[FireCrack]

I've been having some weird problems with specular and enviroment mapping. First as for specular it doesn't work. I have an ATI card but have old (3.1) catalyst drivers? I had them working once, but not now.

Secondly is Enviroment mapping, this problem is.. extremly strange.

If i run just vanilla SCP i get no envirmoent mapping, but if i run a mod (only BWO tested) i get different results for each ship class, either

a) no env mapping (fenris)
b) env mapping but no alpha on it (sobek, sath, v asdan station thing, hecate.. most ships)
c) propper env mappinf (fighters escape pods [this is only for the shininess on thew glass of cockpits and windows however and may be not related to env mapping])

Ummm. anyone have any idea what's going on?

edit: I'm suing the 1.5 shinemaps, if these arent suposed to work 100% with env I apologise for taking your time but i'd still like to know why selecting a mod in the launcher disables/enables these things.

another edit: Shinemaps are in my freespace2/data/maps directory. Is this right?

[Taristin]

Your spec mapping could be because of your drivers. Cat 4.4 supports it. I dunno about 3.1


For the environment mapping... The FS2 ships have it because Lightspeed hasn't done the alpha mapping for them yet.  The FS1 ships seem to lack them because the alpha environment dealie is set up on the shinemaps, and most of the reflections are severly toned down...

Selecting a mod will change it because it takes the textures from the mod folder in place of the ones from the standard maps folder.

[FireCrack]

Ah thanks for your help, i'l check tmy cat drivers, i thaught the shine was supposed to be incompatible with the newer ones wich is why i hadn't hupgraded.

[Taristin]

4.4 was the latest... IIRC. Some people have had sporadic luck with later versions, but as of yet, I haven't had any.

[Drew]

if you use a Radeon 9k, shin and env maps wont work at all in HTL mode

[FireCrack]

^ yes they do, unless you mean an actual 9000, i have a 9800pro (dont know if there is a 9000)

[Gregster2k]

This is driving me nuts. I have actually stopped checking this forum regularly over this retarded problem. I have seen no effort made by anyone here to actually ASK ATI what the HELL they did after Cat 4.4 and the SCP guys already acknowledged they've used crappy code to call in the specular mapping...

I am finding this extremely frustrating in light of the fact that great things like the Constitution Refit (see that other thread) and that HTL orion (a thing thread) are being made and I will have to see them as STUPID PLASTICY SHIPS just because SCP guys cant be bothered to fix a pressing problem thats been going on for months with these ATI cards...their questions about "who gets this problem" are just stalling, they should explore alternative implementations. What are they trying to accomplish by asking who gets the problem but find out if the majority dont have the problem and if they dont, screw everyone else, including myself?

FIX THIS NOW DANGIT! I've been waiting long enough! >_<

[Drew]

9k = 9000

Shines stopped working about a year ago. Iv given up trying to get it fixed.

There is a radeon 9000, and its sitting in my box.  Its sitting my my brothers mobile as well.

[Goober5000]

Originally posted by Gregster2k
I am finding this extremely frustrating in light of the fact that great things like the Constitution Refit (see that other thread) and that HTL orion (a thing thread) are being made and I will have to see them as STUPID PLASTICY SHIPS just because SCP guys cant be bothered to fix a pressing problem thats been going on for months with these ATI cards...their questions about "who gets this problem" are just stalling, they should explore alternative implementations. What are they trying to accomplish by asking who gets the problem but find out if the majority dont have the problem and if they dont, screw everyone else, including myself?

I am finding posts like this extremely frustrating in light of the fact that we have no active graphics specialists, nobody is offering to help, and nobody is offering to recruit any help for us.

Our questions about "who gets this problem" are exactly that... we have no active coders who would be able to fix this.  So we're seeing if any of our inactive coders become active, or if any community person would like to help.

There are several solutions to this:

1) Code it yourself.
2) Find us someone who can code it.
3) Pay us to code it, so we can quit our jobs and work full-time on the SCP.
4) Be patient and wait until one of our inactive coders finds time to fix it or we get an active coder who can fix it.
5) Shut the heck up.

Your choice.

[Trivial Psychic]

Originally posted by Gregster2k
FIX THIS NOW DANGIT! I've been waiting long enough! >_<

While I agree that I would like to see this issue resolved (other than sticking to 4.4 Cats for me & many others), you must remember that people like Bobbeau, Taylor, Goober and the rest of the team, are volunteers & enthusiasts.  They do this because its a hobby of a sorts, so we have no right to badger them about not implimenting a fix.  I'm sure there are countless hurdles to fixing this, especially if that involves a switch to the pixel shaders, which our team members are aware of and trying to work out ceribrally before attempting a game code implimentation.  Also remember that since this is a hobby, personal motivation is more important than someone else's request.  If they just aren't in the proper frame of mind or have too much else on their platter, they won't want or be able to work on this.  I'm sure some day (say, in the next 6 months), one of our graphical coders (or perhaps a talented coder not yet on the team) will be looking through code implimentation of something else, in some other piece of software, and draw the critical neuron connection in their brain that starts a flurry of energized problem solving on this issue, and tangeable progress will result.  I'm sure implimentation of HTL was not without its periods of limited progress accompanied by continued stern requests by non-coders.  In the meantime, be supportive of them, supply them with useful suggestions if possible, but above all don't be negative.  It only hurts progress.

That's my frame of mind on the subject, as I'm sure it is of many others here.

Well, looks like Goober beat me to the first punch, but I'll still post this.

Later!

[Goober5000]

No worries, TP, in some ways you said it better than I did.  Thanks.

[Singh]

The latest Cat drivers seem to have worked for me. Shinemaps show up soo sweet its stunning.

BUT....the latest Omega drivers dont work with shinemaps, as they are based on an earlier cat driver version...but they seem to run faster.

Ugh. performance or playability...what kind of a choice is that?

[taylor]

OpenGL doesn't really do spec mapping right now, just special spec lighting, which looks like utter crap.  I'm working on new OGL code now that will do spec mapping properly but it still has a couple of minor bugs to squash.  When it's done it should work on all cards.  It will use multipass rendering, which isn't too slow in it's current state, but will offer pixel shaders too as soon as I figure out how to get it all working.  This will only help OpenGL though since I don't do D3D.

[Overlord]

As i said in LSD's shinemap thread, this *could* be the solution:

I've heard that ATI's shader compiler is more strict than NVIDIA's in that it disallows implicit casts from int to float. For example, you need to write 1.0 instead of 1, unless you're actually dealing with integers.

I'm no coder so i don't know anything about this, this is only a quote from a dev of a simulation (Celestia).