Freeworlds: Tides of War - A Starwars Total Conversion Mod!

Now that summer has come, the FW:ToW Development team is back at full steam. We’ve been busy adding in vessels into the mod, making sure that attention to detail remains our top priority. With 108 ships, and custom hitboxes to be made in Milkshape 3D for each one, it’s a huge task. To model/texture, hitbox, hardpoint and code a single ship into game takes upwards of 30 hours. However, slowly but surely, we’re working on way through them all. I’m also pleased to announce that we’re in the process of working on our capital ship prototype. Hopefully, by the end of the month, we’ll have a team of testers from the FW USA and FW France communities test the prototype for further modification.

Concurrently, Oma and Deety have been burning the mid-night oil making the FW:ToW systems a spectacular sight to behold. They have just completed the system layouts of all 22 systems. Deety is now busy placing the Non-Player Characters within these systems to bring them to life. I hope to capture a video of these systems, with Oma’s explanation of how he designed them, in the next FW:ToW Development video.

Now, without further adieu, this is a development video of just a few of the notable ships we have into game. I would have included more of the New Republic Capitals, such as the Quasar Fire, MC40a and MC80 but ArvisTaljik, creator of the http://www.moddb.com/mods/tides-of-war-old-republic mod (an example of his work found here Sith Destroyer, has graciously agreed to redo their textures. So, as soon as he’s finished with them, I’ll be sure to show you all his brilliant work!

I also wanted to give a appreciative shout out to Overfiend, who has been working many hours to make sure the FW:ToW hitboxes are perfect. He’s already done over half of the FW:ToW 108 vessels.

http://www.youtube.com/v/tMfQzd-gDa0

Anyways, I hope you enjoy the newest video in the FW:ToW series. As always, any questions or comments are greatly appreciated, as well as your continuing support!

And, as a bonus treat, I wanted to show you all the MC-90 we have in game. It was created by EvilleJedi and imported into game by Sovereign and Dev.

Sushi

Thanks for all the positive feedback, guys. It means a lot.

@Gibbon: FW:ToW got to where it is today because of people like you that shared their talent with the rest of us. So, hats off to you mate for all you’ve done for the FL community as a whole

@Hunter Killer
I wish I could take all the credit for this, but I can’t. It’s been a team effort all the way, I’m just more public about it than the rest. Big thanks goes to Sovereign for converting these models for me to code them in game.  Nevertheless, I’ll send your kudos to the team. It’s always nice to hear nice comments about the work we do.

@Hazard
Your forum is still waiting for you in the FW:ToW Development forum. We got lots going on now, but I’m sure you can catch-up in a hurry, if you want. I’d love to see you back there
A link to your forum: http://www.freeworlds-tow.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=34

@Deety:

No more missions. So what ?

It’s been a long time i haven’t written anything here. With exams, i didn’t really have the time. Though, lately i’ve been working on quite a lot of things : i’ve put some numbers in the capital ship prototype we’re working on, and made the first tests. Meanwhile, i’ve populated most of the systems with NPCs. I may show you some areas soon.

However, today we’re going to talk about something else. As it has been announced previously, there will be no missions in Freeworlds:Tow. So, the question is : what are we replacing them with?

The first idea is to put a lot of hostile NPC everywhere. That’s what i’ve done when populating systems. Around 10% of the NPCs you encounter are pirates. Core systems are safer than Outer Rim territories, and even within a same system there can be huge differences : stay close to Military Checkpoints and Police Outpost to be protected! At the same time, most of the pirate bases are under imperial or republican assault.

Besides, around eight months ago Aldebaran came with another, new, great idea : the Raid Systems. You may have ever heard this name before. Basically, they are small systems dedicated for fighting. In these systems, you will be fighting waves of NPCs, and progress in the system until you reach the final objective (for example, a boss). Furthermore, with Raids, missions have a background. You’re actually trying to do something, and not just kill swarms of NPCs without thinking.

