Freelancer Wireframe

Why would you do this?

in some cases my hardware causes very bad lag due to models of intermediate size (200-270k polys) or in large battles such as in alaska on the way back to NY. only problem is, with that wireframe settings the text disappears, too…

Gisteron wrote:
in some cases my hardware causes very bad lag due to models of intermediate size (200-270k polys) or in large battles such as in alaska on the way back to NY. only problem is, with that wireframe settings the text disappears, too…

“Intermediate size” at 200-270k polygons? What the hell?

A positively insane model’s like 100k polygons.

M1C wrote:
Is it possible to render the HUD with D3DFILL_SOLID and the “space” with D3DFILL_WIREFRAME? (Without much work, if it requires too much work drop the idea)

Nope, looks like it’s strictly one or the other.

dear, FriendlyFire, insane models not made for film studios but for independent artists like us, are of the scale of 1-2 millions. 100k is pretty small if we’re talking about a big ship with greebles or a cityscape.

FL dimensions are ancient but the game has no problem with large meshes on systems that are strong enough to support them (without lag) in the modeler program, too.

Sorry, no. Games don’t run with models of 100k+ polygons, EVEN modern ones. That’s just utterly ridiculous and it has absolutely nothing to do with FL being old.

Obviously for movie CGI and such you can have models with millions of polygons, but then each frame takes minutes to render on a bloody render farm.

I’m not entirely clueless about the setup, y’know.

its a question of preference and ideals. there are eight spaceships in my mod with over 20k, all expensive, special and rare; and big enough for the details to be recognisable. only one exceeds 200k (for now at least, guess there will be replacement for a second one that will, too, be over 200k) and imo, its worth it for an eye-candy. ofc in a later version the player will be offered the option to display reduced versions of them in case his system isn’t strong enough.

good thing vmeshes are client-side

besides: movies use huge models not to show how strong their machines are, but because it looks more realistic. actually exactly what CGI tech is about currently^^

Obviously, but movies have no restrictions such as real-time rendering.

200k is just madness; even at 180k, the ISD in Freeworlds is much too large and we’re in the process of streamlining is. It’s just utterly inefficient to do that (I’ll point out that no game has such large models, even modern ones) and all you’ll end up with is lots of angry players complaining about lag and crashes.

Just sayin’, you do as you wish.

I assumed that more modern games took advantage of features such as bump maps, normal maps etc to give models more detail and depth through the textures and shaders etc, where a graphics card can do all the work.

I thought that the cpu took care of the actual geometry side of the models and that’s why high poly counts eat the hell out of frame rates.

Freelancer doesn’t even take advantage of multithreaded cpus as far as I know, so models of that scale would beat the hell out of a processor a little low on clock speed.

I have to spit out some support for FF here.

Just because it works doesn’t mean you should. Again, FF is taking the horse to water… you know the rest by now.

I’ve seen a lot of models with many polys which are not sculpted at all, just excessive faces on flat or curved surfaces - one had over 20,000 polys in its nosecone mesh alone! Ridiculous. I replaced it and got the entire model under 20,000.

Often, their surface detail is only in the texture they use.

And I’ve also seen other huge models that are sculpted, where the texture overlays and obscures their finer detail. Pipework, lattices etc - all overlaid and obscured with the texture.

Both of these are bad tactics. If the texture is superb then the faces can be significantly reduced without any loss of detail.

If the appearance relies on surface sculpted detail then fine, I would support a larger poly count, but again, only up to a point.

My preference for fine detail is to make and paint individual sculpted parts with colours so they stand out really well, not blanketed in textures. In my view spacecraft of the future will be smooth and swish-looking, not be made of crudely welded plates like 1800’s sea ships. And they won’t have pipework exposed to meteor hits either. FL’s ships look so naff to me, it’s like retro steam ships and some modders make theirs look even worse.

The modeller should ask himself this: Can the player fly close enough to the ship at a slow enough speed to see detail? If yes, then - when the player flies close to the surface of such a ship, what should he see?

If the player is hostile, he won’t last long enough to see much even on a huge ship.

If it’s a small ship, he won’t see much at all anyway as he flies past at 300 m/s!

So - be sensible, even though my car can do 130mph, I don’t push it above 100. And although my 19-inch monitor can display humungous resolutions, my eyes are happiest at 1024 x 768.

youre absolutely right, ST. it depends on how much is needed and how much is efficient. its a question of balance. imo, detail is important and if e.g. a ship only has procedural textures, they need to be modeled while they can be deleted if the texture shows all you want your client to see.

also, timmy’s point is important, too: vanilla FL only supports diffusion and opacity and therefore more details really need to be modeled to provide the feeling of depth. 20k is already a high limit for a game of that age. but for a true eye-candy (!), exceeding it imo is just fine. maybe w0dk4’s graphic improvements will offer a proper alternative.

Exceeding 20k? Sure. Exceeding 100k? Ehh… Exceeding 200k? Ouch.

It’s simply that no engine is created to support that many polygons getting piped through at one time. It’s also that unless the thing is truly massive and so rare you can be guaranteed with 100% certainty never to have more than one on screen, you can get exponential issues when two, three or even four come on screen at once. What would normally be the polygon cap for the entire scene is now already filled by just two models!

If the model is 200k long and everything else is 1k, then fine, 200k polygons works. Just always remember that Freelancer is an old game and that as such a good proportion of its playerbase might be running older machines. Just look at ST and his shiny single-core vintage machine (I’m sure it’s got a wood finish and push buttons)!

Hell yeah, if he gets normal maps working properly that should really help, just depends then whether anyone has the ability to take advantage of them.

M1C wrote:
Because (my) frames are much more constant. And it would be good for people with not as good graphic cards.

You mean those who still have Windows95?

FriendlyFire wrote:
Exceeding 20k? Sure. Exceeding 100k? Ehh… Exceeding 200k? Ouch.

let’s say, the limit of 20k is there by probably a good reason. if you say exceeding it is for sure okay, then you already break the game’s limits. ofc you can set your own saying “i’m not going above 200k, preferably staying under 100k”. many modders say that 20k is big enough for them and refuse to exceed even this hardcoded limit.

but the limits we set personally are not objective. me for myself set my maximum to 200k preferably and to stay under 300k under any circumstance. there are modders going far higher in dimensions of even seven digits and its okay for them, if they consider it okay and if they offer their players to stay away from the graphical advantages or performance issues their movie-ready models could bring.

for myself i try to make ships of over 20k really rare by strict rules and control. but if i am breaking the 20k limit, to say an objectively sensible limit is 50k (or whatever other amount) is ridiculous. it’s up to each modder imo, to say, where is the final step to “highpoly”, to “insane” and to “inacceptable”.

we should limit ourselves for our own interests, not for the interest of our machines. the engine limits us enough already for technical purposes.

besides: my system is lagging in some cases just because of this but i know that most systems out there wouldn’t. a team member could not complain last times btw, he didn’t recognise anything.

FriendlyFire wrote:
… Just look at ST and his shiny single-core vintage machine (I’m sure it’s got a wood finish and push buttons)!

Yep! And it gives out a re-assuring “Chugg… Chugg… Chugg!” as it goes! rofl