[Cobra]

While we're at it we need to find a way to make it look like the ships are entering a vortex instead of disappearing wherever there's white.

And I can see lots of pixelation in that pic. Ew. :eep:

[Herra Tohtori]

Yeah, there's pixelation all right... but the point is, there's a whole lot less of it than in the DDS version. Compare:



That's how the DDS version is*. And that's actually relatively far... Both end up pixelated when they fill most of the screen of course, being that they are only 512x512 res effects, but which one has less pixelation/artefacts?

That's why I asked if there was uncompressed originals of higher resolution, and if they could be made available...


*to be fair, on the edges of the DDS texture the pixelation/artefacts doesn't look too bad and actually create some kind of pseudo-detail, but closer to the center it's just plain terrible IMHO...

[Gregster2k]

While we're at it we need to find a way to make it look like the ships are entering a vortex instead of disappearing wherever there's white.

And I can see lots of pixelation in that pic. Ew. :eep:

That's what I said a while ago. Problem is, without shaders, how?

[Zacam]

I can tell there is a lot less pixelation in the first image.

Mayhap be that it was the DDS options that caused that though, because I've managed (probably entirely by accident) to make some decent DDS textures.

Course, now I'm breaking in Photoshop 10 (red pill), so I dunno how well that will work out.

[Gregster2k]

Terra Hotori (EDIT: Lol, dyslexia --- Herra Tohtori)
I agree, all things that are models ought to be able to be shined or glowed. This sounds like another situation similar to the missiles not being lit originally. Maybe you should Mantis it.

Looks like we got three probs
- @Cobra: Ships not seamlessly entering/exiting portals
- @Me,S99,Axem,etc: entering/leaving ships should be lit by the portals, too (rather than abrupt dark ship coming out of bright portal)
- @Tohtori: No shinemaps/glowmaps allowed on portals

[Cobra]

Greg, the ships ARE lit. Partially, but not fully.

[Gregster2k]

Show me. o.O

[Cobra]

From my 3.6.8 screenshots thread.

[Hades]

  My Freespace2 open does not look anywere as good..... It makes me want....

[Herra Tohtori]

I can tell there is a lot less pixelation in the first image.

Mayhap be that it was the DDS options that caused that though, because I've managed (probably entirely by accident) to make some decent DDS textures.

It's more likely that DDS simply isn't at it's best at smooth gradients. I did some tests with nvDXT (nVidia's command line DDS utility), and it just seems to be so that DDS compression - regardless of being DXT1a, DXT3 or DXT5 - causes rather horrible artefacts to the subspace portal textures. Ship textures usually don't have that many smooth gradients but instead a bunch of sharper lines and borders and stuff.

Kinda like similar to JPEG compression causing much more artefacts to direct lines than to for example photographs, but in reverse? Obviously DDS allows much smaller memory use, but is it worth this kind of quality loss - that is the problem. I'd say it depends entirely on the capabilities of the PC used. Some users might benefit from having more resource-heavy but visually better version of effects... like usually.

I agree, all things that are models ought to be able to be shined or glowed. This sounds like another situation similar to the missiles not being lit originally. Maybe you should Mantis it.

Looks like we got three probs
- @Cobra: Ships not seamlessly entering/exiting portals
- @Me,S99,Axem,etc: entering/leaving ships should be lit by the portals, too (rather than abrupt dark ship coming out of bright portal)
- @Tohtori: No shinemaps/glowmaps allowed on portals

To #2 problem: I think the problem is that there's only one point light source at the center of the portal or somesuch... Increasing the amount of light sources and positioning, say, three of them to the places of the model where the white portion of texture ends and one to the center would likely make the lighting better on this particular effect. That way there would actually be light coming from more points of the portal and it would also light the sides of the ships, not just their stern.

Then it becomes a question of what happens when three squadrons of fighters and a couple cap ships jump in simultaneously, each jump point adding four point sources of light to render versus the current amount of one per warp effect... I don't know how the engine would handle it, I guess that's subject to coders' opinion.

Other option would be to implement lights that have size, not just point sources. But I can't fathom what kind of code changes that would require... I guess it's just easier to wait until shader support hits the builds and then start to figure out what can be done with it.

