[CP5670]

One thing that helps is to stay away from that effects vp; most of the stuff in this file is a far cry from the quality of the things in the other vps and in its current state, this vp is not worth using. Those nebula files you mentioned are not only over twenty times the filesizes of the originals, but they look much worse ingame, and it's not limited to just the nebulas; the missile trails, beams, and numerous other things have the same problem. Some items, like the beamglows, are enormous but have no increase in quality at all, making them a big waste of memory ingame, while others, like the suns, look great but take up only a small space in huge image files, resulting in not only another waste of memory but also suns that look tiny ingame. Actually, about a week ago I ran into a thread about the FS2 nebulas looking bad while searching for something, in which there was a screenshot of the original FS2 nebulas. I know that they aren't exactly great, but they are not totally horrible either, but that's how they looked in that screenshot and I could immediately tell why; the guy was using the effects vp.

If you are ready to do a little a bit of work, you can remove the good files from it (some of the thruster files, the laserglows and the newglos) and keep those only. I think this is also the largest of all the media vp files, so removing it will free up lots of memory.

The other vp files are awesome, though; it's a real pity that this one bad file is bundled with the rest in the zpack file, which is what most people will be getting.

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by TopAce

I know you don't like me, you don't have to confirm it.

My machine is:
2 GHz Pentium IV
GeForce 4 MMX440, default settings
384 Megs of RAM

I used the 03_05_04 build, with the -spec, -glow and -mod RR flags. The file I downloaded was the newest MediaVP, which I found by the link in the news.

I got those kind of results with 256 MB of memory, and the -pcx32 + -jpgtga command line options. And I'm using a Duron 1.6

At the moment, your system isn't using any of the of tga files or planets, so I'm not sure what is causing the slowdown. Maybe -spec; a lot of people have had trouble with it.

[TopAce]

I had the -spec on. And rushed to remove the MediaVP!

[CP5670]

It works very well for me as long as that effects file is removed, even though neither of my machines is exactly top of the line (Athlon 1400, 512mb, GF3 64mb and Pentium M 1700, 512mb, R9000 mobility 32mb). I use 1024x768x32, 2xAA, -spec, -glow and -d3dmipmap on both computers and still get 50+ framerates at almost all times. The only issue I have noticed was a sudden choppiness when certain effects are display onscreen for the first time. Maybe it is an issue with loading mission resources ingame rather than at the start of the mission.

[KARMA]

if that file is a cause of massive slowdowns you probably should remove it from that pack, to avoid to scary new players who have heard about FSO for the first time and want to try it

[TopAce]

If I wanted to show FSO to somebody, I would make sure everything works. So I would remove all these 'Uber' effects.

[WMCoolmon]

RTFW.

The "uber-effects", the ones that seem to cause heavy performance loss, I placed in "hieffects.vp".

However, since people don't seem to get that if "all the enhancements from every VP" are in the zpack, and one of the VPs says it might cause severe performance loss, they may experience severe performance loss...I will add such a warning to the zpack.

If I sound annoyed, it's because it takes a long time to compress and upload the VPs.

BTW, did you try it with -spec off? Like I said, a lot of people were having trouble with that.

[CP5670]

if that file is a cause of massive slowdowns you probably should remove it from that pack, to avoid to scary new players who have heard about FSO for the first time and want to try it

It's not just the slowdowns, but also the fact that a lot of graphics in there actually look worse, and considerably so, than the originals. I have been railing about some of those things for a while now and am a little surprised that the offending effects are still in there.

However, since people don't seem to get that if "all the enhancements from every VP" are in the zpack, and one of the VPs says it might cause severe performance loss, they may experience severe performance loss...I will add such a warning to the zpack.

Well, the problem for me is that nothing was said about graphical quality loss (and probably not intended either), which is what is happening. Just get rid of most of the files from the mv_effects package (if you want I can give you a list of the problematic ones) and everything will be good.

Also, I forgot to mention, some of the glowmaps on the new Ulysses model look kind of weird. I would recommend removing the two large white ones altogether, making the others a bit smaller, and having the flashing ones turned on for very short amounts time only. It seems that the beamglow images look slightly nicer for glowpoints than the laserglow and thrusterglow ones due to their smoother fade-outs at the edges, so try changing to those and see how it looks.

[WMCoolmon]

Erg, alright. Just give me some names and what their problem is and I'll look at 'em before the next release.

[jdjtcagle]

This thread,  
C'mon I wouldn't sue Mcdonalds because I got fat on thee burgers

[Taristin]

Ahh, but in Soviet Russia, McDonalds Sues You!

