Hey guys.

Just started working on a new mod for Jane's F-18.
Look at the following shots to get the idea of where I'm going:

Original Jane's F-18:
(Notice the lack of dithering in the sky and mist)


And here is the same shot with a 32-bit render, smooth gradient sky and mist:



Notice here the MPCD reflection and the sea:


And with the 32-bit mod, smooth reflection and sea:



You will notice some color-banding still, but that's due to 8bit textures... more on this later.

The mod is far from ready to be distributed, there is still a LOT of work to do, but it looks VERY promising.
Right now, I can load the game fine, start a flight and fly without any issues, but I'm getting crashes to desktop when switching from the sim to the GUI (exiting a flight).
I think I know how to fix this now so I need to try a few things and do some debugging.

The mod is actually a directdraw proxy DLL that intercepts that dd calls from the sim. It will require a small EXE patch to inject the name of the proxy DLL as well.
No need for trial and error configuration "a la directx tweaker/glide wrapper" here. It's only a matter of adding 2 files to your game directory and that's it.

I'll let you all know when I have a version stable enough to be tested, but please be patient, I have very little time to work on this.

I'll post updates here when available.


Oh by the way, there still will be some color banding even with this mod, due to the fact that the sim uses 8-bit textures. Ok, don't hold your breath on this just yet, but there might be a way, using the same technique described above (proxy DLL/dd call spying) to use 32-bit textures, but this is complicated... but could be possible!
32-bit textures could mean photo-realistic cockpit by the way but as I said, we're lightyears from that now, let's concentrate on the 32-bit render mod first.

Cheers!

iam.

JANE'S NOT DEAD YET!

Hey man nice work! Need anyone to help you test it out?

Very nice! Finally a solution to the color banding.

Awesome work mate!

I'd be happy to do some testing as well whenever you get to that point.

MMMmm, pretty...

Would love 32bit colors. it willnadd new life to the sim! Keep up the good work!

Hi guys, small update... I've fixed (I think) the crash to desktop on exit flight.

I've been testing the past hour and was able to load multiple flights, fly them in 32-bit color and exit with only 1 crash, which might not be related to the mod anyways.

I have one bug remaining, the in-game comms menu doesn't work anymore (the text doesn't display). I'll be working on this problem now that the CTD is fixed.

I will need people to help with testing. I need NVIDIA and ATI users. Let me know if you're interested.

I have some major code cleanup to do, then will be able to distribute the 32-bit DLL and the EXE patcher to those interested in testing.
Oh, I've been able to run the sim in Windowed mode as well, not sure if this is useful to anyone, but I have some more work to do with this mod as well.


As said above, this mod might be the key to photo-realistic textures, that's my next target, a major one, but a really tough one.
Although I've been flying the VRS Superbug for couple months now, everytime I start a Jane's flight, it still is so much fun... without the dreaded dithering/color-banding problem, it's even better!


Cheers guys!

I'd be happy to help test. And thanks for taking the time to do this; great to see people keeping this excellent sim alive.

Hi again,

I was wondering whether you are seeing any of the strange glitches that are seen with DXTweaker (e.g. carrier crabbing, tanker aircraft jerking about).

Also, are you able to run AA without problems, and is your patch going to work with the TSH version of F18, or does it require a vanilla installation?

Good morning hippo,

About those issues, that's where I'll need you guys help.
I haven't experienced any of those issues, but I haven't done extensive testing, long flights, only short test flights using the trainings. I was able to land on carrier without a glitch and refuel as well.
Also, I've been away from Jane's for quite a while so I lost track of all the issues on modern hardware. If you could list all known issues, I can edit the first post to track issues and fixes.

I'm running the sim with 4xFSAA no problem, getting 60fps stable all the time. The patch will work with any versions, but for now, I'm developing and testing on a vanilla 1.01F. The change to the EXE is very minor though so it won't be a problem with other EXE versions.

Here's some bad news though, just found out about it. By fixing the CTD when exiting a flight, I broke something else... Now it CTD when loading a second flight, without exiting the game. Something must not be properly initialized, more debugging/tracing work to do Oh well, at least it's possible to do a flight and exit it without a glitch, I just have to find out why it crashes on the 2nd flight during load now. I didn't notice that before because after each flight, I was exiting the game to check my logs/API monitor.

Anyways, send me a private message with your email address and I'll send you the patch, also let me know what video hardware you have and OS.

On my end, I'm using Windows 7 x64 Ultimate with an ATI Radeon 6850.



(yeah, I did forget to lower my hook!)