[Trivial Psychic]

Are you playing under D3D or OGL?

[CaptJosh]

You know, I'm not sure. I had some issues with the launcher not having some settings on that I know I had...Let me test again and make sure I was under OpenGL like I thought, and I'll get back to you.

[Trivial Psychic]

I've had issues with OGL displaying colors wrong.  The Minbari Cruiser for example, has some parts of it that show up orange for me.  The sine of the Whitestar also has weird coloring under OGL.  I think that there are some image formats that OGL doesn't like... or its that fact that I've got an ATI card.

[CaptJosh]

Well, my vid card is a Mad Dog geForce FX5200. I'll test this mission again shortly and see what happens.

[CaptJosh]

Tested with D3D8. The color was...as correct as can be expected, given the problems I was seeing with overall coloration and brightness.

Everything was still too bright, just like before.

Babylon 5 was a dark, gritty show. Ships and stations looked dark and weathered.

Now, the problem in this mission could primarily be a problem with the ambient light. IMO it looks like the star is too close to the planet and to B5, so the overall illumination was too high. I'm going to locate a copy of Severed Dreams to watch and see if I can get some screen caps to demonstrate what I mean.

[karajorma]

Add this to your command line in the launcher.

-ambient_factor 70

Play about with the number until the mission is suitable dark.

[CaptJosh]

I'll try that for the lighting. Dunno how much it'll help some of the colors, though. Still working on getting ahold of a copy of Severed Dreams to watch again and maybe get some screen caps from.

[CaptJosh]

Ok...

First of of all, tried playing the mission with the ambient light factor changed. Deffinitely better. Certainly more realistic.

Secondly. Got a copy of the actual episode and watched it twice.

From that, I can tell you that

A) the apparent diameter of the star is too large. The planet Epsilon is not that close to its primary. I would recommend taking the star down to 50% of its current in mission apparent diameter and reducing the illumination it produces commensurately with what effectively repositions the star farther away.

B) It looks like Babylon 5 is placed on the wrong side of the planet from the episode. There may be technical issues that prevent you from reproducing the positioning in the episode, however, so just ignore this bit if you can't do anything about it.


I'll try to get you some screenshots from the ep shortly so you have better references than just my reporting of my observations.

EDIT: BTW, does anyone know of a good media player that has a frame by frame stepping feature?

[madaboutgames]

Been offline for a bit, in the process of moving to York at the minute.  So i will be on and off for a bit.

I have the all episodes and films on dvd so theres no need for screen caps.  This mission background and lighting are not representing that of the actual series.  This mission was done 2 years ago and was unfinished until the B5 model became available.  When it became available this mission was released as one of the first giving the fans to play a mission at b5.  It was a bit rushed and i didnt even consider the bgd at the time when we didnt even have the model of b5 to work with.  The mission was based more on action as close to the episode.  If you are looking for realism why don`t you try looking at the mission Battle at gorash (training mission 5) in the Reflectons campaign.  This mission is almost complete as it will appear in the finished campaign.  All done  bar loading screen and various fixes and ai fixes.

However the B5 area of space in the Campaign demo (released december 05) will live upto your expectations as this is as accurate as possible given the limitations of FRED.

If you would be happy enough to rip the corresponding video frames to match the audio, convert them all into .ani I would be more than happy to use them as since I am doing this all by myself.  It would be a great help for someone else so enthusiastic about making this even better to donate the time required for this task.

[CaptJosh]

I'm not sure I can, not with the tools I have now, but if you can point me in the right direction, I'd love to help. I downloaded Severed Dreams off the net just to have something to compare to, and like I said, I watched it twice in a row. Good Lord I had forgotten how much I missed B5. And nobody runs it on TV anymore.

[Herra Tohtori]

Good golly, what a mission...!

Mmmh, what could we do to make it better still?

- It'd be nice to be able to be able to command friendly wings, not just Alpha, so how about just making the soon-to-be-enemy fighter wings AND the Echo squadron not to receive orders? Because it's much more efficient and faster to concentrate some three fighter wings' fire on same target, if you want it down quickly.

- When the first fleet arrives, it looks a bit goofy when all the ships have a hyperspace vortex of their own, despite the fact that a jumpgate would only form one vortex... so. How about making just one craft's vortex visible and disable other ships' vortex? This could give an illusion that all the ships arrive from the same vortex. Of course the one ship with a visible vortex should arrive from the center of the jumpgate... and other ships should arrive within that vortex, so if this is too complex a thing to implement, just let it be as it is.

