Raise your voices!

Regarding the video: I already have MyGui included in the wrapper. But it is another thing to hook all the interface controls of Freelancer. If adoxa or someone else could do that it might work. Also someone would have to create all the designs for MyGui. I plan to use it for the graphic options etc.

I use Skype very rarely. Usually I have Miranda running. If there is a plugin for your messenger protocol I can use it. There is a Skype plugin, but you also have to have Skype running besides Miranda, which is a really bad solution. I only have it installed on an old laptop.

I think you might convince more people when the project is in a more working state, meaning quite a few high poly models with good textures and a working version of my wrapper. But we will see

When you talk about expanding the univers, I have some ideas of IMG and Gaian ship.

IMG ships can be some sort of Starflier with a vampir look that have yellow tint.

Gaian ships can be organic prototype that look like this to replace the starflier or startracker and something that look like a fusion between wasp, bat or something else that fly for the Hawk.

I’ve made some side viewed concept.

P.S. I hope that I haven’t done an “Out Subject”.

If you want to go on in the timeline, you really should take your time and read all rumours in Freelancer. They provide a lot of material! Like Kishiro working on a ship with jump-drive, as the Osiris already has. ALG fusioning with Krüger Minerals, etc.

I’ve an idea! If we expand the campaign, it would be cool that Trent would become a starship commander, begin with gunboat class then cruiser/destroyer and finally battleship/dreadnought but he wouldn’t be an admiral and will only execute Orilion orders (woops! I didn’t know I will do this joke before writing this, that was unwanted ^_^’ ).

I have some weapons idea :
We could expand particle weapons, adding proton based weapon like an hydrogen cation canon, electron based weapon that can be called cathodic canon. For the FX the proton canon can use the regular red particle (positiv charge) fx and for electron we can just modify bretonian particle fx and make it bluer (negative charge). As for neutron we can make them exclusively green (neutral charge).

I have ideas about shield :
It will not be any longer energetic but armor types and devices. For electric based weapon we can use lightning rod. For thermal based weaps we can use heat shield. For radioactive weaps, wee can use this .

That’s just some thoughts.

Another idea! Making gluon shield that would be good against particle and neutron weapons.

We can extend capship weapons to all Freelancer weapon types and create new classes with available 3D models, for instance Bretonian Battleship could have more classes, one with more particle weapons and another with more tachyon weapons. It could improve ship variety in the gameplay and force the player to scan the ship he is going to fight.

Here is a cool lightning rod :

Oh, those are really nice models.

Nice models, although these sort of details typically go into normal maps (plus bump and ambient occlusion maps) rather than actual poly geometry. Problem with existing vanilla FL model assets is that they were made to reuse same set of textures without much consideration about edges and seams, so simply adding normal mapping over existing geometry would wouldn’t always have a correct result, especially where a model relies a lot on UV mirroring to tile textures and cover seams (and a lot in FL stations and misc assets do that). I guess there’s a sense in “remodeling”… However I don’t think these models, even when finished, would do well as drop-in replacements for vanilla mehses, there are mesh format limitations (16-bit vertex indices, though you can break model into multiple vmeshes internally but it comes with own set of issues too), old render being inefficient at handling this geometric complexity, the game does struggle with higher fidelity model assets.

Due to per-property vertex buffer format those 10+k models will run into 16-bit vertex index limit right away. Besides the game simply doesn’t handle complexity of such things, the engine has no smart buffer caching like static meshes copying does in unreal engine and many others. I’m saying this not to dissuade you but I ran into numerous rendering issues in FL when going with much fancier models.

There’s a good reason why normal maps is such a prevalent technique in real-time rendering and continues to do so as well. Back in the day graphics card manufacturers would boast about how many triangles they can render per second, but that sort of “mhz wars”-like comparison had been gone for a long time, instead the focus had been on smarter techniques and managing performance for complex shader code.

Sure models could be broken down to multiple LODs but I don’t recall if there were any games and their engines that would break mesh further into pre-baked state at close-up distances.

Freelancer handles high resolution meshes just fine. Source: This runs just fine.

I did mention about splitting into multiple vmesh libraries to overcome vertex index size, so I wasn’t saying it’s impossible. I can dig up some of my own models and technically they all work, quirks with mixing material transparency types show up more prominently and so on. A lone ship sure ain’t gonna harm anything but drop in bases which are made of several parts and then consider that you may see several bases on the screen within view distance, a dozen or so ships of similar fidelity and I’m sure you get the idea where it’s going.

We’re spawning dozens of ships for NPC events, we’ve tested with large fleets of ships with polycounts in the 50k+, and it’s running fine with all the rendering stuff Freeworlds adds (which is way heavier than even Schmack’s thing).

I think you’re severely overestimating the cost of pushing some polygons and draw calls.

Quite obviously I can’t comment on what modifications are in Freeworlds, how they handle performance and on what systems. Pretty sure what I meant is running stuff on vanilla and testing lots of high-poly objects in view range. Especially on not-so-modern lower-to-mid-tier graphics cards as well as integrated gpus where things ain’t so peachy really and raw poly quantity makes them struggle.

Anyway all I wanted to say is that .Nx’s models are nice, but as mentioned before, most of these details, in my opinion, are better implemented as normal maps, indented parts perhaps as parallax mapping too. He has high-res models already so baking details into maps shouldn’t be difficult. What remains of course is the engine to put all that good stuff into.

As I said, Freeworlds has no optimizations. It’s drawing them exactly like FL does, except it draws them anywhere between 2 and 6 times more than vanilla (because of a depth prepass, G-buffer, and 2+ shadow passes). In spite of this and all the extra graphics processing we require, we can draw multiple hundreds of thousands of polygons per frame without breaking a sweat.

I’d rather not see yet another project get dragged down because a few people have shitboxes they hang onto for dear life. You can’t realistically game on an Intel GMA from 2005, why should a 2017 project try to make it work?

Plus, that’s why LODs exist. Dropping down the level of detail option in the game will eventually never draw LOD0, and as long as the models have good LODs everything’d be peachy.

FriendlyFire wrote:
I’d rather not see yet another project get dragged down because a few people have shitboxes they hang onto for dear life. You can’t realistically game on an Intel GMA from 2005, why should a 2017 project try to make it work?

To be honest I was quite surprised how many in FL community keep using pretty outdated hardware, often times lagging four or five “generations” behind, but mostly it seems those “shitboxes” are actually laptops with only gma/intel hd stuff to handle any 3d. It’s kinda ironic how some and often the same people also happen to have smartphones that would be more capable of delivering good performance even in ogl es while these laptops will simply crawl.

But I guess I just like to refine meshes (and see them refined) even now at a time when it’s no longer necessary so, at least not like it used to be. What can I say… old optimization habits from the age of ue 2.x/3.x die hard, heh.