[redmenace]

Edit is your friend

DaBrain:
Nice, but there seems to be some pixelation along the edges.

[DaBrain]

Can't do nothing about them. This is what you get for using DXT5 compression.

Looks worse in shots that it does in-game. Indeed I hardly noticed it while I was playing.


BTW the next four effects are ready now.

I'll add some and upload it soon. Tomorrow.

[DaBrain]

         - New Download -

We're close to a complete package.

But first here is a preview version:

The shockwave is included. And some other EFF effects (improved versions of my ANI effects. Well and much other stuff. Glows, trails, particles. (258 files, 31,5MB unrared, 3,35MB rared.)


And I took down the shockwave, as it is included anyway.


Part 1
Part 2
Sorry for the two part DL

I've reworked the missle trails again. I know it's a minor detail, but I like it.



And again I'd like to know how it works on your systems. (especially on low-end systems)
I may even speed up some thing.

Tell me how it works, your system specs, commandline, res, bit depth and other things that might prove useful.


Uhm, this is for your own good you know...


@Mods Could you please fix the thread name.

[JR2000Z]

winrar says ExpMissleHit1.ani and shockwave01_0031.dss are corrupt.

[Taristin]

Originally posted by DaBrain
         - New Download -
*snip*

I looooooooooove your skybox! It adds such a whimsy to the game. If that were a render I'd give it a for everything but the red glow

[Trivial Psychic]

What is the feasability of using effs in place of anis for interface art like command briefings and rotating ship images in the ship select screen?

[taylor]

Originally posted by Trivial Psychic
What is the feasability of using effs in place of anis for interface art like command briefings and rotating ship images in the ship select screen?

Pretty much none at the moment.  The code used to display the anis is completely different, it's run more like a movie than individual frames shown in a timed sequence.  Actually that's kind of the same thing but maybe you get my meaning.  Though not impossible it would be a bit more difficult to implement than effects based EFFs.  It may be easier to implement MJPEG (Motion-JPEG) with an open source library than do EFFs since the number of frames needed really makes the current EFF format a tremendous burden.

[DaBrain]

Originally posted by JR2000Z
winrar says ExpMissleHit1.ani and shockwave01_0031.dss are corrupt.

Does anybody have this problem too?

Originally posted by Raa

I looooooooooove your skybox! It adds such a whimsy to the game. If that were a render I'd give it a for everything but the red glow

That skybox is for the Starfox mod. It took me quite some time to work on it. It is a render BTW.

Uhm, about the red glow...
The glow "sun" is part of the MV pack. I've nothing to do with it.
I've already completed a new "sun". SF fans will know what I mean. Should probably use it for the next shots.

Edit: Looks like there really is an error in the RAR. I'll upload it again.
Ok, fixed.
Happy downloading.


@taylor Somehow DDS beamglows stopped working for me. (They did work before.)
Now the just don't appear.

[taylor]

Originally posted by DaBrain
@taylor Somehow DDS beamglows stopped working for me. (They did work before.)
Now the just don't appear.

I noticed that too.  It's on my list of things to do today.  It really needs to be fixed before 3.6.5 goes out.  If you notice anything else that's missing let me know.

EDIT:  That was quick.  It can't figure out what DXTC format it's in for some reason.  I checked with the windows viewer from NVIDIA and it said DXT5 but the game doesn't read it for some reason.  This is for the beamglow's, newmiss's and MissileTrail's.  There are TGA versions in there for the last two which is why only the beamglows didn't show up.

Great work on this by the way.  I was going over memory usage and though I didn't grab the numbers for every graphic, some are larger and a few smaller than the old versions.  shieldhit especially is half the size of the old version and the total memory size of all the new graphics so far looks to be less the originals.  The only exception being the shockwave of course.

[DaBrain]

For me FS2_open runs more smooth with these effects. (And looks far better IMHO. ).

No more slow-downs during the game. The FPS rate is more constant.

Especially the smoke made problems before. But it's no problem anymore.
(BTW it looks almost exactly like the ANI version, but more colorful.)

[taylor]

Originally posted by DaBrain
Especially the smoke made problems before. But it's no problem anymore.
(BTW it looks almost exactly like the ANI version, but more colorful.)

I never really liked the old effect personally.  The new one is much better.  There does appear to be a strange green in it though but I don't know if that's a rendering problem or something with the image.

If you figure out what happened to the coding of those other graphics (my post above) and make a new release I'm betting it's going to look even better.  I encoded the problem DDS files with the command line nvdxt utility from NVIDIA and not only did that fix it but the file size dropped considerably on them too.  I'm not sure if they were just corrupt or if it was something when you saved them.

