What degree of support for Vanilla overhaul?
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Just a simple question this but I’d like to gauge what degree of support exists for an overhaul of the standard game? By this I mean, modernizing the original content, not changing it but upping the detail across the board through improvement of existing models and the re-making of existing textures for a cleaner appearance.
How many people would actively involve themselves in that kind of project, considering it’s scale?
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I am sure everyone wants to see this to be done, including me as long time Freelancer fan. But at the same time I doubt that anyone will directly participate in this project. At least not longer than maybe one month. Thats the fate of most such projects, even if everyone wants to see them done
I wish you best luck finding enough people to do so! -
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Sooner or later you will stuck with desicion “to mod or not to mod”, because just overhaul is not enough.
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Question is if its worth it.
Ive done ALOT of overhauling the game on my mod in the past years and in the end I also agree with Helloween here. You will get to the point where you have to make that decision.
Main question is if its actually worth to do it with the few players left.Another question is how far would we get.
Ive done alot of modeling in the past. The editing or recreating of the space_industrial module with a few more details is something I would do in just a few minutes. Thats really not a big deal and we have many modular station parts that were created by other people. That has been done many times before.
The problematic part (or lets say work intense part) is working with real stations, where you have to take care about alot more complex meshes, animated parts, animations, textures, lods and surs.Im not saying that its not possible… but its at least tricky and very time consuming.
Its not comparable with what you have modeled so far… -
You need to be realistic. The Freelancer community is getting smaller and smaller every year. I think now only the most core fans remained. Not counting the occasional try-playsaweek-leaves players. And maybe 5-6 mods too.
A complete FL overhaul sounds great, don’t get me wrong, but will it be worth the huge effort it requires? Making a new mod or a vanilla-oriented project is more or less a futile job, in my opinion, since most of the old, active players are sticking with the mods/servers they know for years. I am too thinking if I should make new FL ships or packs. Not sure if the last pack was used somewhere hehe.
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And then there’s the problem of getting the various artists who are left to settle on a style. We’re all of varying levels of skill, background, training, and experience. Agreeing on an Art Director to set the tone would be a hellacious experience, I suspect.
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On the other hand, a lot of games have seen a pretty nice boost in popularity following the release of “HD” mods that refresh the visuals and add some modern features, since those things tend to get covered a fair bit by gaming news websites.
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Prime example: Homeworld Remastered. They did and excellent job remastering them…
@Mobius1NI: No one sad it is a bad idea, it is actually a great idea, however, the vanilla FL textures and models are…well, outdated, and remastering them would require a huge amount of work.
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nah… not good
just fast
people like Kuze are way better with modeling
but like I mentioned, such stuff is the easy part
I don’t want to demotivate you… its just… Ive seen many similar discussions before in the past years…
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What’s really needed is a magical photoshop filter that auto enlarges all the textures and magically repaints them with greater detail, generates the normal and specular stuff and it’s all good.
I’ve been searching for one for years but alas, no joy!
If you were so inclined, you could always make some small modules in a similar style as vanilla, then attach them to things like space industrials etc, like the habitats and solar panels (but smaller cos they’re mahoosive), chimneys with smoke and what not, vents with gases whatever, just to make them more interesting. It’s the lack of variety with these things that makes everything look a little samey and bland.
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Its not that it hasnt been done before.
There are mods which improve the texture quality and also HD texture packs. Creating normalmaps and heightmap is also no witchcraft.
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I think the question of the subject has been answered, at least to my satisfaction. This is evidently not a job for 2 or 3 people and I simply consider it a shame it was not done at a point when the community had the man power and the will power to pull it off.
That is by no means a fault of the community, as clearly it was massively involved in a variety of other mod related projects. The community made a decision on what it wanted to do, and did it.
thank you for letting us all know how good a 3d modeler you are, I’ll keep that in mind.