[IronForge]

This is what I was expecting.

How do I make my freespace look as good as this?




I used the open installer, installed EVERYTHING. Yet it still does not look like this.

Any help appreciated. I was off FS for a while as it gave me problems with freelancer, but now that I ditched that I'm back

Yes, it looks VERY GOOD, much better than when I last played it. My most profound complements to the upgrade team, they sure did a FANTASTIC job.

[Galemp]

So what does it look like? Screenshots, please. (Press PrintScreen in-game, then go to the Screenshots directory of your FreeSpace2 folder.)

[General Battuta]

Do you have postprocessing on?

[Commander Zane]

I just noticed something.
My screenshot of the Carthage (Think this was Homesick) there uses the same textures Droid did that's used on the Carthage in WiH.

[-Norbert-]

Lighting Settings!
Take a look here: http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Sample_Lighting_Settings

At least you'll get something like on the second screenshot, though this isn't an original Orion like you see them in the main campaign, but a retextured version from some mod (Sol a History, Dawn of Sol and Blue Planet WiH had those, among others) if I'm not mistaken. The Orion should have more yellowish lights, not blue like this.
The first somehow looks handdrawn to me . I know I'm almost certainly wrong on this, but I somehow get that impression. And I havn't seen those ships before.

[Commander Zane]

Well any screenshots of the Orion I use have the following:
TrashMan's Orion (Much cleaner looking and removal of a messy texture is awsm), and either Droid's Dark Orion textures (Second screenshot on the OP, or the Carthage on WiH), or a combination of Dark Orion textures and DoS textures.

The first screenshot has a retextured Tennyson and a station I've never seen before.

[Droid803]

The station is in Stratcomm's Modeldump.

[IronForge]

Postprocessing? How do I turn it on and what is it for?

Also my settings are everything set to highest and lighting settins are default (-ambient_factor 70 -spec_exp 8.2 -spec_tube 1.0 -spec_point 8.6 -spec_static 3.5)


These are my screens from blue planet, playing at 1280x800 res with trilinear filtering, 16xAA and AF
Looks really good, but the screenshots had a cold, dark and glossy feel.

[-Norbert-]

Post Processing has it's own flag in the Launcher under the Experimental tab. You might need additional table and effect files though, which you can find here http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=56458.0, unless that comes now included with the new releases. Just try to switch it on, if the game crashes get the files from the link.
One more thing, if you use post-processing, AA won't work, but I think it's worth the tradeoff (at least on the 1680x1050 resolution I'm playing with).

As for the lighting settings, you should really try out some of those settings on the Wiki (link from my previous post). They look better than default. I'm currently using Herra Tohtoris settings.