just an update to say there is no update but i have not forgotten or anything. gah! someone find me a job! 
a lot harder to do than i thought…hey…
also i am working on getting my provisional license…dad bought me a car so thats awesome, just need the license!!
soo…very hectic life right now, despite leaving uni for the rest of the year. hopefully i can settle down sooooooonnn i want to get working on this
yeah mate i am. do not expect to see too much in the next few weeks or so though. i am working on it but i am working on back end stuff! i wont be able to show case much. to put it simply, i am working on items and inventory. first up will be engines, as that will link in nicely with what i have already. once i have engine ‘items’ working in the players inventory (to the point where he can store in inventory, buy from shop, sell to shop, or equip to ship) i can easily expand this to weapons, shields, turrets and anything else that can be equipped really.
currently i am also a little bit busy searching for a job. i live at home and have no income, so i have to jump through several loops to receive pay outs from the government till i get a job lol. ahh, melbourne…
yep cheers for that. the way i have programmed it, some of those values are irrelevant. i did not want the camera being too fiddly, so it works out where it needs to be/how much it needs to rotate/move etc on its own, by checking how long, wide and high the players spaceship is.
these are the values the navigation class pulls from the players equipped engine…right now the values are hard coded in, but i’ll change it so it reads the equipped engine once all this is done…:
(ignore the /100’s. some values need to be scaled down - the players speed is actually capped at 0.1 in game, and it moves as fast as it does… but, for scripting/modding purposes (when it comes time to that 
), it’ll make more sense to put ‘100’)
ok, stripped the demo of shaders, and implemented banking. thats it for me tonight i think…3 am here in the land of oz new versions in the first post, links have changed.
i am personally pretty excited about how it turned out. it ‘feels’ really good now that the banking is implemented. it felt really light before but this sort of gave it a bit of weight, IMO. thoughts? the bank angle is fairly large (45 degrees) just to show what its like. its harder to spot at a lower value with nothing to compare to.
yep i booted up freelancer and i can see what you guys are talking about. getting it to roll isn’t hard, just having difficulty preventing the camera from rolling as well lol
ah right… well i am installing freelancer now (i’ve been going off of youtube videos and memory up until now, just found my cd) and i will have a look into it. must just be a camera thing though, because i distinctly remember that in multiplayer, players only turned along one axis, they didn’t bank…i remember seeing players afk or typing, with their mouse off-center. their ships would just rotate on the Y axis, relative to the ship…
could you elaborate? lean how?
i understand exactly what you mean with the twitchyness. its overly sensitive. just had a brainwave, actually… i think the amount the player should turn exponentially increases from the center going out to the edges of the screen… thing that would work well… it gets more sensitive closer to the edge of the screen… haha… just talking to myself, this is what i’ve been doing to get the camera working the way it does…so much fiddling… argh!!
i will take the shaders off in the next build so there are less issues. they are stock ones that come with unity, and i am just trying to get some attention because a plain dev build will be alot less interesting than one with bloom etc haha we are all suckers for it, dont lie! plus i wanted to give a taste of what can be achieved with it
edit:
also missing stardust hey 
that will give you all the sense of movement needed. but all in good time…
might apply a ‘debug’ version of the stardust effect - just an effect i can slap on and delete after i am done testing…like the contrails…the contrails (when the game is complete) will be generated after the component scans its children and detects a contrail hard point…right now though, i just slapped them on to the wings for debugging
tears
i am afraid i have many things to nut out still… so this’ll happen time to time
Exe uploaded, first post updated. see how you go with that mate.
Hey guys, just wanted an official place to post news about the game i am working on, and this is the perfect place.
Gameplay will heavily be inspired by Freelancer. I am trying to minimic the controls as best i can. Everything works great right now, except (I feel, anyway) that the camera is a little off…its very hard to get it just right… freelancer has such a specific feel. anyway, i don’t know if thats a good thing or a bad thing so i will let you guys decide.
please give me some feed back on what you think of it so far (again, mainly just the ‘feel’ of it but any crits will do). and you are welcomed to ask any questions you wish… i will try to answer them as best i can.
engine being used is Unity3 Pro.
current state of development: Setting down all the foundations…
web demo: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21307579/Showcase/WebPlayer.html
Exe: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21307579/SummerProjR2.zip
Dockbay Controls:
Click and drag LMB to move camera
N to spawn new ship
S to save ship
D to delete save data
L to load save
R to restart (preserves save data)
U to undock
Click on any component to deal 10 damage. Wings HP: 10, Body HP: 100
Keep mouse still for 2 seconds to activate ‘idle mode’ (Cycles through various camera angles every 10~ seconds)
Flight Controls:
W A S D to move
Move mouse around to look
X to reverse
Tab for thruster
Space to stabilize. (This is active by default, press space to begin moving!)
