Freeworlds: Tides of War - A Starwars Total Conversion Mod!
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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.
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W0dk4 wrote:
Over the last few months, I’ve been working a lot on the graphics engine of Freelancer. Inspired by Timeslip’s work. I wrote a Direct3D8 to Direct3D9 wrapper for Freelancer to be able to directly access the graphics pipeline.The ultimate goal is to somewhat modernize Freelancer’s graphics engine. I’m not sure about the features I will be able to add further on, but let me show you the first enhancements that I already implemented.
Before getting to the eye candy, let me quickly talk about mouse lag. I guess almost everybody is familiar with the mouse lag problem that occurs in some games. In almost every case, the laggy/delayed input is to blame on VSync. If you turn VSync off, it solves a lot of the mouse lag problems for many games, including Freelancer. I did some research on the topic and found this article on a private blog by “Vorlath”. Basically, to fix mouse lag in the DirectX pipeline, you have to make sure that after any present call, the screen has really received the frame you just rendered. This is easily done in Direct3D9 as stated in the article and it was one of the first things I implemented. Thank god, no more VSync-related mouse lag in Freelancer!
Lets get to the eye candy. One of the top wanted post-processing effects in older games is bloom. As of now, I added a relatively cheap and subtle bloom effect, but in the future I want to do a proper HDR lighting implementation. Another post-process effect is Color Correction, which to me seems to be very underrated. You can completely change the feel of the game by including a nice color correction effect. The implementation I chose was very simple, yet powerful, based on this article.The vast benefit of this method is the what-you-see-is-what-you-get effect. We simply take an ingame screenshot, load that screenshot in Photoshop and do some color correction with the Curves or Levels tool. We then apply the same color correction to a special texture that will be used by the game. Very easy to do, yet very powerful.
Here is a comparison, with color correction added in the second screenshot:
The color correction effect is implemented per-system. Its a very good tool to give systems their very own feeling, making the ingame experience as varied as possible. For example, we could give rebel and imperial systems their very unique color correction, so you quickly know in which territory you are.Finally a little video to show the effects in motion:
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http://www.moddb.com/mods/fwtow/videos/bloom-color-correction-shader -
awesome
nice rank @ MOD DB =P
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Bas wrote:
awesomenice rank @ MOD DB =P
Ya, we’re getting lucky there.
Really, the only one to take credit for this astounding achievement is W0d. I cannot wait to see what the other mods will be able to do with this once it’s released for everyone to use. I think he singlehandedly gave FL one or two more years
