I had hoped to have had a new beta build out this past month, but these strange times & great weather have been too much of a distraction.
Hopefully "soon" and it will update the bitmap version of the cockpit and also fix a lot of issues in this mode - such as the radar flashing.
The stardreamer icons are currently shared by the 3D panel and the bitmap version, hence the issue. The bitmap mode now has its graphics split out to a separate folder in the next build - this will enable the cockpit, icons, wallpapers and HUD target/drifts crosshairs to be different for 3d/bitmap modes.
Regarding the dark areas around the station, this suggests that perhaps you aren't using a beta build but perhaps the last full release, v1.11?
In later beta builds, I've lightened the surface - artificially at low altitudes so that even on the night side of a planet it should be visible now.
Shininess of many objects (such as buildings & those ground tiles) have also been adjusted, so should be better now.
I should have updated the front post sorry after v1.16 beta 2 got deleted from my Dropbox by, I'm assuming a false-positive antivirus scan.
The previous build, beta 1 is still available - see post #416 here.
I'd recommend adding that over your v1.11 install to give it a try before I suggest editing shader files. You will probably want to back up/rename your ffed3daj.cfg file first so that you don't lose your current settings, then put it back afterwards. (The beta builds now come with a config application too)
Hope this helps.
Kick to backside received... I better crack on with those bitmaps that I wanted to tidy up and get another build together...
That’s a massive help, thanks. I’m using the v1.11 build as per the first post, so I’ll download the beta and get that slapped on.
Awesome news to hear the “retro” mode will get some work, I’ve been playing lots of FE2 recently via DOSbox with the controls mapped to a joypad - I find flying and combat much more enjoyable now, classic Elite style, better than mouse control point&click, wish I could’ve played this way back in the 90’s Your mod seems to be the only one for FFE where I’ll be able to do the same.
Hi again Andy, I've installed v1.16 Beta 1 - selecting the original console bitmap causes a CTD when trying to start the game.
Looking at the (very handy) setup program, I can only remap keys to other keys and the joystick settings only allow me to map to 1 stick + HAT on my twin-stick joypad, so it looks like I'll have to use xpadder to get the controls how I want them.
Planet surfaces are still looking pretty dark, but the gloss sheen is much reduced
Hi everyone. Sorry for the long break, weird times and all... had a couple of last minute issues pop up in testing, a dozen false-positive antivirus results etc etc ... but they're now cleared and I can finally share v1.17beta1 with you all!
(edit: ah, yes - I should repeat that this beta needs to be added over an existing install, v1.11 or later!)
As mentioned previously, this build primarily fixes the outstanding issues with the bitmapConsole mode and includes a set of AI up-scaled graphics to use.
I've redrawn the targeting sights (and include an alternate based upon GLFFE's) and tidied up the stardreamer controls and a couple of console icons that translated less well - but otherwise the images are the result of the hugely impressive Esrgan software. Fixing the bitmap mode has also resolved a few issues with the 3D console flickering or losing the current radar images.
This build includes a fix for the random number seed adjustment when aniso battle patches are enabled in the standard FFED3DAJ game, causing a change to the collection date of the initial "INVALUABLE ARTWORK" BBS mission (#441). It now awards the correct medals on classified photographic missions for the photo distance (#447) - as well as fixing bombing and assassination missions medals in the Anisotropic/Hellmod versions. The flickering colours on red-dwarfs (#440) have also been removed.
I've also included my experimental shaders for the multi-coloured & bump-mapped Asp, and multi-colour (single skin) Cargo canister, Skeet and Viper MkII which includes pirate decals and a separate military skin. (perhaps, hopefully, to be improved upon!)
Anyhoo ... I hope everyone is keeping safe and well, enjoy the build and take care out there!
Cheers!
AndyJ
This is just an inital response as I won't get any real game playing time until the weekend...
Great to see the original cabin backgrounds making a comeback; strangely it takes me back to playing the game in the 320x200 days!
It's also nice to see the updated urgent trading screen working properly. I did manage to mess things up while testing it by using BUFFET to max a quantity out, which resulted in a negative return for selling all those alien artefacts!
And... just a personal opinion but I think the targetting sights you've got are a bit too big and clunky. The ones I use look much better to me...
EDIT: Ok, yours are for the bitmap console. I get it now
Anyway, I will report back in a few days with other stuff, you'll be thrilled to hear
A few days turned into over a month
However, v1.17beta1 continues to impress with its bug fixes and new features. Thanks Andy!
Three points to ponder...
1. I'm currently flying an Imperial Trader and the special blue engine flares glitch a bit when using the rear view on time acceleration eg. when flying away from a planet.
2. Was there any progress in being able to choose colours other than blue for those flares? There was some discussion with Gernot about it a while back.
3. I've just been informed that I can't take an assassination mission because my Elite rating isn't high enough! Trust me, it's Elite and beyond...