Z for engine cut
Click on any component to deal 10 damage. Wings HP: 10, Body HP: 100
U to re-enter the dock
Automaticly saves your ship state when re-entering the dock
i will PM you
wow really? it was literally like 5th thread down from the top, i didnt even bother checking dates thats unfortunate…so the projects dead? any word from them?
haha this is really cool. these seem to be popping up everywhere…why didn’t anyone give this a go when i was modding a few years ago! ahhh…
your game is looking great! i am using unity as well but i think i will steer away from freelancer a little bit. i was planning to replicate freelancer as well and then tack on new features, but i played freelancer for years, i know it like the back of my hand, and i have a good idea of what i think works well and what could be added, so i am going to build a new game from the ground up incorporating those features… 
anyway, best of luck to you and your team!
sounds like a solid system! haha. i had a similar thing going with a game engine i wrote for XNA. i would have a stack of ‘scene’ objects, that i would pop or push. worked very well for basic 2d games! was pretty solid too. push on a main menu scene…user clicks play/options/credits, push on the play/options/credits scene, player exits back - pop off the top scene and your back to where you came from. love designing the backends of engines. i have not done anything TOO major yet (I am studying game programming at Qantm College) and engine programming was next trimester, but i did manage to roll my own engine for XNA during the summer break… so much fun.
unity handles gameobjects a little differently…i can only instantiate cookiecutter versions of each object, (prefabs) and only save floats, strings, ints, doubles, just basic data. this means i give the player a brand new ship each scene, and apply damage to it.
http://imageshack.us/m/190/3190/unledbx.png
the system is really cool, i reckon! i can assign what prefab gets spawned on destruction as well, so i can literally have half of a battleship snapping off mid battle if it recieves too much damage… the component that is going to snap off (the front half, in this case) will call its destroy() function upon reaching 0 health. this spawns an explosion effect and instantiates a free-floating, broken version of the front half of the battleship… how cool would that look!
i just noticed some of the stuff lancesolurus posted! thats wicked, hey kudos to him for writing his own engine…last trimester at uni showed me just how annoying that can be! argh! directx is a bitch
i will post a thread up asap to share some more of my progress. so far i am working on a way to save/load ship states - including damage on certain parts, bits and pieces that are equipped, etc! crucial for when i want to swap between scenes (system to system jumping etc) or when a player enters/leaves the server… sounds easy, but its alot of information to carry over…cant just do a copy and paste unfortunately…
there is not much to actually see here, because the backend is where all the magic is happening… but meh, this is a ship being successfully loaded. Also slapped on a few shader effects. model is by me
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21307579/FHDShowcase/Showroom/webplayer.html
am i allowed to start an official thread about this somewhere? its not really modding freelancer but its completely related, so i wasn’t sure…if so, where? i’d rather post up my work here than anywhere else as this is the only place i have a bit of ‘history’ with - i know some people here etc!
haha thanks man. i am currently digging through these sites for tutorials on modding freelancer. trying to fermiliarize myself with it all again. need a solid understanding of how it all worked before i start attempting to recreate it hey
hey sweet. PM me your mouse tracking and camera scripts please? so i can compare our methods. i am happy with how its working at the moment (a few more tweeks since the above demo - the jittering is gone too) but it will be nice to see if any improvements can be made.
right now i am just taking the code-like-hell approach, but this is just to get my prototype up and running. ill be re-writing everything when i do sit down to do this properly
hey guys, still kicking? lol. cheese and (maybe) FF should remember me. i am taking time off from uni for the rest of the year so i will have alot of time on my hands. i started screwing around with unity a little bit. an hour later:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21307579/FLCntrl/WebPlayer.html
soooo…
