[Freelancer Mod News]Official Roleplay guide and DX9 Updates

Sushi

All I can say it has been a heck of week in development. That’s to do with a few factors, one mainly being I’ve been on vacation for a week from my residency program. Fortunately, this has allowed me to dedicate my time working on some of the models in the mod and getting them to use the full capabilities of the DX9 engine. As a result, I’ve been able to upgrade all 107 ships of our shiplist. To see that link, click here. About 85% of those ships have normal and specular mapping applied. The rest will be added at a later date when we upgrade the XWAUP ships we’re currently using for the mod. For those of you that have missed some of the videos, here’s two of my favourites:

YT-2400
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YT-2400 - Normal and Specular Mapping - Mod DB

Gallofree Transport
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GR-75 Gallofree Transport - Mod DB
Now that the ship models have been completed, I’ve focused my remaining vacation getting our stations up to par with our ship models. The list is only 30 models, however, the models themselves are more intricate because of the way they were designed. That being said, I’ve completed about 40% of the list in the past few days and hope to have the remainder done in another week or two. Here’s some footage of that:

Also, for those of you that are interested in following the day-to-day progress of the mod, I’d take a look at Qi’s worklog for all his doings…he’s going to be creating some wonderful things for the mod. Take a look at that link here.

Not only Qi has been working on the site, Darkforce, our RP lead writer/developer, has been putting the Official RP Guide, onto the website for ease of use of the players. Take a look at this preliminary work here.

Quite a week, I must say.

As always, any comments, suggestions or questions are welcomed!
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Timmy51m

You’re normal maps are unusual for metal objects Sushi. It reminds me of my apprentice days when I used to smash the hell out of sheet metal with a ball pein hammer on occasion, all lumps and bumps. Quite a wild effect fair play!

I’ve been looking at all the normal maps I’ve got for ships and stations in other games like X3, spaceforce etc and they all have the same theme, accentuate the edges of the panels etc, but none of them make the panel look like it’s been hammered. Your maps are more like rock and stone surface normal maps. Mucking about with ship textures with the nvidia plugin for photoshop I had to blur the hell out of a texture to get that effect which ruined the edges of the panels. Be interesting to see your ships in close up and larger pictures.

If you don’t mind me asking, out of curiosity, can you just use normal maps and not use specular maps with your engine? Will freelancer default to it’s own specular effect if you don’t use a specular map for an object?

Good progress by the way, getting a real sense of just how close you are to your goal now, looking forward to it!

Sushi

Thanks, Timmy. Ya, I taken a bit of a different approach with the normal and specular mapping. I really liked the more worn look of the hull of the ships as it reflects where we are in the timeline of the mod. We’re currently in 8-12ABY. The great wars have finished. There’s tremendous amount of rebuilding that is taking place with all the groups. I imagine that most of their military forces aren’t using brand new ships, rather ones that have seen a few battles, here or there. So, that’s the reason I’ve done the normal map the way I did. That being said, I can easily change them all in few seconds with crazy bump

As for maps, yep, I pretty sure you can use one map or the other. I’d have to ask W0dk4 more about that.

Thanks for the kudos otherwise.

w0dk4

No need for spec maps, just specify the Sp node in the material (specular power) as well as the Sc node (specular intensity) and it will apply that as the specular term.

Timmy51m

Don’t change them Sushi, they look well freaky Thanks for the info oh great drunken one!