[CP5670]

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?

I guess nobody read the big post I made. Yes, that was intentional. The idea is that the lesser the color fluctuation in the nbacks is, the harder it will be to see them through the poofs from the side views, making the poofs look more numerous and the nebula look denser, so a single uniform color (an average of all the existing colors) would be the best solution.

As I said, this is not noticeable right now due to bugs with the hardware poofs, but try playing a nebula mission with -2d_poof or with the original FS2 1.2, use the previous (or original) nbacks and look through the side views while moving forward to see what I was talking about earlier. After doing this for a little while, it becomes clear that the poofs are only around your ship and nowhere else; while this is of course true, it is a developer trick that probably shouldn't be so obvious. The ones in the effects vp were better than the originals with their smoother gradients but still had that side view problem.

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

Thanks. I might change those a bit though, as I'm still not perfectly satisfied with them, but they should work for the time being.

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.

yeah that would be very nice, although I think it would only work for background images. (since those will not be changing size during the mission)

[WMCoolmon]

Hmm, I'm a bit hesitant about replacing those since I got the impression that 2d_poof was a temporary fix. At least, IMHO it should be.

I tried them out, and didn't see much difference... (In the mission w/ Actium and Lysander)

[CP5670]

I think -2d_poof is supposed to change it back to the way it used to be with the original version. The hardware-rendered nebula poofs are having various problems (too bright and too large), so it seems that this was added in as a workaround, although for some people 2d_poof doesn't fix the problems either.

You can try it in the original 1.2 though, as I know it can be seen there. It's certainly a pretty small thing, but it looks a little strange through the side views especially when you are turning as well. In any case, since these at the very least look identical to the previous ones but have filesizes a couple thousand times smaller than those, it would seem to be an easy choice.

There is a more pressing issue though that I only noticed last night, a bug in both the last effects vp and my own. It appears that in the default tables, the Shivan beams and anti-fighter beams do not use the beamglow files but rather the thrusterglow01 one. This worked okay with the original graphics as the thrusterglows looked very similar to the beamglows, but with Lightspeed's new thruster files the Shivan beams look really wacky (thrusterglow01 is the Terran one, which is now dark blue and a different size from the original).

A solution to this might to be to use your new addon table file feature to change all the affected beams' muzzleglows to the beamglow files. Otherwise, it looks like we will have to settle with putting that thrusterglow01 image into the speffects package, which has a weapons.tbl that can be appropriately modified.

[WMCoolmon]

This attachment should fix that...all Shivan beam weapons besides LRed and BFRed use glow4(red), BFRed and LRed use glow1(white), the targeting laser uses glow5 (purple), and the rest uses glow5 (blue). You need to rename the extension to .tbm, of course.

On nebular stuffs: I'll need to check and see if 14 MB is worth it. Your effects VP is roughly 7% of the mVP 3.6 one, so size will be less of an issue. TGAs also seem to compress pretty well...

[JarC]

still think it should be fixored properly...you just don't go and call a beameffect thrusterXX. if you want to use the same effect just copy the file and rename it proper, at least that way mucking with thrusters doesn't affect other things that should be MODdable separately...

[WMCoolmon]

Check the file that's what I did When I said glow, I was referring to the beamglow file. I just didn't want to type it out each time.

[jdjtcagle]

Originally posted by CP5670
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.
 

I took a picture in fred sorry I didn't have photoshop so I did it in paint