Release: Advanced Renderer v. 1.1 beta 1

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Used recommendations!
All Materials.json settings just not more than 0.2

As you can see - no more overexposure (over local contrast).
P.S. Btw i have used graphically patched freelancer.exe before - sooooorry

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About photography - there is fun feature at Reshade = LUT.
You may use LUTs from Photoshop, Lightroom, etc
Might do add something similar to tonemapping option?

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Final variant for Vanilla Freelancer:

"Roughness" : 0.6
"Metalness" : 0.2

config.cfg
materials.json

Now there is no local overexposure at all.

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Light sources and headlight are not working at my mod.
And i have only Directional lightsources.

With: https://i.imgur.com/JnVNG1J.png
Without: https://i.imgur.com/VX1MzAd.png

IrateRedKite

@HeIIoween Looks like point light sources aren’t actually in just yet! I suspect they’re on the to-do list, these are also something I am eagerly awaiting

Schmackbolzen

To make this more clear I added it to the known issues list.
I disabled the point lights because vanilla FL uses them in many systems for fake planet ambient light reflections, which look weird without shadows. Also if those lights have shadows enabled they are too close to objects and the shadows break.

I will add a developer menu soon where you will be able to enable them. But if you don’t change the system inis lighting will be weird then at those places.

I never tested spot lights, so I will have to enable them and see if it works. They will for now not have shadows, though. If they work I will enable them by default.

I will add some other useful stuff to this menu, like reloading all textures (only in FLARDATA\textures), reloading the materials.json, reloading shaders and I also think about adding adoxa’s hook for reloading the system in case it also reloads the models (not tested yet). This should really help for live testing stuff.

Also as I already wrote in discord chat to @HeIIoween, you should not reduce metalness too much if the material is metal. I just write it here again so that people do not get bad advice. You can see here, what happens if you do that (it behaves more like e.g. plastic or ceramic).

I also added some more PBR links to the documentation (more to come).

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@IrateRedKite @Schmackbolzen i have got at 1st 1st post about Directional light. Thanks about PBR and links

Problem, that i do not know what type of light gives this explosion - is it spot, point or directional or some sort of inference of light?

effect_explosions.ini

[Effect]
nickname = explosion_br_elite
effect_type = EFT_EXPLOSION_SHIP
vis_effect = gf_explosion_br_ship02
snd_effect = med_explosion1
lgt_effect = elite_flash_to_red ; <-- enables light source (type?)
lgt_range_scale = 30 ; scale of light
lgt_radius = 30 ; radius

lightanim.ini

[LightAnim]
name = elite_flash_to_red
frame = 0, 0, 0, 0, 0.1
frame = 0.3, 0, 0, 0, 0.1
frame = 0.5, 255, 225, 128, 0.7
frame = 0.8, 255, 200, 128, 0.9
frame = 2, 55, 0, 0, 0.1
;; note - even 2 frames are enough to enable light

Schmackbolzen

I had the explosion lights working before. The thing is FL likes to fake lighting stuff with vertex colors - so I do not want to answer that right now without further testing.

Edit: I tested it and explosion lights work again after enabling point lights. So I suggest you just test the next version I will release (should be in the next weeks).

Schmackbolzen

I updated the documentation thread with instructions how to fix problems with DPI scaling.
Also I forgot to mention which format the normal/rougness/metalness maps use. This is also in the documentation now.

Schmackbolzen

I finished beta 2.1: Download beta 2.1

The focus was mainly rendering bugs / improvements.
Changes are:

Fixed rendering bugs with old lighting (affects also starspheres etc.)
Made old lighting very similar to FL lighting (including cubemaps)
Had a nice idea for nebula ambient lighting. It now is complete PBR lighting
Added option to enable point lights for new lighting. Make sure to remove e.g fake planet reflection point lights from FL system inis before enabling it (will look weird, since planets are like suns then). To enable it, set EnablePointLights=1 in config.cfg.

Timmy51m

Well this is a surprise, still slaving away after all these years Schmack. Well done.

Schmackbolzen

Thanks Will continue and currently working on the next features (this time the focus is helping modders).

Timmy51m

@Schmackbolzen Always just nice now and then to see what names are still around doing stuff, happy to see you’re one of them. Take care man, look forward to checking this out sometime.

Schmackbolzen

I finished beta 2.2: Download beta 2.2

Example video: FLAR beta 2.2.mp4

The focus was mainly helping modders and smaller improvements.

