Here is the promised version for everyone to test: Download beta 2

Update: Version 1.1 Beta 1 is here: Download.

Screenshots what it does can be seen here (or if you want to know how it started read from the beginning)

All my videos and screenshots are from our mod: https://www.flnu.net
You can try the renderer out yourself there.

You will need the 1.1 patch installed (including server.dll) as the renderer loads it (might change later on).

For showing the renderer menu you need to add this entry to your keymap.ini in DATA\INTERFACE\

[KeyCmd]
nickname = USER_RESET
ids_name = your id (add entry in your resource dll)
ids_info = your id (add second entry in your resource dll)
state = keydown

and pretty far down in section

[KeyMap]
nickname = IDR_ALWAYS_PRESENT

you also need to add

key = USER_RESET

Also add this to your keylist.ini (same folder)

[key]
id = USER_RESET

The group under which you insert it decides the page on which it appears. Also the order matters here. E.g. if you put it right under group 0 it will be on top on the first page.

Then you can choose a key for opening it in the controls menu of Freelancer.

For converting your models if you want to use normal maps etc. I uploaded a modified UTF editor (including source) here: https://github.com/Schmackbolzen/UTFEditor. You need to add Tangent/Binormal data to a model (there is a button) or use the mass processing in the Tools menu (last menu item). I also added a tool to scan your models for errors (the menu item above).

Important: Do not add Tangent/Binormal data to asteroids/mines etc. (ASTEROIDS\MODELS folder). It will crash FL. For them this data is automatically calculated by the renderer when loading the models.

I have written some documentation here: https://the-starport.com/forums/topic/6276/advanced-renderer-documentation-question-answer-thread

Other tools (with source) e.g. for mass converting textures etc. will follow. I did not have the time yet.

I also will add to the documentation later what I used to upscale the textures. A good starting point is https://github.com/ptrsuder/IEU.Winforms and https://github.com/JingyunLiang/SwinIR.

Feedback is highly appreciated! You can also write found bugs here.

Looking forward to some nice screenshots / videos!

P.S.:
You will probably have to adapt your light sources in the system ini files. Range and color play a role for the new lighting. You also can have color values larger that 255 if you want very bright light sources (original FL does not allow that).
Note also that point lights are ignored for now. Only directional lights work (and will be converted internally to point lights).

The default materials is metal. This means If you have custom planet/atmosphere textures those planets appear metallic . You have to add those textures to the materials.json (I already added the default ones there at the first entry). Same applies to any other texture you don’t want to be metal. If you have mixed materials where a constant value is not enough, then you have to create special metalness/roughness maps. More details are in my documentation thread. Also for bases when docked this might not work yet (FL uses different rendering for most geometry there).

Also Freelancer has this weird bug that on some PCs it detects the maximum texture size as very small resulting in every texture being really blurred. For this reason the renderer applies my offset hack: https://the-starport.com/wiki/fl-binaries/limit-breaking/visibility offset 01AD6F in Freelancer.exe.

Known issues:

• Planets outside the light range of a light source can have bugged lighting
• Planet rings can have artifacts looking like gaps
• Light sources too close to objects can bug out the shadows
• Planets and static asteroids currently do not cast shadows (dynamic ones do)
• Planets currently do not occlude sun for light scattering
• There seem to be some weird shadow bugs in Vanilla FL sometimes (e.g. Starflier shadow on itself if you fly it)
• Currently only directional light sources (in system inis) are enabled. They are being converted to points lights internally. The rest will follow soon. This means spot and point lights in space do not work for now.
• I did not do much for bases yet (meaning when you are docked)
• Some nomads ships do not use new shading yet
• If the envmapbasic.txm is not a cubemap this will break the old lighting (e.g. the one from HD Edition mod)
• Rendering of distant objects is currently different due to how FL manages them
• Light scattering can sometimes be enabled erroneously
• Distant dynamic asteroids can quickly appear and disappear when e.g. you rotate the view quickly
• (Stuff I forgot and will add later )

Thank you guys for all the hard work moving this site!

I already wrote Laz some early feedback. More to come!

For those like me who did not see it, since it only is in the blog post: You need to reset your password. Otherwise you won’t be able to login. Maybe Laz should mention that in the post here, too?

Thanks I really hope so!

Regarding point 1:
It might actually be a good idea to link here. I will think about it. But currently it is up to you
As for point 2:
I added some more things I forgot to my original post. That includes instructions how to get the menu of the renderer open. Also I mentioned that the 1.1 patch is necessary. Do you have it installed? Plus I never tested whether SP works. Will do that later.

I finished version 1.1 beta 1: Download

Preview image:

Example video: Link

This version got a lot larger than originally planned. The renderer now supports clustered shading which allows for thousands of point lights. I plan to extend this for spot lights as well in the future. Note that performance will degrade the more lights have overlapping ranges.

I also added the option to replace those fake lights from FL with real point lights and a much better glow effect using real sphere geometry and PBR bloom. The range of such a point light is three times the glow size. The size of the sphere is the bulb size. You can find those values in DATA\EQUIPMENT\light_equip.ini.

