Hi everyone,
As most of you probably know, the next patch for Natural Selection 2 is going to add support for Linux. In order to make this happen we had to create an OpenGL backend for the game. Whenever we make changes to the engine, we try really hard to provide backwards compatibility and not break any existing mods; we know from our history developing Natural Selection 1 as a mod how frustrating this can be. For the most part, our changes to accommodate OpenGL and don't affect mods at all, but there are 2 exceptions.
The first is the .fx files which will no longer be used by the engine. FX files are a Direct3D format for specifying shaders. Because they are D3D specific, we had to create our own system which can also work with OpenGL. Our format is similar and generally it's a straight-forward process to convert from one to the other.
The second is the .screenfx files, which have also changed formats. The old screenfx file format was our own invention and we could have preserved it with our OpenGL changes. However, since the fx files that the screenfx files reference would already need to be updated, we decided to improve the format by unifying it with the render_setup files that are used to control the entire rendering pipeline. The render_setup files were essentially a superset of the functionality in the old screen effects, so this makes the screen effects quite a bit more powerful and simplified the code for dealing with them.
So, if your mod contains either .fx or .screenfx files, it will not work properly with the next build we release. It's not done yet, but I plan on making it so that this will be detected automatically and the mod will be de-activated. We'd love to work with the creators of existing mods to get them up-to-date for when the release goes out. If you're interested or have any questions, e-mail me at: max@unknownworlds.com.
As most of you probably know, the next patch for Natural Selection 2 is going to add support for Linux. In order to make this happen we had to create an OpenGL backend for the game. Whenever we make changes to the engine, we try really hard to provide backwards compatibility and not break any existing mods; we know from our history developing Natural Selection 1 as a mod how frustrating this can be. For the most part, our changes to accommodate OpenGL and don't affect mods at all, but there are 2 exceptions.
The first is the .fx files which will no longer be used by the engine. FX files are a Direct3D format for specifying shaders. Because they are D3D specific, we had to create our own system which can also work with OpenGL. Our format is similar and generally it's a straight-forward process to convert from one to the other.
The second is the .screenfx files, which have also changed formats. The old screenfx file format was our own invention and we could have preserved it with our OpenGL changes. However, since the fx files that the screenfx files reference would already need to be updated, we decided to improve the format by unifying it with the render_setup files that are used to control the entire rendering pipeline. The render_setup files were essentially a superset of the functionality in the old screen effects, so this makes the screen effects quite a bit more powerful and simplified the code for dealing with them.
So, if your mod contains either .fx or .screenfx files, it will not work properly with the next build we release. It's not done yet, but I plan on making it so that this will be detected automatically and the mod will be de-activated. We'd love to work with the creators of existing mods to get them up-to-date for when the release goes out. If you're interested or have any questions, e-mail me at: max@unknownworlds.com.