Hard Light Productions Forums
Community Projects => The FreeSpace Upgrade Project => Topic started by: martinistripes on October 09, 2014, 12:52:15 pm
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Hello everyone,
I'm a bit late to the party having only recently discovered Freespace Open. I was a huge fan of the old StarWars/Tie Fighter games back in the early 90s (actually got them both in the original boxes here under my desk) and it looks like this is pretty much more of the same with lots of polish. It's a tremendous achievement by all those involved and always great to see older games survive the test of time. And the installer makes life so simple.
One option I remember in the Lucasarts games was being able to turn off the background nebulae (and just have the stars). Is it possible to do that in FS Open? I did a quick search here on the forum. I found the Nicer Nebulae thread (which looks simply awesome) but I think that's specific to certain nebula missions, right? I also found lots of threads on editing skyboxes but nothing about disabling or turning them off. I find them too bright and vivid and would like to see how the game feels with a blacker looking space (perhaps just with motion debris on). Is there an easy way to do this without creating my own skyboxes (if they are skyboxes). Oh yeah, I tried switching the Nebula detail down to minimum in the in-game options, it didn't seem to make any difference.
Thanks for reading :-)
Hope this is posted in the correct place. :-)
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No, there isn't. The only way to do this is to edit the missions to display a black background.
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You might want to try the Unification War mod:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?board=208.0
If I remember right, since that is set in our solar system, no nebulae. Just blackness, stars and planets.
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Download BP:WiH and extract Sol skybox from it [for dark, monochromatic result] or Syrk: Unification War Demo and extract Milky Way skybox [for realistic, Milky Way panorama]. Than extract mission files from root of newest MediaVPs. Open mission one. Delete all background files [except the planets I think], and set proper skybox. Than open every mission and do the same. Create modfolder for this or [not recommended] place the files in MediaVPs_2014/data/missions. Enjoy. I suppose You want realistic result, but most of fanmade mods use multiple colorful nebulae sets/skyboxes so You better get used to it. Realism of backgrounds is almost noexisting in Freespace community :P
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Oh yeah, I tried switching the Nebula detail down to minimum in the in-game options, it didn't seem to make any difference.
It wouldn't, that particular setting is referring to the detail level of the nebula effects in the missions set inside of the nebula. As the others have pointed out, the only way to "turn off" the background skybox effects in the retail campaign would be to replace those assets yourself.
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OK, I'll give it some time, see if I can get accustomed to the stock skyboxes. If not, I'll try and use the BP files.
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You could also try disabling some of the media VP shaders (blur and brightpass). I find that these make background nebulas look too bright and bloomy, and destroy finer details in them.
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How would you go about disabling those?
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I just have zero-byte files named blur-f.sdr and brightpass-f.sdr in a data\effects\ subfolder inside the media VP folder. These override the corresponding files in the VPs.
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I haven't tried this myself, but I think in more recent FSO versions you need to add a game_settings.tbl entry (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Game_settings.tbl#.24Enable_External_Shaders:) in order for FSO to use external shaders.
Maybe something like this? (warning; I haven't tested this)
#GRAPHICS SETTINGS
$Enable External Shaders: true
#END
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You can also use the disable post processing flag in the launcher
Kinda throwing out the baby with the bathwater perhaps, but everyone has different tastes anyway.