Well, life has repeatedly thrown wrenches at both Talhydras' life and mine, and it seems like the same is true for some of the SCP critical to getting their release candidate out too, so... that thing about a few weeks from testing feels close at hand, but not any closer than it did the last time I said it, so, it'll be done when it's done I guess.
Tal has been plugging away at the Marathon bomber I posted a little bit back, deep into the texturing of it.
I think it's turning out pretty great, and sooner or later I'll have to start editing/making missions to give it a chance to shine.
Speaking of shining, I've been distracted a lot by the shader work Qaz has been doing, and got sucked into that. There's stuff on the horizon there that's very visually exciting for me... but it nerd sniped me hard along two different angles. One angle is hopefully going to grow into an FSO code contribution, but that's a topic for another time and place. The
other angle concerns Warmachine more specifically though.
Simply put, the good old TEI ship models, while glorious works of art in their own rights, are done a disservice by the modern game, both the lighting engine and how they compare to the recent monsters produced by Nyx and Oddgrim, and AoA puts them right next to one another often. That's by no means a critique, it's a nessicary evil, but messing with the shader options made those new ships look even better, while doing next to nothing for the TEI ships.
That largely owes to the fact that the BP ships don't have PBR textures, coming from the era before that. It is highly impractical to overhaul so many ships with their complex textures, and with PBR textures you'd probably have to start over from scratch to get good results, since the workflow is just so different from the old way.
So anyway, last week I overhauled all the TEI ships to update their original textures to be (
sorta) PBR assets.
In some lighting conditions the effect can be subtle, in others it can be dramatic. The conversion was highly automated, but I strove to tune the pipeline to bring out some of the different materials implied by the old textures as much I could. It still is humbled by the MVPs' PBR capital ships, or the texture work Talhydras has been doing lately, but it is enough of an upgrade to really make me feel better about seeing the ships together.
Of course, these textures will be made available to BP whenever they want, and anyone else using these ships in a mod is welcome to them as well. And if anyone wants to update other old ships, I'm not offering that as a service but I'd be happy to talk to you about how I did it.
And finally, as a break from texturing Talhydras surprised me by revealing a deeper affection for the Hecate than I ever suspected and churned out a Warmachine-era upgrade package for it, and after he added it to Isen I recorded a run, with fully polished up TIE textures to boot.
Tomorrow night I might post a shinier Icarus too.