[DaBrain]

Strange I do not have had any green in any of these effects. Neither they are corrupt. (Should try OpenGL though.)


The other effects are just 24-Bit DDS files. No compression. These effects look terrible with compression. The strange thing is, the missle trails work for me. Also the new shivan thruster trails. (All 24-Bit 8:8:8 RGB - DDS)

But the beamglows  refuse to work. Well, no problem I can use TGA for this anyway (or does this have any negative effect?). But it should work, I think.

[taylor]

Originally posted by DaBrain
But the beamglows  refuse to work. Well, no problem I can use TGA for this anyway (or does this have any negative effect?). But it should work, I think.

Encoding them to DXT5 makes the beamglows work for me.  The dds reader used by OpenGL doesn't support uncompressed DDS.  D3D uses this same thing to see if a DDS is valid or not since it's much faster than the old way.  This is probably why it's broken in my late October builds and in the November builds.  I'll try and update ddsutils and the OpenGL code to handle uncompressed DDS.

As far as the green (tint) goes this is a screenshot of it.  I thought it was just part of the nebula at first but it's just black space and stars behind the smoke.  You can also see the green over the ships hull.  If you don't see this (in OGL either) then it may just be my build since it's got a lot of experimental stuff in it.

[DaBrain]

Seems to be ok in D3D. At least for me.


I'll check OpenGL now.

Edit: Or I won't...

Error: error loading particlesmoke01_0001 -- File not found
File:E:\Languages\Visual Studio Projects\Visual C++\fs2_open\code\Bmpman\BmpMan.cpp
Line: 1995

Call stack:
------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------

Yeah, right. The file is missing... That's why it works with D3D...

[taylor]

Originally posted by DaBrain
Seems to be ok in D3D. At least for me.

I should have mentioned that it's only when it's pretty close to the screen that I see it.    About 3 or 4 ship lengths or more away and it looks fine.  Just check with a closer view in D3D and if it's fine then don't worry about it.  It's either a build issue and I'll just have to suffer, or it's an OpenGL thing that I'll have to fix at some point down the road.

Originally posted by DaBrain
Error: error loading particlesmoke01_0001 -- File not found

Heh, forgot about that.  It's fixed in CVS but no builds have working EFFs using DDS in OpenGL.  The EFF code doesn't pass an extension and the DDS code just forgets to add the ".dds" when trying to read the file data and therefore fails to load.  It will work fine in the official 3.6.5.

[DaBrain]

Originally posted by taylor

I should have mentioned that it's only when it's pretty close to the screen that I see it.    About 3 or 4 ship lengths or more away and it looks fine.  Just check with a closer view in D3D and if it's fine then don't worry about it.  It's either a build issue and I'll just have to suffer, or it's an OpenGL thing that I'll have to fix at some point down the road.
 

No problem at close range. I've tested this before. Cause I wanted to know how the smoke EFF performs on close-ups.

There also is no green in the DDS files.

Sorry for the shot it was the best I had at hand.

[Overlord]

This looks really pixelated:
http://www.overlords-from-hell.de/images/screen00.jpg

I use your preview and these parameters:
-spec -glow -jpgtga -d3dmipmap -dualscanlines -targetinfo -orbradar -dnoshowvid

Specs in my signature.

[mitac]

Apart from any problems with pixelation or odd colors, neither of which I experience : I really like these new effects. Very nice job.

[Ransom]

I liked the firey ParticleSmoke effects you did before better than these smokey ones. Other than that these are great, especially the shockwave. But where are those suns from?

Overlord: That's a problem with that particular explosion, the animation itself is horrible pixelated.

[DaBrain]

Originally posted by Overlord
This looks really pixelated:
http://www.overlords-from-hell.de/images/screen00.jpg

I use your preview and these parameters:
-spec -glow -jpgtga -d3dmipmap -dualscanlines -targetinfo -orbradar -dnoshowvid

Specs in my signature.

Nope that is none of my effects.

AFAiK it's an OTT explosion. Inferno used this effect. But I've replaced the effect for them. (The the Inferno screenshot thread.)
But the effect was not released for public. (And btw it's an ANI. The EFF - DDS version of it would look more blured.)

You should delete all exp06 ANIs.




I need some nubers and specs. Consider the preview package as Beta test. I'll tweak what's in need of tweaking. But you have to tell me what is needed.

So far everything looks fine. The effects themself do not cause any problem, but should increase the quality and performance.


@Ransom Arceihn Suns? I did not include a sun...