Quote from Gunn :

But you mentioned 768 x 768 earlier, which is not a power of 2 either. So perhaps 768 x 768 is not a good choice for skin size?

the 'old' limit is that textures must have sizes in powers of 2, that is 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,etc. but today there usually simply is no limit at all, other than a maximum size and possibly a limit in aspect ratio. In Direct3D the support can be checked from the caps flags, if the card has D3DPTEXTURECAPS_POW2 flag then it only supports texture sizes in powers of 2. There is also another flag, D3DPTEXTURECAPS_NONPOW2CONDITIONAL, if that one is set then the card supports non powers of 2 textures but has some limits for them when using pixel shaders. But, as far as I know, every even semi-new card today has neither set and has no limits for the texture size (other than the max size and aspect). And if a card does not support the textures it is easy to know from the caps flag and use 512x512 textures for example instead, so 768x768 or any other practical size should be well useable.

Quote :

Can you show me a 3D texture? I'm intrigued.

http://resumbrae.com/ub/dms424_s03/24/00.html
http://www.hypeskeptic.com/mattias/3DTexture/
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users ... eServer/TextureServer.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mU15seBuLZg

Quote from Gunn :

3D texture meaning a texture that will be mapped to a 3D model and displayed by a 3D graphics card (there is no such thing as a 3 dimensional texture in reality AFAIK).

Such texture can be one, two or three dimensional, thus if you say '3D texture' it would imply a texture with three dimensions. 'Static' 3D textures are used quite rarely since they use up alot of space, procedural 3D textures do not but those do not have much use in games but both certainly do exist.

Quote from Gunn :

I stick to that rule because I know that powers of 8 are fully compatible with 3D hardware.

All 3D hardware do not even support texture mapping

Quote from Gunn :

G: Generally speaking, a 3D texture needs to be a power of 8 for most graphics cards to display it correctly.

I'm not sure if you really meant 3D texture, but for 2D textures (which is the topic here) there really is no such limits today. For Nvidia, if I remember right, non powers of 2 size textures have been supported at least since the GeForce 2.

A compromise would be to use, for example, 768x768 textures. Some old cards might not support them but those cards could keep using 512x512.

Quote from dawesdust_12 :

yell at kegectys to fix it.

Glad I don't have to do it

I cut my wrist once on a corner of the momo pedals as I was reaching for something on the floor. Still has a scar visible :P

What would the effect focus on? There is no way for the game to know which part of the screen you are looking at so when racing you'd get situations where what you want to see is blurred. Think of a situation where you are driving close behind another car, if the game focuses on the other car then the track would be blurred and you wouldn't see the corner ahead. And if the game would focus on the distant track then the car would be blurred.

Only place where such effect makes sense is predefined cutscenes in my opinion.

Quote from Fufunka :

Unfortunately there ARE always visible edges in multimonitor/projector setup!
Please refer to this workflow diagram at the bottom of the page from Bourke's site:...

I see it's about purposedly overlapping projector images and then fading the overlapping regions to black... The overlap is already possible, it would propably not be hard to add the black fade but I have no projectors myself so it would not be very high on the 'todo' list.

Quote from Fufunka :

Anyway what are your thoughts about the next topic - advancing your current "cylindrical correction" by user selectable image output warping according to given mesh warping setup

It would be possible, though at least having the mouse work properly would propably be difficult as it is already quite problematic to have it work without any distortion applied. Again I have no need for it myself so it is not very likely I'd spend alot of time doing it.

Quote from Fufunka :

Basically, you chop of the edges in two overlaping regions in such a fashion (by ramp function) that they can be seamlessly blended together...

There are no overlapping regions in the image produced by the game, the edges you have with a triple monitor setup are the monitor edges, there's no way to 'chop' them off (at least with software, an axe might work :P). With properly placed projectors there would be no edges.

Quote from glyphon :

drm hasn't affected VCR recording, at least here in the the states...yet.

No?

Quote :

No one operating system is "best" - it's what's "best for you". Consider three ways of programming your VCR to record a TV program:
* Don't record it at all since DRM doesn't allow you to
* Spend five minutes entering the times in the manufacturer's proprietary method that you have to learn first, then for the first few times find out you got the channel/am or pm setting wrong, but after that it'll be spot on most of the time.
* Don't worry about video - listen to some music from iTunes!

Guess which equates to which operating system.

Fixed it a bit

A very similar thing happened to my mother some years ago, she hit a moose which tried to jump out of the way or something and it hit the top of the windshield. The car only needed a new windshield and new paint on the part above the front wheel (the moose legs scratched it apparently).

What kind of FPS do you get with the AGP+PCI setup? When I tried it I got about 15-20fps, but I have made some optimizations to SoftTH later on which might have helped.