...or not.

[Inquisitor]

Also, the media VP is designed to show stuff off, but technically it's not the SCP. Note SCP stands for "Source CODE Project"

The media VP is the result of of hard work by of people, but, the SCP enables that, so, if you think you can do better, go for it I, however, am damn glad I have something like this to show people to brag about this team.

I also know that the mediaVP has of hi end stuff in it, but if you need lower spec stuff, someone needs to make it.

That being said, give WM some specifics (file names, more detail on what was crashing) and give us some more detail on your machine (driver release numbers, DX version, things like that) and we might be able to address some of these things.

Also, for specific bugs, Mantis is the best way to get that information to us, then we can figure out who and how we can fix it.

[CP5670]

Sorry if I came off a bit harsh earlier, but I would like to see the media package (and of course all the SCP things) become as good as possible even though I don't work on it directly. This whole effects issue has been around for some time now; I have commented on it quite a few times in the last several months but was mostly ignored earlier, so I thought I might as well try bringing it up again.

Erg, alright. Just give me some names and what their problem is and I'll look at 'em before the next release.

Sure. These files are the bad ones and should be removed altogether. They reduce detail due to their blur, although a few make no difference at all aside from having a larger filesize. A few months ago I posted some screenshots comparing the new and old nebulas for example; I don't have those anymore but could retake them if you want.
2_laserglow03.tga
beam-blue.tga
beam-blue2.tga
beam-dblue.tga
beam-green.tga
beam-green2.tga
beam-orange.tga
beam-orange2.tga
beam-purple.tga
beam-purple2.tga
beam-saph.tga
beam-saph2.tga
beam-white2.tga
beam-white3.tga
beam-yell.tga
beam-yell2.tga
beam01.tga
contrail.pcx
contrail01.pcx
dneb01.tga
dneb02.tga
dneb03.tga
dneb04.tga
dneb05.tga
dneb06.tga
dneb07.tga
dneb08.tga
dneb09.tga
dneb10.tga
dneb11.tga
dneb12.tga
dneb13.tga
dneb14.tga
dneb15.tga
dneb16.tga
dneb17.tga
dneb18.tga
lightning.tga
missiletrail01.tga
missiletrail02.tga
missiletrail03.tga
missiletrail04.tga
neb01.tga
neb02.tga
neb03.tga
neb04.tga
neb05.tga
neb06.tga
neb07.tga
neb08.tga
neb09.tga
neb10.tga
neb11.tga
neb12.tga
neb13.tga
neb14.tga
neb15.tga
neb16.tga
neb17.tga
neb18.tga
newglo9.pcx
newmiss1.pcx
newmiss2.pcx
newmiss3.pcx
newmiss4.pcx
newmiss5.pcx
warpglow01.tga
warpglow02.tga

These objects should be kept at their existing sizes, but with the borders removed. You will notice that these have lots of empty black space around the main picture; this both wastes a lot of memory and makes the effects look very small ingame, since the game scales the entire image to fit the appropriate size. These look awesome otherwise though and would make great additions to the media package.
sunblue.tga
sungold.tga
sungreen.tga
sunred.tga
sunviolet.tga
sunwhite.tga
sunglow01.tga
sunglowblue.tga
sunglowgold.tga
sunglowgreen.tga
sunglowred.tga
sunglowviolet.tga
thruster03-01.tga
thruster03-02.tga
thruster03-02a.tga
thruster03-03.tga
thruster03-03a.tga
thrusterglow02.tga
thrusterglow02a.tga
thrusterglow03.tga
thrusterglow03a.tga

These are good but too blurry to justify such large images. Their dimensions should be cut in half as the blurriness would mean that no quality would be lost. These can actually also be reduced to 8-bit pcx images (at least with the PSP octree method) with almost no loss in quality, especially the last two, so that's worth considering as well.
beamglow1.tga
beamglow2.tga
beamglow3.tga
beamglow4.tga
beamglow5.tga
beamglow6.tga
beamglow7.tga
beamglow8.tga
thrusterglow01.tga
thrusterglow01a.tga

For this one, remove the large spaces at the top and bottom and crop off a little from the sides; with a little work it should be possible to reduce it to 1024x340 or thereabouts.
sunsathanas01.pcx

A note on the nebula backgrounds (the nbacks) would also be in order here. I always had reservations about these in FS2, mainly because if you looked from the side view while moving forward, you could see bits of the nbacks behind the nebula poofs. Not only were the seams between different colors visible due to the small 8-bit images wrapped around the entire sphere, but these backgrounds were still relative to the nebula poofs and your ship, so it looked pretty strange to see something in the background that was far enough to look stationary while you were moving but still visible in such a dense nebula. This whole problem is hard to notice in the current builds, but that is due to the nebula poof brightness problem which will probably be fixed soon; you can try it in the original 1.2 to see what I mean. The new ones in mv_effects help with the first problem (the seams) to some extent, but the other issue is still there. I have found that it looks much better to just have one uniform color for the nbacks, so the player cannot make out stationary stuff in the background while still having everything else look the same, and this has the added benefit of not requiring large image files.

