New Renderer (OpenGL 3.3)
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Hey ! I did a render in xNormal and I wish some feedbacks.
Here are some pictures :
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My question is where so I pick up the software? Groups I worked with in the past (2008-9) fell flat trying to get a .dds DXT5 implementation into the FL engine for at least some normals mapping. And your renders look good. Can you change the lighting angle a bit more oblique to show the height variation a bit more? Also does it stand up w\ lod distances? I’d shoot someone to get normal mapped textures on my ships. Whatever you’re doing is getting close. There are other people doing normals on other threads, but I think they’re running down the same paths that dead ended when the output worked only on a certain class of graphics card.
So again, what software and where do I filch it?
And is it on implemented in the modeler or through the graphics? -
There’s no “software”. Schmack created an OpenGL implementation himself, from scratch, which hooks into Freelancer and replaces the renderer in large part. All you do is feed the game the new textures it’ll need and that’s it, provided you have the renderer.
There are only two such implementations right now: his, and Freeworlds’. Neither are currently released for other modders to use, though Freeworlds is already out there to play with.
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I don’t use Freelancer engine and open GL wrapper, I rather use xNormal, because I can’t use the wrapper. I give the textures to Schmakbolzen and he makes the adjustments.
You can find xNormal here : http://www.xnormal.net/
I put other screenshots as you wished.
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Really that’s what I thought FF. Been modeling for Freeworlds and now updating ships in line with the new STWars look:
Sorry won’t upload .jpg
Edit: It lied it did upload X2
Anyway I just found and downloaded XNormals.
Am disappointed it’s another texture baker and not a a real fix for FL’s graphics implement. Seems like since Microsoft started the whole .dds thing in the first place the FL engine should play nice with all the beautiful .dds DXT5’s tools for normals, but in 2003 DXT1 was new and the the rudimentary DXT3 alphas for the nomads was bleeding edge.I still believe firmly the key to fixing this is some simple recode of the .dds implement to allow DXT5 normals mapping since all the tools are there and modders for games like Fallout and Elder Scrolls have been using them for over a decade. Plus what PS user does’nt have a .dds exporter or Nvidia’s .dds DXT5’s normal map-height map filter?
Baking a texture seems a bit clunky when there should be a direct implementation within reach.
Almost makes me wish I was a coder. (Almost).
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I might take XNornal for a spin then becase that oblique looked really good and I’m loading in XNormal now and will have some downtime to RTFM.
At least I hope it will give my ships that “Something extra” as far as the texturing goes. Though the day someone gets real subpolygon displacement into the engine is day I’ll keel over.
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There’s nothing that’ll “fix” Freelancer’s graphics short of actually replacing the renderer, which is what Schmack and I did. The texture format has literally nothing to do with this.
This isn’t Unity, you don’t just tick a box and give a texture and the engine magically does everything for you. The engine was never built with normal mapping support, therefore it cannot support normal maps. XNormals is just a tool to generate normal maps, it’s completely useless for Freelancer since Freelancer doesn’t know what the hell to do with them.
Now, with Schmack’s and FW’s renderers, we can support normal maps, but that’s only because we specifically implemented support for them ourselves, and you won’t be able to test that for a while longer.
Also not sure what you mean by “been modeling for Freeworlds”?
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Sorry,that sounded wrong. I revamp freeworld existing ships cmps and mat files for myself and local users. Doest get seen by the server side. Getting a new ship into the game is nigh impossible as you must know but customizing existing ships is simple. I’m waiting for calls to update ships to the types in the new movies.
As for Normals Mapping it’s what I figured. I’ve tooled through XNormals enough to see it’s not doing anything I can’t already do without it.
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Be aware that this will eventually flag you for cheating, since modifying local files can provide an advantage. We don’t condone any kind of modification of the mod files.
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OpenSP’s. Wonderful things.
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Ah, so you’re not talking about the actual, current Freeworlds. The one you’re using doesn’t have any normal mapping support (or anything really, it’s plain vanilla FL).
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l have the newest release, but I’m still having issues with WIN 10. Won’t play on my VM, like most it tells it it’s too ancient.
Playing with XNormals now. Comparing it to results from my other bakers. I’m thinking now it’s faster than either what I have for 3DMax or C4D, question is, are the results better? I’ll find out.
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there is more than just one freeworlds out there
FF is right about the wrapper and that textures wont fix anything…
I am btw. not sure why you are constantly refering to the DXT5.
FL is generally able to read DXT5… the question is if it makes sense to use them. I have some DXT5 textures in my mod but in many cases I wouldnt advice against that compression. In most cases DXT1 or DXT3 will do the job while at the same lead to much smaller file sizes (it highly depends on what you actually want to achive). -
As FF pointed out to me I’m putting my ships into the ancient, obsolescent, archaic, venerable Freeworlds V1.65 with the equally decrepit V0.41 OpenSP.
Hey it’s old, but all I wanted to do was see if my ships worked within their mod framework. They obviously did.Speaking of rendering; The big comment I had with the Freewords of that time was all the ships except Imperial Ties looked like they REALLY needed a paint job or at least a starship version of a carwash. Call it a bit too much dirt in the “dirt map” and a bit too much occlusion in the ambient occlusion. Yes I suupose if you’re Rebellion you have bigger issues than you’re Y-wing looking like it just flew through Jabba’s mud pit, but PLEASE! Any decent crew chief would down check the bird until at least get a steam clean to keep all that grime out of the hangar! A clean ship is a tight ship. Sorry, but that’s my opinion. (I’m USAF retired).
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I’ll admit to not having a great opinion of old Freeworlds, for many reasons… One of which was the very poor overall quality of the assets. “Everything and the kitchen sink” was the favored approach and it shows.
We should probably move this discussion to another thread if we want to keep going though.
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FriendlyFire wrote:
We should probably move this discussion to another thread if we want to keep going though.Yeah it would be nice if you could continue this discussion in another topic and maybe move your replies from here into the new one as they are quite offtopic
Freestalker wanted some replies on how you like his textures so maybe we should continue there. I personally miss a better distinction between the different heights. It will look better ingame due to self shadowing, but still.
I have been experimenting with neural networks and came up with an approach which first removes the dds compression artefacts and then uses a different trained network to upscale them. After that I plan use normal algorithms for further filtering and upscaling (currently it’s only a very good upscaling algorithm afterwards). The results look more than promising to say the least. Here are a few examples (click on them for full size):
Original Vanilla:
Upscaled:
Original:
Upscaled:
Original:
Upscaled:
What do you guys think? Want more examples?
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I think you’re on to something.
Better impression of height. -
Neural net texture upscale in Freelancer ? Legit ! XD
The result is nice. With this, FL textures, even if they are High Def, could become high quality even with a compression. Nice approach ! I shouldn’t have been able to think about doing that. Honestly hats off !
More examples ? Rheinland textures please ? Because there are some details that I don’t want to miss. THX ! (Edit : Just Upscale)
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I could be wrong but… I have the feeling that the original has a higher contrast than the upscaled version
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Upscaling always brings luma and chroma changes, a great upscaler preserves contrast and other things. Upscalers like Genuine Fractal and S-Spline Max keep contrast and sharpness. They are top of the line upscalers that are vector based and the others are interpolation based.
But in the printing univers we haven’t the right to upscale above 20% ! It should be the same for internet and so on.
Neural net is promising. Although it’s not a mature algorithm it does the job. With 1024X1024 textures it could be very interesting to see it ingame.
