[Objekt]

What the heck is this?  I see this odd banding on both planets in the first mission of Cardinal Spear.



Speaking of Cardinal Spear, I was wondering whether it's possible to have more highly-detailed models.  In the Tech Room, I can see that the Hercules and a few others have a ridiculous level of detail: You can actually see the pilot sitting in the cockpit.   Exactly which fighters have had models done with that level of detail?  It looked incredible when I was playing the Freespace 1 port, and I was wondering whether there's more to see.

[Herra Tohtori]

Hmmm...  probably again the texture size making things problematic with your particular graphics card, since those planets use fairly big ones to look relatively good. There was link to resized smaller versions in the re-release topic - with pretty familiar problem reports - but they only give a disturbing 404'd flash animation.

Anyhow, you can either deal with the problem yourself or wait for someone to make a package of re-sized planet textures and upload it somewhere... If you want to do it yourself, you need a program to open the Cardinal Spear VP file (search for Maja VP editor on the forums, it's pretty good replacement for Descent Manager VPTools as well as VPMage), navigate to internal data/maps/ directory within the VP file, extract the huge textures, resize them and put them in your ../CardinalSpear/data/maps/ directory, which will cause them to override the huge non-functional ones.

It's pretty much my fault for not considering texture size limitations before sending the stuff ahead, so quite a few people ended up having to fiddle around the problem. Oh well, can't make an omelet...

Regarding high-poly ships, you get a lot of them when you use FS2_Open mediaVP's in conjunction with FSPort and Cardinal Spear (-mod CardinalSpear,FSPort,mediavps), but I won't guarantee complete compatibility off the top of my hat. They might have some unwanted effects on some things, depending from a lot of things including the order in which the mods are loaded and which tables override which), but it's worth it in my opinion.

I can't remember right now what all models have been re-modeled to higher polycount, but they are rather plentiful indeed.

[Jeff Vader]

Oh yeah. I removed the planet texture files from my site at one point and then lost them permanently when I did a reinstall on my rig. I can redo and upload them when I get home (which would be in roughly 3-4 hours).

[Objekt]

My video card is an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro with 128 MB RAM.  Maximum texture size is supposed to be 2048 x 2048, according to http://www.delphi3d.net/hardware/viewreport.php?report=1569.  That's freaking gigantic, way bigger than the whole screen.  Are you telling me your planet texture is bigger than that?!

FWIW, I had no problems with the exquisitely-detailed Lucifer model, with its 1600x1000 texture.

Also note, the instructions included with the Freespace Port for enabling ultra-high-res textures are obsolete or something.  Here's what the included README says:

"This download includes high-resolution texture maps for many FS2 ships, including the SD Lucifer, GTC Fenris/Leviathan, and PVC Aten, and all FS1 fighters and bombers. To use these textures at their maximum resolution, you will need to alter your registry. Only do this if you are familiar with registry editing, as serious damage can result from tampering!
-On Windows 95/98/ME, click Start->Run and type in REGEDIT. If you are running NT/2000/XP, type REGEDT32.
-Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Volition/FreeSpace2. You will need to add two new DWORD entries to the keys found there.
-D3DTextureDivider
Sets the rendering routines based on amount of texture RAM:
0: autodetect as below
1: optimize for > 16 MB
2: optimize for > 8 MB
3: optimize for > 4 MB
4: optimize for <= 4 MB
else: same as 4
I've found that a value of 1 works for me.
-D3DUseLargeTextures
0: use 256 as max textures size (default)
else: max size the card can use as the max
The Lucifer texture is approximately 1600x1000, so setting this for 1600 will enable it to be shown at full scale. Consult your video card documentation to see what the maximum texture resolution it supports is."

There is no "-D3DTextureDivider" entry in that part of my registry, but I do have the -D3DUseLargeTextures entry.  It must be set to the right value, because like I said, the Lucifer looks incredibly good, and my video card is well capable of handling huge textures.

[Jeff Vader]

Awright, here we go. What Herra Tohtori said. Extract to \cardinalspear\data\maps and you should be alright.

