I currently use Ray's trick (http://vendetta.guildsoftware.com/?action=msgboard&thread=4380&page=3) to fix the OS X sky box errors, but I've noticed it absolutely kills my FPS. After I run the command suggested by Ray in the thread referenced above, my frame rate maxes out around 20fps. As soon as I go into the options menu the frame rate returns to normal. Bellow are some pictures of the behavior.

http://fuller.mit.edu/alan/vendetta/options1.gif
http://fuller.mit.edu/alan/vendetta/options2.gif

OS 10.3.3
Dual 2ghz G5
1536mb ram
Radeon 9800

Wait, so you went into the options menu and then exited the options menu without changing anything, and then your frame rate went back up? Looks like it stopped rendering about 18000 polygons, too, which will naturally make things a bit faster.

[moved to Bugs]

Why was it rendering 20k polys when looking at open space anyhow? My open space polys are a lot closer to 2.1k than 20.1k...

hahaha.. I figured out the issue... I was setting rHiRezBK to 10. Which btw only causes problems in s18. Not really sure why but not really important.

P.S. where the hell did I post this without paying attention? I thought I posted it in bugs.

P.P.S. Ray's solution doesn't actually work "/set rHiRezBK 1 ; set rHiRezBK 5"... the commands appear to be executed 'simultaneously' not in order resulting in just the last command in this case. Though with a "wait 1" added it does work. I've noticed this before that it appears the client figures out the final result of a set of commands on one line and only executes the end result not the steps in between.

Ah, heh. Yeah, then it renders each star as two polygons (a textured square), etc.

'twas in Suggestions.

I bound F10 to 0 and F11 to 5 and switch with two keystrokes. That way, I can turn BK off for botting/searching and ex.high for the sheer beauty of the game!

If backgrounds were made more Homeworldesque, I think you can get the best of both worlds.

I would like to know how homeworld2 renders it's skyboxes.
Does it still just use gouraud shaded polygons?

I wish I could tell you. All I know is that the new background rendering scheme of Vendetta makes skyboxes extremely choppy in performance. The old ones (3.0.x) not only looked better with graphics turned down, but had little impact on framerate.

In closing, I'd like to offer more droolworthy Homeworld 2 screenshots!

http://well-of-souls.com/homeworld/hws/hw2/images/homeworld2_021803_001.jpg

http://www.wcnews.com/newershots/full/homeworld2c.jpg

http://www.4gamer.net/specials/homeworld2/img/007.jpg

http://www.4gamer.net/specials/homeworld2/img/007.jpg

http://gry.tsmail.pl/g/hom2.11.jpg

Subtle, non-cluttered, simple... yet Beeaaaaaautiful.

Yes, they are...but, IMHO, not as beautiful as Vendetta's.

BTW, rule out the atmospheric ones.

setting background detail to low/medium/high is basically the same as it used to be: a single set of textures mapped onto a box. They are just dynamically rendered once upon entering the sector. If you set the backgrounds to off, i suppose you don't get the choppyness.

So... would that explain this? http://img36.photobucket.com/albums/v109/Xorbital/Vendetta/more_squares.jpg

Is that the space junk being rendered in squares? Or is that on the background? Looks like space junk rendering error.

It's not space junk...none of the squares are in front of the frig or any of the roids.

They are the stars rendered very low.

Kat, that error's been fixed for a long time now... are you still getting it???
Arolte, it was in the background not the space junk.

Arolte, all of those pictures look like GIFs with the color depth turned down to 256 or something. Unless it's the JPEG compression on the images, which I don't think it is, it looks like Homeworld is cheating a bit...

edit: nevermind.

Cheating?

o_O