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He says he's running a mod where level isn't important, the issue surely is with either the mod or mod manager. He certainly won't need to finish single player if he has a mod that takes care of the level requirement

you must finish the single player campaign to unlock all the jump gates

If you have a mouse with programmable buttons it's easy to program your mouse buttons to fire auxiliary weapons such as missiles, cruise disruptors, and CMs.

Dug out my copy of FL last week but I've got a question; I'm running mod mgr. and have a mod that supposedly opens ALL the gates but it isn't I can't get out of Bretonia (Access denied) And when I do get up towards the outer fringes (planet Harris Leeds etc.) I can't get any work Rather than mess around with mod manager, how many jobs do I have to take to unlock the jump gates?

I know what you guys mean. You are talking about the well known "feature creep". While it might look that way, there is actually a goal I had (and still have) for the first release:
- Good looking shadows
- Good rendering quality so it does not look artificial
- A (somewhat acceptable) material system
- Acceptable performance
- No problematic bugs and enough polish for release

For the current state only the last one is open now. So as you can see there is quite a large progress already made.

Stuff I have on my list for after release:
- More lights, especially make running lights real lights
- Add bloom support (currently there is only exposure control)
- Automatic exposure control (from Valve HL2 paper)
- More baked in reflections so that e.g. nebula not in the starspheres are also reflected
- More performance optimizations
- ... (here you can add literally endless stuff which you could do)

@Moonhead:

I intend to make it a mod so in the end everyone can use it. I am thinking about to exclude mods who stole stuff from others, so that they can learn the hard way why stealing is not good. Why should I respect their work if they don't respect the work of others. I am still open for feedback on this, though.

At first I will release it for our mod only, so problems can be found more quickly. After a while I plan to create a standalone mod on Moddb with only the graphics enhancements for others to use. Hopefully FL will live a bit longer that way.

As for the files: The models in the videos are from vanilla FL. They just use height and normal maps. I upscaled the textures using a self build and trained neural net plus some automatic post processing. Regarding the engine: Basically I replaced the end of the rendering pipeline from FL with my stuff. So maybe its half a new rendering engine. Some stuff still gets just passed through.



I did some tests with eigos and it looks like we have a usable workflow for exporting stuff and use it with my new rendering system. Here is a video from an asteroid eigos created: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/flroid02_4.mp4 . It uses height, normal, roughness and metalness maps.

It seems like everyone is happy with the way the rendering looks now (me included), so I won't touch that anymore as far as I am able to.

Edit: Replaced the video with a one where the shadows aren't bugged due to wrong bias.
Edit2: After some map and parameter tuning: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/flroid02_8.mp4

The look is great.
It is more than old FL players could dream of.
But I assume you suffer the same disease most of us have... the wish to make it perfect. The problem with that is, once you get a step closer to perfection you run across many new ideas which would make it even better. Am I correct?

It surely looks good enough to be worthy of "better than fine"!

What (in a nutshell, and in layman's terms) does you project entail? Will you be 'releasing' a graphically revamped version of FL? Do you, apart from the graphics rendering, still use all the files that make up the game? Or are you writing a whole new engine? (BTW I apologize if I bore / bother you with these questions; feel free to ignore!)