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Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2020 10:31 pm
by DarHan

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 2:11 am
by stafdady
blue_max wrote:
Wed Apr 15, 2020 9:06 pm
I'll try to downgrade the shader model of the new effects so that more people can use them; but I can't make any promises here :)
Looks like all the shaders work well on Shader Model 4.0.

@stafdady, @XDragon: Please replace your ddraw.dll with the following version and try again:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7t3rwuecamvr4 ... 0.dll?dl=0

Also new in this version: support for Jeremy's Text Renderer and Increased brightness for DC elements.
THANKS!! That works and looks AMAZING! My computer is still a little old to handle it I guess, cuz now it's lagging lol. But, I have a new one being delivered tomorrow. I mostly play on console, but this game I've always gone back to and check here to see what's new over the yeas. Can't wait to check it all out. It's unbelievable how this old game looks now! Great job to all who's involved!

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 2:19 am
by Ace Antilles
stafdady wrote:
Thu Apr 16, 2020 2:11 am
THANKS!! That works and looks AMAZING! My computer is still a little old to handle it I guess, cuz now it's lagging lol. But, I have a new one being delivered tomorrow. I mostly play on console, but this game I've always gone back to and check here to see what's new over the yeas. Can't wait to check it all out. It's unbelievable how this old game looks now! Great job to all who's involved!
The new XWA can tax any machine lol I have an I7 and right now a GTX 970 and I've had a little stuttering when launching.

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 2:48 am
by stafdady
Ace Antilles wrote:
Thu Apr 16, 2020 2:19 am
stafdady wrote:
Thu Apr 16, 2020 2:11 am
THANKS!! That works and looks AMAZING! My computer is still a little old to handle it I guess, cuz now it's lagging lol. But, I have a new one being delivered tomorrow. I mostly play on console, but this game I've always gone back to and check here to see what's new over the yeas. Can't wait to check it all out. It's unbelievable how this old game looks now! Great job to all who's involved!
The new XWA can tax any machine lol I have an I7 and right now a GTX 970 and I've had a little stuttering when launching.
Mine is probably 13 years old lol. I ordered an Acer Nitro 5 17.3" Gaming Laptop with Intel Core i5 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650. Now I'm hoping, that this will be good. Please say that this will be good LOL. But I haven't kept up on what's good in years. Just relied on my Xbox. But this has me excited enough to push me to finally upgrade.

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 3:41 am
by blue_max
I play with a laptop, i7 and nVidia 1060. It's good enough to play at 4K; but the best performance I get is at 1920x1080. I think your performance will be good too stafdady; but remember to check the other thread for performance tips. Also, I'm glad the newest ddraw worked for you!

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 9:04 am
by DTM
I made a fix for the X-Wing Dynamic Cockpit. It should solve the problem with the visbility of the sensors screens and the dimensions of the text boxes.

http://www.mtdindustries.com/xwa/REBCP/ ... -04-20.zip

Simply copy the folder in your X-Wing Alliance directory and overwrite existing files. This fix will be introduced in the installer for Rebel Alliance Cockpits as soos as possible.

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 3:11 pm
by marcop000
Hi DTM,

I have downloaded and overwrite your update but the targeting ship informations still not easy to read becouse the text position is wrong as attached.

There is a way to fix it ?

P.S.

I remember in the original version of XWA when you target a ship you see in the front or bottom mirror the ship that you target inside a very small crosshair, this to understand if the target is on front or behind.

This small crosshair is not present with the modded version. Is possible re-activate it ?

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 4:20 pm
by blue_max
marcop000 wrote:
Thu Apr 16, 2020 3:11 pm
This small crosshair is not present with the modded version. Is possible re-activate it ?
The yellow bracket on the targeted object, in the left/right sensors is still there; but it may be on the edge of the sensor, so it may not be visible because of that.

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 5:36 pm
by marcop000
blue_max wrote:
Thu Apr 16, 2020 4:20 pm
marcop000 wrote:
Thu Apr 16, 2020 3:11 pm
This small crosshair is not present with the modded version. Is possible re-activate it ?
The yellow bracket on the targeted object, in the left/right sensors is still there; but it may be on the edge of the sensor, so it may not be visible because of that.
Hi blue_max,

You have right, however for my opinion is better keep it always visible in the mirror like the original version.

Eventually can be a good idea an option in the config file.

Personally I find it very useful.

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 5:41 pm
by BenKenobi
marcop000 wrote:
Thu Apr 16, 2020 5:36 pm
blue_max wrote:
Thu Apr 16, 2020 4:20 pm
marcop000 wrote:
Thu Apr 16, 2020 3:11 pm
This small crosshair is not present with the modded version. Is possible re-activate it ?
The yellow bracket on the targeted object, in the left/right sensors is still there; but it may be on the edge of the sensor, so it may not be visible because of that.
Hi blue_max,

You have right, however for my opinion is better keep it always visible in the mirror like the original version.

