Freelancer 2 (?)

I think as regards future projects, there is little room for teamwork on a community basis because everybody has a different vision for an FL2.

However, what I think would be a worthwile attempt is to upgrade Freelancer. HD textures, normal maps for everything, some gameplay features everybody wants (can be optional) and so on. Once Freeworlds is released this will be my top priority (and in that process, bringing the graphics update to all mods).

Together with Oculus Rift support, we can actually make some nice news about our old little game

I made normal and specular maps for vanilla fl ships in crazy bump, then testing them in your freeworlds demo, honestly, I was gutted at how poor they were compared to games like x3 etc. Looked like an apprentice panel beater had gone to town on them lol, and no matter what approach I tried, couldn’t get a good result. Think it might take someone with skill and great patience to make them manually if they are to look good. Civilian ships didn’t even work for some reason, couldn’t work out why.

Converted ships from x3 and spaceforce etc looked awesome though, so I’m not knocking your work, it’s awesome!

That’s largely because crazy bump can’t make miracles and tends to make everything look like rock.

offtopic: as for normal maps I use 3ds max to produce them as well as making color maps, just make rectangle mesh with details, make ortho projected image for color texture, use directional lights to produce normal map or you can google how to use 3ds max to create normal maps with Render to texture technique, both works osom for me. Also there’s nice ssbump generator program to make normal maps from color images, but try to provide b/w color map instead of color image source.

One idea has crossed my mind, multiple times, yet never posted anything reguarding a possible Freelancer game or something similar. Maybe, just maybe, someone might take the idea and create it from what Im thinging of.

As we all know, Crytech released the Cryengine 3 to the public, as a GLP program for creating their own games/alternative concepts, with either existing or newly made content. The idea of mine, we with a decent or very large team of devolpers and concept designers would work with the Cryengine 3 in creating a large scale version of Freelancer. With the Cryengine 3, the team would be able to create Alternating Economical System, Ship to True Scale(like that in Tides of War, fighters are tiny compared to Capital ships), Increased graphical settings that can be modified by the Client-Side for better FPS and/or Gameplay expirence, New Worlds and New Civilizations( To boldy go where no man has gone before XD), New tech trees and concepts, and most importantly, more diversity in ships, factions, goods, and technologies(weapons included).

But not alot of people see this as a oppertunity and simple forget about it with in a few hours of the idea. This idea is really a better alternative. Ive used the Crysis Map Editor and found that the boundries can be removed and basically go a really far distance from the original area. A sandbox engine, like that of Crysis 1-3, gives a wider margin of larger systems, more room, and some special or secerets that could be hidding. The CryEngine 3 also opens alot more for ship designes, like moving parts, like that of the Human Ships from Babylon 5. But as I said, either someone willing to get thier friends and start doing this or it will fall into the “Pit of Great Ideas, but are crap”. Reason I say that is that anytime I give a concept idea, someone shoots it down saying “If its not made, its crap”, in basic terms Im really just finally starting out, but I still perfer doing concepts. But this concept is very very possible.

CE3 is hard to work with and not particularly suited to a space sim.

People need to realize that space sims have peculiarities which make them extremely hard to work with, largest being scale. As we have seen in Freelancer, ship shaking (which is due to floating point precision issues) is very much prevalent as soon as scale becomes interesting. Vanilla Freelancer worked around this by using unrealistic scale. Freespace just sticks to small mission areas and uses painted backgrounds for planets, working around the issue.

To make a true to scale space sim, you’d need to heavily modify an existing engine or start from scratch. The former requires access to the engine’s source. Good luck with that.

I studied several engines at the start, those were Unity, CryEngine, Gamebryo, Leadwerks, Irrlicht, UT. Keep in mind that even those engines produce nice graphics, there’s still a lot of problems appear when you start to render more complex scenes than you can see in FPS shooters (like volumetric cloud rendering or complex shadowmaping of transparent objects, adding custom shaders). Sandbox editor and indirect scripting will end up badly without source code access. Most people just dont understand a lot of small details 'cos their job domain isnt software developing.