Ah, now I've got a proper, game-ending bug to report!
I had an assassiantion to carry out at Darkes starport in the Quince system, but when I arrived there I found all but one of the landing pads had been taken so although I was able to land, my target wasn't there. By using BUFFET I removed one of the ships from the starport and then took over my target ship which was lurking in space and landed it at Darkes.
When the time came to attack my target, they didn't launch from the pad so I swooped in low and destroyed them. My roster showed the mission as having been completed but when I docked in the Vequess system to receive credit for the kill, I briefly saw a message which read "We're annoyed as you destroyed the ship before the target was on board" and then the game crashed.
Whether this is a consequence of using BUFFET to manipulate ships I don't know, as occasionally you can end up with indestructible ships using that program, but when I loaded the same save into GLFFE there was no crash.
I've attached the save game. You're approaching ens Base in Vequess, prior to docking.
EDIT: Ok Frontier, I can't name the actual starport in Vequess!!
Just restarted a new game on the latest beta - seems smoother and slicker than ever, no bugs yet (although the oblate spheroid feature for stars is rendering a bit extreme on my game, and also seems to affect gas giants - disabled it for now as i also prefer the 2D star textures, but mebe a tuning variable for spherical oblation in the config would help.. (on that point, i've always found the effect too pronounced for gas giants too))..
Quick question tho: i'm currently rockin' a Python Freighter in Aniso's mod, but is there an alternative model or skin somewhere to the 'pink w/ sharks teeth' base model?
And i'm sure it must get asked all the time - what might be the prospects for an updated ship model pack (some of the Oolite model packs are great; tho even the base ones are awesome)..? Our current mish-mash collection is so underselling the game..
I'm testing the new v1.17 beta1 right now. Overall good experience. I've also tried FFED3DAJ_Config utility which works great too. However, here I have question - is there a way to bind multiple key combinations to single action? And also, how would I bind a shortcut like SHIFT+F1 to time x1, like the original FFE used to have?
Thanks for great work Andy and others!
Yeah. It's a weird time right now, and time seems to be weird too...
Disclaimer: The following may or may not be entirely accurate as my PC ate my original reply... and I'm retyping after a few weeks of doom-scrolling on twitter since the build, and I've a healthy glass of wine to-hand. Cheers!
1. I'm currently flying an Imperial Trader and the special blue engine flares glitch a bit when using the rear view on time acceleration eg. when flying away from a planet.
2. Was there any progress in being able to choose colours other than blue for those flares? There was some discussion with Gernot about it a while back.
3. I've just been informed that I can't take an assassination mission because my Elite rating isn't high enough! Trust me, it's Elite and beyond...
1) weird engines - I think you are seeing them flip inverted, which I suspect is related to the ship rarely flipping inverted in the external view. No answer right now, perhaps something is being treated as a signed value somewhere that should be unsigned and can exceed a max value.
2) Engine colours - I haven't found the thread on SSC but IIRC the chat had expanded somewhat to individual thruster colours, and obviously not all ship supported them anyway. I think that I said at the time I wasn't going to consider engine colours until I had time to look at the wider aspect of supporting individual thrusters on all ships. Anyway, I think that this isn't going to be something anytime soon - so I've decided on a compromise for now and have added values in the shipdata patches to change the colours for each ship, for AI and the Player. More info in the ffed3daj_versions.txt file.
(Ah, belatedly just found a couple of posts in this thread, perhaps that was the discussion I'm mis-remembering... #388 to #395)
3) I've tracked this after deciding my build position so the cause is understood, but not fixed as yet.
This is an error in the mission generation: it selects a neighbouring system (Veareth 0,-5) but although it does know it's low-population, it doesn't know that it has no stations or starports. Delivery missions to the same system would have the same issue.
When you try to respond the assassination mission in the test case, it cannot explain where the target will depart from. And although it catches this failure internally, it exits via the same code which displays the message that your Elite rating isn't high enough.
To fix this, the mission generator needs to check if a system has stations/starports, and to do that you have to temporarily create it so that all he planets and potential locations are known. These missions only seem to generate rarely and although I think I have a proof of concept working, it needs more testing/safeguards to be sure I'm not stomping on anything: creating a system updates some global variables which might affect the info views if you happen to be inside them. It'll need wrapping with a config option too, just in-case, which means more work to the config app these days - so this will have to wait until the next build now.
Ah, sorry that one's on me. I didn't spot that the failed missions weren't storing their values as a byte value like success missions, but as a word (double-bytes). So when I corrected the assembly code to use the same local (byte) variable before assigning medals it blew up with a fail. It's fixed now!
After destroying the sat I traveled to target base "+rontier" and noticed a side effect of anisotropicBattleMode=1. No enemy ships are generated near the base! This makes photographic missions very easy.
