Crossfire 1.8
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About one year ago I decided to create a new version of the Crossfire mod with the basic idea just to extend the universe a bit. Now, one year later Crossfire 1.8 has been developed to something extremly BIG.
I don’t want to publish a full list of features now since we still do some final changes atm and will release the final mod in a few weeks. But id like to take the opportunity to introduce some key elements of the new mod.
We intended to build the most detailed FL mod and when i look at the current version I can clearly say we have reached this goal.
Graphics:
Meanwhile there are about 2-3 mods out there trying to improve the graphics of FL. What always bothered me was that these graphics always looked “half-finished”. The used textures were placed over the meshes without taking care of the details and borders. Effects were changed on those mods but nobody really took the time to check if the changed cause bad looking side effects (and there were many of those).
In Crossfire we tested everything over and over again - until it did fit perfect. If something did not look right we started from the scratch. The outcome are high res graphics which fit perfect into the FL world.
We have created amazing looking systems with unique atmospheres, more than 40 custom planets, more than 100 new effects, more than 120 new high quality ships and more than 40 cool stations. To make everything perfect we even designed +50 custom cockpits.
Whats with the old crossfire content?
We decided to retexture many ships and stations in order to adjust the old content on our new high quality models.
Additionally almost every vanilla solar model has been retextured (the textures still have the old look but are more detailed).
Many of the standard FL effects have been edited to show up in a higher quality and finally we integrated new shaders allowing the usage of a smooth bloom (not overpowered), motion blur, reflections and bump mapping(experimental).Gameplay:
One of the biggest problems with the old Crossfire versions was the balance. Crossfire always was intended to be a mod for experienced players so the gameplay was very challenging. With Crossfire 1.8 we wont change this… no we make it even more challenging but also decided to take care about the new players so we reduced the low lvl difficulty.
Balancing was one of most important tasks for us and we took care that nothing gets overpowered, too hard or too easy.As usual Crossfire comes with a dynamic universe and dynamic economy. New is that we decided to seperate the sinleplayer mode from the multiplayer mod. That means you will be able to play the usual Singleplayer, OpenSP and MP… but the FL universe is “different” in these modes.
Crossfire Story/Universe:
With Crossfire 1.8 we again tell a part of the Crossfire story line based on quests. This story line is purely based on Freelancer and its prequel Starlancer and does start a few years after the nomad war.
With Crossfire 1.8 we will add about 10 new quests starting where Crossfire 1.7 did stop.
One of our priorities while creating this mod is the realistic atmosphere so Crossfire 1.8 will contain thousands of new very detailed infocards(eg. every planet has its own story and like the vanilla planets the new ones have all stats such as diameters based on vanilla references). All this together in combination with the other content and the graphical changes will ensure an extremly detailed FL world.Server software:
For the new Crossfire mod we had the choice to either use FLAC or the new FLhook plugin version. In the end we decided against both since they were not able to offer what we were looking for. We decided to continue to use the old FLhook version 1.5.5 with our custom changes and add what we need.
Biggest problem going this way was the lack of anticheat in that FLhook version so we decided to develop a new anticheat (and will for sure be able to test it soon).
Most of the other server software we use also got reworked and many new features got added.Customization:
Like Crossfire 1.7 the new version will be high customizable. There are hundreds of options that you can use to choose how your Crossfire mod should look like.And now to the bad news:
To play this mod with full details you need a halfway good PC. Dont worry… you also will be able to play Crossfire with an old machine but you might turn off some effects and play with normal shaders.
Considering the need of a FLMM activation you also will be in the need of about 5-6Gb free hdd space since the mod is somewhat big. (and no we dont use oversized tga textures or other uncompressed stuff - everything we have build so far was done under the premise not to waste disc space)By request a few choosen screenshots (older ones)
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I’m with Strail on this, looking very good there SWAT. One area of concern though is the obvious size of your mod. I appreciate decent quality content takes up space and i’m assuming the 5gb is uncompressed, still a fair old chunk of disk space though.
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yes indeed - uncompressed (and based on flmm activation - so more disk space is needed than the actual mod size)
based on the current version and tries to zip it shows that the final release will be somewhat more than 1gb zipped (a size we actually didnt want to exceed due to our somewhat excessive plans for Crossfire 1.9 and 2.0)
a big part of the new CF is planned to be used/released in several other mods aswell
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well the links looked good when i posted them… but maybe that was browser related (ive seen much funny stuff already)
the update problem might be due to vista and the firewall
there are good instructions on the Crossfire forum how to solve this problem -
well you see i have been playing freelancer for years on a dell with a basic video card. now i have a brand computer i bought it in march and played single player while i was fiqureing how to get around the vista problem. that i found out what a beautful women she is. her beautiful curves and ok sorry.
