Gamma Correction

Timmy51m

Adoxa, you’re an absolute wonder! That’s made my day!

As I suspected, that has made one hell of a difference. Space looks like the cold dark place that it should be now yet the effects look bright and sharp. No need of bloom mods anymore!

0.0 is way, way to dark, but from 0.5 upwards it’s all good. Around 0.7 seems to be ideal. Is it possible to set the slider to go from 0.5 to 1.5 instead of 0.0 to 1.0? It would be right in the usable zone then.

Thanks again Adoxa.

Gisteron

or from .5 to 1.0? so you can set it up even more precisely?

Timmy51m

Sure, that would be fantastic for me. It would be interesting to know how it pans out for other people if anyone is willing to try it out, get some impression if it’s just me that thinks this is better or whether that’s a wider view. I appreciate some people’s displays might be dimmer or the lighting in their room might be an issue.

Gisteron

in general, due to the bright starspheres a rule is - the darker the background, the better. because open space is pure black and any fire you see is totally bright as there is neither air between the fire and your eye, nor anything nearby that is big enough to blend the fire when illuminated by the light source.

Timmy51m

I’ve got a feeling you’re right about that advanced graphics option in perf.options.ini aswell. I grew curious about it after seeing it enabled by the quickfix patch, but not really noticing anything significant had changed.

I tracked down the tab for it in the options list and got it to show up in the menu, but I can’t get it to turn into a switch or anything. You can see it in the picture here:

You can put it in the list by entering a line for
“1408” (advanced graphics) in data/interface/optlist.ini

[interface]
option = 1894
option = 1334, 2443, -1, true, false, -1, -1
option = 1332, 2444, 30, true, false
option = 1408, true, false <–--------------------------------adv.graph
option = -1
option = 1896
option = 1501, 2447, 50, true, false
option = -1
option = 1897
option = 1400, 2449, 100, false, false
option = 1401, 2450, 100, false, false
option = 1495, 1769, 1, false, false
option = 1555, 1771, 0, false, false
option = 1498, -1, 1, false, false

[Audio]
option = -1
option = 1409, 2451, 100, true, false
option = 1336, 2452, 100, true, false
option = 1337, 2453, 100, true, false
option = 1918, 1791, 100, false, true, 33, 100

option = 1895, 2446, 100, true, false, -1, -1
option = -1
option = 1493, 1774, 100, true, false, 0, 100
option = 1404, 1775, 100, true, false, 0, 100
option = 1624, -1, 100, true, false, 0, 100
option = 1622, 1777, 100, true, false, 0, 100
option = 1483, 1778, 100, true, false, 0, 100
option = 1403, 1780, 100, true, false, 0, 100
option = 1402, 1779, 100, false, false, 75, 100
option = 1630, 1772, 100, false, false, 50, 100
option = 1585, 1773, 100, false, false, 50, 100
option = 1481, 1781, 100, false, false, 50, 100
option = 1623, 1782, 100, false, false, 50, 100
option = 1663, 1770, 100, false, false, 30, 100
option = -1
option = 1407, -1, 2, true, false
option = 1671, -1, 32, true, false, 0, 100
option = 1914, 2456, 100, true, false
option = 1915, 2457, 100, true, true, 0, 50

But no matter how I configure it I can’t turn it into a switch or slider or anything. Welcome to try if anyone else thinks they might be able to make it work. I’m wondering if it was actually intended as a sub menu that didn’t make it in, there are other tabs that do work that were left out for nebulas etc.

