[Inquisitor]

CP: That is the kind of specific feedback people can act on.

Thank you. I am sure people wouldn't mind a hand with it, if you were looking to get directly involved?

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by 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?

Because it takes a lot of time to compile (over 150 MB of data), compress (Down to 38 MB) and upload (At 20 k/s).

That's along with the time for the other packages. Those are lots smaller, though.

I'm hoping future SCP releases will be frequent enough for it not to be a major problem. If that isn't the case, well, I'll jump that node when I come to it...

[mrduckman]

Strange. I don't get such problems with my Duron 600Mhz and GeForce4MX440 of 128 Mb.
I don't use the -glow flag because the model jumps awfully out.

And the Holy moly Fenris looks wonderful!. good job for whoever did it.

EDIT,PS: And the MX is the only thing I can afford.

[Kosh]

 try removing any custom tables you have and if you are using the speffects vp file, see what happens without it.

Thanks. I'll give it a shot this weekend (have a midterm tomorrow).

[J3Vr6]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon


Because it takes a lot of time to compile (over 150 MB of data), compress (Down to 38 MB) and upload (At 20 k/s).

That's along with the time for the other packages. Those are lots smaller, though.

I'm hoping future SCP releases will be frequent enough for it not to be a major problem. If that isn't the case, well, I'll jump that node when I come to it...

So how do we know that the individual packages have been updated?  Has there been any updates to the individual packages that aren't in the zpack one?

Also, my movies aren't working with the zpack.  I thought it was the latest builds (the one from kazan or goober), but others say they have the movies work w/ those builds.


Lastly, I think it should be suggested to create a new folder w/in Freespace directory to put the media files.  I think karajoma was the one that told me to just make a new folder called fs_open (in this case I called it open3.6 and put the media and effect files in there.  That way if you ever had to go back to stock, you have everything in that one folder.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by J3Vr6
Lastly, I think it should be suggested to create a new folder w/in Freespace directory to put the media files.  I think karajoma was the one that told me to just make a new folder called fs_open (in this case I called it open3.6 and put the media and effect files in there.  That way if you ever had to go back to stock, you have everything in that one folder.

Yeah. I mentioned that quite a few times and advised it on the Wiki. FS2_open now has support for multiple mod dirs. Once FRED and the Launcher have been updated to take this into account there won't really be any good reason to have anything except the original .vp files in the main FS2 folder.

[JarC]

Originally posted by CP5670
...
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.

Well, given the way they are scaled in-game I think I prefer them more this size than the size of a super trooper at 3ft distance...?

[CP5670]

CP: That is the kind of specific feedback people can act on.

Thank you. I am sure people wouldn't mind a hand with it, if you were looking to get directly involved?

no problem, I will start doing that stuff if you guys have no objections, as I can't do much with PI right now anyway due to the somewhat unstable FRED2s and that repeat/chain bug. I need someone to tell me what's going on with the multiple thruster sets though.

Yeah. I mentioned that quite a few times and advised it on the Wiki. FS2_open now has support for multiple mod dirs. Once FRED and the Launcher have been updated to take this into account there won't really be any good reason to have anything except the original .vp files in the main FS2 folder.

I have been doing this ever since FRED2 started supporting the -mod command. It keeps things quite a bit cleaner.

Well, give the way they are scaled in-game it is I think this or like standing next to a super trooper at 3ft distance...?

sorry, I can't understand the second half of that. Their ingame dimensions are between 30% and 50% of their original sizes, so they look much smaller than usual. You can test this easily in any mission; just try it with and without the VP.

[KARMA]

maybe you should make those *.vp files as self extracting exes directly on a new dir with their number version

[karajorma]

Originally posted by CP5670
I have been doing this ever since FRED2 started supporting the -mod command. It keeps things quite a bit cleaner.

Didn't say I invented it. Just that I evangelise about it Most of us who understand the way FS2 looks for files probably do it.

 Not only does it keep things neater but it also prevents the possibility of  getting a conflict with campaigns like TBP which don't use the FS2 ships.  I've never tried it but Mimbari ships with vasudan thrusters would probably look quite odd

[übermetroid]

um...  I downloaded the newest zpack and I was having trouble with it.  15fps and such.

So I went and messed with the launcher and am I just running what I want to and I am back to 75 fps no problem.  

See if everything can be made fast by just turning off something.  (I think it was d3dmipmap that mad everything slow)   I am currently running C:\Games\FreeSpace2\20040503_fs2_open_r.exe -spec -glow -pcx32 -jpgtga -fps and it is amazing!

[Taristin]

I thought mipmapping was useless anyway?

[CP5670]

Okay, I have been working on this for the last three nights and just finished everything. I put the file in a zip and uploaded it here for now; you can put it into a rar sfx or whatever. I did everything I listed earlier as well as several other things I noticed:

I redid most of the laserglows and newglos with somewhat weaker blurs, as many of them had excessively strong blurs.

The sunglow designs were not good for their purposes. Their brightness levels and shapes/sizes caused them to heavily discolor the suns behind them. An appropriately colored and scaled simple lens flare is all that is needed here, which is what I did. I found a different use for those sunglow graphics though; see below.

Most of the suns were very blurry at their existing sizes, so I shortened them a bit, enough to fit in 256x256 images, without losing any quality. The red one is the only one that makes use of the higher resolution, so that one is a 512x512 image.

