New Renderer (OpenGL 3.3)
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I bet to differ, every character looking like metal would be quite entertaining and totally worth it
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They are gonna go like sorta boozed metal music fans. (Just hearing Alestorm at the same time writing this post XD) Epic joke with epic music!
:pint:
More seriously, like Bolt, I would like to see this. It would be kinda fun! -
haha I see. Oh well at least the robot planet bar will look great
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Yepā¦ indeed! And I have some ideas how making HD textures, heightmaps and normal maps of the planets. But it is a quite long task to do, so I must find some peoples who want to take an eye on this project. For me, the best way is to delegate the work between 3 or 4 people, where Iām one of them. Iāve already thought about how to make height using GIMP. And we have not to forget that some room shadows were insert on the texture, so we should take care about that. Or else rework lighting in the rooms via thn and the wrapper.
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I hope some talented folks offer you that help!
http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl0807.mp4
I love in this video how the bottom of the station reflects the orange nebula.Iām a big player the X series games and one of my most fondest memories was the first time I started up X3 Reunion in 2007 and was flying around the Argon home system and was stunned to see the planet and moon reflecting off the metallic space stations and ships! I remember thinking āweāve entered a new era of realistic looking space gamesā¦ if only Freelancer had come out in this eraā. Schmackbolzenās mod is making that dream a reality!
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I noticed it on the ku battleship vid too! Love it too!
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This is making me want to get back into Freelancer modding. I didnāt think anything could do that. Very good work all around, Schmack.
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Any progress or news?
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I had to learn for another exam more than I thought (was for my minor in microelectronics) and after that I took a break. Freestalker has started to help me out with height maps, so I hope this will save me some time. I will get back working on this in the next week I guess. As always I have gotten some new ideas and perspective after taking a break, so I hope this will help me improving it further and find the last remaining bugs
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Alright, I managed to fix lots of rendering issues and also completely changed the pipeline for upscaling the textures. Additionally I redid some of the height maps. You can see a video here: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl1410.mp4 I think it never did look that good before.
Btw. sorry for the stuttering. I was testing OBS studio with HEVC hardware encoding and there seem to be some issues, since I did not see them in the game.For those of you who wanted to see metal - Trent and his friends plus the interiors: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl1410int.mp4
Keep in mind that the textures are the unchanged vanilla ones.Also Freestalker and I have been testing how to make new textures: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/flnewtex.png
But we are not finished, yet.As always, feedback is welcome It helps me to judge whether I am doing the right thingsā¦
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Looks even better! Iād like to get my hands on that renderer as soon as possible!~
Question: the heightmaps, are you putting them into the MAT or are they separate in a folder somewhere? How do you reference them for the renderer to work with it?
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you are right
it looks better than ever before -
@eigos: They just lie in a folder and if the texture from a mat file is being loaded has a file with the same filename in it (e.g. āSTADTL1_256.tga.ddsā ) this one is loaded. Same applies to normal and ambient occlusion maps plus any future maps I might add (each have an own folder). I donāt know which material is being used, yet.
Actually I am quite surprised how well it looks now. Had some small ideas and the combination of them plus some rendering fixes really work well. E.g. I was not expecting how well it works here (apart from the rocks): http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl1510.png
Today I finally was able to fix the fake lights in nebulas (fog did not work), so here is a video: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl1510neb.mp4
There is still some work left, but we are getting closer
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Any new developments on the graphics?
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Just boring stuff. Tested window management and OpenGL context creation with SDL2, but sadly the event processing breaks the controls. Plus it does not fix the wrong resolution in fullscreen mode (since FL manages the window, something seems to break there). Also I had to patch SDL2 to make it use an existing window with OpenGL.
I also did some further clean up and optimizations. On my NV 970m it is now nearly about 1,5 times faster as the original d3d8 renderer (with disabled shadows), but on my AMD RX480 the d3d8 renderer is faster. So either a driver problem or I am doing something wrong / something the driver does not like. Not much left I can do, though, since I have not that much control about how FL renders things. Sadly weapons fire also seems to impact FPS (on AMD). This is something I need to investigate further. I tested the newer OpenGL debug callback functionality, but neither on AMD nor on NV this helped.
Shadows also seem to impact the FPS a lot, but not when generating the maps, but when using them in the shaders. So Iāll have to investigate whether this is normal or not. Could be a fillrate problem, though. The scenes I am testing with have a lot of overdraw, since FL renders back to front and there a hundreds of objects. A z-prepass could help here.
I also have been working on getting the TB vectors generated like presented here: http://crytek.com/cryengine/presentations/triangle-mesh-tangent-space-calculation (there is existing c++ code but I need to adapt it to the UTF Editor code in c#).
As you can see, nothing of interest for the normal user (who doesnāt understand anything of the above anyway). I will post progress here when I have to show something new
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Schmackbolzen wrote:
I also have been working on getting the TB vectors generated like presented here: http://crytek.com/cryengine/presentations/triangle-mesh-tangent-space-calculation (there is existing c++ code but I need to adapt it to the UTF Editor code in c#).
As you can see, nothing of interest for the normal user (who doesnāt understand anything of the above anyway). I will post progress here when I have to show something new
Maybe you find this interesting: http://forge.the-starport.net/projects/utfeditor/repository/revisions/35/diff/UTFEditor/UTFForm.cs
(we also had to add tangent/binormal data for our normal maps etc. in Freeworlds)Or do you use the tangent data as provided by the UTF editor? Is it faulty?
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Sry, I am again very busy due to university and my student job.
@Wodka: Yes, this implementation produces wrong TBN data. I have modified it locally and also added code so that new vertices can be inserted. Currently I recalculate all normals and duplicate vertices in case the angle between the normals is too large. But this is only a stopgap measure until I can convert the code I linked above, since there are still case where the TBN data is wrong. Plus everything looks very edged right now since the original normals were smoothed a lot. Maybe I also should have a look at your MAX plugin in case you have used a better algorithm there.
I hope that I can get a public beta test running after I had some time off during the upcoming holidays, but no promises. It will only work on our New Universe server so you would have to check out our mod. Iāll probably use the current ugly shadow implementation, but at least you could test it out. We will seeā¦
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Youād have to detail whatās wrong about it because itās been in use with FW for years now without any issue whatsoever.
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You can read about that in the linked presentation. Also I only tested the UTF version. Wodka once wrote to me that you donāt use that. As far as I remember there also was problem with references in the vector maths and thus wrong results. But since you donāt use it anyway I never committed it.
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Weāve used both actually. New models use the 3ds Max exporter, but older ones were just upgraded through the UTF ed. I havenāt noticed errors with either.