Freelancer 2000-Release

Would or will?

w0dk4 you big tease!

The shadows are still in SP, now they are very light grey circle under the chars…

Sad that the 2001 trailer looks better than the finaly game…that defender with additional engines looks uber cool. Leaving the forums and starting Cinema 4D

I remember having a discussion with one of the main coders regarding the 3D radar in the early version, he told me they could never get it to work properly which i think personally is a lame excuse. If ELITE got it working 25 years ago and Starlancer to name one a bit closer to home had it, why couldn’t the FL guys manage it? Shows how much FL was dumbed down by M$ really, turned a potentially awesome game into a good game imho

Can’t argue with that Gib, a little more time and it probably would have been released as DX9 with more eyecandy to boot. Just glad we have w0dk4 and co to show us the error of their ways.

I also just noticed the Liberty Defender had animated wings in the E3 2001 trailer, just after 2 mins in. Like a neat consertina effect of extended the wings. There’s a video of them working here. Has anyone here managed to get them working, or know how?

Yes, look in the modelling section, forget who but they got it working

Found it, looks like nobody ever actually bothered seeing it through and releasing anything though, too much trouble. Shame, would have been pretty trick.

There is actualy a tut for this by w0dk4:
http://the-starport.net/freelancer/forum/viewtopic.php?topic_id=2031&forum=26

And some mods have/will have this feature. (FW:ToW and Procyon for example)

I see the tutorials etc, I just assumed that if someone had restored the animations on the standard FL ships they would have released them in a pack or something.

Of the vanilla ships, only Crusader and Valkyrie come with animated wings. In SP, with Console, type anim wings to see them.

There are other ships not used by players that have animation as well, the CSV has a working cargo bay and the prison liner also has working docking bays which you have to add the animation code back in. I use them as prison liners so grabbed the animation code from the luxury liner and works great.

Hmm… So what we played and modify now is actually Freelancer 2, while Freelancer 1 was never released! Fascinating…

Timmy51m wrote:
I see the tutorials etc, I just assumed that if someone had restored the animations on the standard FL ships they would have released them in a pack or something.

If you want I can send you the modified Defender and Dragon, but dont expect to much, it was just POC so that I never fixed the bugs…^^

Hey! Probably all fighters have animations, we never know…

By the way, defender wing animation is crapy, it doesn’t like 2001FL animation but it stay a good work for me.

microsoft leave Project

we need new freelancer

Gibbon wrote:
Shows how much FL was dumbed down by M$ really, turned a potentially awesome game into a good game imho

It should probably be pointed out, for fairness sake, that without MS we would most likely never have even got Freelancer…

Of course someone else may have bought it instead - but it’s damned easy to slate MS when we know jack #$%% about the actual circumstances surrounding anything. Simply put, they had donkeys years and still didn’t manage to release. Question is, why?

(yes, I honestly wish it had been all it was originally mooted to be - but is it MS that made them cut stuff, or were the programmers so over ambitious that they simply could not produce anything and risked losing what they had instead).

Totally agree with you Chips, it’s something we’ll never know which is a shame in itself as after all this time it would be nice to know tbh. That said, we still ended up with a great game, virtually a free game engine to play with and relatively easy modding capabilities, especially nowadays with the tools and hacks available.

On a personal note i’d love to have seen the fully working version of say the 2000 or 2001 build, just to compare with what we have today if nothing else

It’s hard to say, I know. It could’ve pulled a Duke Nukem Forever on our asses, maybe become a Too Human, but it also could’ve gotten us a Starcraft 2.

We’ll never know for sure. The initial plans sure were extremely ambitious, but ambition isn’t a bad thing. Microsoft severely cut back down on this and I just feel like they could’ve been a bit more lenient. The way they cornered Ensemble and forced them into a console-only RTS before shutting them down, as well as taking down Flight Sim, however, make me think MGS might not be the best publisher around.