[Bobboau]

nothing specal in this one, just been doing a lot of debugging and I though it's gotten to the point were it's worth a publick beta test, so most up to date version of FSO is avalable now right here
I think the biggest improvement will be in the nebula, I did a lot of work on getting thrusters to fade properly, and there is a general improvement to the rendering of thrusters, as well as a number of other small improvements mostly leading to stability (not nesasaraly crashproof but thereshould be less/none of that fireballs flickering beams disapearing bull)

[Goober5000]

Note that this is an unofficial public test.  I'm stickying this so that people will see it, but please understand that we're still squashing bugs.  Don't expect bulletproof performance, but do tell us what goes wrong so that we can fix it.

[Galemp]

Do thruster trails scale according to absolute velocity yet?

[Setekh]

Beauty, downloading now.

[Bobboau]

updated, better nebula poof code

[Ypoknons]

That y-key crashes still occur to me, and I think that it will be the end of the me

(DirectX 8)

[J3Vr6]

Just curuious.  I saw a post where Kazan said that FS_Open was using like 172 megs of memory and mentioned that stock FS2 didn't use that much.  Did any  coder look into that?

[Col. Fishguts]

Just tried it, runs pretty smooth.

Good stuff:
- Rotating stuff works as it should
-Shine mapping seems very stable, no more flickering or over-shiny'ness
-Scaling of the models in Tech room is nice, not perfect yet, but nice

Buggy stuff:
-glowpoints sometimes are not where they should be.
-Some models (i.e. the jumpgate from TBP) cause massive fps drop down to 10fps, but only in certain missions. In other missions they work fine, haven't figured out yet what causes this.
-Sometimes gunfire is visible through objects, sometimes it isn't.
-Nebula missions crash after 10 secs back to wiindows with a D3d_help error. But what I've seen in this 10 secs was über-schweet...just awesome

BTW just noticed: Something with the engine glows has changed. I'm running FSO on 1280x1024 TFT which obviously is a ratio of 5:4. So FSO with its 1024x768 res is always a bit vertically stretched, but all recent FS2 builds (even stock FS2) somehow managed to keep the engine glows circular. But this newest build doens't, it stretches the glows also, so they becom ellipses which is a bit strange......just thought I'd let you know.

[Zarax]

Good job over most stuff...
I've noticed some problems however...

1) Everything is way too dark... you should raise the default lighting level...

2) Effects have an odd problem... playing at 1024x768 previous circular effects now looks elliptic... weird..

3) There's a strange slowdown that occurs when an object comes in view for the first time... just like it's loaded only in that moment...

My system: PIII 1ghz 512mb RAM GE-Force2 GTS

[Lt.Cannonfodder]

Originally posted by Zarax
2) Effects have an odd problem... playing at 1024x768 previous circular effects now looks elliptic... weird..

3) There's a strange slowdown that occurs when an object comes in view for the first time... just like it's loaded only in that moment...

Same here. Plus the game crahes after a minute or so from starting the mission. The screen just freezes, and nothing happens.

[Zarax]

New bug: in some missions friendly turrets don't fire, and even friendly beams seems affected... they fires once per target and then nothing... yes, beam free all is activated, in this case by FRED Open default

[Flipside]

Bobboau, have you been experimenting with Environmental mapping again? Only I'm getting the wierdest effects going on with Phreaks background POF... I'll try and get some screenies, it'll explain it better.....

Flipside

Ok, I'm just having a casual dogfight, and suddenly, theres no other way of describing it, the sky falls off.



Next is a little later as it nears the bottom of the screen. Attempting to steer the ship towards your rapidly vanishing universe has no effect whatsoever.



And finally, another one (the thing rotates around the screen a bit as well).



The very very wierdest part of it all is that the moment I kill all the Shivans, it all snaps back into place? It might be something to do with the Engine particles being used on my modded fighter, I'll give it a try without them and see what happens

Flipside

[Fineus]

I like it overall, havent had much time to play with it - but to address the lightness issue, can we make this adjustable via command line or something? I love it as it is (though some of the shines are still to bright) but others dont. Only fair to make it an option, right?

[Bobboau]

I think the brightness issue has to do with RT's new gama code, so you'll just have to make an adjustment in the options screen.

are all you people useing DX or OGL, the thing with the sky falling off in particular sounds like matrix problems and it could explain the crasshing, but I'm prety sure my DX matrix code is working and I know for a fact that the backgroud pof thingy is causeing problems that I don't see in that pic.

I think I have fixed the glows not rendering quite right bug I'll post an update in a minute
[update done]

[Sticks]

I think that the position of the background pof isn't being updated every frame, because mine seems to occasionally become "jerky", where it starts to receed for a frame or two and then snaps back into place.

[terren]

WOW!
this beats the SS of doom 3 that I see in PC gamer.  I'm not kidding, although I do need a new Vid card so FS2 run's faster then the screen shots...

[IceFire]

Flipside, whats going on with that beam cannon in the background.  Thats really cool!

[StratComm]

I think that's the particle trail on a fighter.  But it does look like a beam cannon; perhaps it's too intense for what it's supposed to be.

[Skippy]

Originally posted by Col. Fishguts
-Scaling of the models in Tech room is nice, not perfect yet, but nice

Yes, as the Colossus isn't showing entirely

[Lightspeed]

ambient light!! we want ambient light !