I hope everyone's finished their back to school shopping! Got your notebooks, your slide rule, your Carl the Shivan lunchbox… Anything else we're missing? Oh yes, the newsletter!
Some real cool releases (and re-releases) this month!
BTA sends us
Act 2 of his Dusk Wars series. If you're unfamiliar with it, the story doesn't take place in the FreeSpace universe, but it reuses a lot of FreeSpace models. So if you can get past that little detail, I'm sure you'll have a ball!
A few months have passed since the Bal'ran have retaken their core systems of Soci, New Soci, and Xhi-Ceti but your shore leave has come to an end. Their crusade must continue to reclaim their lost worlds, but darkness awaits our fellow Bal'ran, but not just from the outside but from within.
Also he re-released a graphical upgrade for Dusk Wars Act 1!
UndyingNephalim, as their name implies, shows no sign of dying out by releasing a demo for
Star Fox: Event Horizon! It's great to see all those old models from Shadows of Lylat getting used, and it's also great to see so many new and amazing models and effects and landscapes and backgrounds and and… It's just so beautiful.
Before we get back into "normal" FreeSpace territory, wookiejedi releases another update for his
Star Wars mod, it now supports the latest mediavps, as well as the start of a campaign, cockpits and other fun stuff.
Back in FreeSpace territory, CP5670 has released an update to the classic
Procyon Insurgency, compatible with the latest mediavps. So if you missed this one the first time around, now is the perfect time to get caught up. Just a warning, it is a bit on the difficult side (but you like it like that, don't you?)
And now for some fun news from me! There's a re-release of
Just Another Day 2.21! Well, technically it's now a proper release, not a silly leaked beta like before! So if you like to laugh and be amazed by lots of silly things, be sure to check out! And if you've played it before, why not play it again? There's lots of delicious stuff in there.
Off in preview land…
Rheyah is looking for help with
Shetland! If you have some time to help him test his missions or even some simple modelling, let him know!
Ephesus is a big mod (1.2-1.3 GB uncompressed without changes though unlikely to get bigger - it'll probably shrink by 300 meg or so I reckon) with 12 missions (final configuration) including 1 cutscene mission. I wouldn't mind some feedback and a little expert examination on my FREDing. That'll be in the next month or so.
Let's end off this section with a pretty pic from TheHound's
Venice Mirror!
by niffiwan Another month is over so let's see what's up in coding & scripting land! Firstly, 3.7.2RC4 has arrived, although I'm not exactly sure when final is going to be yet. Hopefully not too far away...
Anyway, New Features Time!
- Add no-collide object flag - FUBAR-BDHR, chief1983, m!m and MageKing17 (i.e. no need to create a separate .pof to get no-collide behaviour)
- Add getFrametimeOverall() lua function for timing purposes outside of gameplay (Axem)
- Add the multi-eval SEXP to allow LUA scripts to run in multiplayer - karajorma (WARNING: This SEXP is subject to change and will likely be removed or changed in a future version)
- Add isInCampaign() lua function to tell when a mission is being played in a campaign (as opposed to via Techroom) - Axem (this helps LUA scripts know when *not* to save data)
- Add '+Substitute main hall:' flag for displaying MjnMixael's main halls in fsport - Goober5000
In addition to these features, here's a special mention for Yarn who has produced a heap of localisation related bugfixes. Thanks for your sterling work on the nuts & bolts of FSO (vs the more obvious fancy/shiny stuff)
Here's the current bugs scoreboard. The bugs on mantis have gone down again despite 17 new ones being found during the month. And there's been a hadful of Coverity fixes submitted as well, good stuff all round.
| | |fixed | |new | |delta | |outstanding |
| ---------------------------- | |---------- | |---------- | |---------- | |-------------------- |
| Coverity (this month) | |7 | |3 | |4 | |395 |
| ---------------------------- | |---------- | |---------- | |---------- | |-------------------- |
| Mantis (last 30 days) | |19 | |17 | |2 | |161 |
(Mantis includes 31 feature requests, so outstanding bugs is really 130)
In other news, zookeeper has coded up an
EFF subdirectories feature. EFF's are cool because they allow the use of formats like PNG which allow transparency and a greater palette than the retail ANI format. Unfortunately they also require a heap of loose files per EFF which can quickly get annoying. While we wait for APNGASM this feature allows each EFF to be stored in its own sub-directory. There are a few tradeoffs, but for the most common use cases this will allow a much more structured/ordered approach to using EFF's.
m!m has created a new launcher dubbed
Alpha. From some of the responses so far this seems somewhat contentious, regardless, if you have any ideas / suggestions or assistance to offer, please head over to the thread. And perhaps triggered by this thread, there's been
surge of discussion from m!m, Hellzed & ngld about a new installer / launcher metadata format. i.e. one that has more support for dependencies (e.g. FSO version), mods being split up into required/optional components, etc.
