Just wanted to drop in and thank you for working on this. It's amazing work well beyond what I can do. Would love to be able to work on shader creation and implementing it one day. For now, it's just creating more content, haha.

I'd like to learn about shaders, but how are you even getting it into the game? Are you having to write it and then inject a DLL into the game .exe so it can have those resources? Or is there another way you're managing to get it loaded? Curious.

Hope you're both well and progress is still going well, too.

No worries! I'm on the Discord too as 5anitybane/inhaledchaos. Trying to relearn all the modding knowledge I lost and make a set of videos for our community to try and draw some new blood in.

Holy frolicking spaceballs. Your work is AMAZING. I usually hate graphics update mods as they change the flavour entirely, e.g. Morrowind. For Freelancer, you've just made it feel like a graphical remaster while keeping the feeling alive. That's special. Is this something you're making publicly available or donation based? I'd like to donate at least a few coffees if you're releasing that. The FL community has been dear to me for a long time (though I am relatively new to The Starport, I modded back in TLR days) and what you're doing helps it in a BIG way. Modding FL again is already exciting, but I cannot wait to open up FL in your new renderer. Very, very exciting.

@Schmackbolzen looks awesome, except old textures. Can you try this render with my 2k station textures? You can find it in Freelancer HD or I can send it directly.

Example:
https://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/ ... 021-02-14_16-39-49-52.png

Hey Schmack ! I found Swinir Super res And it gives a nice look to straight line compared to ESRGAN Ground textures and it gives a subtle metalic roughness texture. It's accurate and not that blurry compared to some ESRGAN pretrained models. I think you can try foolhardy remacry. Swinir removes random dithering too.

Here is another DXT compression reducer : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WXBNd ... a3L1_U7zuNkSpN9aBF0M/view I gonna try to look how it behaves with Swinir and Foolhardy Remacry. I'm testing it curently I gonna do a post to show the result with Swinir and foolhardy remacry. OK I tried ! So BC1 smooth used once or twice + Swinir or foolhardy remacry is better than these two other methodes.

For albedo creation, I can use Blender but as my PC isn't powerful enough, it crashes if I have too much polys... -_- I already created te base material by doing some blender displacement tricks. I can use bump maps to do the displacement too. So I can have a good base by downloading free PBR materials and materials that have bump maps in it. There is this : Artomatix It can convert any diffuse to PBR. I think I will have to try it but if it needs CUDA cores or a powerful PC, I will not be able to use it.
Edit : System requirement for Unity ArtEngine : https://unity3d.atlassian.net/wiki/spa ... rements+and+compatibility
Edit 2 : Here is an example of how to use the PBR material generation. https://unity3d.atlassian.net/wiki/spa ... 26727/Material+Generation
Edit 3 : Albedo Generation : https://unity3d.atlassian.net/wiki/spa ... 4426754/Albedo+Generation

Thanks and likewise!

I actually have been pretty busy and used most of the free time to work on the renderer. Also we mostly write in discord nowadays. Turned out Swinir is really good for planets as you can see in the screenshots below.

I currently am testing with a very small group of players. I am fixing the last crashes and some more severe rendering issues. So far it mostly runs on other hardware than mine. The goal is to launch the public beta of the mod including the new renderer in the next 1-2 weeks! Expect some more screenshots and videos for the announcement (this time not done by me).

Here are some screenshots of the version we are currently testing:

Right click - open new tab

Looks amazing! Wow, really great work. Everything is smooth, even the skyboxes. Looks beautiful. Will it require vanilla or also work in HD?