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

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

I sorta like that But everyone is different. Just made a new wing animation for our V-Wing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=342kWtwvZI0

Definitely I left it in our nexus cause I wanted to use the starsphere somewhere but we didn’t have canon system to put it in…hehe

Terratec wrote:
how do you do it, the wings spread. flhook commands? with me only baydoor

W0dk4 got that working for us. You’d have to ask him nicely

@Tai: If there is anything you’d like to know, send me a PM and I’ll see what I can do for you :). I have no intention in keeping things secret or whatever nor do I think that’s beneficial for Freelancer Community.

We, as a whole, can profit from everyones work

We wanted to know how good our Star Wars models are when compared to the best models out there, ones from the Star Wars movies. So, our FW:ToW testing team (Slyder, Cropto, Orac, Avenger, Shadow and Chewie) have taken it upon themselves to use all ingame video recordings to reproduce some of the most epic scenes from Star Wars. Much to our surprise, we found the quality of our ingame models were almost as good as the movies. I don’t have a finished video to show you yet, as we still are in the process of filming, however we are excited to show you a sneak peak of what is to come.

The following image montage are all ingame screenshots that have not been digitally edited or enhanced.

Episode IV Intro
Tantive IV is being chased by Darth Vader’s ISD

Episode VI
Vader’s Lamda undocking from his ISD

LOL. Thanks for the kudos, guys. We’ve put a lot of work into these models and we also have TSP community to thank for working out some of our bugs, too!

Over the past few days, Demi, our resident computer guru, has been hard at work making a brand new developer website for the Freeworlds: Tides of War Developer team to use. As a team, we decided to create these boards because we needed more space plus wanted more features for development than our current forums had. Using the webspace provided by Qi, Demi made a wonderful layout. With this new site, you will be able to get the latest news, development blogs, images, 3D representations of the vessels and ask questions on the development forums. As for the layout of the site, below are the two prototypes Demi worked on:

As you can see from the layouts, the Freeworlds: Tides of War Development team has accounts on facebook,youtube, twitter, and google buzz. We welcome everyone interested in this mod’s development to follow us there as we are regularly updating the sites.

Another special feature that I wanted to mention is the ability to see all of our models in 3D. While we’re still in the process of converting all of our ships for viewers to see, I wanted to show you what you can expect 3D Models click me. Demi is still in the process of refining the viewer to optimize the performance, however, for now, I think it’s an excellent proof-of-concept that I cannot wait to see running on the site.

Lastly, we welcome everyone to join us on our forums where you can ask the developers any questions, comment or give suggestions. We welcome all feedback from our followers.

To view the sites main page, go here: Freeworlds: Tides of War Development Site
To join our forums go here: Freeworlds: Tides of War Development Forums

Explosions, explosions, explosions, every gamer loves them; they have pretty colours, dazzling lights and most importantly, they inflict significant amounts of damage! Over the past several months the team has been at work discussing the prototype of the system we hope to put into place in the mod. The prototype that has been created has largely been influenced X-Wing vs. TIE-Fighter and X-Wing Alliance. I’ve created the 14th Development Video to discuss key features of the types of missiles/torps/bombs and how they will be used in the mod.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yUe2XzksBs

(A huge thanks to Adoxa and M0tah for creating fixes for the problems we were having. Without their contributions, I wouldn’t have been able to make this video or employ this system)

Also, since I haven’t updated this link in awhile, please enjoy our Capital Ship video created by ChewieBacca

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg3abDWcUmw