It looks very nice. But i hope also, that this upgrade can be canceled while mod activation, because actually my 8400GS <strike>is slow</strike> is crap. I cannot force full quality, and have to lower FL preferences, to run it with ~20fps, when a big planet is in my HUD. More graphic enhancment on disco, and i have to play with 16 bit...
Thanks everyone for the encouragement:)If i have any questions I'll chime in straight away.
I've been doing some more extensive testing with allowable formats and remap / mat / engine performance. Slow going since this Modding business is all new to me but it's turning out well so far.
I've just finished some early tests with the Li01 starsphere. Goes well with the new Civilian HD textures. Seems like NY has some burn overlay which punches the colors pretty hard and for the life of me I can't find where this is controlled. I've tried playing with the sunght format but it won't remove the "NY" style colors. I've tried the same starsphere in Li02 and it's not affected by the colorization. Any one who has an idea what is causing this I would love to get your insight. I reformatted my texture to accept this colorization without weird jaggies / overlays so it still works... looks a lot better without it though.
I've adjusted the compression of the textures and reimported them with the proper DDS - TAR format to compensate for the engine instability in the civ.starflier upgrade. Overall the effect is the same but uses the original texture sizes as a baseline with an optional upgrade to 512*512 instead of the default MIP6 existing files. I have not gone back yet to replace some of the detail elements on the back of the flier but that will get done in time.
All of these upgrades should be completely optional as they currently affect only vanilla files and textures specifically. Should eliminate some of the folks who don't want to push their machines above the current minimum requirements.
The thing I love about discoveryFL is I still feel like it's freelancer, not some weird hack job and I want to keep the original flavor of the game in all the new updates I'm working on. You guys do FANTASTIC work and I love playing the game:)
Needless to say I've been spending a lot more time in NY and even playing through the original story mode in my vanilla install just to take it all in.