Vega Strike Forums

Hi everyone.
After some trials with commercial picture rescaling software I now made the first HR base screen for PGG (and any other privateer/vs based game) using the original agricultural base screen from PGG. Now the resolution is 2048x1280px and the result is quite impressive in comparison to 'normal' zoom. But it seems the vegastrike engine is not very good in downscaling the graphics, so there are some artifacts when displayed at 800x600 px as it is standard for PGG by now. Nonetheless it looks much better than the original upscaled graphics. Animations also still work, but I didn't rescale them.
Please post here if the screen works for you.

And here's the download for the files.
aggricultural base:

http://www.inscenique.com/temp/agricultural_hr.rar

refinery base:

http://www.inscenique.com/temp/refinery.rar

Unrar/copy the files to your PGG folder. Please keep the folder structure...

BTW: I disabled the moving stars in the concurse and landing bay windows of the refinery base. In my eyes it simply didn't look good and didn't fit to the rest of the game (The refinery doesn't move that fast through space). On the other hand fitting the old animation to the new HR file would have taken lots of trial & error work. Maybe it would be even faster to create a completely new animation... Let me know what you think about the non-moving stars and if you see any glitches with the new HR files.
Cheers.
Andy

Andy wrote:Hi everyone.
After some trials with commercial picture rescaling software I now made the first HR base screen for PGG (and any other privateer/vs based game) using the original agricultural base screen from PGG. Now the resolution is 2048x1280px and the result is quite impressive in comparison to 'normal' zoom. But it seems the vegastrike engine is not very good in downscaling the graphics, so there are some artifacts when displayed at 800x600 px as it is standard for PGG by now. Nonetheless it looks much better than the original upscaled graphics. Animations also still work, but I didn't rescale them.
Please post here if the screen works for you.

I think that downscaling issue might be because VS is configured not to do mipmapping for png and jpgs. It can be changed on the config IIRC, but that will incur quite a performance hit (RAM usage x1.5 and increased CPU usage as well).

When you say original, you mean the 800x600 ones or the HR ones John made a while ago?

In fact they are 640x400. That's why they are upscaled to 800x600 in PGG, which doesn't look that good.
Theoretically I could upscale all other screens in the same way wich would improove the look of PGG a bit imo... but this only makes sense if the original picture has a relatively high resolution. I also tried with pics of lower resolution, but with not so good results...
Look here (the original pic is only 320x128).
First simple zoom:



and now with the upscaling software:



The result still is remarkably good, but in this case it would be better to recreate the screen completely... but who could do this???

When you say original, you mean the 800x600 ones or the HR ones John made a while ago?

...do you say, there are HR screens already out there somewhere? The screens that come with PGG are 640x400 or lower...

John had HR screens, but I'm not sure if he redid all of them or just base screens.

Sorry, who is John? I found PGG just a few months ago and would like to see it updated a bit...

Well, John Cordell is PGG's admin, the one who forked it from Privateer Remake. He's a bit MIA, but not entirely (I think PMs do get to him)