Eventually can be a good idea an option in the config file.

Personally I find it very useful.
@marcop000

May I suggest reading this thread: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=12495

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2020 2:42 pm
by Trevor
All the shaders in the new effects are compiled with Shader Model 5, so nothing would work if this feature set isn't supported.
I was looking at what you meant and found that the hlsl files are compiled into blobs by VS with the feature set you assign at build time.

I then looked for info on how to select feature sets based on GCard caps with the only source of decent info from here
https://www.3dgep.com/introduction-to-directx-11/

He seems to suggest that the only way to support "downlevel" cards is to compile at runtime and use featurelevel check to compile the right version - he has a template function to check for latest featureset.

So, this is a problem I never thought about before. I thought you could simply check if feature level => do this, however since they need to be compiled this is more fixed than I thought (with the exception of runtime compile) and means that games and programs that still support dx9 for example Only support dx9, likewise dx11 is Only dx11, meaning graphics are always at the lowest denominator... cant easily do gracefull degredation (yet some games have the option "Use legacy graphics" which I now assume means the game has to recompile shaders at runtime or hotswap d3d9/dxgi.dll?)

Anyway, if your shaders run fine in 4, then at least its some respite for older cards for now

Trev

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2020 5:32 pm
by keiranhalcyon7
You can do graceful degradation, but it's more work. In this case, since it seems all the physical operations can be done in both shader models, you could probably compile and distribute both dlls with different suffixes and a main, unsuffixed dll that decides which of the two others to load based on the detected features. But it only really matters if the SM5 compilation is able to operate more efficiently or something along those lines.

In situations where you're doing things that actually need a higher shader model, you can do the same thing, only in the lower-end dll, anything that couldn't be implemented at that SM is replaced with a stub, just so the program will link. Or with an inferior version of that feature that could be implemented on that shader model. This would all be managed with #ifdefs in the code.

Blue_max, is there a noticable difference between the SM4 and SM5 versions of your ddraw.dll? Sometimes what happens is a feature works, but the compiler has to do it in a totally different, less performant way.

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2020 9:46 pm
by blue_max
The documentation for the shader models states that there is no difference in performance between the models -- that's implementation dependent. The main difference is the instructions that can be executed. I haven't noticed any performance penalty so far either.

There were two main reasons I switched from SM4 to SM5: I ran out of constants in the shaders and I started using bitfield operators which were not available in SM4. Both happened when I was coding the Dynamic Cockpit. At some point I had to break the shaders down into smaller units to increase performance and that solved the first problem too, as a side effect. The second problem has a workaround; but it turned out I was wrong and these operators were available in SM4 after all (unless the compiler is doing a substitution; but I doubt that). So, in this case, it was easy to go back to SM4.

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2020 6:58 pm
by Bman
Hi Blue_Max, have a noob question. Is the SM4/SM5 shader models a feature strickly for NVidia/Intel GPU's or is it also compatible with ATI/AMD chips, and older cards ? Not to muddy the water. Lol.

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2020 7:49 pm
by keiranhalcyon7
The shader model specs are part of the DirectX spec, so they're universal. It would be a truly ancient card, like, voodoo, that doesn't understand the concept.

In fact, AMD beat Nvidia to SM5 by about 6 months with the Radeon HD 5000 family. Shader model 4 was introduced on Radeon HD 2000 & GeForce 8 cards.

Huh. I just realized that my computer is 10 years old this month. (I bought my HD 5850 just after Nvidia released their competing card, to take advantage of the usual price drop.)

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Sun Apr 19, 2020 12:53 am
by Bman
Thanks Keiran for answer. I'm still using this AMD Radeon HD 5670 with duel core AMD Athlon CPU. I assumed Shader M4/M5 was NVidia nomenclature. No need for me to upgrade for a long while. :-)

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:20 am
by Ace Antilles
blue_max wrote:
Wed Apr 15, 2020 9:06 pm
I'll try to downgrade the shader model of the new effects so that more people can use them; but I can't make any promises here :)
Looks like all the shaders work well on Shader Model 4.0.
@stafdady, @XDragon: Please replace your ddraw.dll with the following version and try again:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7t3rwuecamvr4 ... 0.dll?dl=0
Also new in this version: support for Jeremy's Text Renderer and Increased brightness for DC elements.
So something in this makes me crash on 3d loading into the hangar.
ddraw.dll - Version 1.1.20 VR works fine. But 1.5.10.0 makes me crash. I'm guessing this is because they are 2 different files and not merged?
Gets very confusing when there's 2 on the go at once but I realise they are tests. Can easily get mixed up.
Can the data in the CFG file just be copied across or does it not work that simply.