adoxa

freelancer.exe	0244F7	B889->E875 = gamma ranges from 0.5 to 1.5, not 1.0 to 2.0 ~adoxa

```(Don't forget to restore the previous patch.)

Apparently advanced graphics was supposed to be a menu - 1765 is "Opens the Advanced Graphics menu." Finding where it handles Difficulty shows that advanced graphics really does have no effect.

Timmy51m

That setting is absolutely perfect. Thanks very much Adoxa, and thanks for clearing up the advanced graphics mystery once and for all too! Have a nice day.

Timmy51m

How the hell did you find this Adoxa, do you have some sort of tool for decrypting the dll files? You’ve made me extremely curious now as to what else is hiding away in the options, haven’t seen anything related to antialiasing or anisotropic filtering on your travels have you :pint:

adoxa

I came across the menu string looking at the tips for the other options. Wondering how the difficulty option was handled, I searched my disassembly (which is all I use, along with Ollydbg) for its id and saw that’s how it gets handled. The id for advanced options is not referenced, so there’s no code to handle it.

There are references to antialias and anisotropic in rp8.dll (I use gsar to search the binaries), but I think they’re just general DX stuff, not really FL specific.

Gisteron

now antialising in FL would be really great. finally the contours stop looking mechanic in at least one game. is there also something about motion blur?
or a way to activate that stuff??

Timmy51m

If that handles the dx stuff then I would imagine it just states whether aa/af is allowed or not per object at driver level, a true/false scenario which I guess is present in all dx rendering code. Looks like we’re stuck with forcing it in the drivers then, which is fine.

Thanks for looking Adoxa, we can’t win em all can we!

Timmy51m

So how far can you actually go with the tools and resources you’ve developed for freelancer. I’ve no real idea what you do exactly or how you do it so I’m just throwing this out there. Can you actually read and edit what’s contained in the dll files or is it just limited to the types of offsets in the limit breaking?

I had a look at that rp8.dll you mentioned using the tiny hexer tool you’ve got linked on your homepage, although I see some plain text here and there it’s mostly just garbage, I guess that’s an encryption of the code. Can you read and edit that stuff?

I can make out bits and bobs, mentions of d3d8.dll, dxt1, dxt2 textures etc, then other stuff in the shading.dll like opacity and emissive texture types, also mentions of specular power (sp) and specular colour (sc), those two i was not aware of until now.

I’m guessing if I can read stuff it’s useless, if it’s encrypted is the good stuff?

FriendlyFire

There’s no “encryption”. You didn’t expect computers used plaintext commands did you?

You’re looking at assembly code in its raw form, that’s all. Commands like “mov” or “test” aren’t written in plaintext, that’d be horrendous. We’ve just attributed names to what are essentially series of bits that the processor recognizes and executes. Everything’s as plain as it gets, just not in a format humans easily understand.

Gisteron

mostly yes. adoxa is a computer veteran, coming from the days there were no simplifications and this way he learned to understand the assembly directly. did you mention specularity? gentlemen, can’t wait to use that stuff. hopefully the rendering won’t get too slow by enabling this channels in the freelancer engine (possible).

Timmy51m

FriendlyFire wrote:
There’s no “encryption”. You didn’t expect computers used plaintext commands did you?

You’re looking at assembly code in its raw form, that’s all. Commands like “mov” or “test” aren’t written in plaintext, that’d be horrendous. We’ve just attributed names to what are essentially series of bits that the processor recognizes and executes. Everything’s as plain as it gets, just not in a format humans easily understand.

Seriously, I haven’t got a clue about computer languages, other than the fact that I’m clueless about it I just figured out though that the bits I can read actually do something. I edited the d3d8.dll entries in rp8.dll to d3d9.dll and when I tried to launch FL it gave me the message “The procedure entry point Direct3DCreate8 could not be located in the dynamic link library d3d9.dll” I guess that Direct3DCreate8 is a dx8 header or whatever used to draw something, so if those headers could be changed to dx9 code then the game would run in dx9. At least I guess that would be the case. As to where the hell those headers are though, pffft! Can anyone get to that stuff?

Yeah Gist, specular power (sp) and specular colour (sc), are in the shading.dll, so perhaps you can use them in the same way as you would Dc, Ec, Et or any of the others in texture files for ships or whatever. They must already be used though because specular highlights are evident on all ships and stations.

FriendlyFire

Stuff that you can read are usually string values. They can be used for INIs, files, etc. The big part of the code we can’t (really) alter however is the assembly part. Assembly is extremely difficult to code; most progamming nowadays is made in other languages (called high-level languages like C++) which are compiled into assembly.

Timmy51m

So in short, we’re stuck with what we’ve got lol. Thanks for clearing that up.

Timmy51m

Direct3DCreate8 was also in rp8.dll so i changed that to 9 and got the message freelancer failed to initialize directx 8 please try rebooting. Could this go somewhere, is there anything else that can be changed to get through all this or is it a dead end?

FriendlyFire

Eh? No, porting to DX9 is FAR, FAR more complex than just changing a number

Timmy51m

Damnit! Well I could only hope couldn’t I. I was reading something that said that often games are written with more than one table, one for each directx version it supports, something to do with compatibility with older graphics hardware I think. Seeing as you’re required to install dx9 to run the game I was hoping they might have had it in there somewhere. It’s easy enough to point it at directx9 it would seem, it just doesn’t have support for it then.