2013-08-11 - Version 1.01:
•New options to enable Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing to smooth model & line edges.
•Enabled support for global model shaders. This was disabled in the first release because it gave everything
a dark and metalic appearance, so individual models required their own shader effect.fx file.
•There is now a ships.fx, asteroids.fx and models.fx within the Models folder to provide a generic shader for
ships, asteroids and everything else. Individual model shaders will be used where they are available
to permit customisation.
•Added multiple skins support for objects. Each can have up to 10 different skins and in the case of Police Vipers,
they have their own dedicated skin. Implementation is via new shader variables/
•Improved the atmosphere shader so that the sky and clouds obscure the stars during the daytime and then fade
to reveal them at night, with just a faint cloud layer visible in the night sky.
•Reworked part of the rendering code so that when inside an atmosphere, the sky is now drawn before the sun,
which in turn is drawn before the planet - so the sun can now be seen in the sky of a living planet.
•In case your PC is unable to load the high-resolution cloud textures, or to save memory, there is a new setting in
.cfg file- hiresCloudTextures=1. Set this to 0 to use lower resolution images.
•The current sun colour was being applied when drawing your ship in the Equipment view and when viewing other
ships in the ship yard. They are now correctly lit with a white light as per original FFE.
•The "1st Encounter" Quest ship now displays throughout the intro sequence.
•Chasing Quest ship at end of intro sequence is swapped to be the expected police Viper when using models.
•Extended the option to hide text on loaded models so that it can apply to bases and stations too.
•Anisotropic version now reads shipdata_aniso.txt to load the ship configuration values.
•Correction: re-enabled specular lighting so that objects will reflect light. This was accidentally left disabled in the
2013-04-02 release.
•Correction: Replaced lua.dll because it required Visual C++ 2005 runtimes to be installed.
•Added patches to allow the number of credits to be altered for each start point. Feedback was that the Anisotropic
mod is particularly harsh - so if you want to cheat and play as a millionaire, now you can!
•Ships now display their radar dishes and antenna. Added temporary model 197 for the Naval ECM antenna which is
just a copy of 196 with a different texture. The new Panther Clipper and Lynx engine models are now used as well.
(problematic equipment submodels can be hidden)
•Additional fixes for characters in names, e.g. du Prés's Wreck at Lawacan, Köhl's Hole at Zeiocan etc.
•The final line of each of the initial journal stories can now be scrolled up into view and read.
•Console warning lights now illuminate when under attack, undercarriage is lowered or auto-pilot is active.
•Updated the "Hints" messages in the start-up script to be in-keeping with the game.
•The Eagle Mk2 and Mk3 now use their separate models correctly and won't draw the long range variant over the top
as well! Models 24 & 25 in FFE inherited the base Eagle from model 23. The change supresses drawing of model 23
but retains missiles, ECM and thruster pines. (Primitive models of the ships render as before)
•Model 271 (spaceport) and model 302 (hangers) can now have their name labels hidden by specifying notdrawtext=1
under the [MODEL] section of their tris.ini file. This can be used to finally hide the "Old Blackelk" text on the replacement
spaceport model.
•Cargo containers on Lifters (model 153) now have a color/skin value passed to it so that it can change its appearance
using a shader effect.fx file. (Example provided of programmatic color changing of default skin)
•Fix for Nic mod "NoMassMissiles=1" hack: ship doesn't gain 1t cargo space when launching a missile now!
•New option in .cfg file "modelPreLoad". This defines whether to pre-load models during start-up sequence.
• 0=no pre-loading, 1=intro models, 2=intro & default start position models.
•Application is now responsive during start-up. It can be moved/closed, and doesn't show "not responding" in the title bar.
Resources are loaded by separate worker-threads.
•Proximity mines don't display the missile object as well now.
•Added texture1-5 tga/png for models which shaders can use for bump maps etc
•Sub-models will also hide text as well now if specified in tris.ini, e.g. Aggy's wind turbines.
•Mouse pointer doesn't jump to top left corner now when right-clicking in full-screen mode.
•Shutting down will now wait for the model manager thread to terminate first!
•Only supported Textures present in the range above tex600 will be loaded to safeguard memory.
•New checks for out-of-memory when trying to load a model and its textures. Stale objects will be dropped immediately and
a re-load of the model attempted.
•Found and fixed a memory leak when passing colors over to the planet shader. (dates back to r8 of the original ffed3d source)
•Rewritten model cache management thread. This will now limit the number of models loaded into memory to avoid running
out of resources. Settings are available in FFED3DAJ.cfg to customise ...