Also I can't see the TextFontFamily = Verdana lines to change fonts?

FYI I'm on a clean install with all the Dynamic Cockpits and Effects installed.

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2020 5:06 am
by blue_max
Ace Antilles wrote:
Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:20 am
ddraw.dll - Version 1.1.20 VR works fine. But 1.5.10.0 makes me crash. I'm guessing this is because they are 2 different files and not merged?
I'm going to assume here that by "1.5.10.0" you're referring to ddraw-Apr 15 2020 (otherwise I have no idea why you're talking about "2 files not being merged" -- which files?). I'd say, remove the old ddraw.dll and rename "ddraw-Apr-15-2020.dll" to "ddraw.dll". Can you attach a crash report?
Also I can't see the TextFontFamily = Verdana lines to change fonts?
Just add the line to DDraw.cfg.

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2020 8:34 am
by JeremyaFr
Ace Antilles wrote:
Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:20 am
So something in this makes me crash on 3d loading into the hangar.
ddraw.dll - Version 1.1.20 VR works fine. But 1.5.10.0 makes me crash.
Are you referring to Reimar's version?

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2020 11:39 am
by Ace Antilles
JeremyaFr wrote:
Mon Apr 20, 2020 8:34 am
Ace Antilles wrote:
Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:20 am
So something in this makes me crash on 3d loading into the hangar.
ddraw.dll - Version 1.1.20 VR works fine. But 1.5.10.0 makes me crash.
Are you referring to Reimar's version?
No it's the one that blue max posted to download above.
There seems to be lots of differences in the data contained in the CFG files.
Jeremy one is simple but the one after the VR release has more in. I'll look at it again soon and try and work it out to explain better.

How do you get a crash report? It just kicked me to desktop.

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:43 pm
by Trevor
Can the installer be made (optionally) to upgrade an installation by leaving cfg files alone? (unless new sections are required at which point can they be appended to existing files?)

crash report is in event viewer.
I use a custom view

Code: Select all

<QueryList>
  <Query Id="0" Path="Application">
    <Select Path="Application">
     *[EventData[Data[1]='XwingAlliance.exe']]
   </Select>
  </Query>
</QueryList>
Trev

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:55 pm
by Ace Antilles
blue_max wrote:
Mon Apr 20, 2020 5:06 am
Ace Antilles wrote:
Mon Apr 20, 2020 1:20 am
ddraw.dll - Version 1.1.20 VR works fine. But 1.5.10.0 makes me crash. I'm guessing this is because they are 2 different files and not merged?
I'm going to assume here that by "1.5.10.0" you're referring to ddraw-Apr 15 2020 (otherwise I have no idea why you're talking about "2 files not being merged" -- which files?). I'd say, remove the old ddraw.dll and rename "ddraw-Apr-15-2020.dll" to "ddraw.dll". Can you attach a crash report?

Just add the line to DDraw.cfg.
OK things are working now. Even the fonts. I don't think I should be allowed on a computer after 12am ;)
I dunno what was going on. Even me trying to be careful I may have messed things up. I obviously had a wrong file as I had a font bug which has been fixed now.
I think somewhere I must have used Reimar's version maybe. Also I did a SFC scan today which may have helped.
This is the DLL I am using now. Which was downloaded from this thread. It lets me play fine so far.
Image

The files I was referring to being merged is the CFG file. There's the one online which is xwa_ddraw_d3d11.1.3.9 and then there's ones for the effects with lots more info and Multisampling choices.
Can someone take a look at the CFG file I am using now and uploaded to see if it's accurate an up to date please?
Ace Ddraw.zip
Sorry I am a pain guys. :( I feel for noobs lol This is why I've done a fresh install so I have a good copy to go back to and am now in a better place.
I've deleted random stuff I don't need too. I'm getting there quickly! I'll make it up to you by making cool XWA stuff :)

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2020 3:17 pm
by Trevor
your cfg matches mine (well, I have enhance explosions and fxaa)

Trev

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2020 5:18 pm
by blue_max
Your DDraw.cfg file looks good, Ace.

Re: New effects and installers

Posted: Mon Apr 20, 2020 5:26 pm
by Ace Antilles
Trevor wrote:
Mon Apr 20, 2020 3:17 pm
your cfg matches mine (well, I have enhance explosions and fxaa)
Trev
blue_max wrote:
Mon Apr 20, 2020 5:18 pm
Your DDraw.cfg file looks good, Ace.
Thanks to you both :) At last I have a stable version as a backup, I think!
Now just gotta look at messing with the fps fixes and other stuff.

Is the "bloom" the yellow circle areas which come out the ship when it's being shot on?
That's the area I find a little over the top right now