Freeworlds: Tides of War - A Starwars Total Conversion Mod!
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Oh, well that’s an entirely different story. The answer to this is I doubt it. A lot of the functionality we have in the game is through FL Hook. By removing this server application with the mod, you’ll lose a lot of what we hope to design into it (dockable carriers, dynamic economy, etc).
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Yes i should have made myself clearer. I was referring to open singleplayer. I get asked about OSP all the time with my mods and i tend to provide it these days. I agree certain funcitonality is lost like dockable carriers but a dynamic economy is easy enough to do in SP using Cold Void’s price randomizer which simulates that. Just a thought
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It has been a few months since our last development video, so I thought I’d try to include some of our most recent happenings in the 11th edition. Unfortunately, I was not able to capture all of our work because I personally do not like making these videos over six minutes in length. So, for the work that wasn’t included, I thought I’d show you some of the short clips/images here.
This 11th Development video focuses on the capital ship prototype that is being developed, primarily, by Deety. He and I have spent many hours conversing over what we want capitals to be in the mod and thus far, I’m quite thrilled with the results. He’s spent countless hours recording statistical data and coding it into the mod to bring these beautiful gigantic ships we have to life. With Deety’s determination and work ethic and our new capital testing crew, we’re inching closer to the final capital ship prototype. In addition to that, Deety has been requesting many custom capital effects that I’ve been assisting him with. You’ll see that there are many new shield hit, hull hit and explosive effects, which have been a joint project of Deety and I. We are also using some of the work Why485 left us to further the immerse feel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Myw_2niQ6zQ
Another developer, W0dk4, has done some incredible things for the mod. His recent creations brought animations to our game. Through the tutorial he gave us, we were able to recreate many of the wing folding animations you see in the movies: Lambda Shuttle, B-Wing, X-Wing and ETA-2. In our next development video, I hope to show the wings folding appropriately when you engage the ships hyperspace drive. In addition to this, he also has written a FL Hook that increases the turning rate of fighters/bombers/interceptors when they go to 33% throttle. Those of you that have played X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter or X-Wing Alliance know that this throttle percentage was the optimum level to turn quickly in the game.
As a personal mini project, thanks to a little prod from Lancer Solarus, I’ve been working on a new enter/exit hyperspace effect for the game to take away the standard Freelancer jump tunnel. Although it is still a work in progress, I’ve been quite happy with the results. The only sad thing is that there is no possible way to slow down the effect at the end of the sequence. This means that I cannot slow down the stars at the end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX2H3mKcUUM
Overfiend and Mirkha have also being working incredibly hard on hitboxing all the models in the game. I can assure you, that is no easy task. Fortunately, with our newest hitbox technique, which allows us to use infinite hitbox groups, they’ve been able to hitbox things that we only dreamed about. The image below is our 10km long Mon Calamari Shipyards generously donated by EvilleJedi.
This hitbox took over 298 parts to make. But, we do believe it’s paid off as you can see in these early images: 1 and 2.
Overfiend also has been working very hard on new Mon Calamari Cruiser textures as well. I won’t get into this now as I’ve already discussed his work at length in my last news piece.
As always, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to post. And please click this link to keep up-to-date with Freeworlds: Tides of War.
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Sushi -
moved to a more appropriate forum
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The Freeworlds: Tides of War development team has been busy over the past few weeks bringing the mod to life. Deety and Myself have completed putting in all the code for all the mod’s small craft including the shuttles, transports and freighters of the mod. Deety has also been busy working on creating new missions for the mod, similar to the scale and nature we previously mentioned in this news piece: Battle of Yavin. We’ll be releasing more details about missions as Deety completes more of the project.
As for systems, Lilfire has joined the team to help fill in the large empty space we have. By tediously placing numerous ships, bases, shipyards and container fields, we hope to breathe some life into our massive systems. Below are some images of what Lilfire has been doing with the assistance of Deety:
Fondor Shipyards:
We also have head some significant development with Fondor Shipyards. The model was originally built by Overfiend and has been textured by Super D. Here are some images of the large base:
Furthermore, Qi has almost completed the groundwork of our economy. Unfortunately, there’s not much to show you regarding this, but you’ll have to believe me when I say that it’s going to be epic
W0dk4 has also been busy with FW:ToW by creating many new FL Hooks for us. Some of the creations include:
Having mass of cargo/missiles affect how the vessel will handle (More mass = sluggish)
Preventing players from moving while in cruise (that means that players will have to point themselves in the right direction before they engage their cruise engines)
Speeding up turning rate when you throttle down. Some of you that remember XvT/XWA know that when turning your optimal speed to turn was 33%.