[Objekt]

Well, now that's an improvement - planets are actual objects, rather than infinitely-distant pieces of the background.  Are there any plans to make use of that in missions?  Although, it doesn't seem the planets are solid -  I just flew right through the Earth when running the first CS mission in the simulator.

[Herra Tohtori]

I took a very simplistic approach to the planets and chose to view them as visual effects (much like subspace vortices and shockwaves), and didn't bother at all with collisions, so yes, you can just fly right through them if you take the time to go at them. Mostly they are far away enough that in normal missions it isn't an issue... but it also became an advantage with the rings of one of the planet, which produced kinda cool effect when you could actually fly through the rings.

But like I said, in most missions it doesn't matter anyways unless you use some heavy time compression to get to the planets anyway... and I don't think there's any plans to use the planets as anything else than visuals in any missions, bt you would need to ask all the mission designers of their future plans.

And yes, the planet textures I made are exactly that big... for the precise reason that I wanted the planets to look relatively good even when you went closer to them than the actual mission area, so I kinda went a little overboard with the texture sizes and it came back to bite me... Not to mention I should've used 1:2 ratio with them anyway (due to the manner they are wrapped over the sphere surfaces) and not square textures, but oh well. Can't remember if I was sensible enough to use 4096x2048 size, or if I used 4096x4096... if it's the latter and if you wish to have some improvement in memory use, you could as well resize the textures to 2048x1024 and have the approximate same quality as with 2048x2048, if they indeed were square.

Also, don't bother with anything related to D3D and graphics. D3D hasn't been officially supported in at least a hundred years and it's pretty much became like an appendix (the mostly useless little piece of gut) in the code, a remnant that sometimes infects and has to be surgically removed. It'll very likely suffer that fate in close future unless some mad DirectX coder comes and muddles through the D3D rendering code section, modernizes it to the level of current OGL code and de-bugs it.

[Objekt]

Right, I completely forgot I was using OpenGL rendering anyway.  Makes sense that D3D settings wouldn't matter.

It would be neat if ships could actually orbit planets, burn up when re-entering, etc.  I don't know whether the FS2 engine comes even close to supporting such shenanigans.  Maybe what I really want is a graphical update of the good old Elite series.

[Herra Tohtori]

Well, with scripting it should actually be possible to add point gravity sources to the physics engine, but it would make low orbit missions and navigation quite literally nightmarish. And I shudder to think how the engine would handle situations like, for example, multiple object gravitational fields that would be required in making things like moons orbiting planet and ships orbiting the closest gravity source possible, and I really don't know if it's possible to actually bind the gravity sources to objects so that it would actually be the planet pulling you towards it, and not just an acceleration value towards certain point in the reference frame...

But anyway, if you want to brush up your orbital navigational skills, try out Orbiter, a realistic space flight simulator.

[Objekt]

Freespace doesn't really have Newtonian mechanics anyway, and I see no point in spoling the fun by adding them.  You don't get turning 'n' burning dogfights with "realistic" physics.  Star Wars took this concept to the bank.

I've played Orbiter on my Kubuntu install.  I also played Elite and Elite "3", aka Frontier First Encounters (FFE), on my older PCs.  Those also implement more or less realistic spaceflight, along with atmospheric maneuvering and landing on planets.  However, there's an artificial speed limit of 2/3 c, and no relativistic effects - which would likely be a royal pain to implement properly anyhow.

FFE had a lot of potential, but was released in an unfinished state, with broken missions that made it impossible to complete the storyline.  Come to think of it, I wonder whether a fan community has picked up FFE and updated it - or even added to it - as has been done with FS2?

[colecampbell666]

Didn't some guy make something to the tone of the planetary missions thing? And I believe that gravity points are scheduled for some version of the SCP. 3.6.10 or.11, I think.

[Grizzly]

Right, I completely forgot I was using OpenGL rendering anyway.  Makes sense that D3D settings wouldn't matter.

It would be neat if ships could actually orbit planets, burn up when re-entering, etc.  I don't know whether the FS2 engine comes even close to supporting such shenanigans.  Maybe what I really want is a graphical update of the good old Elite series.

Vega Strike?