Improving settings for Wing Commander Saga

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  • #184429
    Zarkov
    Participant

    So I love old style space sims like X-wing and Wing Commander and so. Sadly most of these games are too old to be supported by VorpX.

    However some to make “Freespace 2 open” which runs in OpenGL which is supported by VorpX. Now I haven’t been able to get the current version of feespace 2 open to work with VorpX. It simply won’t hook no matter which profile I try.

    But I have been able to get one of freespace 2 open’s offshoots to work with VorpX. Namely Wing commander Saga, which is a good space sim in its own right and is available for free if anyone wants to try it for themselves.

    Now the experience isn’t perfect but it’s definitely enjoyable. I’ve used the profile for Quake III Arena (which is also based on OpenGL). Doing that the game hooks without issue and supports geometry3d which looks awesome.

    The one issue that I have is that any information on the side of the screen is pretty hard to read and that is where quite a lot of useful info like weapon loadout is located.

    The game supports fov changes, however I haven’t been able to get that to work. I’ve asked a question in their forum but it’s not very active. So, I’m not really expecting a reply anytime soon.

    Is there any sort of setting in VorpX that I could look at to improve the text at the edges of the screen? Or can I force a different FOV in the profile?

    If anybody has an idea why Freespace 2 open won’t hook at all and one of its older offshoots works without issue I would love to find out as well. My guess it’s probably has something to do with different OpenGL functions.
    Getting Freespace 2 open to work would be awesome because there are tons of mods and full conversions out there.

    #184444
    moarveer
    Participant

    Wow it’s really surprising that wing commander games work,can you specify which one, since there are a lot of them. Are you using geo3d or z3d?

    About FOV, there are two options inside Vorpx config (supr button) that can help increase FOV artificially, increasing it too much will give some issues, but increasing it a bit usually gives good results, I can’t remember their names but they are fov related, so have a look around all the vorpx config pages and tell us how it worked.

    I loved freespace 2, but I have no idea why it’s not working sorry.

    #184445
    moarveer
    Participant

    Hmmm I thought fs2 used direct3d but it was dropped from FSO after 3.6.9, maybe you could use an old version of FSO.

    #184454
    Zarkov
    Participant

    It’s wingcommander saga, it’s a fan made game based on the FSO engine. I would hesitate to call it a mod because so much effort has gone into it to make it a full fledged game. Its available here. https://www.wcsaga.com/

    It supports Geo3d.

    With the help of the people at hardlight forums I’ve managed to get Freespace 2 working with the same profle. Also supports Geo3d but has the same issues with the edge of the screen.

    I’m using freespace open version 3.6.12.

    The FOV changes from within the VorpX menu aren’t really helping. I’ll try to tweak some more and get it to work.

    #184460
    dellrifter22
    Participant

    You’re saying you can’t see the screen edges in view, or that you can’t read the small text because of image quality?

    There is an edgepeek feature (middle mouse button by default I believe) that zooms the image out so you can glance at the edges when needed.

    Alternately, you could use immersive screen or cinema modes, which let you look around the screen’s edges freely. You can zoom the screen in very close to occupy your full view if you want.

    Perhaps what you actually want is to scale down the HUD layer so it is more centered in view (assuming this would not make text too small to read). For this you’d need to experiment with the shader authoring tool enabled and expert settings in vorpX config. I’m only assuming this is possible for OpenGL.

    You’d use the tool in game (Ctrl + End) to cycle through and identify the shader layer(s) of HUD, add them to the active below, then set their status to HUD. Any layers you assign to the HUD status can now be scaled through the vorpX delete key menu, on the Image Settings Page.

    Expert settings should also unlock the FOV enhancement slider (provided directVR is disabled) on the main page of delete key menu. this can pull the camera back from geometry if it feels too close to your face. This will begin to show edge culling if you go too far. This wouldn’t affect the HUD layer though. Also you can use image zoom on the Image page to pull the screen itself back some.

    #184469
    Zarkov
    Participant

    The hud elements on the edge of thescreen are visable but I can’t really read due to image quality. Edge peak works, but that does mean I have to remove my hand from the flight controller and find the mouse on my desktop with the VR-set on. So that’s a bit of a challenge.

