• "Living" planets can now use an enhanced atmosphere shader.
The shader is derived from Alex Peterson's "Simple Flexibile Atmosphere Shader" which can be found on his blog at
http://petrocket.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/simple-flexibile-atmosphere-shaders.html
Full credit and thanks to him for sharing his work with the internet community.
• Gas giants and irregular planets have a new atmosphere glow surrounding them. The new atmosphere effects are enabled or disabled by the .cfg setting "useEnhancedAtmosphereShaders"
• Atmosphere colour images and settings are exposed via the texture configuration file.
• Cloud texture mapping corrected so that it doesn't skip at midnight and does a full rotation per day.
• Animated the cloud texture so that it moves for planets displayed in the planetary view.
• Alpha blending corrected on cloud layers so that they don't discolour the sky. (Additive blending)
• Cloud layers appear beneath the ship when ascending from the planet, they don't just disappear.
• Reworked the reading of configuration files so that they are all processed before the game window displays. This has resolved the issue where the game would silently fail to start up.
• Extra external cloud textures configurable via textures.cfg
• Planet surface 'fog' settings added via textures.cfg which can colour the planet terrain to imitate the effect of atmosphere fog when flying higher into and beyond the atmosphere.
• Planet surface 'glow' settings to adjust colour added via textures.cfg, primarily to increase red tint on the Brown Dwarf planets when the player gets closer to the surface.
• Space dust is visible again at high speeds and away from space stations. It is also correctly coloured grey rather than white. There is a new setting in the .cfg file to adjust its scale from 0 to 100%.
• The default is starDustScale=100 for full size. Setting the value to 0 will prevent star dust from being drawn and is independent of the FFE game setting (within 'Other') which turns off other game details such as clouds.
• Textures folder can be defined in the [DIR] section of the configuration file.
• Resolved the occasional crashes that occurred when shutting down the game.
• Fixed the blank area on textured planets/asteroids. The sphere-mapping code didn't test for out-of-bounds values being passed into the acos() functions, the values had been caused by rounding errors.
• Added a "borderless" window mode that can be used as an alternative to the "exclusive" fullscreen mode. This new mode will draw a full-screen window on the primary monitor without borders/title, and permits applications on other monitors to be viewed/clicked upon. Borderless mode is enabled by setting "enableBorderless=1" in the configuration file and fullscreen=0. The user can toggle between it and windowed mode as before. With this option enabled the game can be started in this mode by setting "defaultBorderless=1". This will be the new default mode as it automatically runs full-screen without the user having to edit anything.
• When using special CTRL key functionality, the key presses won't be passed through to FFE now. So for example, CTRL+F12 to toggle between full-screen/windowed mode won't activate an escape pod!
• Experimental texture load settings have been added to the .cfg file to permit the loading of game textures directly onto the graphics card rather than into system memory. Users on 32bit Windows who have large amounts of graphics memory available may benefit by being able shift textures to the graphics card. Currently there is no analysis of what can be loaded, the user will need to experiment themselves to find what works.
NB. Switching between fullscreen and windowed mode will take slightly longer when caching directly on the graphics card as they have to be released and reloaded in order to switch resolution/mode.
• Fixed occasional start-up crash when JJFFE read the configuration file to get the FPS limit value.
• At a certain rotational point and distance, small planetoids such as Io would spike areas of their surface out towards the camera. There was an undocumented fix in the FFED3D code base between r58 and r60 which actually fixed this and so it has been added back in. It is skipped for asteroids though as it prevents large portions of their surfaces from being drawn.
• Fixed a situation that displayed a combined external and primitive model for the Eagle Mk 2 or Mk 3. This would happen when drawing external .x models, and model 24/25 is not present but model 23 is. Model 23 would be drawn as it is a common model part but it would display .x Long Range Eagle model with vector landing gear. If model 23 is being drawn as a sub-object and the parent model 24/25 has not been loaded or is missing it will be forced to draw as the primitive model instead.
• Added CTRL+F3 key combination to reload game and ship patches to aid developers making alterations.
• Added CTRL+F7 key combination to reload game textures to aid developers making alterations.
• Added additional ship patches to restore the rear view so that it isn't blocked by the ship model.
• When using grey-scaled shoreline textures on green living planets, it can use vertex blending to create a beach effect. This is enabled by the ffed3daj.cfg configuration setting useVertexBlendingForBeaches=1.
• Setting it to 0 will cause a solid green shoreline texture as in v1.09 and earlier. Has no effect when using pre-coloured textures.
• Initial splash screen will redraw the text and not remain blank after user switches screen mode or after the DirectX display device has had to be reset.
• Bug Fix: Sub-Objects are lit once again by the lights of their parent object (broken in v1.08+)
• Static interplanetary shuttles are now above ground and won't display their base name as the ship label.
• The replacement docking bay entrance now uses a unique model for the cylindrical space station which has a slanted front opening, model 470. Other stations use the squared version, model 227 which is scaled as required to fit the other stations. Both models have been updated to remove the second 'lift' room which should not have been present behind the rear bay doors. The updated models, skin and tris.ini files are included in the patch.
• Added animation timings for the docking bay replacement model so that the doors open and shut correctly.
• Supressed the loading of replacement models for the docking bay lift and two complex areas which are parents to variations of other shapes and models. Models 234, 236 and 237 will not be loaded now.
• Added unique texture for internal docking bay doors, tex557. This is only used along with the replacement docking bay models 227/470 to blend transitions.
• Added unique textures for the docking bay lift model 236. These are used with the replacement docking bay, model 227/470 to blend transitions between rooms. The new textures are tex558 to tex564.
• Police Vipers in the intro sequence now start in front of the space station in scene 11. They don't fly through the front walls as they give chase!
• Z-Order tweaks to TV/Posters so that text overlaps in the correct order.
• Clock faces now appear on all sides of the original FFE church tower, but the hands still spin too fast.
• Corrected alignment of Boa decal stripes.
• Crew icon now appears on the cockpit panel when using a single person ship but have retained crew either by changing ships in Buffet or from using the patch to keep excess crew.
• Updated splash screens for FFED3DAJ mod and removed outdated website links.
• Additional start-up "tips" & tweaked positions. (Thanks for those provided by Steve of FrontierAstro)
• fixed FFE's missing alignment for surface temperature in planet information text.
• The cargo inventory icon is hidden when the ship is empty.
• Improved z-order of TV screens/posters so that they don't disappear when launching from the docking bay.
• Choice between 2 models to use for the space-station docking bay final room and for that of underground stations.
• Two new settings define which to use: "spacestationDockingBay" and "undergroundDockingBay". These can be set to either 233 or 471. If Model 233 is used for the underground room then the animation is set to display a blank frame outside the windows so that the rotating stars aren't visible. Models 233 and 471 are included within the patch package to ensure that they are as expected.
• Added image tex427 to the core files pack as it is used by adverts and was missing from some installations.
• Added images tex529 and tex530 to the core files pack to correct how they are displayed.
• tex529 is the Recycle image, this version is darker than in some installations.
• tex530 is the Frontier logo, forced red in this version to display on the game-over headstone.
• Suppressed the drawing of Space Dust when still within a planet's atmosphere.
• Main shader files now reside in the \Shaders sub-directory.
• The blue explosion stars in the intro sequences rotate.