Although this is a great concept, nothing had been done so far. So far. You’ve guessed that i’m here to show you the first Raid system!

The idea behind it is that we wanted to put the awesome Death Star Zaxx and Sov had done. However, in 12 ABY the Death Star shouldn’t exist anymore. Thus, i’ve thought about using the Raid concept to create a simulator of an Historical Battle where the Death Star was present. Of course, i want to talk about the Battle of Yavin.

Here is the explanation i wrote in the Development Section :

@Deety:

But think about this. As a Rebel :

• you dock to some capship somewhere in republican space. When you undock, you can jump to a Republican Fleet system (as you do for every Raid).
• there, you choose the “Battle of Yavin Simulator” buoy. Undock, and you “jump” (we can do some kind of jump sequence to show that you’re entering the simulator) to Yavin. This Yavin looks like the real Yavin, except that there is a Death Star instead of its debris.
• we’ll think about a way to kill the cruise speed (Interdictors?). Then, all you have to do is to reach the Death Star through the ennemy lines (TIE swarming!). We can think about secondary objectives : for example, you have to kill an ISD to use a jump buoy and get closer to the Death Star.
• once you reach the Death Star, the trench run starts. You have to get to the otherside. Heavy, accurate towers can prevent you from getting out of the trench. You win when you kill the exhaust port with a torpedo.

This was written one month ago. Yesterday, i’ve duplicated the awesome Yavin system Oma made and tweaked it to create the Battle of Yavin system. The battle is divided in five stages. I’ve used tradelanes to link the areas together :

• in the first area, you’re attacked by a medium, compact group of TIE Fighters. You have to shoot them down until your allies arrive.
• the second stage requires you to fight your way through a large number of TIE Fighters. The next level is 20K away and you can’t use the cruise speed…
• in the third area, a Star Destroyer is on your way. No need to tell you what to do.
• in the fourth zone, TIE Avengers and TIE Bombers come to party, while you have to reach the Death star surface.
• the last zone (not done yet ) is the trench run, with Vador on your six!

The battle still needs a lot of tweaking, but it begins to look great. Here are several pictures to give you an idea :

Squadrons of TIE Fighters :

“They are everywhere” :

A Star Destroyer you have to destroy :

Same ISD :

Death Star Hangar :

Death Star Trench :

The NPC forces are the following one :

Rebel Alliance

• X-wings
• Y-wings
• Luke Skywalker (hero)
• Wedge Antilles (hero)
• Millenium Falcon (hero)

Galactic Empire

• TIE Fighters
• TIE Bombers
• TIE Avengers
• Star Destroyers
• Dark Vador (hero)

You may argue that there weren’t TIE Avengers in the Battle of Yavin. However, as they’re based on Vador’s x1 prototype, i believe it makes sense to put them in the battle too. Furthermore, they represent a major challenge. You’ll need a lot of friends to go through all the different battle areas!

To finish, Sushi has spent countless hours working on a presentation video. Enjoy !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OirlytD_upI

Oh and, if you can’t wait for the release to play the Battle of Yavin, try this :

http://www.bruneras.com/fgames_boy.htm

8-)

Not sure what you mean, exactly, Gibbon; Open Source Project? If that’s what you mean, I welcome pretty much all modders that are interested in helping FW:ToW. If they want to work mutually on the project, and borrow some of our materials/methods, I welcome that, too.

As of now, Forsaken, FriendlyFire, W0dk4, Why485 and possibly F!R have access to our developer boards and mod. If you’d be interested in access to the boards as well, join our forums over at www.freeworlds-tow.net/forums I’ll add you to the development group and you can go from there. There’s no obligation to contribute anything but you’re always more than welcome to if you so desire. I thought this would be a great way of bringing some of the talented minds of FL together. And, fortunately, we’ve reaped some fabulous rewards of this collaboration.

