everything looks amazing ! Nice work !

Hi folks!

The TSP download archive is currently hosted here in a fairly messy fashion. We’re using Backblaze to host it and generating unique links that change every day and then piped into the downloads page.

The archive as it exists now is a mess. There’s a ton of duplicate, non-relevant content and the stuff that is interesting is all over the place with often non-descriptive file names and no description.

I’d like to kick off an initiative to try and clean some of this up, remove files that shouldn’t be there, write descriptions for the ones that do and get screenshots for software and mods where relevant.

There’s also the question of what to do with video and image content. There’s quite a few old clan videos, mod showcases and other things that I’d love to make available on a platform like YouTube for easy viewing, but I’m not really sure where we stand with regards to uploading without permission. There’s also things like old forum signatures which I’d like to preserve but don’t really fit in with the archived content as a whole.

I’ve had a look over the archive as a whole and there’s a ton of interesting stuff in there. If anyone’s interested or keen to get stuck in, I’d love a bit of help trawling through it and cleaning it up. Let me know here or on Discord if you’ve got any thoughts on how to proceed with it all.

I wanted to give you guys a quick update after my last post. I still am working on the renderer and have fixed many bugs (mostly visible rendering issues) since the public beta release. Also there has been a lot of optimization work and I am currently working on some more optimizations for the shadow calculation/rendering. After that the list of remaining bugs is very small (and are minor ones). It should be out of beta once the last ones are fixed. Then I hopefully can start working on releasing the tools so that everyone can use it.

One recent change is the improvement of the light scattering. Now it knows where the suns are and only is enabled for them (before that it only used the first light source (not sun!) in the system). Also you now can have up to 8 suns with light scattering in one scene (the maximum limit actually is currently arbitrary set from me). You can reduce the maximum number in the settings window of the renderer (e.g. if you have a slower graphics card).
If no sun is visible light scattering is disabled now (before it was always on when in an asteroid field or nebula).

Example screenshot of 3 suns with light scattering:

One bug that has given me trouble for a very long time is some weird memory behaviour. After some time the renderer just could not reserve any more memory resulting in missing textures and crash of Freelancer shortly after. On some PCs this even was after 15 minutes when switching between many systems (I finally was able to reproduce it after switching nonstop systems for about 45 minutes on my PC). For the technically inclined: Address Sanitizer using VS2022 (https://learn.microsoft.com/de-de/cpp/sanitizers/asan?view=msvc-170 and Visual Leak Detector using VS2017) do not find anything. Also lets just say I usually know how to avoid and also find memory leaks.

My current (also not so good solution) is to enable the Large Adress Aware flag for the Freelancer.exe. After I have had the registry setting “MEM_TOP_DOWN” on for some weeks I can at least confirm that Freelancer has no problem with the flag (while the registry setting funnily broke some windows 7 control panel applications, meaning they are not large address aware). For now that solved it for our players (unless you play for lots of hours).

I suspect memory fragmentaion going on here, but that remains to be seen. I will come back to this later and it also might have disappeared by then due to my optimization work and code cleanup process.

I was planning for some time now to post some sort of FAQ thread where I explain what the renderer can do and what you need to do to convert your mod, but (as always) I did not have the time to do that, yet.