS hit a huge wall when I tried STR with driver settings cranked to max.
EDIT: Scratch that, looks awesome! Highly recommend it, however make it an app specific setting or your other games may lagz0rus
I'm confused now.
I don't know if you mean AF or AA now, but at least on my card (GeForce 8800 GT) the Launcher's anisotropic filtering setting does remarkably little. It has some effect but not much.
Additionally, anisotropic filtering in modern GPU's causes remarkably little performance loss and it can pretty safely be set to forced 16xAF from the driver control panel with no adverse effects. I use that as global setting. This has been consistent since my first GPU which was a GeForce 6600 and I could never see any performance hit from anisotropic filtering being forced to 16xAF. And, in my opinion, it looks a LOT better than the launcher-set, engine-driven filtering option.
Anti-aliasing, however, is a lot more resource-intensive and I concur that making application-specific setups for games of different hunger for performance is recommendable, but if you want the anti-aliasing, do not set anti-aliasing to application-controlled in the case of FreeSpace2 Open, because when there's no AA used by the application, well, you get my point.
What comes to the strength of AA, I personally think it's best to use at least 4xAA or none at all. My old 7600GT could use 4xAA with good frame rates on FS2_Open but I couldn't use any on IL-2 Sturmovik to achieve passable frame rates, though I could use 8xAA for glory shots. On my new 8800GT I can use up to 8xAA with both IL-2 and FS2_Open with negligible frame rate loss in most missions, and games like Mass Effect can easily use either 4xAA or even 8xAA most of the time. It depends a lot on what card you have and how much memory it has; anti-aliasing is a memory-unfriendly feature so the moar VRAM the better AA effect you can use.
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Anti-aliasing does not have as much effect on normal map aliasing [...]
That isn't quite right. There is one way to improve them. The standard mutisampling, doesn't have an effect on normal mapped surfaces. Which is what probably 90% of all players are using, but there is also super sampling (SSAA).
It does not only enhance "edges", but also all shader-caused shimmering effects, like normal map shimmerhing.
On the downside, it's quite a performance hit and also needs more vram. In FSO any semi-decent gfx card should be fine.
My good old 8800 GT doesn't mind SSAA in FSO. ;)
D3D11 is supposed to have a special "shader anti-aliasing" for this. Maybe we could enhance our shaders with something similar as well, if that is possible in OpenGL 2.1...
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I have transparency option that has the options "None", "Multisampling" and "Supersampling", but none of these seem to have any effect on the normal map aliasing on FS2...
Are these super-sampling anti-aliasing options even selectable in the NVidia driver control panel? RivaTuner does show a few AA options that are not available via NVidia control panel...
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TSAA (AA for alpha content), won't do much good in FSO, cause alpha is hardly ever used. And cocpits don't cause shimmering.
SSAA can't be selected in the driver, I think. I used a tool called "nHancer" and before that I used a little but very nice tool called "aTruner".
I think ATI only supports SSAA in mixed AA modes and I'm not sure if it works in OpenGL at all for ATI. So you might only get MSAA even if you select a mixed mode.
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Right, nHancer seems to offer some interesting choices like 32xAA (which makes for pretty smooth sight in FS2_Open with very playable frame rates)...
Also it seems to make the shader-lighting effect silhouetting edges in Mass Effect to actually use anti-aliasing as well. Thanks for the info.
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If you want to make a screen shot with no HUD display, just hit Shift+O as in Owl. Hit Shift+O again to get the HUD back.
Like this...
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v104/Onyxwing2004USA/GTDMusashi1.jpg)
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I've had pretty good success with nHancer using 16x ASF and 16x S under the combined option.
Which combines Super Sampling with Multi Sampling. It's gotten rid of the vast majority of the shimmering with no fps hiccups ^^. (8800GT still going strong)
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Hmm, I've scaled it back to 8xS (1x2 Super Sampling and 4x Multisampling) because it'd lag a smidge when a lot of stuff was going on screen. (Lots of cap ships and oodles of fighters) but mostly because it'd really lag on Nebula levels.
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supersampling won't work in this game. OpenGL doesnt support it.
Trust me, i've tried every mode.
the only possible difference is that some of the combined modes use something called 'rotated grid antialiasing' for the multisampling component.
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Hmm, the "rotated grid antialiasing" must do the trick.
I've got nHancer set now to 16x ASF & 16x Q Multisampling A.A and I'm still getting a good amount of shimmering. I don't suppose there's anything else I can do, is there?
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Yes, the hybrid modes still use SSAA.
They should all be using 2x1, or 2x2-OGSSAA (ordered grid). But the pure SSAA modes only work in D3D for a reason only Nvidia knows...
A guy who knows a lot about this told me the 16*S and the 32*S use SSAA for sure, but the 8*S mode might be replaced by pure multisampling.