Hard Light Productions Forums

Community Projects => The FreeSpace Upgrade Project => Topic started by: Volodnikov on April 23, 2010, 08:39:10 pm

Title: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: Volodnikov on April 23, 2010, 08:39:10 pm
Hello, I've installed the recent 3.6.10 release and I'm getting little white artifacts around engine glows, like for the Myrmidon fighter and other ships. They look like little white dots that trail behind a ship. I'd take a screenshot but they blend in with the stars when not in motion. Is there any way to remove this?
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: Nemesis6 on April 23, 2010, 08:43:40 pm
This is caused by enabling anti-aliasing in your display drivers. There was a topic about this a few months ago.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: Commander Zane on April 23, 2010, 08:50:27 pm
So that's what would happen if it acutally turned on like I asked? I'm trying this again.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: Scourge of Ages on April 23, 2010, 09:28:09 pm
Hey yeah, I get that too. So AA really causes it?

Interesting!
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: Volodnikov on April 23, 2010, 09:29:56 pm
That removes them, however I had it on through the Nvidia Control Panel in the first place because it seems the AA settings in the Launcher don't seem to work very well.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: Shivan Hunter on April 23, 2010, 09:34:34 pm
They don't work at all. FS doesn't actually have aa implemented, you have to force it driver-side...

it's interesting that it causes the engine thing, though.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: Commander Zane on April 23, 2010, 10:01:35 pm
Doesn't look like I get this problem, maybe it's still not working even though I have it forced on, I still can't tell how it's supposed to look with it on.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: Shivan Hunter on April 24, 2010, 01:29:37 am
Judging by some screenshots from you in the Celebration of FS thread, you don't.

Basically, edges of polygons would look smoother.

. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aliasing)
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: pecenipicek on April 24, 2010, 03:29:51 am
If post-processing works for you, you cannot have AA.

That is all.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: Herra Tohtori on April 24, 2010, 03:36:51 am
Crash course to anti-aliasing:

It works to counter aliasing effects on a screen made of pixels.

FSAA (full screen anti-aliasing) affects both polygon edges and textures to reduce aliasing effects, but the most notable effect is on model edges as shown here:

(http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/6420/antialiasingexample.png)

Close-up:

(http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/6647/antialiasingsampleclose.png)

This is what anti-aliasing does. Depending on how it's done, it smooths out the kinks in diagonal edges and reduces the jagged effect that is caused by pixel-based design.

Incidentally, this is the main reason why I would want displays to increase their pixel density and colour depth instead of physical size. 22 inches is plenty sizeable widescreen display; 24 inches is excellent. But if resolution is increased while keeping the display's pixel density constant, it still won't improve things like this, while reducing pixel size and increasing pixel density would result in sharper image, smaller pixels would lead to less apparent jagged edges on same sized display at same view angle, and it would essentially reduce the need for gimmicks like anti-aliasing while making it possible to use higher resolutions.

Pecenipicek, post-processing only disrupts FSAA on times where a model is silhouetted over a light effect such as explosion, engine glow or explosion. Other times it seems to work quite nicely.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: pecenipicek on April 24, 2010, 04:53:06 am
Pecenipicek, post-processing only disrupts FSAA on times where a model is silhouetted over a light effect such as explosion, engine glow or explosion. Other times it seems to work quite nicely.
Not in my case, forcing it via drivers to do it only managed to dump the framerate to 'round constant 30-ish fps.

Unless i'm using an old enough build :p I know Hery was supposed to be doing something to fix the whole postproc = no AA problem, but i'm not sure if he did anything.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: Commander Zane on April 24, 2010, 07:49:07 am
If post-processing works for you, you cannot have AA.

That is all.
I do tend to forget this fact frequently. :P
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: sigtau on June 08, 2010, 11:32:38 am
Funny how I had both turned on (AA 4x hardware side) and post-processing and I didn't get these artifacts.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: Shivan Hunter on June 08, 2010, 03:26:02 pm
post-processing works for you alongside aa?!

TELL ME HOW


[EDIT] also, NECROTHREADAGEDED
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: FreeSpaceFreak on June 08, 2010, 04:46:28 pm
Well, you can have AA and postpro on together, just that the postpro adds aliasing again. So there's no real point to running both.
Since the artefacts are caused by AA, I guess postpro removes them.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: Kolgena on June 09, 2010, 10:21:13 am
Maybe he has a 5850+ and is running SSAA? That would definitely work fine alongside post processing.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: sigtau on June 09, 2010, 10:14:42 pm
I'm running SSAO and AA 4x hardware, with postprocessing, on a Radeon HD 5770, on an i7 quad-core 2.8GHz with 6GB DDR3.  I love this computer.

Also, I made a Friday the 13th full moon sacrifice to the C++ god a few weeks back.

The above should help you.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: Fury on June 10, 2010, 12:13:59 am
Errr, what? SSAO is not supported in FSO. For details see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Space_Ambient_Occlusion

In addition, as far as I know, no type of AA works with post-processing unless the game has implemented AA via shaders. Which FSO does not do. Well actually Hery got it working via shaders in FSO, but he disappeared before posting any diffs.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: sigtau on June 10, 2010, 09:36:23 am
I had it enabled hardware-side.  I think.

I dunno.  All I remember is that I had antialiasing and postprocessing working flawlessly at one point, and I really don't remember exactly how I got it to work.

I really don't know.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: Kolgena on June 11, 2010, 10:50:34 am
Were you using High Quality (Super Sample) AA?

That basically renders your screen at much higher resolutions, then downscales. Depending on when the card does that, it could allow for perfectly compatible post processing and AA.
Title: Re: White Artifacts around Engine Glows
Post by: sigtau on June 12, 2010, 10:13:13 pm
Adaptive multi-sampled AA, actually, and it's still just fine on my end.