The planet detailmaps were previously compressed with the NVIDIA texture tools. However, the mipmaps weren't sharp, which caused the detailmaps to look a bit blurry at great distances. Therefore, Crunch was used to recompress the texture files with more a more accurate and sharper downscaling algorithm.
There were some inconsistencies based on the text and the used news images. There were stories regarding Rheinland and Bretonia. However, an appropriate faction flag rift image was missing. Therefore, I decided to make it myself. It's been added in the previous commit to newsvendor.txm
After all these months I finally noticed an issue with banding on the mission and news vendor images. This was caused by the fact that the uncompressed tga images were saved as 24-bit. I was aware of Freelancer rendering 24-big tga images poorly because I previously did experiments with tga starspheres and nav map images. However, I never noticed anything amiss with the news and vendor images, so I didn't bother changing them. But now I finally noticed it. So I've converted every images to dds DXT1.
Update the barrier_tile_cloud.dds and tile_cloud_generic.dds texture files. They used to be quite oversharpened. The new versions have a more natural look to them. feature_auroraC.dds has also been updated; the new version looks nicer and sharper.
Essentially made the lights twice as large. Also the green light blink every second or so. I couldn't create new lights since that would cause crashes on vanilla servers. Instead I edited and used existing lights. The TradeLaneGreen light isn't used anyway. This commit also fixes an issue where trade lanes in some Border Worlds systems were missing 2 green lights. Those have now been added.
It turns out that after the previous changes made in this file, the issue where the Q's Men ships fire at the player after the race still occurs. Unfortunately I wasn't able to fix this, even after 5 hours of trying because the FL mission scripting engine doesn't really seem to agree (one of the two ships just always kept firing at the player, despite it being friendly to the player, no matter what). Instead, I've made the ships fly away at cruise speed to a different location. This way they just mind their own business and don't attack the player.
The old mat file for some reason specified different overlay colors for the Armored Transport. All textures from the mat files have been repacked in the vanilla mat files so they all use the original colors.
In the base maneuver HUD boxes where there's 2 or 3 icons, you could see the top line of that HUD element. In all the others this can't be seen. So the HUD boxes have been moved up slightly so the line cannot be seen anywhere.
This resolves the issue where players with foreign installs will have the blank ship control names. Now they'll at least still be displayed in English, but they can always be translated later. This commit also adds a few missing tool tips for the new controls.
For some reason, during Mission 7 when the player reaches the gas pocket field, the player is made invulnerable. Because of this, the player doesn't take any damage from the gas balls, despite Juni saying that they may damage your ship. Hence this could teach the player that the gas balls only show a cool effect and not actually do damage to the ship. This is unfortunately false and so the invulnerable state has been removed. These gas balls specifically do very little damage anyway.
Despite the fact that this issue has already been fixed (sort of), the battleship could still be seen if you stuck around at Holman and started going to the trade lane slowly. Now it spawns the battleship right before it uncloaks, so that fixes it.
In the story, the Tekagi Transport strike force mentions the Transport cargo containing gold, diamonds, and thousands of articacts. However, the diamonds were missing in the cargo hold. It also only contains 1.000 artifacts, not thousands. The cargo hold has been edited so it matches what has been said by the strike force.
The lamp light height was reduced to ensure that Mr. Blix's artifact effect can be seen properly, just like in the original bar. It used to be kind of hidden behind the lamp light before.
When one of the Order members says 'All set sir', his voice kind of cuts off when he says 'sir'. This happens bcause the set duration of the audio being played is about 0.2 seconds shorter than the audio track itself. Hence it's been fixed by setting the duration to 0.92 seconds.
Fixed the transparent fireplace texture. Before it showed textured spots between the fireplace bars, which should have been transparent. This has been fixed.
The transparent parts on the inside looked a bit weird in space, as if some areas weren't transparent at all. This has been fixed by completely deleting any colors in the transparent parts.
cv_01_bar_ambi_bw01_03: Fixed the black outlined stars by ensuring the srt_grp of the stars is lower than the starsphere. li_09_bar_ambi_iw04_02: Fixed an issue that caused the asteroids in the background to not render. This was fixed by increasing the usr_flag property of the starsphere
br_08_bar_ambi_bw10_02.thn: Previously this bar script used the correct starsphere but it didn't have the correct white tint that the Bw10 starsphere has. This has now been added for the bar script.
cv_01_bar_ambi_ew01_01.thn: This bar script used a generic nebula as a background. However, this station is not actually in a nebula. The script has been modified so it uses the Ew01 starsphere background.
Adjusted the ambient lighting for all bar scripts so the space backgrounds look more like Leeds; the colors weren't accurate before. In the br04_02_base script, the stars have also been removed because Leeds doesn't have stars either.