Creating a missile view mode
Creating a key that causes the ships wings to fold prior to engaging cruise:B-Wing, X-WingAnd last but not least, this is the latest FW:ToW Development video so show you the amazing new bases that we’re going to have populate our systems. The movie also includes some footage of the huge fleets Lilfire has been working on. I hope you enjoy it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiqjoBpqVIs
As always, any comments, questions or suggestions are welcome!
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Sushi -
I cant watch the vid cause of copyright denied it in my country o.O
[Edit]https://www.vtunnel.com helps
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The Freeworlds: Tides of War mod team has been busy over the past few weeks fixing bugs, building an economy and, of late, creating more of the mission systems for players to enjoy (ie. Battle of Yavin). Below, you’ll find the latest video of this new mission system Deety has designed called, “Battle of Bilbringi.” Essentially, this mission will feature a gigantic ongoing battle between the New Republic and the Empire full of huge capital ships, hundreds of laser beams and a whole lot of fun!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ase_sw_z65A
In other news, Qi, our resident Economy Guru, has completed the first alpha prototype of our economy and it contains over 1000+ trade runs. He strove to make this economy as canonical as he could to further the immersion factor of the mod and we all really think you will love what he’s done. In addition to this, Qi is working on a web interface that will allow players to view the changes in commodity prices based on what is being traded on the server. However, I will release more information about that when the graphical interface is near completion.
Lastly, I wanted to show you all the new Pirate factions Deety has created based on what systems you’re in. Below is an image on how the territories will be separated:
Thanks again everyone for following this mod. We’ve really appreciated the ongoing support and compliments.
Happy holidays,
Sushi -
Welcome to another development blog post
First I wanted to say thank you to everybody who voted for us in the MotY 2009. There is a present in form of a 1080p HD ingame video when you’re brave and read until the end of this post
But lets get started:I have been working on various stuff since my last update, a quick overview:
- X-Wing Alliance inspired flight model (max turning at 0.3 velocity and some other tweaks)
- new cruise behaviour and cargo affecting ship mass (-> affects ship handling)
- wing folding animations (also with triggers and synced in Multiplayer)
I dont really want to go in detail here, so lets skip to the eye-candy feature instead and save the boring stuff for later.
Freelancer has pretty much no built-in functionality for taking hud-less screenshots or shooting videos. This always bugged me so one day I decided to dig into the code and see what I can find. The result has been pretty elaborate and time-consuming, but its definately worth it.
VideoMode is the feature called, and it basically allows you to see awesome fly-bys of your favourite ships. Also, there is built-in functionality for completely disabling the HUD on-the-fly and you can spectate other ships, something completely new in regards to the Freelancer engine.
It has been quite a task smoothing out camera movement: Its one of those things where you start with 100 lines of code but eventually end up with 30 lines of code that work just like you wanted it. In comparison it has been pretty easy to program the actual fly-bys, switching in front of the ship once the camera is too far away.
Videomode has a “shake” effect applied when the ship flys by, which was also quite challenging, but not as annoying as camera rotation smoothing.Enough of the technical talk, here comes the eye-candy. Its a 1080p ingame video.
You’ll also see a wing animation on the X-Wing, triggered by entering cruise. Yes, animations are in and also synced in Multiplayer (but was too boring actually filming it).
Also, please excuse me for using yet-again our super-ugly combat prototype system, I’m just that lazy.
I’m sure the testers and other devs will make use of VideoMode in future videos, so stay tunedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmKyq2bu9Xk
http://www.moddb.com/mods/fwtow/videos/freeworlds-tides-of-war-videomode-feature
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Gosh, where do you guys get your knowledge? This is purely amazing. Well done!
Next up, how about fixing the cruise camera?
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That when you have a high cruise speed, the camera doesn’t really follow the ship and lags behind so far off that you can barely see it.
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I sorta like that
But everyone is different. Just made a new wing animation for our V-Wing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=342kWtwvZI0 -
Definitely
I left it in our nexus cause I wanted to use the starsphere somewhere but we didn’t have canon system to put it in…hehe -
Terratec wrote:
how do you do it, the wings spread. flhook commands? with me only baydoorW0dk4 got that working for us. You’d have to ask him nicely
@Tai: If there is anything you’d like to know, send me a PM and I’ll see what I can do for you :). I have no intention in keeping things secret or whatever nor do I think that’s beneficial for Freelancer Community.
We, as a whole, can profit from everyones work
