Old - The Swag Pack v1.0 - Graphical & Audio Enhancements

[Orin]

I dunno if anyone's still using this... but I've been having some major issues. I just installed Freelancer again after not playing for years, just in the mood to roll through the Vanilla story again, and nothing is going right.

First off, I found this guide (http://craig.mayhew.io/blog/2008/09/free...tion-hack/) and followed it to get my game running at 1080p. While I HAVE to launch into space or load a game in space to make the HUD show up properly, it DOES show up properly once I do that.

Then I started looking into HD textures, ENB, etc. I tried SweetFX, but the game crashes no matter what for me with that, so no dice there. ENB seems to work, which is nice, but annoying since I don't care about bloom so much. I wanted SweetFX for the sharpening and SMAA.

As for the HD textures, I found a massive starscapes retexture that (in the screenshots) look amazing. I installed that just fine, but then I realized the game wasn't looking so terrible because of my textures, but rather because of an odd graphical issue I'm getting... See for yourself:

http://i.imgur.com/AJ1FAK0.png

http://i.imgur.com/7pD7Iel.png

It's... splotchy. Plain and simple, it's splotchy. I don't understand what's going on with that. I have a very strong laptop with a very high end NVIDA 680M GPU in it. The game didn't look weird and splotchy like this when I played it years ago on my weak integrated graphics Dell laptop. It almost looks like when you downscale an image to use less colors and instead of seeing a gradient, you see "splotches" of descending color shades. What in the world would make the game do something like that? This is a clean install of Freelancer, so there's no weird settings from me going on.

Also, as you can see in the second picture, Manhattan has no texture. Fairly certain that only happened after I installed this swag pack. So what's happening there? And as someone mentioned before, what's with the darkness? It seems to work fine for some people here, but it's unbearably dark for me. Might have something to do with my current graphical issues... but yeah.

Any help would be much appreciated.


EDIT: Okay, turns out my prefs file got set to 16-bit somehow, so that explains that problem somewhat. However the texture files I'm installing just aren't working! Starscapes still look low resolution, the planet's textures look awful, nothing seems to change even though I've installed massive 1.4GB worth of textures via drag and drop and overwrite in the proper places.

Why the heck aren't my texture changes working? I just went and tried an obvious texture change (changing Trent's clothes) and it DOES show up, but I'm looking hard at the starscape and planet retextures and I'm seeing no difference... which is screwy, because I can look at screenshots here and for the HD starscapes mod and they look excellent. In my game they are clearly NOT HD. I'm on my phone now, but I can upload new pics tomorrow.

I'm thinking... the color depth is still off? I don't get it. In the PerfOptions file the "color_bpp" was at 16, and I changed it to 32. However the "depth_bpp" was 24 and is STILL 24, while the "freelancer.ini" has both of those values at 32. No matter what I do, it will NOT change from 24. Every time I change it to 32 and open the game, it gets set right back to 24. So basically the game is still insisting on running in 24-bit mode and now only looks marginally better than 16-bit which it was just at? Because starscapes are still blotchy looking freso paintings to me, just not AS bad.

How do I make it stay at 32-bit?

Also, planet atmospheres are showing up as opaque to me. That's why it looks so odd in the picture above. Why would that be happening?