Crossfire - Upcoming changes, upcoming content

both fixed

This is what CF might look like when switching from DirectX8 to OpenGL (make sure to switch the video quality to 1080p).

The possibilities are great but it is nothing that simply can be switched on/off.

Much work and time needs to be invested to modify the assets. I personally think that it might be worth all the effort.

Better lighting system, real time shadows, light scattering, new pbr material system and lots of other improvements.

The new renderer was developed in the past years by Schmackbolzen from the New Universe mod and now has been released to be used in other mods (where developers are up for the task to integrate it and create the new textures). Huor and I have been in contact over the past weeks sharing test results and trying to get a few bugs fixed. Meanwhile major incompatibilities between CF and the new renderer (instant crashes) no longer exist in the newest version. There were other stability issues which might also be gone but I will have to do additional long term tests.

If the final issues can be sorted out and if we can do the work required to edit the assets the FL engine can be elevated to signifiantly higher quality standards. CF has the benefit of already having insanely good textures in most areas. That is a very good foundation to work on.

it might

Either next Friday or Saturday (most likely saturday) I would do a first test for the new Nomad server event.

This is mainly mant to be a stability test, gathering info for balancing the event and actually checking if the concept behind this kind of event is actually working. Would b cool to see some ppl on the server that day.

In the meantime... some more preview of the new renderer stuff. It's just a rough and tough texture work so far but it seems to be a good foundation for detail improvements later on.

sucks a bit that a bunch of details get lost when recording

Small bug fix:

• A bug in mission 9 where the wingmen would attack the tradelane rings that are constructed there got fixed. Mission progress should not get blocked any longer.
• Also the a bug where the old Order fleet ships appeared in Omega 3 and in Sol instead of the new versions got fixed. Correct ships are appearing now.
• A texture bug with the APC got fixed.

• small fix on a visibilty issue with one rare type of steroids.

Just some minor information about stuff being worked on atm.

The new event system has been tested online and the balancing roughly worked.

The reward system needs adjustments which I would try to test in an online test environment soon. If working a final test is being conducted on the CF server.

Another issue the last test showed were FPS drops during the event. I am not entirely sure yet where they were cominng from. I need to do further tests to figure out a solution.

Regarding the OpenGL update.

This whole thing is very work intense due to CFs already massive size.

In the end it is required to create settings for every texture that is meant to be rendered with the new lighting system. Every texture of every station, ships, cockpit, asteroid, etc.

On top of that for each of these textures normal maps and various other texture maps have to be created.

Since I already started on it and already finished a big amount of that work (all solar objects and ~30% of the ships) I can estimate a release size of the first version of 4-5Gb.

Not all areas of the game will benefit from the new Renderer. Right now static asteroids (asteroid fields) are not correctly using the renderer yet. Cutscenes, station interiors and NPCs are also not correctly using the new lighting system. In many cases stuff might look different... sometimes even strange. Correcting this might be very time intense and propably is not going to be part of the initial release.

Also lighting in space might not perfectly fit. While I am able to test every station and every ship (and in the end all stations and ships are being tested) it is a whole lot bigger task to test every location in every system to see if the lighting fits.

The task to introduce this renderer is enormous.

EDIT:

What about Performance of the OpenGL Renderer?

Apparently better graphics are of course more demanding. Certainly more Vram is required. But in some cases the rendering might be even more efficient.

I have not done a clear comparison between the renderers but I can tell that certain objects and sceneries for sure cause FPS drops. For that case I will keep an ingame option active to adjust render settings and if required to disable the new lighting system from inside the game.

On top of that do I not intend to replace the old DirectX renderer for compatibility reasons. The OpenGL Render is purely optional and I decided to allow players to activate it just like the already existing shader options on the launcher settings. I think this is the most convenient to provide the new option and also keep the old one for those who like it or run into performance issues.

What about Reshade?

I made the new Renderer also run with the latest Reshade version. Presets and shaders remain the same.

Development Menu?

In the videos I posted I sometimes adjusted settings via the development menu. This option will remain active.

In general the I want to keep the development of this new graphics upgrade as open as possible. That means you can play with the settings and also if you think you are able to produce better texture results you can provide me the results and I would include it into the mod. The sheer size of CF makes it hard to provide perfect results from the very beginning. But maybe with time and help from the community the results get better and better.

You also do not have to worry about anticheat or something like that when editing stuff. The server is not going to flag any edits as cheats. Only thing worth to mention is that once you restart FL and let the launcher do the patching stuff your own settings will be overwritten (reset). Sharing your improved texture results here would be the best way to include them permamently into the mod.

sollte nun korrekt sein aber bitte mal schauen (ich kann es derzeit nicht testen)