I was going to just size the beamglows back but then decided that these didn't look much better than the originals. I instead made some modifications to the sunglows and used those here. I think it was a few hours well spent, as these look much better now. It also turns out that no quality is lost by converting these to 256 colors, so that was done.

The positions of some ships in sunsathanas01 were changed to have them all face the center of the image; their centerpoint used to be somewhat offset to the right. There is still one issue though: the six Sathanas in the center area look quite crappy compared to the rest. I don't know how to fix this however, as it looks like the central six were done by just taking screenshots in Modelview while the others were rendered using some antialiasing technique.

For the thrusters, I settled on what I had suggested earlier with some changes. Most of these images had lots of problems with sizes and scales and many were either too blurry or too grainy, so that is now corrected. I used almost all of the originals that weren't either very blurry or too small when scaled properly, and all the slots were filled up in the end.

I will fix up the Ulysses later today and post it when I am done.

[DaBrain]

I think that's a job well done.
And my shield ani is inside

[Lightspeed]

I think it's good for those with low spec systems, but looks worse for others.

The suns don't have that 'black space' for nothing, its a very smooth gradient of a huge size (i.e. the lower colour values extend to quite a big part of the image). The size reduction youre speaking of was a benificial side effect so I could finally make smaller suns (as the minimum value is 0.1, and theres no upper limit).

Well, the laser glows are good. Beamglows look a bit odd (lines look pixelated?), no idea how they'll look ingame.

The NBacks probably look significantly worse in-game.

But as I said, it's the ideal solution for those that experience performance problems with the effects VP.

[J3Vr6]

I get a constant 75 when maybe a couple of ships/caps doing nothing are sitting infront of me.  I start moving and thinks start to get crazy and it'll be around 37 fps.  The worse it will get is like 17-23 fps when a colossus shows up and beams are going everywhere.

[CP5670]

I think it's good for those with low spec systems, but looks worse for others.

You should have said all this stuff earlier when I was asking for comments. But seriously, let me explain some of the things I did.

The suns don't have that 'black space' for nothing, its a very smooth gradient of a huge size (i.e. the lower colour values extend to quite a big part of the image). The size reduction youre speaking of was a benificial side effect so I could finally make smaller suns (as the minimum value is 0.1, and theres no upper limit).

The problem was that it was screwing up the suns in all the existing missions, particularly the main campaign missions, which is mainly what this is for after all. loop2-2 (Into the Lion's Den) is a good example; they used a nebula graphic to depict gases moving from one star to another, but the decreased sizes of the stars meant that the gas image looked way too large for the suns.

The gradient did take up a lot of additional room but it was definitely much less than the whole picture. The sunblue one for example had 0-0-0 colored pixels everywhere outside of a 704x704 square centered on the sun and this number became much larger if single figure RGB values were dropped. In any case, the gradient was hardly visible (actually, I never noticed it at all even when facing the suns directly unless they were being used at 8+ scales) and it wouldn't have been worth having everything smaller, even if the performance costs were not considered.

I wouldn't recommend going down to 0.1 scales though even with the normal sizes, because the intensities of the sun's glare and specular effects remain exactly the same (unless you are going to be changing the tables, but anything with that will have to reserved for speffects), so it looks strange to have a tiny sun that still causes just as much glare and shine as a similar looking but much larger one.

Well, the laser glows are good. Beamglows look a bit odd (lines look pixelated?), no idea how they'll look ingame.

I thought that might be an issue as well, but they look fine ingame. I might try messing around with these some more and see if I can get anything better, but at any rate they are much better than any of the previous ones, so that's good enough for the moment.

The NBacks probably look significantly worse in-game.

Actually, that's what they are supposed to look like, because then you cannot seen things on them through the poof clouds, making the poofs look more dense. See my remarks on the nebulas earlier; unless you are making a nebula without any poofs (which would look funny, since you would still get fog on ships), this will end up looking better in the game.

[Lightspeed]

Originally posted by CP5670
The sunblue one for example had 0-0-0 colored pixels everywhere outside of a 704x704 square centered on the sun and this number became much larger if single figure RGB values were dropped. In any case, the gradient was hardly visible (actually, I never noticed it at all even when facing the suns directly unless they were being used at 8+ scales) and it wouldn't have been worth having everything smaller, even if the performance costs were not considered.

Well, I can see the gradient

and I know it only fills ~800 pixels of the image. However, I aligned it to 2^n so the next stop is 1024x1024. I still think the game should 'mipmap' the background images (looking up which size was used and downscaling them if the size is not needed) - this would give best looks and quite a performance boost.

[WMCoolmon]

Thanks CP. I still haven't gotten around to going through the mediaVP,  but, well, TGIF. I'll try to get around to it this weekend.


I've got finals coming up, which tends to increase one's workload somewhat.

J3Vr6: Can you localize the problem? I had a similar problem and I found that if the background wasn't moving and a sun was onscreen, my FPS would hover around 60. I could fly forward and back without any performance loss. Once the background changed (If I turned my ship or something), it would dip down to 30 or so.

[WMCoolmon]

CP, are you sure you used the latest version of the mediaVP? I've been looking through the copy on my computer and the nback* graphics are very different from the ones in your VP. Was that on purpose?

Your changes, esp. the beams, look pretty good though.

I'll be checking them out in-game soon...