Welcome to Vendetta Online 1.8.79

Changelog:

*** Vendetta 1.8.79
- New high-resolution compressed textures for EC and Raptor series.
- Re-exported and compressed textures for all rocky asteroids.
- Compressed starfield textures.
- 256MB Visual Quality settings no longer enable Texture Compression.
- 256MB VQ settings also enable Super High backgrounds.
- New Shader Model 2.0a low precision setting available.
It is mainly for Geforce FX series cards.

There's at least one issue: the station solar panels will change as you get closer to them, due to a different shader being applied to the LOD mesh vs the full-resolution mesh (Ray updated this, not me). FYI.

There may be other issues, please post and let us know.

Also, as a heads up: Compared to the uncompressed texture usage, the Training sectors are now using about 100MB less video memory.

Lastly.. a bunch of other changes didn't make it in tonight. Updates to some other fighters, the Leviathan, Queen, some Station memory improvements, and hopefully sprucing up the background nebulae, plus various misc stuff. Hopefully I can drop those in next week, as well as getting some forward momentum on new gameplay content.

I saw a roid that changed brightness while flying around in the sector.

Here it was almost black: http://kitchen.nfshost.com/ven/blackboneroid.png.jpg

Switching between FP16 and FP32 made no difference. I didn't try anything else.

inc i found that ever since this update the distance level of detail has been kind of...off like before you started doing this i had pretty smooth transitions now i have these huge chunks of roids missing till im literaly 50m away from them or so. after messing around with the dlod i can sort of find a medium but the frame rate suffers (especially on the bone roids)

oh i play on a black macbook btw

Peytros, are you using a "Scene LOD" of 20? If you're using less than that, the positional accuracy will not always be good. However, I don't know why it would be any different with this version compared to previous ones. We didn't actually export or change any 3D geometry in any of these versions.. just texture and material changes. Ie, surface stuff, not actually changing or moving meshes. Anyone else seeing anything like this? Asteroids in the wrong place or something?

Memory savings in the Training Sector (Sol A11) - 256MB 6800GT, 1280x960, texture compression off, "Highest" background, no anti-aliasing, after flying around near all the asteroids and capship:

1.8.77 - 236MB, 94%
1.8.78 - 199MB, 87%
1.8.79 - 118MB, 52%

("/query video memory", which I think only works in DirectX)

Granted, this comparison is with texture compression off. The savings comparison would be much smaller with runtime compression enabled, but the impact would still be evident (since we now have pre-compressed normal maps, which were never runtime compressed before). Being choosy and doing the compression beforehand (rather than runtime) allows better quality while still keeping the memory footprint down.

uh... what does that mean?

Wow, nice.

Peytros: it means that when we started in .77, the Training sector took up 236MB of video memory (with compression turned off), and now it takes up 118MB to display the same content with the same settings. Actually, that also includes high-res maps for the EC-89 and stuff, so technically it's more content with less memory usage.

Reduced texture memory usage means reduced memory-bandwidth requirements, reduced load-times, reduced system-ram overhead, and perhaps most importantly.. means we can add more Stuff to video memory (make textures look cooler, add more realtime stuff like shadow maps or whatever, or use additional memory for advanced lighting or sorting or whatever).

It also greatly reduces the chances of "texture thrashing", a kind of worst-case situation where there is more data in a particular scene than your videocard has memory to display (so it's continually trying to swap out textures, and the framerate is dropped by like 90%). This wasn't happening anyway, before, due to our enabling Texture Compression for 256MB cards, but now we can turn runtime-compression off for that hardware and still yield better-looking overall quality.

So, anybody take before-and-afters of the EC-89/Raptor yet?

peytros,

If you can get me a screenshot of the missing chunks of roids, then I can make a diagnosis.

i get the exact same thing as spuck

We're looking into the issue spuck reported.

[EDIT]: We found the issue and are patching it (tiny patch, was just a typo).

inc and ray the problem with the roids seems to be non existant now. it is only the stations that are having this popping effect. I will post screen shots soon.

For a while some station textures (like on the walls of the Jallik E-15 station) would randomly change brightness with distance for me. I rather suspect it's my hardware instead of a VO problem, but it might be worth noting.

tada! .. old vs new bus and raptor.

http://kitchen.nfshost.com/ven/busold.png
http://kitchen.nfshost.com/ven/busnew.png

http://kitchen.nfshost.com/ven/raptorold.png
http://kitchen.nfshost.com/ven/raptornew.png

That's about as high quality as I can go. The new textures are way less blurry.

Ooh, very nice!

That is quite a noticable improvement, good job devs.

I just noticed there's like little square-ish bits of metal on the valkyries's hull. The new textures are way awesome, definitely more detail on it. Looks less like a graphic and more like a ship =D

Getting this message on the console...

warning: The VAD has been replaced by a hack pending a complete rewrite

Figure that it's harmless, but, still wondering... what is the VAD?