[alco17]

Hi. I have been a longtime fan of Freespace, and recently got into the SCP. I worked tirelessly to get the new graphics but never achieved those spectacular lighting effects seen in the posted screenshots.

I got all the other effects, afterburner, more stars, new textures and they look nice but the screenshots with the lighting effects look infinitely better.

I downloaded and put all the .vp files into their own special folder in the freespace folder, including patches, selected all the right stuff in features according to many FAQ's yet still I am stuck with less than appealing graphics...

PLEASE HELP

[Mars]

System specifications please

[StratComm]

You may not have gotten the mod selection right.  What's your command line?  OGL or D3D?  (the latter is probably the most important).  We would love to help but we need a little more info from you.

[alco17]

i got a 1.8 celeron, ati 9600XT 256mb, 1gig of ram

its under Open GL

[StratComm]

Shines should definitly work under that setup then.  I suspect it's in your launcher flags or in the way you've got your mod directory set up (you do have mv_textures, right?) but I really still can't tell for sure.  Another thing to try would be to add -ambient_factor 85 to in the custom flags window, as sometimes the high ambient lighting can confuse people as to whether shines are working or not.

[WMCoolmon]

Someone should write a wiki article from this page, or write up a guide (in HTML) of what the solutions are...I've gotten this complaint a lot and offered suggestions, but I never hear back from people about whether it worked or not.

[Mars]

Uh... I don't want to sound negitive or anything, but speaking as the one with no idea what they're doing on the wiki, it should be somone other than me, or else somthing terrible (that everyone will regret, especially me) will happen. Should this topic be split into the Wiki forum?

[alco17]

hey guys, the ambient lighting did the trick, now the only thing for me to do is upgrade my ****ty computer.

Thanks heaps

[CP5670]

I think the default value for ambient factor really needs to be changed to something lower. If you leave it as it as, the lighting hardly looks any different from retail FS2. It's not one of the launcher options either and most new people will be unaware of it unless they ask around here.

[StratComm]

The only problem is that the ambient factor really low looks absolutely terrible without glow (maybe shines too, but particularly glow) so just lowering it would be bad for those who want the old-school feel or need it to get the game to run.  Now automatically lowering it to somewhere in the 75-85 range (unless manually overridden of course) when -glow is active would indeed be a good idea.

hey guys, the ambient lighting did the trick, now the only thing for me to do is upgrade my ****ty computer.

Thanks heaps

Great to hear

[karajorma]

Uh... I don't want to sound negitive or anything, but speaking as the one with no idea what they're doing on the wiki, it should be somone other than me, or else somthing terrible (that everyone will regret, especially me) will happen. Should this topic be split into the Wiki forum?

Writing it here and letting someone else transfer it is better than doing nothing

[neoterran]

you won't get any thruster glows using the 3.6.8 Delta mvps unless you add a table file called species-defs.tbl in the data/tables folder in the mediavps (create it if it's not there). Newbies won't know about this. That table file can be found on these forums somewhere.. I'd attach it but the board won't let me for some reason.

[Wanderer]

Try this species_defs.tbl. It works on post-January CVS builds  and it disables retail modelled thrusterglows and switches on the glowing SCP thrusters

[Gregster2k]

Now automatically lowering it to somewhere in the 75-85 range (unless manually overridden of course) when -glow is active would indeed be a good idea.