Oh, well that’s an entirely different story. The answer to this is I doubt it. A lot of the functionality we have in the game is through FL Hook. By removing this server application with the mod, you’ll lose a lot of what we hope to design into it (dockable carriers, dynamic economy, etc).

It has been a few months since our last development video, so I thought I’d try to include some of our most recent happenings in the 11th edition. Unfortunately, I was not able to capture all of our work because I personally do not like making these videos over six minutes in length. So, for the work that wasn’t included, I thought I’d show you some of the short clips/images here.

This 11th Development video focuses on the capital ship prototype that is being developed, primarily, by Deety. He and I have spent many hours conversing over what we want capitals to be in the mod and thus far, I’m quite thrilled with the results. He’s spent countless hours recording statistical data and coding it into the mod to bring these beautiful gigantic ships we have to life. With Deety’s determination and work ethic and our new capital testing crew, we’re inching closer to the final capital ship prototype. In addition to that, Deety has been requesting many custom capital effects that I’ve been assisting him with. You’ll see that there are many new shield hit, hull hit and explosive effects, which have been a joint project of Deety and I. We are also using some of the work Why485 left us to further the immerse feel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Myw_2niQ6zQ

Another developer, W0dk4, has done some incredible things for the mod. His recent creations brought animations to our game. Through the tutorial he gave us, we were able to recreate many of the wing folding animations you see in the movies: Lambda Shuttle, B-Wing, X-Wing and ETA-2. In our next development video, I hope to show the wings folding appropriately when you engage the ships hyperspace drive. In addition to this, he also has written a FL Hook that increases the turning rate of fighters/bombers/interceptors when they go to 33% throttle. Those of you that have played X-Wing Vs. TIE Fighter or X-Wing Alliance know that this throttle percentage was the optimum level to turn quickly in the game.

As a personal mini project, thanks to a little prod from Lancer Solarus, I’ve been working on a new enter/exit hyperspace effect for the game to take away the standard Freelancer jump tunnel. Although it is still a work in progress, I’ve been quite happy with the results. The only sad thing is that there is no possible way to slow down the effect at the end of the sequence. This means that I cannot slow down the stars at the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX2H3mKcUUM

Overfiend and Mirkha have also being working incredibly hard on hitboxing all the models in the game. I can assure you, that is no easy task. Fortunately, with our newest hitbox technique, which allows us to use infinite hitbox groups, they’ve been able to hitbox things that we only dreamed about. The image below is our 10km long Mon Calamari Shipyards generously donated by EvilleJedi.

This hitbox took over 298 parts to make. But, we do believe it’s paid off as you can see in these early images: 1 and 2.

Overfiend also has been working very hard on new Mon Calamari Cruiser textures as well. I won’t get into this now as I’ve already discussed his work at length in my last news piece.

As always, if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to post. And please click this link to keep up-to-date with Freeworlds: Tides of War.

–----
Sushi

moved to a more appropriate forum

The Freeworlds: Tides of War development team has been busy over the past few weeks bringing the mod to life. Deety and Myself have completed putting in all the code for all the mod’s small craft including the shuttles, transports and freighters of the mod. Deety has also been busy working on creating new missions for the mod, similar to the scale and nature we previously mentioned in this news piece: Battle of Yavin. We’ll be releasing more details about missions as Deety completes more of the project.

As for systems, Lilfire has joined the team to help fill in the large empty space we have. By tediously placing numerous ships, bases, shipyards and container fields, we hope to breathe some life into our massive systems. Below are some images of what Lilfire has been doing with the assistance of Deety:

Fondor Shipyards:

We also have head some significant development with Fondor Shipyards. The model was originally built by Overfiend and has been textured by Super D. Here are some images of the large base:

Furthermore, Qi has almost completed the groundwork of our economy. Unfortunately, there’s not much to show you regarding this, but you’ll have to believe me when I say that it’s going to be epic

