DX8 to DX9

Kaytfoh

Hey guys, I’ve been looking at some of the advances you guys have made, and my god the graphical enhancements with bloom and colour correction with dynamic lighting etc is amazing.

Has this functionality been released to the public yet? Because I would love to use it in my own project with the proper credit of course.

My entire project is to update the vanilla freelancer installation with the new engine effects, hi-res textures, ships and stations all bump and spec mapped, better ALE effects and a lot more.

I used to play this game a while back but real life things got in the way, it’s all come back to me now … I played on the Voideserver under the tag of Zyos, life has settled down for me and I have missed this game.

I remember you friendlyfire, remember I showed you the stargate deadalus mod I was working on a few years back? Heh, and so many other names I can’t remember at the moment.

I digress, I can haz dx9 pleaz??

Bas

Not yet, but the devs of FW: TOW said that they will release that stuff along with their mod. The release date of TOW is set to 15th dec or sth like that.

Kaytfoh

Awesome, I’m guessing its being hooked in via dll form into dacom.ini or some similiar process, any exe hooks as well?

Xarian_Prime

No idea… i’ve fished for info on this but came up pretty empty my guess is there busy as all hell right now… and im just gonna see what comes on the 15th.

Would however be nice to know whats ahead moding wise so i could get a serious head start on whatever it is that i’ll be doing for the next few months… yeah… that statements just about as vague as any info on it… lol still… i understand why the secrecy is needed, and me respects that, its just frustrating having so much on hold, that may or may not need be on hold… etc, etc

All the best to em… it’s all good as long as i don’t look at Freelancer at the moment, hehe, but that’s just me… i work like that and hate having to do anything twice lol

FriendlyFire

If you want a headstart, make normal and specular maps. That’ll keep you busy for a while.

It’s the main change you can do.

Ezekiel

then, what doing with these maps ???

Goulash

Then we wait. I’ve made loads of them for some models i have on standby for DX9. Clock is ticking….tick…tock

Kaytfoh

I’ve got a lot of stuff to remember/catch up on before this gets released anyways.

Gotta start my modular script framework all over again heh, got Argh’s toolkit again so I will start there.

I’m not touching anything but vanilla for a long ass time with this project so anyone who’s already bump and spec mapped vanilla ships would be nice, stations will need to be done after this

Emmanuel

Actually Freelancer has always been DX 9. I remember that because back in the day I tried to play it with a DX 8.1 card and it said that it couldn’t.

Btw. Does Freelancer support reflection maps? Because I’ve been looking around and what is really missing in Freelancer are some good real-time reflections. I’m sure it can do it, but there is nothing in the game that really does it.

Sizer

Yeah, no. Freelancer was DEFINITELY DX8 prior to this. It’s rather well documented. It’s far more likely that you had another problem. Considering that the game was developed from 99-2002 and released in 03, when DX9 was first released in Dec of 02… yeah.

Emmanuel

Freelancer Minimum Requirements:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/814552

-A 600 megahertz (MHz) processor.
-128 megabytes (MB) of RAM.
-A 4x CD or DVD drive.
-1.3 gigabytes (GB) of available hard-disk space, plus space for saved games. Additional space is required for the Windows paging file and for the installation of DirectX 9.
-16 MB video adapter with DirectX 9 compatible driver.
-A sound card that is compatible with DirectX 9.

My Windows said that it requires a video card with a DirectX 9 compatible driver.

Sizer

It’s still running through DX8. Trust me on this one. And I’m sure either W0d or FF will show up in this thread within the next day with a far more detailed explanation than mine.

Schmackbolzen

Since I also hooked the rendering stuff I can confirm that it is dx8. There are a few more who did this and we all agree on that it is dx8.

w0dk4

You can easily see that by looking at what library Freelancer loads, and that is d3d8.dll

FriendlyFire

And no, the game doesn’t support real-time reflections. At best you have static cube maps which somewhat imitate specular lighting.

Emmanuel

Then what’s with the phony requirements? Oh well, I guess you guys are right. I mean, you have been modding the engine after all.

No real-time reflections? Awww. But I can understand why since you don’t really need that much real-time reflections in space anyway.

FriendlyFire

It’s more than that; try actually thinking how games looked back in '03 and you’ll quickly recall that reflections were not around much if at all.

Considering FL wasn’t the prettiest game around on release, it’s not exactly surprising really. The game IS 8 years old!

Kaytfoh

Slightly off and on topic here.

When the push to dx9 is made does this mean that overlays can be done and injected into the game? I’m sure we have all the interface calls down by now so might it be time to create a new UI? Or would that be too much work compared to editing the original?

FriendlyFire

We actually have no hook into the interface at all. Collecting a list of all the calls would be an extremely large job, plus good luck emulating navmap support.

Kaytfoh

Hey FF, you don’t happen to still have a copy of my INI coding style or the stargate daedalus ship mod I did several years back with the plasma beam weapons do ya? lol - I know it’s a longshot.

It’s just I’d rather save myself having to re-create the coding from scratch heh, if not no big I just thought I’d ask that’s all.