[Freelancer Mod News]New Inherent Anti-Aliasing Support for this Star Wars mod for Freelancer!

Sushi

Over the past month the team has been working on tying up loose ends of mod development. With release date 4 ½ months away, we’re dotting our I’s and crossing our T’s.

With that, the last few ships on our shiplists are being touched up or being completely remade. Sizer, our Model/Texture Lead Developer, has been working around the clock to get the last few of our models in game and textured. Below you can see his completely redone Corellian Cruiser:

Here’s what this awesome capital ship looks like in game with the normal and specular maps applied:

FriendlyFire has been working on improving the effects with the new graphical improvements of soft shading and dynamic lighting that W0dk4 has worked on. He’s vastly improved upon all the explosions, missile/torpedo trails and laser/turbos of the mod. He’s also started to work on some special effects that you’ll see littered throughout the mod upon release. Below is a teaser of one of these such effects:

The other big news is the inherent integration of anti-aliasing to Freeworlds: Tides of War. However, I’ll let W0dk4 cover this topic since he was the one to bring it to Freelancer:

Since we have upgraded the Freelancer engine from Direct3D8 forward rendering to Direct3D9 deferred rendering we had a new problem - lacking anti aliasing. This is a common issue for deferred rendering on Direct3D9. Luckily for us, just recently a new post-process image-based anti-aliasing technique has been developed by Timothy Lottes from NVidia. The technique is called FXAA, which stands for “Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing” and is being used by many recent and upcoming games. It offers a great deal of quality while the performance loss is minimal.

We implemented the latest version (FXAA 3.11). If you want to read more on the technique, check out this whitepaper.

Please click the images below and view the original to see the true beauty of this graphical improvement:

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

AA has had a hell of an impact on that ISD, looks like someones taken a grinder to it. Sounds like your toolkit is complete, best of luck bolting it all together!

Sushi

Timmy51m wrote:
AA has had a hell of an impact on that ISD, looks like someones taken a grinder to it. Sounds like your toolkit is complete, best of luck bolting it all together!

We still have a few more things up our sleeves but now it’s time to lock down this mod to get it out!

Thanks for the kinds words, Timmy!

Maverick

That stuff is awesome guys, just like the other work you have done. The things you have done to the game make your mod so much more than just a simple modification; one might rather speak of Freelancer 2 in my opinion.
When the mod is ready I’m definitely gonna play it to enjoy all that awesomeness.

Thank you for all the hard work you lot are doing to prolong the lifespan of Freelancer.
Big huge thumbs up for you guys!

Xarian_Prime

It’s looking very awesome

I however would like to see what it means for other’s though, this is some excellent work… but I’m worried for everyone else (and obviously myself) how much work per .cmp/.mat… is there anything we can do at this stage to offset that workload latter??

I dare not touch anything in my mod for instance, for fear of having to totally rework much of it when the public(ish) version is released…

Sry to not bee all woohoo and all that… but its a legitimate question that been bugging me since you first released this mega news, as a single person team… i like to be prepared

Sushi

Xarian_Prime wrote:
It’s looking very awesome

I however would like to see what it means for other’s though, this is some excellent work… but I’m worried for everyone else (and obviously myself) how much work per .cmp/.mat… is there anything we can do at this stage to offset that workload latter??

I dare not touch anything in my mod for instance, for fear of having to totally rework much of it when the public(ish) version is released…

Sry to not bee all woohoo and all that… but its a legitimate question that been bugging me since you first released this mega news, as a single person team… i like to be prepared

That’s a very reasonable concern, Xarian_Prime.

I use the program called crazy bump to make normal and specular maps. This program loads an existing texture, and through using its interface, I can create a normal/specular map in about 1 minute per texture. It’s not as good by doing it by hand, however, but I think the results are definitely good enough. For those people interested, I’ll be doing up a tutorial to show people how to do it upon release.

To add bionomial data to models takes literally one second with the new UTF Editor - this is how you get the normal/specular map to show on the model in FL.

All the other features run pretty much by themselves. FF can answer the question with the dynamic lighting and soft particles. But from what I understand, the implementation was minimal.

Once the DX9 conversion is working in the mod, the work to get all the eye candy your seeing is rather minimal. W0dk4 did the hard part for us

? Offline

Is Deffered means Post-Process?

rsabatino

like i said on facebook cant wait till this is out. going to drop some imperials show the dark sitih how we do it in new jersey.

Gisteron

this is impressive! can’t wait to see reflection and refraction xD

Bas

Looks great!

Can you upload the video to moddb as well please?

Bas

//Watch youtube video even from Germany:
http://7.hidemyass.com/ip-1/encoded/Oi8vd3d3LnlvdXR1YmUuY29tL3dhdGNoP3Y9cmFfMnFuMk1FYXMmZmVhdHVyZT1wbGF5ZXJfZW1iZWRkZWQ%3D&f=norefer

FriendlyFire

@Hello: No, deferred is a method of rendering. FL used forward rendering before if I’m not mistaken, which is the more… traditional approach. Deferred lets you do some nifty stuff, though, like having a lot of dynamic lights with very little cost.