I'm not going to sugarcoat it. FL's graphics are dated. Honestly though they hold up in some areas but there are some glaring deficiencies in others which could be easily remedied to make the game look a LOT better.
I am getting tired very very fast of the current skyboxes. They are low resolution, dithered to oblivion and a lot of the stars are squares instead of twinkling dots of light. Is there a good high res or retextured skybox mod available? I hopefully want one that works with Discovery.
If something is available, please share it! Thank you!
Also on a completely separate and unrelated note, I have noticed that the entire screen seems to be somewhat organized into "sections." Each section is responsible for rendering a part of the screen, it would seem. This is most noticeable when you have a large engine and you pan and tilt the view around a bit. You should see boxes where the engine is. Just something I noticed.
' Wrote:Try this starsphere mod out: http://discoverygc.com/forums/index.php?...pic=124274
Perfect! A little grainy but overall it looks good. I installed the HD textures but they still look sort of standard. At any rate it cleans up a lot of the splotchiness, so I'm happy. :)
Got anything like this for lighting and mood? How about ships?
' Wrote:Got anything like this for lighting and mood? How about ships?
There's the realistic lighting mod which is approved for use with Disco:
http://sirius-terror-elite.de/download.php?view.1
It doesn't make the graphics better but it removes much of the ambient light in the systems, iirc.
As for ships, there isn't much on the HD side, other than the HD mod you've already used.
You could try Fagu_Aegis' tesxtures for 88Flak, they're compatible with disco, too.
http://www.moddb.com/groups/freelancer-4-e...flak-rc130-v125
They, again, don't change the graphics, but give you alternate styles for the ships.
There's not much in the way of redone stuff, perhaps with the advent of the DX9 Conversion on FWTOW release we will see a HD FL mod. (That however, would not likely be compatible with Disco)
' Wrote:... but there are some glaring deficiencies in others which could be easily remedied to make the game look a LOT better.
...
Also on a completely separate and unrelated note, I have noticed that the entire screen seems to be somewhat organized into "sections." Each section is responsible for rendering a part of the screen, it would seem. This is most noticeable when you have a large engine and you pan and tilt the view around a bit. You should see boxes where the engine is. Just something I noticed.
Sure, there are plenty of areas which could be improved, but unfortunately Disco has a lack of developers skilled in those areas. That's not a criticism, just a fact - those who are really, really good with effects and the like are few and far between in the Freelancer community.
On that other subject; post a screenshot? Because either something is wrong with your graphics driver or you've encountered a bug.
In case you haven't seen it, check out this thread as well:
http://discoverygc.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=96116
You may find something else that you like. Bear in mind that Adoxa's Hudshift is now packaged with Discovery and can be enabled upon installation of the mod.
Somewhere in the thread, there is a link to the HD textures mod. You may like to download that and use their nebulae/planet/ship textures, but stay away from the asteroid/base textures because sometimes they don't have 100% compatibility and cause things to become invisible, in a way which is particularly unhelpful.
' Wrote:Sure, there are plenty of areas which could be improved, but unfortunately Disco has a lack of developers skilled in those areas. That's not a criticism, just a fact - those who are really, really good with effects and the like are few and far between in the Freelancer community.
Oh that wasn't a bash on the devs here, just that a lot of the textures of things like planets and some objects are really low-quality. Again that's the original textures and not a knock against the devs. I really like Discovery! I think it brings a lot to the table.
As for the boxes I noticed this only happens in windowed mode. A good way to see a side-effect of this is to go into windowed mode then hit Y to bring up your friends list. The top line of the list is generally cut off by one or twi vertical pixels so I think it's something to do with some frame resizing or something. Anyway, yeah ;)