Many thanks Black Eagle.

Well I must say it looks very nice, the subluminar light frequencies have very obviously moired with the superluminary photofrequencies and Fresnelled the Ocular Photoscopic Sensors in your ship!

Heheheheh.

OK, seriously... the problem is with the envmapbasic.mat file. FL seems either unable to support it correctly, or it is still in the wrong format.

The envmapglass.txm file seems to be correct now, it is behaving itself as it should, the appearance of glass in the standard ships and stations where it is used hasn't changed for the worse (although I may be fooling myself it seems to have added a shade and some reflection as you pass a ship or station) and there are no error messages.

By combining the new envmapglass.txm with the old envmapbasic.mat files, the game is good again,apart from lots of messages in FLSpew.txt that envmapbasic.mat is an old or invalid format, which we always had.

For the envmapbasic.mat file, I will try to make a new Cube Map when I get some time, but as I said my knowledge of lighting using cubemaps is limited to almost zero. My problem is my inability to test changes on either of my laptops, because both have Intel Extreme-II graphics and neither of them show the visual problem.

So if anyone is knowledgeable and can help throw me some guidelines or can even take over the project, I will be more than happy?

Many thanks again pals.

Here's a copy of my files - i redid what you did back then, and didn't see any rainbowing effects. Feel free to test em out etc, as it's still going to be at least a couple of days before I can start looking again at anything

Download

Let me know if anyone sees any errors occuring, or strange colorations etc.

Hi Chips.

The DDS image file in your envmapbasic.mat is different, there is no white spot in the 3rd image.

Nonetheless, although I haven't tested it yet, it should also cure the messages then although it won't show the reflections that were meant, it solves the warning messages problem so it's not a bad solution.

Cheers

I shoulda mentioned, I have about as much talent as a turnip that has been boiled in sea water at photoshop and other related imagery magic.

No worries, Chips. Every help is a help. And if this achieves the target of getting rid of the messages without making the game lose anything then it's acceptable as far as I think, until someone comes up with a better solution.

Cheers pal.

Hello pals.

There's been no advance on this problem and there are still an awful lot of errors being generated in the game from envmapbasic, even with new mods that are being released these days.

So I would still like help from you expert modellers out there to try to solve it ?

Can anyone shed light on :-
how and where these textures are used in the models - an example that I can open up and see?
since the effect is erroring its obviously not working, what should we see?
what happens if we simply delete the envmapbasic and envmapglass entries in the .ini files?
how about if we remove the envmapxxx settings in the flconfig.ini file where the different adapters are listed?

Loueva, any ideas about this please?

download CubeMapGen i have never had any errors with the DDS cube files it makes. Also, it beats the heck out of "a really good gfx editor" for envmapping because it lets you preview the affect it will have

what does environmental mapping do? well duh - it projects X,Y,and Z reflections from a static image base - so if you have a system that's red on one side, green on the other, you can place that in an environmental map. how does it do it? every archetype has model info, and if it has an envmap name AND envmap material library it will display that envmap. FL's dumb-envmap is JUST for glare- it makes rounded items appear round.

and heres the big secret:if you assign a single environment map to every ship name it "dynamic map" or whatever, don't specify where the material-library for it is, and place a unique (tailored) cubemap into a starsphere (and also name it 'dynamic-map or whatever), it will appear on every ship in that system!

by using simple dark-nebula tex's like in NY you get a shiny, more spacey look on ships.

Edited by - Cold_Void on 6/9/2007 12:39:16 PM

Many thanks Cold Void, I appreciate you taking the time to explain.

I'm not exactly sure I understand but I will try to work out an example to see the effect you describe. It seems like magic to me at the moment, but so did so many other things in the past until I got down to them.

Does doing what you describe with a new envmap get rid of the error messages in FL?

NP. i would guess that using newer DDS cubemaps would do so as it never gave me a problem (the 'vanilla' ones are quite out of date and do not push cards very hard because they are so low-detail - its up to you whether you go with high-performance optimized maps or larger more wasteful ones, and really depends on how many of them you want to display on screen at once) but really don't know because i've never seen the described error

just to be a bit more specific on the starsphere-envmap displacement trick - all the starsphere models have self-contained material libraries (they're inside the model file and acessible with UTF editor) - an environment map is no different from any other texture, except that its node looks different and it has no material-library entry. open envmapbasic.mat and copy that structure in a starsphere's texture-library, voila you've got "localized" environment mapping, which was what i was trying to explain.

just to hazard a guess, the envmap errors are probably just from ships that have environment maps assigned without the extra "material library = fx\envmapbasic.mat" line required to display the map consistently (otherwise, it can only appear when a properly defined ship appears and supplies the correct MAT file location with the texture listed under the shiparch for envmap..phew )

Many thanks once again, Cold Void. When (if) I get some free time I would like to pick your brains more on this topic, its intriguing.

The messages happened all the time with plain FL and with most mods too, I got fed up seeing them in FLSpit/FLSpew when I'm debugging stuff. Some modders advise to remove all envmapglass.txm and envmapbasic.mat entries for the ships and bases etc, but that's not good enough for me and I refuse to do it!

So I tinkered around again and managed to fix the envmapbasic.mat file too, I used a single plain matt texture and generated the MIP maps from it, and imported it as DDS (DXT-3). It doesn't change the way the game looks and the messages have gone.

So here are the fixed envmapglass.txm and envmapbasic.mat files for those who don't want to go into making their own...

http://downloads.rrjds.com/Fixed_Envmap_Files_31-7-2007.zip

Put them in DATA\FX replacing the old ones (rename them first if you want to keep them).

You could also come and join our "RRJDS TNG Mod" server for some fun, we operate a great and fun gaming environment irrespective of which mod we run, we don't allow bullying or harassment of other players, nor mad pointless shoot-outs - it's running TNG at the moment but we're shortly going to run our second own mod, RRJDS 2.81. We have a test server up at the moment "{RRJDS} Coldfire's 2.81 Test Server" but some files were missed from the flmod file and its limping a little at the moment. The Big Fix is on its way. The RRJDS 2.81 Mod download file is on our server by the fixed envmap files.

Roleplay: - the art of self-deceipt!

Edited by - StarTrader on 7/31/2007 5:32:18 AM