New Renderer (OpenGL 3.3)

Looks interesting, but I think they still have a long way to go.

Last weekend I had time to test an idea I had for a while. Took me the whole Saturday to finish it, but the results are way better than I expected. Basically I use the generated normal maps to smooth the textures, so that I lose the details. This actually is correct, since the details are in the normal map. Before I had to downscale the impact of the normal maps, because it would look very weird. Now I can have stronger normal maps and it looks really good.

Here is a video of the result: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl1503.mkv

The codec is h265 this time, because with h264 it was about 250mb. Took me a while to find good settings, but now it only has about 120mb and looks quite the same.

Edit: Here is a second, shorter video, where you also can see the more 3D look of the textures:
http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl1503_2.mp4

I don’t know what you mean with “gribles”. Can you elaborate?

Here is an example of the smoothing:
Before:

After:

As you can see, it only removes the smaller edges. That’s why I wasn’t expecting it to work as well as it does. Also I did write it more as a proof of concept. There is still some room for improvement.
For the larger ones I do have an idea for an algorithm, but this is for later when I have the time for it.

Yes, it already is batch processing along the normal map generation.

Do you have some example images of the greebles and how it looks in the game? It is difficult to image how it will look.

Also I made quite some progress. There are not many things left to do now. Here is a video of the current look:
http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl0305.mp4
The shadow flickering issue will stay for the moment. I will look into it after the release as it is not that easy to fix.

Most of questions I already answered in this thread, but I give a short summary:
The material appearance is implemented like here:
https://learnopengl.com/PBR/Theory (except the ao maps - not needed. Example maps are at the end of the article). This should cover all the needed materials plus it is sort of a standard and should look the same in other PBR renderers. Additional height maps are also used for the pre baked extended normal maps (ssbump) and parallax mapping.

There is a json file where you can set default values (metalness and roughness) for all textures and also different values for specific texture names. But you also can use textures for both values instead (loaded by default if they exist). In my videos I use automatically generated roughness textures (that really creates a cool look) and a default metalness value. For the glass of the space domes I currently use settings of roughness 0 and and metalness 1 which gives perfect reflections. For the rest I did not have the time to create settings yet. This is why everything else is metal.

All the stuff FL can do is still supported. If it does not work I will fix it. There still is a shader for the old lighting, which I wrote to map all the states from D3D8 to OpenGL. You can see it in action here:
http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl0405_options.mp4
It is still used for the GUI and other stuff (effects etc).

For bases the rendering is mixed (both new and old lighting). Although I did not upscale the textures yet, here is a image which looks quite nice:

So basically you want to replace part of the textures with real geometry, do I understand this correctly? It would help if there were any screenshots how it looks in FL, if you have some already.

P.S.: I am making quite good progress. Polishing just takes really a lot of time.

With polishing I meant getting it ready for everyday use. Like adding options, in game menu for those and getting rid of any annoying enough bugs I find. Also testing how the automatic texture upscaling / generation works for our custom models (for some surprisingly good, some have too bad base textures). So there is nothing really new to show currently. I still need to find a solution for duplicate texture names, like automatic renaming of them in the UTF file if they are not identical.

And yes, removing those additional details from the textures will really be hard. I did not try anything further for now.

I hope you did not lose a lot of data because of that crash. I actually currently use one of the heightmaps you did I just wonder whether it will look better than those parallax/normal maps I currently use.

P.S.: I finally renamed the topic, since the name originally was chosen by wodka back then when he split another topic into two threads. It should be more clear now.

Sorry I totally forgot to reply here (usually I write in FL discord nowadays).

Thank you! It basically is a Direct3D 8 dll which gets loaded by the game. But it does way more than just wrap the rendering calls to OpenGL. There is a lot of hooking into the game engine (which needed a lot of reverse engineering) in the background. The shaders are plain text GLSL, so you indeed can play with them if you are up to it.

I managed to do much progress and currently am working on getting the mod in a state where I can ship an installer (last minute fixes, clean up stuff, updating the installer etc).

I was able to increase the texture quality a lot (including normal and roughness maps). Here are some screenshots and a video:

Video: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl2211.mp4

Thanks! I actually feel the same. It’s very hard to find mods which keep the original mood. So if you think I succeeded here it makes me very happy

I did not like the current normal maps (somehow it looked a bit like there were compression artefacts) and did some tweaking to the generating process. They are now way more clean. Here is an example:

Regarding donations: That is very kind of you. I still am not sure how to handle this, since I am not so fond of PayPal and do not plan on making an account there. Nevertheless the new renderer will be free for anyone as it should help keeping Fl alive. Donations would be completely optional.

Thanks! Sure I can try, but my textures are not the original textures. They are 4x upscaled with ESRGAN and the model I wrote a few posts before. I attached a texture as an example.

I will try the the same process for roughness and normal map creation to some of your textures and we will see. For the height maps I can use the same as I currently use (drawn by me and one by Freestalker).

If you want perfect results you would have to create metalness, roughness and normal maps for your textures yourself. Also you would have to convert the textures to albedo maps, as the details are in the normal / height maps. My method currently tries to do exactly that, but it only can do it for the fine details.

Edit: I had a look at the mods and it would be better if you can send me the original images in png/jpg format to avoid compression artefacts. The ones from the mat files in the SOLAR folder (no subfolders) are enough to get a good impression.