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.