I have an 'internal' version with some multihead optimizations which should improve FPS noticeably if one of the monitors is on the same physical card as the primary one. Unfortunately it doesn't help in LFS though as the D3D feature it uses only exists in Direct3D 9...

Another thing I'm just now working on is a "cylindrical" correction feature that tries to remove some of the distortions caused by high FOV. The results look like this (120 degree FOV):
http://www.kegetys.net/SoftTH/ ... softth_cylcorrection1.jpg
http://www.kegetys.net/SoftTH/ ... softth_cylcorrection2.jpg
There's some different kind of distortion caused by it where straight lines can become curve shaped, but I think it still looks better than without it. Unfortunately, this feature also doesn't play well with LFS as it requires widening the rendered frame, after which LFS again begins stretching the whole GUI to all three monitors like with the border setting. Another problem is the 4096 pixel limit when using a high resolution (except for GF8800 owners).

Last edited by Kegetys, Sat 24 Feb 2007, 02:30.

If you'd record a (high quality) mp3 from a real SID chip then it would be much better than what any software SID emulator can produce.

I hope the devs take strong action against this kind of stuff before it gets out of hand. One person doing it and not get any kind of punishment is just a big invite for other people to attempt to do the same. And those people might not be stupid enough to get caught so easily (Use it only to get a small advantage that is hard to detect)

Quote :

New York State is taking fresh legal steps to ban spinning hubcaps and wheels.

I'm looking forward to seeing cars with wheels and hubcaps that don't spin.

Quote from lerts :

and yes i was raaaid, did you hang around in those forums or you just took the time to search the forums for similar posts?

I read them every now and then.

Quote from lerts :

i spent 5 years in the il2 forums standing attacks all the time just for the joy of talking with some frineds, right i have no social life

Did you happen to be using the nickname raaaid there?

Quote from Kegetys :

ISI games dont like the border setting for some reason, I'm not sure what causes it but hopefully I'll find the reason someday.

This should now be fixed in v1.04 available on the site. It was caused by a stupid typo in the resolution returned to the game.

Quote from joshdifabio :

He has, apparently, offered to help with security problems on multiple occasions but is ignored. I don't think he is the only one to blame here.

Did he report this practicular exploit to the devs? How long ago was that and what was the dev's response?

Promoting yourself to administrator might seem like a minor thing, but the fact that a system has been compromised can mean a lot of work for the devs. Especially since LFS is a commercial product and the person compromising a part of the system could have use that system to compromise another. As an example, he could have modified the LFS purchase page to steal credit card numbers while pretending he just exploited the forum to show the exploit was there (He might even say that just so the real admins wouldn't look anywhere else so the credit card theft would remain hidden). That can mean alot of work when everything needs to be went through and inspected for changes. That's lost time, and with a commercial product lost time = lost money.

Quote from BrandonAGr :

I'm not familiar with french law, but if we already know his real identity then surely something can be done legally speaking right?

Obviously, it just depends wether or not the devs decide to do something about it. As far as I know, this kinds of things are even handled quite well between the police of EU countries.

Quote from spankmeyer :

I assume he understands that by hacking this forum he made an actual crime punishable by law.

And the devs propably already have all his personal info from S2 license purchase and his real IP address from master server. Not exactly a very well planned crime

Quote from splunk4u :

I can't get the border thing to work correctly though. Every time I try to enter a number in the field (any number), the game loads, but the graphics are un readable. This number is supposed to represent the number of pixels to be dropped, correct? So if my bezels were say 150 pixeles wide, I would enter 150 in that field?

ISI games dont like the border setting for some reason, I'm not sure what causes it but hopefully I'll find the reason someday. In LFS it also causes the game not to detect it as a triplehead mode anymore so the GUI gets stretched on all monitors, which is something I hope Scawen could fix someday...

Quote from splunk4u :

Also, SLI does not seem to work well. I finally got it to work if I unistalled/reinstalled and added cards in a certain order, but the frame rate actually dropped to 9 FPS after SLI was enabled. Any thoughts?

Only a guess since I dont know much about SLI, but the SLI profile for the game might be such that doesn't play well with SoftTH.

Quote from JTbo :

but how about when you plot course wrong, virtual space shows you are at jupiter even you don't see any planets nearby, then what?

Then the mission has failed miserably and the project leader gets fired

The maximum texture size can be checked with the DX caps viewer here:
http://junk.kegetys.net/DXCapsViewer.zip (From the DirectX SDK)

Go to DirectX graphics adpaters/your card/D3D device types/HAL and select the 'Caps' icon. On the right it will display the MaxTextureWidth and MaxTextureHeight values which are the ones that matter. Someone with a 8800 could run it and see what it says...