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.
Rebuilt MultiIntro.dll using VC6. This was done because the previous version apparently got picked up by quite a few antivirus programs. According to virustotal.com, it got flagged 11 times as being malicious. The new VC6 build only has 1 malicious flag, and the plugin still works the exact same way code-wise.
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.
This modified version is compatible with the no level requirements for ship and equipment patches. It fixes the NPC paths in multiplayer while still allowing no level requirements. This has been achieved by removing the patches for the level and rep requirement patches for multiplayer.
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.