Additionally I implemented automatic camera exposure (was needed, because the scenes are now darker because of all the other fixes). This is an early version and probably will need some more improvements. But it is quite usable already.

There have been many internal changes (more reversed stuff, optimizations and bug fixes, some rewrites (I even wrote test cases for verification (!)), etc.), which will be very helpful for future versions. For that reason I decided to increase the version number to 1.1.

Because of all the changes the graphics again look a lot better than before (you should notice it especially when comparing with older versions).

As always I am looking forward to your feedback

List of changes:

• Added clustered shading which allows thousands of point lights (will hopefully be extended to spot lights later on)
• Added option to replace fake lights from FL with real point lights
• Added much better glow effect when replacing fake lights with real lights using sphere geometry and PBR bloom
• Added automatic camera exposure (early version for testing)
• Added the option to use precise SRGB colour conversion which improves colours a lot (for transparency this is now always enabled since it caused wrong colours)
• Special lights e.g. from explosions etc. are now recognized and will be used automatically
• Many internal changes which will be helping a lot in future versions (e.g. used material types etc. are now known)
• When using glass materials without textures glass PBR settings are now applied automatically
• Improved appearance of light scattering
• Light range is now more similar to original FL light range (was too bright previously)
• Various optimizations and bug fixes

Regarding the SVN problem: My suggestion is to start the SVN server, check each repo out with git SVN brigde (e.g. Tortoisegit has it integrated right into the clone dialog) and then upload it as a git repo. You can have the full history from SVN this way. You just need to do this correctly. I have some SVN repos checked out as git repo just before it got shut down this way. But not all of them.

That is good to know! Can you give me the name of the plugin with the keymapping problems? Maybe I can fix the issue. It probably is one from adoxa, right?

@IrateRedKite: Thanks! I am very happy myself that it works so easily. Was expecting it to be more difficult. Also watching videos from others using it is very interesting. Very curios what people will do with the renderer.

Yes, if a constant value is not enough, then you need to craft special roughness/metalness maps. Otherwise just create a new entry in materials.json or use an existing one which is working for that.

Since a lot people asked about that (especially custom planet textures) I added some text about it to my release post.

@NeoTendar: Thanks! Yeah you can leave them empty if you do not need any text.

The default settings in materials.json are more a rough orientation. They are used in our mod, where I have proper roughness and normal maps.
Note that I released the beta also so that people can understand better how PBR works. You will have to adapt your mod if you want to use it.
Also what you disabled there is the tonemapping, which just caps the maximum light value to 1. It is not a fix.
There will be another factor you can change soon: It is the exposure value, which already is used and currently set to a fixed value. I did not add this on purpose yet, because I am afraid people will use it wrong.
The idea is that you can change it in the config, or that I allow a value to be set per system. I also will experiment with automatic exposure control later.

I wanted to give you guys a quick update after my last post. I still am working on the renderer and have fixed many bugs (mostly visible rendering issues) since the public beta release. Also there has been a lot of optimization work and I am currently working on some more optimizations for the shadow calculation/rendering. After that the list of remaining bugs is very small (and are minor ones). It should be out of beta once the last ones are fixed. Then I hopefully can start working on releasing the tools so that everyone can use it.

One recent change is the improvement of the light scattering. Now it knows where the suns are and only is enabled for them (before that it only used the first light source (not sun!) in the system). Also you now can have up to 8 suns with light scattering in one scene (the maximum limit actually is currently arbitrary set from me). You can reduce the maximum number in the settings window of the renderer (e.g. if you have a slower graphics card).
If no sun is visible light scattering is disabled now (before it was always on when in an asteroid field or nebula).

Example screenshot of 3 suns with light scattering:

One bug that has given me trouble for a very long time is some weird memory behaviour. After some time the renderer just could not reserve any more memory resulting in missing textures and crash of Freelancer shortly after. On some PCs this even was after 15 minutes when switching between many systems (I finally was able to reproduce it after switching nonstop systems for about 45 minutes on my PC). For the technically inclined: Address Sanitizer using VS2022 (https://learn.microsoft.com/de-de/cpp/sanitizers/asan?view=msvc-170 and Visual Leak Detector using VS2017) do not find anything. Also lets just say I usually know how to avoid and also find memory leaks.

My current (also not so good solution) is to enable the Large Adress Aware flag for the Freelancer.exe. After I have had the registry setting “MEM_TOP_DOWN” on for some weeks I can at least confirm that Freelancer has no problem with the flag (while the registry setting funnily broke some windows 7 control panel applications, meaning they are not large address aware). For now that solved it for our players (unless you play for lots of hours).

I suspect memory fragmentaion going on here, but that remains to be seen. I will come back to this later and it also might have disappeared by then due to my optimization work and code cleanup process.

I was planning for some time now to post some sort of FAQ thread where I explain what the renderer can do and what you need to do to convert your mod, but (as always) I did not have the time to do that, yet.