Parias is continuing in his efforts to improve
FSO multiplayer cooperative campaign play. I gotta say that this makes me really nostalgic, I've wanted to play space-flight sims co-op since the original X-wing. XvT came somewhat close, at the cost (IMO) of crippling difficulty scaling which meant that playing with people who were new to the genre just didn't work. Anyway (and I'll get off my soapbox now) there's still a few outstanding code changes that need to go in before this is ready, hopefully that can be sorted out soon so that the project can continue.
Swifty has released a
new build of his deferred lighting and soft shadows build. There should be performance improvements with subobject rendering and soft particles as well as bugfixes. Head on over and give it a spin.
And for those that find their daily beam intake to be a bit low, MageKing17/AdmiralRalwood has
got you covered. Subspace Beams. What else do I need to say?
New member electrojustin has produced a simple command line
VP archiver. It's for Unix based systems only, sorry Windows (but you've got heaps of other options already...). Anyway, if you have any ideas/suggestions for features to add, go give it a look.
Goober5000's installer is
continuing to improve. Installing retail Freespace2 from the GOG installer now seems to be working on Linux and Windows, great news! It may work on OSX as well, I just haven't seen (or maybe I missed..) anyone report success yet. Regardless, this is Good Stuff!
Scooby_Doo has
released version 0.2 of his rotating animation script, which should have fixed a bug causing crashes. Perfect for all your landing gear (which also help avoid crashes :nervous:) and vectored thrust nozzle needs :)
First off, BWO has
opened up their wallets to help see their project through. Looks like quite a few people have already offered to help, but the more help the merrier, right? Let's hope this will finally get BWO released!
Fightermedic has finally relented and released some of his
very awesome and very cool skyboxes that he showed off a few months ago. The only danger with these is that I'm more liable to pay more attention at the backgrounds than the mission! #hlpworldproblems
BlackWolf has finally made an update to his
asteroid refinery. I must say, it really rocks. BlackWolf certainly has a way with creating great looking industrial equipment. But I must also say it looks like it could also cook some large pizzas.
Hmmm… Hello future JAD mission idea.
Fresh off the Hera Carrier, Col Hornet has started a new project, the
GTC Naxos! This looks like the child of the new GTD Raynor and the Bolitho from Diaspora, in other words, really nice and sexy.
Actius dives head first into modelling with a very nice rendition of the
Spectre-class attack fighter, which if he is to be believed, is from Shattered Universe, a Star Trek game. Still, it looks like it could fit in any mod looking for a unique looking fighter.
Newcomer Alcom Isst shows off a very faithful reproduction of a Lego
Swarm Interceptor. Repairing that fighter should be a breeze, you just need to snap the missing parts on again, right?
Jonathan_S47 gives us a hint at a
Star Fox Cornerian Frigate he had started for the old Shadows of Lylat mod. Maybe Star Fox: Event Horizon could use it for good and awesome? (Love those giant cannons!)
Starbug has a cool looking
battlecruiser in the works! Taking inspiration from a number of sources, it’s a nice blocky looking Terran ship. Here's to hoping we get to see it in a finished state!
ShadowWolf is getting back into the swing of things by starting a sort of
BSG Viper-ish heavy assault fighter. No word yet how many gigaton bombs it can carry. I'm thinking 50? Thousand?
Bryan See continues his long journey in bringing his
SDn Sariel to life. It's certainly had quite a few facelifts since work began on it (now it’s a big momma Rakshasa), but I hope we just see a release one of these days! Good work getting this far though!
What does Scooby have for us this month? A real cool looking
cockpit for one. Also a fighter that is sure to shock your world, the
Thunderbolt! I'm really loving these new generation of ships, especially the landing gear. Just makes them feel more… real.
I'm taking the month off on teaching modding stuff, but here's a trio of helpful tutorials! BlackWolf tells you how to
make spiffy nameplates, DahBlount tells you how to
turn a 15 map model into a single UV Map baked ship, and TheHound goes over making some
simple planets to put in-game.
Next month starts a multipart series on Lua scripting and FreeSpace!
by mjn.mixaelLast month's theme was Dread.
This was one of the most creative pics we've seen yet. I asked how he did it and you should too.
Screencap Scoreboard:
Ckid - 2
Mpez - 3AndrewofDoom - 1
tnathan475 - 1
The Hound - 1
Runner up was DahBlount because
rainbow missiles are way cool. As a reminder, we're going to do things slightly differently this year. Our many campaigns are filled with emotional ups, downs, and/or lackthereof. So we'll highlight that with a whole year's worth of emotional themes. I don't care what's in the image as long as it portrays the particular feeling for the month.
The new theme for September is
Relief.
Watch those HUD gauges (especially that sneaky FPS gauge) and check out the
Screencam Script to help you win a badge and bragging rights. You can see the rules and the previous winners here on the
Wiki.
