well I have to say, these textures look awesome. I want to play this game again but I have to check out what mods to use.

It's low-key bugged me for years that the PDA and keycard buttons on the HUD are in a different style from all the other buttons. Well no more!

Who says all the buttons have to be the same, even within the same grouping?



No taste! Looks to me like they wanted the MFD button to stand out, and from an aesthetic standpoint I prefer the original.

Still, I am poking at you over something largely subjective and extremely minor. Carry on.

It's low-key bugged me for years that the PDA and keycard buttons on the HUD are in a different style from all the other buttons. Well no more!

Been lurking for a while and decided to give SHTUP-ND beta 2 a whirl. It is looking great and I noticed that on my side the UI doesn't look like your change above. Was this reverted in the latest version, or is this just a classic PEBKAC error?
https://imgur.com/a/7x9QKJ1

Poking around in ..\SHTUP-ND beta 2\iface it seems like the mod files themselves are in the "old" style I'm seeing on my side, but 

Wow... I survived the simultaneous release of both SCS Beta 5 and SHTUP-ND Beta 2!

Seriously, thanks ZylonBane and happy new year.

Forgive me if this is the wrong place to ask, but I'm curious what the sources are for the images used for the magazines used in the SHTUP mod, specifically the old man one.

Unrelated, but for the sake of consistency, is the magazine shown on the far left of the attached image going to receive an update in the next update (assuming one is planned at some point)

Cheers! 

The plant on the left there could use a facelift. Or maybe it's just something you leave to Vurt perhaps.

There is always more people turning up deserving of Macintosh credit then we hear about in the mainstream associations.
I have heard of Wozniak but this is the first I have heard of Raskin.

Meanwhile Jobs seems to get most of the credit.

*prominent

The old man is Jef Raskin, the "Father of the Mac".

Leather jacket guy is just some catalog model I found years ago in a Google image search.

I would have preferred to use the original high-res sketches for these covers by Gareth Hinds, but he probably lost them years ago.

It's kind of amazing how approximate the automaps are when you pay close attention to them.



EDIT: This was supposed to have been posted in the SCP topic, not the SHTUP topic, d'oh.

ZylonBane
Have never noticed that before 

Fun Fact: The HUD icons for nanites, cybermods, the PDA, and keys are set by the gamesys instead of being baked into the interface graphics. The controlling gamesys objects are FakeNanites, FakeCookie, PDA Soft, and FakeKeys, respectively.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsOMSEO2G8w
Interesting, but not terribly useful.

It's low-key bugged me for years that the PDA and keycard buttons on the HUD are in a different style from all the other buttons. Well no more!

Hmm. That texture was done by a contributor. I'd never noticed how much it deviated from the vanilla texture. I'll take a look at it.

and we lose the vaccine

A little story on wasted time. I've recently upgraded the frame rates of the spinning TriOp and Med/Sci logos (again), and as a result I now have 68 256x256 textures to deal with. So I've been looking into saving them as DDS to save video card memory. The advantage of DDS files is that they support DXT compression. DXT for opaque textures yields a fixed compression ratio of 8:1, and it can be decoded directly on the video card in realtime, which saves a ton of the aforementioned VRAM.

However...

As it turns out, the difference between 68 textures saved as PNG vs DDS is 23 megabytes of VRAM. That may sound like a lot, but if you have, for example, a bargain-basement 4GB video card, 23 MB is barely half of one percent of that. SS2 as a whole, with SHTUP and 400 enabled, barely breaks 700MB total VRAM usage.

So in the end, not worth the hassle. All that VRAM exists to be used, after all. And it's a small price to pay for not having to deal with compression artifact nonsense like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TtH4ldEzXA
For those wondering what they're looking at here, DXT compression works by dividing the image into 4x4 blocks, then within each block directly encoding the TWO most prominent colors, then deriving two more colors interpolated between those colors. It works great for photographic images, but it absolutely sucks for images with fine multicolored detail. Like for example, an image where green, orange, and black might all be present within the same 4x4 block.

Yep I jumped the gun a bit early I should have read the post history better sorry about that. However the texture mapping thing is very subjective, a lot of textures in the game preserves more detail by not having the filtering applied to them (example being most environment textures, desks, and especially 3D models of enemies). Some of them do look worse though I give you that, like reflections and transparent ones.

Do you think, even in theory, that texture filtering could use a slightly less lossy/blurry method?

voodoo47
roger!

Looking at the latest posts (except explosions of course) I think I must have messed something in my mod order, I don't have the sexy blue turrets, nor the smooth psi wall animation,
it looks like this right now: https://i.ibb.co/X3DrSXC/mod-order.jpg

also about the texture filtering disabled, I just re-enabled it, I prefer it without, but it has a few issues here and there, and supersampling the renderer SSAAx16 to eliminate texture aliasing is slightly too brutal for my GPU (I can target 60 FPS but 120 is harder), which is understandable I mean we're talking SSAAx16 after all

Finally, the explosions are complete! Until I decide to tweak them some more!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmSdgozlbac
It's been so long since I've looked at the vanilla explosions instead of SCP, I'd forgotten how slowly the vanilla animations run. No idea why Irrational did that, they look so much better sped up. So yeah, the actual SHTUP explosions will animate faster than in this video. I just speed-matched here for comparison.

And when it's either shooting at you or exploding.

ZylonBane
Regarding blue turret: hack suggestion alert! Assuming remodeling is not an option, how about spawning a textured flat mesh where the turret opens up, so that its guts have detail instead of black nothingness? And of course destroy the mesh when the turret is destroyed.

Perhaps only do this for the bottom half of the turret for performance reasons. Since the top half (underside) will be seen far less. And the top half is also the part that moves which complicates things.

hypnotoad approves.

also, whoever will be hammering the KEX engine into running SHTUP properly is probably going to love this.

Easy as 1 2 3.

HikariI can't guess anything from those old textures. Either it's cleary visible, or just random pixels. I think ZB did a good job interpreting these pixels into something plausible.

What, you mean like this?