- Something must be done to that Sharlin colouring. My system also shows it wrong, here's what I've got:

-Windows XP SP2 Finnish language
-AMD 64 3200+
-1024 GB DDR-SDRAM
-NVidia GeForce 6600 [256 MB]
-Using TBP build 3.2 with fs2_open_3.6.7

I'm also getting ship's middle section tan or orangeish beige - and it's not just this mision's problem, it also shows it like that on Earth-Minbari War demo campaign missions. I don't think it's likely that this is related to *.dds file format in general, because all the other ships show just nicely. I think it's something to do with this particular model's mapping that some systems interprete wrong... I'm not an expert, though.

So, how many people have been having weird sightings of wrong-coloured rogue Sharlins? Perhaps we could find an unifying factor or something...

I did a little test on screen shot basis. On the Sharlin's middle section, the beige/orange colour's RGB values are roughly

Red ~80%
Green ~50%
Blue ~30%

Whereas on blue colour visible on wings seems to have corresponting values of

Red ~30%
Green ~50%
Blue ~80%

From here we can draw an immediate conclusion that for some reason, some systems read these files a bit wrong: They turn red and blue values upside down on the files that form mapping for Sharlin's main hull. Wings of the Sharlin are show as they should be, this bug only seems to affect the center of the ship.

Weird...

[CaptJosh]

That's an OpenGL issue with the color. Switch to D3D and it goes away. If you've read this thread you know this mission is a beta. Expect these kind and generous folks to have it fixed for the actual release.

BTW, anyone know a decent video editing program? I have VirtualDub, but I wonder if there's something better for taking a crack at getting the clips needed for the comms animations in this mission if I can. Also, what tool would I need for converting DivX video into ani files?

[Herra Tohtori]

Aye, it might fix it. Only thing is that with D3D mode I'm getting this:



 

...I think I'll stick with OpenGL. Besides, I've got an impression that HT&L on TBP are optimized for OpenGL. I'm also getting some weird picture distortion that concerns the loading image, but that one I could tolerate.

But I'll not stand Omegas that look like shining nebulae. Btw, Babylon station looked exactly the same.

[CaptJosh]

What the...?!

Um, I never had that issue with D3D. Something's wrong with your Omega Destroyer model or textures or something. Do you have environment mapping turned on?

[StratComm]

Mmmm, environment mapping.  More specifically, alpha environment mapping, by the look of it.  Turn that feature off in the launcher to get rid of that effect.

Originally posted by Herra Tohtori
So, how many people have been having weird sightings of wrong-coloured rogue Sharlins? Perhaps we could find an unifying factor or something...

I did a little test on screen shot basis. On the Sharlin's middle section, the beige/orange colour's RGB values are roughly

Red ~80%
Green ~50%
Blue ~30%

Whereas on blue colour visible on wings seems to have corresponting values of

Red ~30%
Green ~50%
Blue ~80%

Is the Sharlin's wing texture map a dds?  Because I've seen instances where certain things read red/blue values backwards for DDS maps with DXT0 compression.  I don't have TBP installed at the moment, but that seems possible.  However, you should look at the Sharlin in the techroom and determine from there if something is wrong, because it's possible that environment mapping or even just a red sun could cause you to get a strange tint on certain surfaces.

[CaptJosh]

It's not just a tint. Trust me. The main body of the Sharlin class Minbari cruiser looks beige/orangey under openGL.

[StratComm]

So is it a DDS file?  Ah screw it, I'll look for myself

[Herra Tohtori]

Yeah. The Sharlin midship really is orange/beige in-game, tech-room, heck, it's even beige in FRED.

Other thing that fixes it is to turn off -jpgtga support. The pcx's work all right in OpenGL mode.

Also, I removed the uses alpha for env mapping, and it reduced the phenomenon. Now it just looks cool, actually. The ships reflect the background with D3D, but not with OpenGL... here's a pic of what it looks now.

.

The ship's hull actually reflects the nebula on the background... Though I'm quite sure that actually these ships' surfaces didn't actually shine very much. Well, I can always turn off env mapping if I want, but now it looks cool to me.

The other bug that can be seen on D3D mode is that the download images become distorted. This is how they look:



For some reason it  seems to stretch the picture's height so that the lower section of the picture goes below the display... Anyone else had this problem?

[StratComm]

What resolution are you running in?

[Herra Tohtori]

Originally posted by StratComm
So is it a DDS file?  Ah screw it, I'll look for myself

There are DDS files for both wings and the hull, at least it seems so to me. There are also PCX files for both, so it seems to me that for some reason only the DDS files for hull are misread.

Or actually they are named "sharlin_body_lod*.dds" and "sharlin_fin*_lod*.dds" files, and there's DDS's and PCX's for both.

I am running on resolution 1280x1024.

Perhaps running under non-standard-mode would help...