W0dk4 has also been busy with FW:ToW by creating many new FL Hooks for us. Some of the creations include:
Having mass of cargo/missiles affect how the vessel will handle (More mass = sluggish)
Preventing players from moving while in cruise (that means that players will have to point themselves in the right direction before they engage their cruise engines)
Speeding up turning rate when you throttle down. Some of you that remember XvT/XWA know that when turning your optimal speed to turn was 33%.
Creating a missile view mode
Creating a key that causes the ships wings to fold prior to engaging cruise:B-Wing, X-Wing

And last but not least, this is the latest FW:ToW Development video so show you the amazing new bases that we’re going to have populate our systems. The movie also includes some footage of the huge fleets Lilfire has been working on. I hope you enjoy it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiqjoBpqVIs

As always, any comments, questions or suggestions are welcome!
–—
Sushi

Try this: http://www.moddb.com/mods/fwtow/videos/freeworlds-tides-of-war-development-video-12

The Freeworlds: Tides of War mod team has been busy over the past few weeks fixing bugs, building an economy and, of late, creating more of the mission systems for players to enjoy (ie. Battle of Yavin). Below, you’ll find the latest video of this new mission system Deety has designed called, “Battle of Bilbringi.” Essentially, this mission will feature a gigantic ongoing battle between the New Republic and the Empire full of huge capital ships, hundreds of laser beams and a whole lot of fun!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ase_sw_z65A

In other news, Qi, our resident Economy Guru, has completed the first alpha prototype of our economy and it contains over 1000+ trade runs. He strove to make this economy as canonical as he could to further the immersion factor of the mod and we all really think you will love what he’s done. In addition to this, Qi is working on a web interface that will allow players to view the changes in commodity prices based on what is being traded on the server. However, I will release more information about that when the graphical interface is near completion.

Lastly, I wanted to show you all the new Pirate factions Deety has created based on what systems you’re in. Below is an image on how the territories will be separated:

Thanks again everyone for following this mod. We’ve really appreciated the ongoing support and compliments.

Happy holidays,
Sushi

@w0dk4:

Welcome to another development blog post First I wanted to say thank you to everybody who voted for us in the MotY 2009. There is a present in form of a 1080p HD ingame video when you’re brave and read until the end of this post
But lets get started:

I have been working on various stuff since my last update, a quick overview:

• X-Wing Alliance inspired flight model (max turning at 0.3 velocity and some other tweaks)
• new cruise behaviour and cargo affecting ship mass (-> affects ship handling)
• wing folding animations (also with triggers and synced in Multiplayer)

I dont really want to go in detail here, so lets skip to the eye-candy feature instead and save the boring stuff for later.
Freelancer has pretty much no built-in functionality for taking hud-less screenshots or shooting videos. This always bugged me so one day I decided to dig into the code and see what I can find. The result has been pretty elaborate and time-consuming, but its definately worth it.
VideoMode is the feature called, and it basically allows you to see awesome fly-bys of your favourite ships. Also, there is built-in functionality for completely disabling the HUD on-the-fly and you can spectate other ships, something completely new in regards to the Freelancer engine.
It has been quite a task smoothing out camera movement: Its one of those things where you start with 100 lines of code but eventually end up with 30 lines of code that work just like you wanted it. In comparison it has been pretty easy to program the actual fly-bys, switching in front of the ship once the camera is too far away.
Videomode has a “shake” effect applied when the ship flys by, which was also quite challenging, but not as annoying as camera rotation smoothing.

Enough of the technical talk, here comes the eye-candy. Its a 1080p ingame video.
You’ll also see a wing animation on the X-Wing, triggered by entering cruise. Yes, animations are in and also synced in Multiplayer (but was too boring actually filming it).
Also, please excuse me for using yet-again our super-ugly combat prototype system, I’m just that lazy.
I’m sure the testers and other devs will make use of VideoMode in future videos, so stay tuned

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmKyq2bu9Xk

http://www.moddb.com/mods/fwtow/videos/freeworlds-tides-of-war-videomode-feature