Raise your voices!

Actually, if you could do a high-res version of all the vanilla models and textures I would really appreciate that! This would save me some time and would make it look a lot better. For now I developed a pipeline which upscales the textures and uses some advanced filtering (I have a lot of experience in image processing due to my student assistance job in medical imaging) to make them look less terrible. The normal maps are created from the textures, but I have to create the height maps manually (which means ship and some station textures don’t have any yet).

If you create high quality models this of course means the entire workflow can change. I think we can skip the parallax mapping then and use real geometry instead. But regarding that I am really flexible. If you think some maps (like reflection, ambient occlusion etc) look nice I can implement them. The renderer can be extended quite a bit. My end goal is some sort of screen space reflections so that we have real time reflections. Even clustered shading for thousands of lights should be possible. I have been testing it in the engine Skotty and I are developing for some time now and it works really well. But of course this only makes sense if people are really using the wrapper. Currently I am working on polishing and optimizing the code so that all the bugs are gone and the frame drops at certain places, too.

Regarding chat: If you have ICQ or Jabber just PM me your number/id and I’ll add you

The problem with the original models is that the UV mapping is a bit messy.
Adding details based on the current textures wont be easy (at least not if you want to keep the original look).

There is a trick to avoid the limit. But I am not sure what it was exactly. There is an internal counter for points (VMeshRef or VMeshData node?), which is a 16bit unsigned integer, means you can have max. 65535 points.

That model looks very nice. I do like the rather clean style (since that stuff can’t oxidate in space) and the minimalistic but existent colouring. The geometry adds a lot to it.

The homepage design looks really nice, though.

Agreed, thanks for that!
Maybe one of these days we can switch to a new software with this design

For such ambitious plans it would be nearly a waste to concentrate too much on current FL. It would require a lot of hooking and such.
Librelancer or something else might be much better suited since you have access to everything. And I mean not just interfaces.
But that would still need to be finalized. So until then, I know, there is only Freelancer.

Btw the link to the interface prototype you had in your post earlier was very nice.

Regarding the video: I already have MyGui included in the wrapper. But it is another thing to hook all the interface controls of Freelancer. If adoxa or someone else could do that it might work. Also someone would have to create all the designs for MyGui. I plan to use it for the graphic options etc.

I use Skype very rarely. Usually I have Miranda running. If there is a plugin for your messenger protocol I can use it. There is a Skype plugin, but you also have to have Skype running besides Miranda, which is a really bad solution. I only have it installed on an old laptop.

I think you might convince more people when the project is in a more working state, meaning quite a few high poly models with good textures and a working version of my wrapper. But we will see

When you talk about expanding the univers, I have some ideas of IMG and Gaian ship.

IMG ships can be some sort of Starflier with a vampir look that have yellow tint.

Gaian ships can be organic prototype that look like this to replace the starflier or startracker and something that look like a fusion between wasp, bat or something else that fly for the Hawk.

I’ve made some side viewed concept.

P.S. I hope that I haven’t done an “Out Subject”.

If you want to go on in the timeline, you really should take your time and read all rumours in Freelancer. They provide a lot of material! Like Kishiro working on a ship with jump-drive, as the Osiris already has. ALG fusioning with Krüger Minerals, etc.

I’ve an idea! If we expand the campaign, it would be cool that Trent would become a starship commander, begin with gunboat class then cruiser/destroyer and finally battleship/dreadnought but he wouldn’t be an admiral and will only execute Orilion orders (woops! I didn’t know I will do this joke before writing this, that was unwanted ^_^’ ).

I have some weapons idea :
We could expand particle weapons, adding proton based weapon like an hydrogen cation canon, electron based weapon that can be called cathodic canon. For the FX the proton canon can use the regular red particle (positiv charge) fx and for electron we can just modify bretonian particle fx and make it bluer (negative charge). As for neutron we can make them exclusively green (neutral charge).

I have ideas about shield :
It will not be any longer energetic but armor types and devices. For electric based weapon we can use lightning rod. For thermal based weaps we can use heat shield. For radioactive weaps, wee can use this .

That’s just some thoughts.

Another idea! Making gluon shield that would be good against particle and neutron weapons.

We can extend capship weapons to all Freelancer weapon types and create new classes with available 3D models, for instance Bretonian Battleship could have more classes, one with more particle weapons and another with more tachyon weapons. It could improve ship variety in the gameplay and force the player to scan the ship he is going to fight.

Here is a cool lightning rod :

Oh, those are really nice models.

Nice models, although these sort of details typically go into normal maps (plus bump and ambient occlusion maps) rather than actual poly geometry. Problem with existing vanilla FL model assets is that they were made to reuse same set of textures without much consideration about edges and seams, so simply adding normal mapping over existing geometry would wouldn’t always have a correct result, especially where a model relies a lot on UV mirroring to tile textures and cover seams (and a lot in FL stations and misc assets do that). I guess there’s a sense in “remodeling”… However I don’t think these models, even when finished, would do well as drop-in replacements for vanilla mehses, there are mesh format limitations (16-bit vertex indices, though you can break model into multiple vmeshes internally but it comes with own set of issues too), old render being inefficient at handling this geometric complexity, the game does struggle with higher fidelity model assets.