    Sadly the VorpX shader tool does not seem to work in OpenGL mode. It shows the message that “The current version of VorpX only supports older versions of openGL which don’t support shaders”.

    It might have somehting to do with the fact that I’m using a Pimax 5k headset which seems to be a bit blurry on the sides even in native VR games.

    #184532
    Zarkov
    Participant

    I’ve been experimenting a bit with Freespace Open. And the last version that hooks with VorpX is FSO 3.7.4. Which is cool because it supports a lot of enhancements via the MediaPV’s (2014). It does have an issue with flickering 3d models, but that can be fixed by disabling post processing.
    It also supports a cockpit mod which shifts some of the hud elements which helps a bit with the legibility of the hud elements.
    It also supports a heap of mods, so that gives you a hours and hours of spacesim fun.
    I’m pretty happy with the results and feel comfortable enough to actually start playing the game instead of just tweaking.

    #184533
    moarveer
    Participant

    Sounds great, I’ll try it at some point.

    #184736
    Zarkov
    Participant

    FYI,

    Buoyed by my succes with FSO I decided to give Xwing Alliance another try because I never got that to run either. I’ve managed to get VorpX to hook it and run with G3D by doing a couple of things.

    1. There’s a DX11 wrapper available for xwing alliance and I installed that.
    2. Using the generic Unity 5 profile I managed to get it to hook succesfully.

    The results are decent, but it runs into the same issue as FSO and that is that the hud elements on the sides of the screen are hard to read. As far as I can tell no one has maneged to make a succesfull hud mod, so we’re stuck with that. But at least it works and looks pretty good.

    #184766
    moarveer
    Participant

    Have you tried tweaking the hud options on the vorpx config?

    #188732
    apollon01
    Participant

    @Zarkov

    Thanks for the info above.

    Would you mind to give more details on how you managed to get it work all together?

    I got the Freespace 2 from GoG. Then I installed Knossos 0.13.3 which allows only FSO 3.8.0-3 and MediaVPs 3.8.2.

    How did you managed FSO 3.7.4 and MediaVPs 2014 (aka 3.7.2) to install via Knossos? Or did you do it manually or via different launcher?

    I am a bit puzzled… so your help will be highly appreciated.

    Milan

    #188790
    apollon01
    Participant

    OK, figured it now – it runs in 3D on FSO 3.6.12. Here is how to make it work (well at least on my setup :-)) in case someone else will want to give it a try:

    – get Freespace 2 (mine comes from GoG)
    – get wxLauncher for the SCO
    – get FSO 3.6.12 INF SSE2
    – get MediaVPs 3.6.12
    – use Quake III: Arena profile as suggested by Zarkov
    – vorpX needs to hook on fs2_open_3_6_12r_INF_SSE2.exe

    Install via wxLauncher and you are ready to go!

    The FSO 3.7.4 hooks but does not give a 3D effect (at least not for me). The FSO 3.6.12 works fine.

    Milan

    #190289
    TheLastStarfighter
    Participant

    Hey man thanks for this. BIG HUGE fan of the WC series (more specifically Privateer). Played the heck out of that game as a kid. Freespace was also pretty excellent. Hope we can see some more stuff like Xwing Alliance or whatever. I don’t get the G3D effect on XWA. Its there for a few minutes but when you goto combat it disappears.

    #197467
    wm79
    Participant

    How did you get it to run in the first place? If I start WCSaga, nothing happens. If I manually add the files, it does not work either. Is there a profile to use?

    #199028
    sirou
    Participant

    OK, figured it now – it runs in 3D on FSO 3.6.12. Here is how to make it work (well at least on my setup :-)) in case someone else will want to give it a try:

    Thank you for your post. I’ve just installed your combination and vorpx is hooking and showing “3d things” on FS2.
    In my Oculus Quest 2 is also working TrackIR after copy the required dll. This is cool because you can look around the scene as modern space sims

    But there are some things a little bit wrong. The HUD is composed of 2 different layers that move in a different way. I’ve tried to use authoring to try to fix this but I get a message saying is not supported for this opengl old version.

    Due to this, i’m trying things: switching between full-vr and immersive cinema, changing FOV with -fov flag, zooming in out inside vorpx..

    ¿Did you get a good configuration settings that made freespace 2 playable?

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