Changes are:

Added additional developer options window which allows you to reload textures within “FLARDATA\Textures” folder, reload shader, reload “materials.json” file, edit materials live and save the changes (see video for details)
Screenshots are now saved as PNG
Existing keyboard hook will now be recognized and handled accordingly (meaning no crash anymore)
Offset hack for low resolution texture problem on some PCs is now applied on startup
Minor shader cleanup

Note: Texture preview for non power of two texture sizes does currently not work, as the GUI I use does not support it (will fix it later)

To use the new developer options window you have to add the additional key bind “USER_RADAR” the same way as I described for the settings window in my first post.

@Timmy51m Thanks Let me know what you think once you checked it out!

domo

Great. I hope this fixes the lighting / shadow bug on faces (Windows 10/11) since it’s per pixel not per vertex anymore. I just wonder, if there is a texture pack for all the PBR textures (normal, roughness, etc). Otherwsie it looks flat and weird sometimes.

domo

Is there a download for the textures? I don’t think this violates copyright. It’s only custom created normal map, roughness map, etc. Or is there a guide to generate theses textures? Or did I miss something?

SWAT_OP-R8R

There are no textures, so you have to create them on your own.
How to create them highly depends on what you want to achieve. Quick and dirty guides on PBR texture creation can be easily found on google search. Quality of course won’t be perfect using anything that just does mass convert textures, especially since the source material often needs some upscaling first (not always). There also are going to be some texture name conflicts that need to be resolved first. Schmackbolzen shared info about the required texture types in the first post.

I’ve so far created ~3000 PBR textures for my mod (so far) and the best approach in my eyes was to create the textures one at a time and tweak settings until the 3d models (all of them tested) looked good in a standard lighting environment.

domo

I think it would be possible to provide the normal map, roughness map, etc converted from the original textures. I don’t think this would violate copyright. I have no idea where the textures are. I’m not deep in modding Freelancer. Otherwise I would craft a tool which iterates through all textures and generate the PBR texture variants automatically. It’s maybe not as perfect as handcrafted, but maybe better than no PBR texture which results in flat weird reflective surfaces. We could also share the textures. Not sure how many textures exists. But I think this would done quickly if the community is big enough. What tools are you using to extract the original textures to convert into PBR (normal, roughness, etc)?

SWAT_OP-R8R

Sure, you can do that.
I am curious. Based on what would an automatic tool decide how reflective a surface is… if reflective at all. How does it decide if a surface is metal, plastic, skin, cloth or a rock?
In many cases it is not even required to create a full set of PBR textures since the new renderer has settings for that if the texture does not require to have different levels of reflectivity. But again… the question is what texture needs which treatment?
If you apply the same settings for everything the results might look nice in one area and terribly wrong in others.
However, maybe you figure out something that fits everywhere or requires just some tweaking later on. You can give it a try. The textures easily can be extracted using the UTF editor Schmackbolzen linked. Same tool is required to make the 3d models compatible with the new renderer.
Maybe one thing worth to mention… not all objects in FL fully use all of the new render features. e.g. static asteroids don’t, most stuff on bases also don’t, detailmaps/tilemaps IIRC also don’t.

Schmackbolzen

I finished version 1.1 beta 1: Download

Preview image:

Example video: Link

This version got a lot larger than originally planned. The renderer now supports clustered shading which allows for thousands of point lights. I plan to extend this for spot lights as well in the future. Note that performance will degrade the more lights have overlapping ranges.

I also added the option to replace those fake lights from FL with real point lights and a much better glow effect using real sphere geometry and PBR bloom. The range of such a point light is three times the glow size. The size of the sphere is the bulb size. You can find those values in DATA\EQUIPMENT\light_equip.ini.

Additionally I implemented automatic camera exposure (was needed, because the scenes are now darker because of all the other fixes). This is an early version and probably will need some more improvements. But it is quite usable already.

There have been many internal changes (more reversed stuff, optimizations and bug fixes, some rewrites (I even wrote test cases for verification (!)), etc.), which will be very helpful for future versions. For that reason I decided to increase the version number to 1.1.

Because of all the changes the graphics again look a lot better than before (you should notice it especially when comparing with older versions).

As always I am looking forward to your feedback

List of changes:

Added clustered shading which allows thousands of point lights (will hopefully be extended to spot lights later on)
Added option to replace fake lights from FL with real point lights
Added much better glow effect when replacing fake lights with real lights using sphere geometry and PBR bloom
Added automatic camera exposure (early version for testing)
Added the option to use precise SRGB colour conversion which improves colours a lot (for transparency this is now always enabled since it caused wrong colours)
Special lights e.g. from explosions etc. are now recognized and will be used automatically
Many internal changes which will be helping a lot in future versions (e.g. used material types etc. are now known)
When using glass materials without textures glass PBR settings are now applied automatically
Improved appearance of light scattering
Light range is now more similar to original FL light range (was too bright previously)
Various optimizations and bug fixes