Bump mapping and normal mapping are the same thing. There is another thread here that has a bit of information about bump mapping in freelancer. The normal maps are allowed to be in greyscale only, which when rendered acts more like a height map.

Meaning any dark or light spots on the texture will look like it has depth/layers when rendered in game. It takes some special DLL’s for bump mapping to work.

Again though its very very buggy.

Bump mapping is very buggy in Freelancer. By very buggy I mean 90% of the time it doesn’t work correctly. From all I’ve seen from BM attempts… stuff ends up completely black/missing lighting effects or environment mapping.

I wouldn’t know much on how it is implemented. The game is capable of it but on a very low level. Would involve a lot of editing of the normal mapping of a majority of the textures in the game to get a reasonable look.

Not many people are willing to take the time to do it. Maybe when I’m more comfortable/familiar with the utf editor and how it works… I can look into doing normal maps on the side. However right now my priority is to give freelancer a smoother look without any fancy engine tweaks.

I guess then I’m really just looking for a more elaborate mod activation… if I had that activated first… and then activated another mod over it… “This entry already exists, overwrite it?”

Something like that while time consuming… would be more “effective”.

I checked out Plasmafire but couldn’t find a download or an english description of it anywhere.

Oh well. I guess I can just stick to texture modding for now. Thanks for the suggestions.

That ubergraphics mod looks pretty good. Too bad it breaks the mod I’m running currently. Mostly because it modifies some of the equipment entries/ship entries….

This is my problem. I’m looking for something that’s just a pure graphics mod. No music addons, no equipments, no ships. No stat changes. Nothing. Just graphics. If that uber mod did that, it would be a must have for everyone… (integrated with the SDK 1.3 would perfect it)

All right thanks! I’ll see what I can do with that in between studying. Maybe in a week or so I might have a whole new look for the game.

Thanks for the helpful info. I really enjoy playing through the original story mode of freelancer. Would love to do it with a better visual experience. Or maybe on a new engine (cough) Unreal 3 engine (cough)

I had heard Louva is doing full time game development/working his butt off. So a chance of seeing any combo graphics mod is probably not likely.

I was thinking about looking at the guts of the mods I’ve got and seeing where I could put two and two together. Technically if it is done right any other mod should be able to install with it… sort of like using the SDK as a base for a mod…

But here is a question, if I were to feel so compelled as to go through every texture in the game and resize it to 1024x1024, maybe clean it up more… I would need a mat importer for ms3d? or is there a library/download for these already?

Hey forum people! I’m looking for a mod that has/uses graphic improvements for vanilla freelancer… I know there is Real Space, Bloom and HD Textures… but I haven’t seen anything that has all of those things as a stand alone mod or compatible with each other… anyone have some good recommendations?

I have tried to activate these mods together but it seems to break a lot of things. Like cutscenes in the story mode are black screens. Some other odd things have happened as well.

I’m aware of crossfire and 88flak, and discovery. Though it seems like those heavily modify the game… Some of them don’t support single player story mode. The ones that do have their server rule-billboards pasted all over the place…

If nothing else maybe someone could point me in the right direction as to how I might be able to combine these sorts of things on my own?

While perks are nifty and bring a different style of play to the table, I don’t think they are a necessary element in freelancer. Developers drop those in to give their content lacking games some replayability.

We all know that freelancer isn’t missing any content, at all really. Not with the community it has. Don’t get me wrong though, taking the time to do it, and making it work, I’d like to see it, I think it would be pretty cool.

For now though, I recommend focusing on just beefing up the graphics, making them look improved, detailed and VERY appealing, and the easiest task to do on your list.

Make an extension mod after for your perk system if you can get it figured out, that way its an optional feature.

Also, for compatibility for those server hosts, use the SDK as a base for everything. Build up from that as I know the majority of vanilla servers use it for improved stability. More incentive for people to use your Enhanced Graphics.

Good luck!