Unity - no low level engine’s objects access, you just cant create new scene rendering flow, only scripts.
CryEngine - even source code is open to anyone, you just cant improve/modify engine for your needs and still call it CryEngine without proper permissions.
Gamebryo - also used by Black Prophecy, really nice but full commercial license only
Irrlicht - not really accurate architecture.
UT - unreal engine is similar to Cry/Unity one - only sandbox, license problems.
Leadwerks - tech demo runs on it. direct low level access to engine objects as well as high level wrappers. Still some bugs present but they dont mean much for now. Also license doesnt permits you to make fully scriptable game engine, but it can be outrunned by using compiled scripts for final version.

Have you tried Torque 3d 1.2?

i know it is now free, but it is a good engine. It is what i am using at the moment to make my game.

And for $149 bucks you get full source with 2 programming seats, easy to use in game game editing tools, and a great community chock full of awesome resources. It supports Collada DAE with animations, collision ect … , collision detection for static objects can be based on the mesh not hand built collision meshes.

The custom Torque Scripting language is based on C++/C# and quite powerful.

worth a look.

J.Walker wrote:
Have you tried Torque 3d 1.2?

i know it is now free, but it is a good engine. It is what i am using at the moment to make my game.

And for $149 bucks you get full source with 2 programming seats, easy to use in game game editing tools, and a great community chock full of awesome resources. It supports Collada DAE with animations, collision ect … , collision detection for static objects can be based on the mesh not hand built collision meshes.

The custom Torque Scripting language is based on C++/C# and quite powerful.

worth a look.

torque3d uses win32 platform only while Im making a cross-platform source code already.

it is not win32 only. All you would have to do in recompile it on the other platforms (linux/Mac) to have it cross board.

J.Walker wrote:
it is not win32 only. All you would have to do in recompile it on the other platforms (linux/Mac) to have it cross board.

np, but have you ever tryed to build/support code that will run on different operating systems + different OS versions? you just cant recompile it on MacOS with hope it will run on every MacOS version without problems. On the other hand, why torque’s developers havent did it themselves yet?

they do compile it on and for multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, and XBOX). To what extent? i do not know. Would it be as simple s one two three to compile it yourself for other platforms? more than likely not. For example if you write code into the engine that is only for DirectX then do not expect that feature to be available on other platforms.

so it is allot up to the programer who is altering the engine to make sure their code is cross platform. GG cannot predict what code you will write.

From my understanding, Crytech doesn’t give a damn what people do with the CryEngine, cause once it hits GLP grounds, its fair game. Valve Source could work, but its not a Sand-box engine, like UT and CryEngine. The Engines Massdriver mentioned, are the only ones that could do this effectively. Also at this point in time, most of any gamers’ PC is made now to run engines like that of BF3, which is even more intecive than the CryEngine 3. The UT engine would also be a good canidate, since games like “Angels Fall First” mod, going stand-alone, showed new features, like destructable enviorments and some new graphical improvements that decrease resources for Graphics. A custom Engine might seem good, but most “custom” engines are child-set of another Engine already in exisitance.

It doesnt have to be exactly like the Freelancer from Anvil Studios, but should have similar features. Similar features with differenet executions. Unless anyone has any other ideas for engines that would seem good, post up. Should be Sand-box like setup, easier to modify than enclosed.

It’s only about graphics, 80% of code is not related to engine objects at all like zone/login servers, account management, net code(which is based on RakNet), ini scripts and overall program architecture. Leadwerks which is the base for tech demo, proved to be very comfortable in use after some months of development.

Is’nt what was posted at TLR org - Signum or Openlancer modification?

Openlancer is dead. Let it rest.

FriendlyFire wrote:
Openlancer is dead. Let it rest.

Yeah… couldnt agree more