[Mars]

I had the idea from somewhere that the quality of your DDS textures was directly related to the performance of your video card... I know nothing of the process though.

[Herra Tohtori]

Video cards don't magically replace lost information. If there are artefacts in the texture, there will be at least the same amount of artefacts in the render...

You can simply find the subspace warp animation frames in the a_subspace.vp, extract any of them and open it in for example the GIMP. Zoom in a bit and you'll see horizontal lines, pixelation and all kinds of other nasty stuff in the files themselves.

[Gregster2k]

Greg, the ships ARE lit. Partially, but not fully.

Exactly. The whiteness from the portal seems to be ignored, while the blue edges are being lit on the Fenrises (Fenri? which is it? Fenrises or Fenri)? I don't think that picture is accurate representation of the problem. It has a sun and a planet in it and those reflecting off the ships may easily be mistaken for subspace portal lighting. For a test picture, create a mission where there are no suns and the ambient lighting is pitch black, then have one ship enter or exit a subspace portal. Then have two at once do it.

As Axem said, it appears that portals light up ships around them, but not the ship that's actually going in or coming out. The other issues at hand are the pixelization you guys are talking about, the lack of shine or glowmap support, and the "seam" created where the ship's edge ends and the center of the vortex begins. But I think there's only so much we can do right now. If we just keep upping the resolution to fix the pixelization, won't that compromise performance? Is it possible to put mip-mapped animated textures on a subspace portal to conserve resources?

[Cobra]

Umm, Greg, the lighting in Freespace 2 is set to light only one side of the Fenris cruisers. Light doesn't "reflect" off of metal. Yet.

Those cruisers are being lit up by the vortexes in a crude way.

[Gregster2k]

Figured as much. I'm just wondering how we can work around it. And I was using the "reflect" term loosely to describe the hulls being lit. Sorry about that.

[taylor]

Lighting issues:
I've previously mentioned in another thread about the lighting problems.  Basically it's just a point light which is positioned in the center of the vortex.  This creates a problem for the ships entering/exiting the vortex since that type of light isn't well suited for lighting objects like that.  Also, the light ends up inside the model as it's moving through the vortex and thus kills the lighting effect on that ship.  Ships that are further away get much better lighting that the ship that controls the vortex.

I have a plan to try and address that though.  I'm going to change it from a point light to a tube light, where the light is basically spewing out from the vortex in a cone (ie, a flashlight).  The source of the light will also be pushed back behind the vortex, so that it can give better lighting to the ship all the way through the vortex.  This isn't really a difficult set of changes, but it's going to take a bit of tweaking, and that requires time.  It's basically just too minor of an effect to spend the required time on right now.  But I'll probably make the necessary changes after 3.6.10 is released in a couple of months.

Clipping issues:
Known, but there really isn't anything we can do about without volumetric fogging.  But fogging messes up texture rendering (which is why you don't get spec maps or env maps in fullneb missions), so it's a dead issue either way.  After I get the time to finish the shader code then we will be able to handle fogging properly, without messing up texture rendering.  We can take a look at volumetric fog at that point to try and make this look better.  But, obviously, we'll have shaders at that point and I wouldn't be surprised if someone came up with a shader which gives an ever better effect.

(EDIT: hit the wrong button. )

Texture issues:
The warpmap is one of those few effects that sort of needs to be 1024x1024.  It would be a memory hog, at 4 times the memory requirement of the 512x512 version, but it would look better.  At 1024x1024, and using the correct nvdxt settings, the blockiness isn't nearly as bad as it is with the 512x512 version.

[takashi]

my revamped GTF donar disagrees...most of the time.

[DaBrain]

Wasn't there a 1024² version of the effect?

Just asking... I'd like to add it to the adv effects VP.

[RazorsKiss]

... GTF donar ...

What is that? Donated Sonar?

[takashi]

REALY old ship that i touched up. with alpha channles, shinemaps, bumpmaps for when 3.7 comes, glowmaps, fixed tables, fixed .pof data: to put it simply, the whole ship was screwed up.