Freelancer Graphic mods
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Hey forum people! I’m looking for a mod that has/uses graphic improvements for vanilla freelancer… I know there is Real Space, Bloom and HD Textures… but I haven’t seen anything that has all of those things as a stand alone mod or compatible with each other… anyone have some good recommendations?
I have tried to activate these mods together but it seems to break a lot of things. Like cutscenes in the story mode are black screens. Some other odd things have happened as well.
I’m aware of crossfire and 88flak, and discovery. Though it seems like those heavily modify the game… Some of them don’t support single player story mode. The ones that do have their server rule-billboards pasted all over the place…
If nothing else maybe someone could point me in the right direction as to how I might be able to combine these sorts of things on my own?
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Bloom (ENB) is a simple addon… but can cause strange GFX artifacts and won’t work on all cards/systems
The HD texture pack just goes straight over the original game… its a full replacer mod and if i can recall (been a while) has no data overwrites
Louva’s RS… hmm is pretty awesome, but its alot of code… and will need manual integration… although if you started with that, the other 2 above should work. (good luck getting a response from louva though)
88Flak is another Whole complete mod… trying to mix this and RS will fail.
There really isn’t a “all in one” upgrade… we’ve tried that… but not everyone was happy and it caused confusion with ppl thinking they could just load it over another mod (or vice versa) server admins were not impressed (lolz) it however was a great idea.
The pieces of the puzzle you seek are around… but scattered, most work alongside each other nicley with some code alteration… may i suggest to you Adoxa’s JFLP to begin… (highly stable) then add the HD textures pack, and whatever takes your fancy… there is no GFX pack though other than WHY485’s and that takes some coding to integrate.
I’d send ye to my mod… as its kinda what you seek… but im only 25% along my plan… and there are many gaps (still pre-beta) and i ripped out the story (replaceable though) for a testing sandbox OSP…
Best of luck.
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Thanks for the helpful info. I really enjoy playing through the original story mode of freelancer. Would love to do it with a better visual experience. Or maybe on a new engine (cough) Unreal 3 engine (cough)
I had heard Louva is doing full time game development/working his butt off. So a chance of seeing any combo graphics mod is probably not likely.
I was thinking about looking at the guts of the mods I’ve got and seeing where I could put two and two together. Technically if it is done right any other mod should be able to install with it… sort of like using the SDK as a base for a mod…
But here is a question, if I were to feel so compelled as to go through every texture in the game and resize it to 1024x1024, maybe clean it up more… I would need a mat importer for ms3d? or is there a library/download for these already?
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there’s a download with all the main textures in .tga & .dds … but i can’t quickly find it… but it is there
also… some tools you may want are the “UTFImageExporter” , “UTF_EditorV1_0_0_4” & Adoxa’s “FreelancerXMLProject”
with those 3 tools on hand you can extract/replace everything… there all here in the downloads section… somewhere (try moding downloads 1st)
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an important upgrade is adoxa’s gamma hack. it puts in some contrast while it does not interact with the game, the onboard hardware and even not with every mod. some anticheats however recognise the program hack and detect it as cheating. combined with some other features, some coding and utf editing you can reach an effect similar to bloom but without any interactions with other graphics-only mods.
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Also worth to mention:
1 Shattered Worlds: War-Torn
2. Plasmafire -
Bas… although i agree those 2 mods look excellent… there hardly use-able sources to work from or take from… that could get them into a ton of deep s*#t, just sayin
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That ubergraphics mod looks pretty good. Too bad it breaks the mod I’m running currently.
Mostly because it modifies some of the equipment entries/ship entries….This is my problem. I’m looking for something that’s just a pure graphics mod. No music addons, no equipments, no ships. No stat changes. Nothing. Just graphics. If that uber mod did that, it would be a must have for everyone… (integrated with the SDK 1.3 would perfect it)
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The problem with that, is that it isn’t easy to do such a thing without code changes. The only way you could “safely” make a graphics mod for maximum compatibility is a graphics mod entirely consisting of replacement ALEs. My own effects pack has a couple effects that are direct over-writes of the vanilla effects, namely the missile trails. The rest of them require code changes to work correctly. Effects are just too tightly integrated into equipment and code to make an easily portable solution, especially when you are talking about more complex ones that involve debris.
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I guess then I’m really just looking for a more elaborate mod activation… if I had that activated first… and then activated another mod over it… “This entry already exists, overwrite it?”
Something like that while time consuming… would be more “effective”.
I checked out Plasmafire but couldn’t find a download or an english description of it anywhere.
Oh well. I guess I can just stick to texture modding for now. Thanks for the suggestions.
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Bump mapping is very buggy in Freelancer. By very buggy I mean 90% of the time it doesn’t work correctly. From all I’ve seen from BM attempts… stuff ends up completely black/missing lighting effects or environment mapping.
I wouldn’t know much on how it is implemented. The game is capable of it but on a very low level. Would involve a lot of editing of the normal mapping of a majority of the textures in the game to get a reasonable look.
Not many people are willing to take the time to do it. Maybe when I’m more comfortable/familiar with the utf editor and how it works… I can look into doing normal maps on the side. However right now my priority is to give freelancer a smoother look without any fancy engine tweaks.
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Bump mapping and normal mapping are the same thing. There is another thread here that has a bit of information about bump mapping in freelancer. The normal maps are allowed to be in greyscale only, which when rendered acts more like a height map.
Meaning any dark or light spots on the texture will look like it has depth/layers when rendered in game. It takes some special DLL’s for bump mapping to work.
Again though its very very buggy.
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No. Freelancer has no bump mapping.
The other “bump mapping” thread is actually about detail maps which give textures a “detail” layer, but that doesnt have anything to do with bump mapping.
Meaning any dark or light spots on the texture will look like it has depth/layers when rendered in game. It takes some special DLL’s for bump mapping to work.
Do you mean parallax mapping via the ENBSeries shader?
That’s completely bugged and not usable at all. -
That’s not bump mapping. It’s just taking a normal map and applying it to the diffuse texture, ie useless.
I think many people just throw around the words “bump mapping” and “normal mapping” without even knowing what the hell they’re talking about. There is no bump mapping nor normal mapping within FL.