Well, this one turned out to be a bit of a rabbit hole!
So in the Aniso mod (applies to Hellmod also) Photo and Bombing missions adjust the frequency which base defence ships spawn at depending upon mission difficulty. The most difficult missions spawn at the same rate as FFE, easy missions will spawn fewer ships.
Aniso also added interception ships which are created upon entry to the system and will harass your journey to the target. Unfortunately I'd missed that Aniso's C code for missions sets up a new custom value stored on the base object and so this wasn't created in the FFE build with anisotropicBattleMode enabled.
Having fixed that, I noted that for the harder mission it creates... a LOT of them. And really, A LOT. Perhaps enough to stop the base from being able to spawn anything...
I can't say I'm entirely convinced with these changes, so I went digging into the alt.fan.elite newsgroups to see if I could find any info about how what this is trying to achieve, and drew a bit of a blank. On me to figure it out then I guess!
I've made some changes...
Looking at the creation of the interception ships, they were using the military ships tables but are essentially just pirate ships, marked with a new object type for Aniso to count them & the total number spawned. (which also broke their response to ship-to-ship messaging)
I've reworked this now so that they're also kitted out as military ships and use separate object types for imperial/federal - potentially for use in the ship shaders to select/modify the skin appropriately. The additional imperial object code does mean that an in-mission save aren't truly backwards compatible with the original aniso builds but won't stop them working.
I've also made sure that it won't just spawn all of the interception ships without leaving enough object slots for base defense ships to be created.
I'd also noticed working through this that Aniso always creates Federal bases (+rontier) and spawns ships appropriate for that, even if the mission is against an Imperial target. So I checked this on FFE and found another oddity - that it actually assigns the base depending upon its position in your missions list, alternating federal/imperial - again not in relation to who the mission is against. (probably why I've never attacked a *rontier target before!)
This seems wrong, so I've added an optional patch for each build to fix the station generation & naming and create them appropriate to the mission type. Federal missions will then always get an imperial target & defense ships, Imperial missions will be against federal target & defenders. This will of course remove variety - so it's disabled by default. I'm a little surprised that nobody seems to have noticed this before...
I'm not entirely happy with how Aniso changed the defense ships for photo/bombing missions or the interception ships tbh, so decided that I would separate these from the anisotropicBattleMode in the FFE build. Further to this - I added a pair of patch options for each build to turn on/off both the interception ship creation as well as the proportional levels of defense ship spawning. I'm a bit surprised that Aniso doesn't spawn base defense ships faster on hard missions than FFE does - but maybe FFE spawned too many... feedback & insights welcomed as I've not played these enough to have a valid opinion on balancing them.
Whilst I didn't find anything very helpful on the newsgroup regarding Aniso's photo/bombing changes, I did trip over a thread about the 0.9c to 0.9d rolling-beta build. Wait... errr... the what now?!!!
Yes, there was a further work-in-progress Aniso 0.9d that never got finished and only existed as a beta build!
From the newsgroup posts, this appears to have had a number of worthwhile bugfixes and tweaks so I decided in my lockdown madness that it'd be "fun" to decompile the executable and figure out what the changes actually were in the code+data!
I think I figured them all out OK and the alterations apply to both the Aniso and Hellmod builds. They are enabled by default - with an optional patch value to turn them off again, just in case there's any issues - or just don't like. More info in the ffed3daj_versions.txt file.
But I'm saving the best, and most important fix for last.
The clocks on the FFE church models display the time again!
(with a patch option for FFE/.X model clocks to lock to in-game time or the traditional PC clock time)
The rapidly spinning hands was a bug that's annoyed me since I bought FFE after Frontier, oh so many years ago! Yeah OK, I'm a geek!
If you read this far... well done!
You probably skipped to the end for this though didn't you - the download for v1.17beta2 is >here!<
Quick question tho: i'm currently rockin' a Python Freighter in Aniso's mod, but is there an alternative model or skin somewhere to the 'pink w/ sharks teeth' base model?
And i'm sure it must get asked all the time - what might be the prospects for an updated ship model pack (some of the Oolite model packs are great; tho even the base ones are awesome)..? Our current mish-mash collection is so underselling the game..
I'm afraid that the python doesn't have a replacement model as yet, so it's not one that can be reskinned.
I'm not sure how hard it'd be to convert the Oolite models but there is an immediate issue in that they don't seem to have landing gear...
I might have a go at trying to convert the exported FFE mesh to a .X model myself and see how hard it is!
As far as new model packs. Well we need new modellers really. New modellers on a long outdated model format. Yay!
And if we do get everything replaced, I can imagine it all breaking again with memory usage...
Gernot is the only active modeller of late (well, ages) for FFED3D and has other projects that take up his time. I did a bit of web searching as he's been quiet since losing his laptop - think he's ok and busy with a retro-DosBox project if my Google powers are working...
