In this commit the alpha detail map placements have also been remastered manually. Now there's no more rock detail map placements where there's supposed to be water, etc.
Adding this effect was deemed to be impossible without crashing while playing on vanilla servers. However, a different approach has been taken by replacing existing unused select_equip.ini entries. As long as no new ones are added, crashes on vanilla servers won't occur.
Cruiser captains should always be wearing some eye piece. However, Walker didn't have that during mission 3 and 4. This has now been added. Also, there is one moment during mission 11 where Walker can be seen flying a Defender. Here he should be wearing a helmet, but he wasn't. This has been added. This commit also replaces the comm_ge_generic1 (Pirate) helmets with comm_ge_generic2 (Liberty) helmets, and also the uniforms li_scrote_body to li_male_elite_body. The former Pirate helmets and LSF uniforms were incorrect because they were worn by Liberty Navy pilots.
When taking the jumphole from New Tokyo to Honshu during Mission 8, an issue would be apparent where one BD fighter fails to enter formation and gets left behind. This however doesn't happen when the latest Autosave is loaded; the BD fighter will enter formation correctly and follow the squad. The issue was caused by the fact that the BD fighter didn't jump through correctly, which has now been fixed. Another notable issue was that another BD fighter would spawn right near Yukawa Shipyard, before you and the other BD fighters reach the Transport. This resulted in the BD fighter getting destroyed by the Naval Forces escort as soon as you arrived. This caused Ozu to say 'We lost a fighter, we need to cover each other' right away. This has been fixed by making the BD fighter a part of the escort as soon you enter Honshu. It may sound a bit strange that you suddenly have an additional fighter (4 in total), despite Juni asking about the 3 ships before taking the jumphole. However, based on the radio messages from Ozu, this approach makes the most sense.
Juni said in two comm messages in Mission 4 that she made it to a few planets in Bretonia. However, while docked she shouldn't be wearing a helmet. Therefore, that's been removed. Furthermore, a delay to the first comm message has been added because you previously couldn't see her in the top left due to being in a jump tunnel.
During Mission 7 when you approach Cali base, you can see the announcer is missing the Outcast mask, which all Outcast base announcers wear. This has now been added for the announcer during the mission.
During mission 5 when you talk to the Battleship Norfolk announcer, he has the wrong body. It used to be from Liberty while the base is owned by the Armed Forces. He's now been given a Bretonia body. Additionally, in the second comm he was missing the neuralnet accessory, which he did have in the first comm. This has been added for the second comm too.
When you attack the Navy squad after they kill Brandon Rowlett, you'll see the leader comming without a helmet. However, comming pilots should always have a helmet if they are in space. Hence he's been given a helmet now.
Patrol Zeta 1 during mission 2 has the LPI faction assigned. However, the leader mentions 'Navy Patrol Zeta 1'. Furthermore, Juni says that she ordered a wing from Rio Grande, which is a Navy base. Hence the faction has been changed to Navy.
This commit replaces the current planet textures with upscaled originals. Therefore, the issues caused after adding the updated planet detailmaps are now fixed. However, there are still some minor issues and other inconsistencies with the new textures. Those will be fixed in future commits.
In Freelancer's resources there are infocards for many dockable bases, including the ones from Juneau and Ithaca. However, in the released game neither of those bases are dockable. As a result, Freelancer doesn't show the additional info for Juneau and Ithaca. Controls.dll has been edited so it contains merged versions of the Juneau and Ithaca infocard sections.
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.