The last thing I should mention is that there seem to be two distinct versions of thruster graphics in here; which one is used depends on whether or not -jpgtga is set. Is it supposed to be like this? I personally like the trails from the pcx version and the main glows (although they are currently too small) from the tga version, but that's just my preference.

That's about it. I might be able to make those changes myself if you are short on time or anything.

[Kosh]

For some very strange reason, my system can handle the hi-poly stuff without any trouble, but when looking at a Triton class freighter docked with it's cargo container will sometimes cause a huge slow down.

When I tried the lightning marshall SCP release, the nebulas killed the framerates.

One thing that I did notice was that now it starts crashing randomly at the ends of missions.

The last thing is that now the collossus won't fire all the beams it used to. When it first showed up it would only fire a Terslash and a BGreen at the Hawkwood. During the mission to wax the NTD Repulse it wouldn't shoot at it PERIOD. No beams, no lasers, no flak, nothing. The Repulse actually went inside the collossus and exploded.

[Nico]

The things that will have the biggest impact on performances will be the high res maps and effects.
I'll take an exemple:
OTT ( my old xcampaign which runned on vanilla FS2, no HT&L, nothing, I just thew the source code in at some point for the self ilu maps ): it featured quite high poly meshes, and exclusively 512*512 maps. All that on an athlon 900 ( and radeon 9700 pro, ok ). unned like a breathe. Then I had the marvellous idea of making my new explosions ( 512*512 anis, loded, tho ). Catastrophe. Those ani on their own ruined my FPS in drastical proportions. Put a high res background for some effect I wanted. Same deal. Anything not related to ships will have a huge impact on performances. To some extent, maps do the same. I've made my ezechiel with a 2048*2048 map, but on default it will use a 512*512 one ( the high res one will be availabele, but one will have to thrown it in the maps folder if he wants to use it ). Polys are fine. Higher limits seems fine too. Most effects are fine ( but will impact on performances because spec, self ilu, etc use more maps ), but high res anything WILL hurt.

[ryuune75]

Originally posted by DaBrain
The Geforce 4 mx is not that bad.
It should be fast enough for high qulality setting, unless you activate AA, or AF.
Or is it a 32 MB Mx ?

The GeForce MX was NEVER a good card, not even when she was brand new, and now it's a very very old card, even the casual gamer can easily afford a Geforce 4200ti now, and that it's a entry level card today...
Trying to use exessively big textures on such card is foolish, and some texture in this pack ARE too big, what the point in making 2048x2048 textures that don't even look any better than the old ones?
Not even brand new commercial games have this exagerated resolutions...

[karajorma]

Originally posted by CP5670
For this one, remove the large spaces at the top and bottom and crop off a little from the sides; with a little work it should be possible to reduce it to 1024x340 or thereabouts.
sunsathanas01.pcx

I don't think it would be a good idea to do that CP. IIRC the game scales everything up to power of 2 anyway so croping it wouldn't save any memory at all.

[CP5670]

During the mission to wax the NTD Repulse it wouldn't shoot at it PERIOD. No beams, no lasers, no flak, nothing. The Repulse actually went inside the collossus and exploded.

I first thought that this might be related to the dreaded repeat/chain bug, but that mission seems to just use a simple event with a beam-free-all for the Colossus. The only thing I can think of is a table related problem; try removing any custom tables you have and if you are using the speffects vp file, see what happens without it.

I don't think it would be a good idea to do that CP. IIRC the game scales everything up to power of 2 anyway so croping it wouldn't save any memory at all.

I know; its current size is 1069x514, which is just barely over 1024x512 but uses up four times as much memory. It would be easy to crop it slightly to get it within those dimensions.

[karajorma]

That on the other hand would make sense

[J3Vr6]

I downloaded the entire zpack one.  Is that the one with everything new and improved?  For some reason, I thought I read somewhere that updates would be done to the individual packages and no the big one.  Why?