(()) [AndyJ waves at Gernot on the chance he should he be lurking!]
I'm testing the new v1.17 beta1 right now. Overall good experience. I've also tried FFED3DAJ_Config utility which works great too. However, here I have question - is there a way to bind multiple key combinations to single action? And also, how would I bind a shortcut like SHIFT+F1 to time x1, like the original FFE used to have?
Thanks for great work Andy and others!
Hi Milosz & welcome to the thread and to the forum!
Thanks for the feedback - I'm afraid though, it's bad news - at present there isn't any way to bind multiple keys or key-combinations to an action.
The keyboard bindings in the .cfg file are simply stored against the action name, and because the first entry wins there can't be duplications. The remapping is also at a 1:1 key level, so remapping 'E' to 'J' actually sends the game the keyboard states for the 'E' key when you are actually doing a press/hold/release of the 'J' key etc.
It's not impossible to extend mapping, and I have considered adding an 'advanced mappings' tab for combination key presses that'd work like joystick/mouse button mappings (triggering key actions or scripts) but it's not likely to happen any time soon. Updating the new config app with a UI to support this would be the majority of effort. (I possibly will, but ETA ... Christmas! 202x!)
One alternative solution in the meantime (rather than wait on me) might be to look into creating a script in the freeware AutoHotkey that sets up extra bindings and runs the ffed3daj .exe of choice, and IIRC it can be compiled to an .exe so used as a launcher instead of running the game file. If it's a viable solution for you, and you try & get something working then please do let us know - or if anyone else wants to see what can be done, please do! (There might be other alternatives, but this one came to mind) Maybe it was Frontier that used shift+F1 key for time though, I don't recall FFE or seeing code to do this - I may be wrong?
AFAIK it's always been keys 6 - 9 that select time acceleration. I'm wrong. Should have dusted off DosBox & JJFFE first - I'll consider that a bug.
Hi,
Been loving your updates to FFE for ages. Thanks.
Just going to give the lastest one a go.
When I try and load the FFED3DAJ_Config program I just get the following error...
I am using Windows XP which I kow is old, but the game runs so much better and more smoothly on it than on Win 10 (for me anyway).
Cheers!
Thanks for your reply.
I think I found a partial solution to key binding. Simply unticking "Enable Key bindings?" seems to bring bindings back to original FFE. I will report any bugs if I find any.
Hi,
Been loving your updates to FFE for ages. Thanks.
Just going to give the lastest one a go.
When I try and load the FFED3DAJ_Config program I just get the following error... View attachment 191555
I am using Windows XP which I kow is old, but the game runs so much better and more smoothly on it than on Win 10 (for me anyway).
Cheers!
Could you check if you have .Net 4.0 installed?
This is the highest version that XP supports - and the config app is meant to be compatible with it.
If it's not present, you can download the installer for the runtimes here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-GB/download/details.aspx?id=17718
Can you let me know if that was the issue - or if it's not working with .Net 4.0 already installed.
Could you check if you have .Net 4.0 installed?
This is the highest version that XP supports - and the config app is meant to be compatible with it.
If it's not present, you can download the installer for the runtimes here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-GB/download/details.aspx?id=17718
Can you let me know if that was the issue - or if it's not working with .Net 4.0 already installed.
Was that the first error message you've had trying to get it to run?
I've set up an XP virtual machine, updated to SP3, DirectX 9.0c and .Net 4.0 and it complained that it couldn't find api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll. You haven't perhaps added the missing file manually from somewhere?
I've found that installing the latest Visual C++ runtimes for Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019 from this page is allowing the config app to run:
The config app is built in Visual Studio 2017, perhaps you only have C runtimes for 2015 installed?
It seems that the later versions of Visual Studio share the same .DLL files and update them with each new version rather then install separate files each version.
Btw, it's highlighted a bug not seen on Windows 10 - a couple of the drop-downs e.g. game font only show a single item at a time.
This will be fixed in the next release, but I've zipped up a quick build of the config app if you want to update it. (here)
Hmmm, there seems to be a problem with my system.
Tried installing those c runtime but they wouldn't install. (I'm fairly sure they were there already)
So I tried uninstalling any visual c things listed on the add/remove programs page and tried to reinstall them.
They still wouldn't install so I'm going to have to devote a fair bit of time sorting out my installation of WinXP before I go any further with this.
Hmmm, there seems to be a problem with my system.
Tried installing those c runtime but they wouldn't install. (I'm fairly sure they were there already)
So I tried uninstalling any visual c things listed on the add/remove programs page and tried to reinstall them.
They still wouldn't install so I'm going to have to devote a fair bit of time sorting out my installation of WinXP before I go any further with this.
)) [AndyJ waves at Gernot on the chance he should he be lurking!]
