Freeworlds: Tides of War - A Starwars Total Conversion Mod!
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w00tf? Looks goddamn nice !
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LOL. Thanks for the kudos, guys. We’ve put a lot of work into these models and we also have TSP community to thank for working out some of our bugs, too!
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Over the past few days, Demi, our resident computer guru, has been hard at work making a brand new developer website for the Freeworlds: Tides of War Developer team to use. As a team, we decided to create these boards because we needed more space plus wanted more features for development than our current forums had. Using the webspace provided by Qi, Demi made a wonderful layout. With this new site, you will be able to get the latest news, development blogs, images, 3D representations of the vessels and ask questions on the development forums. As for the layout of the site, below are the two prototypes Demi worked on:
As you can see from the layouts, the Freeworlds: Tides of War Development team has accounts on facebook,youtube, twitter, and google buzz. We welcome everyone interested in this mod’s development to follow us there as we are regularly updating the sites.
Another special feature that I wanted to mention is the ability to see all of our models in 3D. While we’re still in the process of converting all of our ships for viewers to see, I wanted to show you what you can expect 3D Models click me. Demi is still in the process of refining the viewer to optimize the performance, however, for now, I think it’s an excellent proof-of-concept that I cannot wait to see running on the site.
Lastly, we welcome everyone to join us on our forums where you can ask the developers any questions, comment or give suggestions. We welcome all feedback from our followers.
To view the sites main page, go here: Freeworlds: Tides of War Development Site
To join our forums go here: Freeworlds: Tides of War Development Forums -
Explosions, explosions, explosions, every gamer loves them; they have pretty colours, dazzling lights and most importantly, they inflict significant amounts of damage! Over the past several months the team has been at work discussing the prototype of the system we hope to put into place in the mod. The prototype that has been created has largely been influenced X-Wing vs. TIE-Fighter and X-Wing Alliance. I’ve created the 14th Development Video to discuss key features of the types of missiles/torps/bombs and how they will be used in the mod.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yUe2XzksBs
(A huge thanks to Adoxa and M0tah for creating fixes for the problems we were having. Without their contributions, I wouldn’t have been able to make this video or employ this system)
Also, since I haven’t updated this link in awhile, please enjoy our Capital Ship video created by ChewieBacca
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Exceptional work as usual. One of the numerous things that impresses me with this mod are the sizes of the ships. That capship video with two large ships fighting above what looks like a super star destroyer, i mean seriously, how big is that? And no sign of slow down in the fps, even more impressive. I use large ships in my mod, but not to this scale, really gives a sense of being there, which is the whole point for star wars fans
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Ya, the SSD is its canonical length, coming in at, roughly, 18km. She’s a hefty one. It won’t be player controlled, though.
Thanks for the kind comments
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Now that our New Republic and Imperial starfigher and capital fleets are completed, we have begun focusing on the other factions in the mod. One of these factions is affectionately known as the Pirates.The term Pirate refers to the variety of rogues that were scattered across the Star Wars galaxy who would attack, rob or commandeer ships as they saw fit.
Many of you that have followed Star Wars for sometime know that Pirates generally cobbled together unlikely pieces and created beautiful Frankenstein ships. These ships are affectionately known as “Uglies”. Basically, it combines the New Republic and Galactic Empire starfighters into vicious abominations. The models we had previously came from the wonderful work done by the XWAUP. We thank them for donating their models to our mod. However, we decided to use the wonderful models and textures by the First Strike team, rip their models apart, make brand new models and put them back together again. Icewolf, our resident jack-of-all trades, even redid the textures for all the vessels to make them look even more ugly. I present to you the efforts of our labour:
From the bottom left clockwise: Deathseed, Vornskyr, X-TIE, TYE-Ugly (Image 1)
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I see Freeworlds is still going beyond the impossible.
How in the world did you do that icon thing? Does that really work like it sounds? Does it apply only to ships with brackets currently around them, or to all ships in space? Do they really fade/disappear when you get close to them? I honestly haven’t a clue how any of this was done.
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They apply to all ships of a particular class and they really do disappear when you get close to them. What you see is what you get with them
The HUD icon thing started off as my pet project but FF took over and brought it to new heights. It basically uses fuses and .ales to do a majority of the dirty work.
If you want the code, just signup on http://forge.the-starport.net/ and I’ll give you access to our SVN. With FF’s permission, you’re more than welcome to use it, Why, after all the work you did for FW:ToW.
I really believe our next big thing is the conversion of the Freelancer Engine from DX8 to DX9. W0d’s is just in the process of implementing the shaders. He’s been successful with post-render colour correction. He’s currently working on bloom. As soon as he posts the news, I’ll be sure to update this topic.
The other big news we have is that a concept artist from Crytek has joined us. He’s an amazing talent and he’s been producing some insane textures. http://users.cybercity.dk/~dsl59684/ He wants to tweak a lot of the effect textures…I’m very curious how they’ll turn out.
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The team has done a lot of great stuff over the past two years. I’m very fortunate to have such a good group of fellas working together.
As for the shader, W0d’s made his own hook. I don’t know how he did it, but he has. The mod has been converted over to DX9. The next step is getting the shaders in and working.
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What w0dk4 is doing and ENB have absolutely nothing in common. Think “paint job” versus “entire body replacement” if you need a car analogy
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What w0dk4 is doing and ENB have absolutely nothing in common. Think “paint job” versus “entire body replacement” if you need a car analogy
Fair enough I was just wondering. I remember playing this mod a couple months ago it was great, although people where talking about 2.0 and how it would change everything, so i held off getting right into it before then. Can’t wait to see it.
Would also love you if you made the conversion open to anyone, but I can’t blame you for keeping that baby all locked up
Ozed.
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This will be given to Freelancer as a whole as I, w0dk4 and the rest of the team, are firm believers of sharing information with Freelancer modders, as long as credit is given where credit is due. We will release it to everyone when it’s stable and relatively bug free.
Just to note, except models/textures, pretty much everything we do is available for other teams. We’re waaaaaaaay too late in the game to be keeping things from each other. The only way to keep FL going forward is to pass all these breakthroughs along to everyone.
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If you have time, is there any chance you could give us a brief description of what sort of changes we can expect to see in your mod if you convert the engine to dx9 please. Will it be shader model 3.0, bump mapping, HDR etc?
P.S. Having been gone a while the last time I played freeworlds must have been almost 4 or 5 years ago or so now, can’t believe just how far you’ve moved on, talk about dedicated!
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Once FW-ToW is released, I’ll work on releasing all the stuff I did on the client as standalones for everyone to use. The problem is, it’d take a lot of my time releasing everything the moment I finish it.
As regards the graphical features that will be included, I dont know at this moment. Just keep watching our development blog, and you’ll know for sure
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Also, I think its understandable that we want to create a certain hype. If we see all the features of FW-ToW months earlier in other Freelancer mods, it kinda takes away from the wow-effect once ToW gets released. But be sure, once we release, we will release all the tech that goes along with it.
