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

Now that our New Republic and Imperial starfigher and capital fleets are completed, we have begun focusing on the other factions in the mod. One of these factions is affectionately known as the Pirates.The term Pirate refers to the variety of rogues that were scattered across the Star Wars galaxy who would attack, rob or commandeer ships as they saw fit.

Many of you that have followed Star Wars for sometime know that Pirates generally cobbled together unlikely pieces and created beautiful Frankenstein ships. These ships are affectionately known as “Uglies”. Basically, it combines the New Republic and Galactic Empire starfighters into vicious abominations. The models we had previously came from the wonderful work done by the XWAUP. We thank them for donating their models to our mod. However, we decided to use the wonderful models and textures by the First Strike team, rip their models apart, make brand new models and put them back together again. Icewolf, our resident jack-of-all trades, even redid the textures for all the vessels to make them look even more ugly. I present to you the efforts of our labour:

From the bottom left clockwise: Deathseed, Vornskyr, X-TIE, TYE-Ugly (Image 1)

They apply to all ships of a particular class and they really do disappear when you get close to them. What you see is what you get with them

The HUD icon thing started off as my pet project but FF took over and brought it to new heights. It basically uses fuses and .ales to do a majority of the dirty work.

If you want the code, just signup on http://forge.the-starport.net/ and I’ll give you access to our SVN. With FF’s permission, you’re more than welcome to use it, Why, after all the work you did for FW:ToW.

I really believe our next big thing is the conversion of the Freelancer Engine from DX8 to DX9. W0d’s is just in the process of implementing the shaders. He’s been successful with post-render colour correction. He’s currently working on bloom. As soon as he posts the news, I’ll be sure to update this topic.

The other big news we have is that a concept artist from Crytek has joined us. He’s an amazing talent and he’s been producing some insane textures. http://users.cybercity.dk/~dsl59684/ He wants to tweak a lot of the effect textures…I’m very curious how they’ll turn out.

The team has done a lot of great stuff over the past two years. I’m very fortunate to have such a good group of fellas working together.

As for the shader, W0d’s made his own hook. I don’t know how he did it, but he has. The mod has been converted over to DX9. The next step is getting the shaders in and working.

This will be given to Freelancer as a whole as I, w0dk4 and the rest of the team, are firm believers of sharing information with Freelancer modders, as long as credit is given where credit is due. We will release it to everyone when it’s stable and relatively bug free.

Just to note, except models/textures, pretty much everything we do is available for other teams. We’re waaaaaaaay too late in the game to be keeping things from each other. The only way to keep FL going forward is to pass all these breakthroughs along to everyone.

W0dk4 wrote:
Over the last few months, I’ve been working a lot on the graphics engine of Freelancer. Inspired by Timeslip’s work. I wrote a Direct3D8 to Direct3D9 wrapper for Freelancer to be able to directly access the graphics pipeline.The ultimate goal is to somewhat modernize Freelancer’s graphics engine. I’m not sure about the features I will be able to add further on, but let me show you the first enhancements that I already implemented.
Before getting to the eye candy, let me quickly talk about mouse lag. I guess almost everybody is familiar with the mouse lag problem that occurs in some games. In almost every case, the laggy/delayed input is to blame on VSync. If you turn VSync off, it solves a lot of the mouse lag problems for many games, including Freelancer. I did some research on the topic and found this article on a private blog by “Vorlath”. Basically, to fix mouse lag in the DirectX pipeline, you have to make sure that after any present call, the screen has really received the frame you just rendered. This is easily done in Direct3D9 as stated in the article and it was one of the first things I implemented. Thank god, no more VSync-related mouse lag in Freelancer!
Lets get to the eye candy. One of the top wanted post-processing effects in older games is bloom. As of now, I added a relatively cheap and subtle bloom effect, but in the future I want to do a proper HDR lighting implementation. Another post-process effect is Color Correction, which to me seems to be very underrated. You can completely change the feel of the game by including a nice color correction effect. The implementation I chose was very simple, yet powerful, based on this article.

The vast benefit of this method is the what-you-see-is-what-you-get effect. We simply take an ingame screenshot, load that screenshot in Photoshop and do some color correction with the Curves or Levels tool. We then apply the same color correction to a special texture that will be used by the game. Very easy to do, yet very powerful.
Here is a comparison, with color correction added in the second screenshot:


The color correction effect is implemented per-system. Its a very good tool to give systems their very own feeling, making the ingame experience as varied as possible. For example, we could give rebel and imperial systems their very unique color correction, so you quickly know in which territory you are.Finally a little video to show the effects in motion:
<object width=“560” height=“340”><param name=“movie” value=“http://www.youtube.com/v/M-shtZoovY0&hl=en_GB&fs=1&hd=1”><param name=“allowFullScreen” value=“true”><param name=“allowscriptaccess” value=“always”><embed src=“http://www.youtube.com/v/M-shtZoovY0&hl=en_GB&fs=1&hd=1” type=“application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=“always” allowfullscreen=“true” width=“560” height=“340”></object>
http://www.moddb.com/mods/fwtow/videos/bloom-color-correction-shader

Bas wrote:
awesome

nice rank @ MOD DB =P

Ya, we’re getting lucky there.

Really, the only one to take credit for this astounding achievement is W0d. I cannot wait to see what the other mods will be able to do with this once it’s released for everyone to use. I think he singlehandedly gave FL one or two more years

This is the latest development image of all our new graphical toys rolled into one. Colour Correction + Bloom + Wireframe Viewer

What this image is a merging of two ingame screenshots. One with the wireframe viewer on (on the left) and the other with just the model (on the right). There’s a gradient in the middle.

I thought this would be a great opportunity to show you the power of this latest graphical update from w0d. Here’s to Freelancer

http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/11/10662/TatooWire.jpg