[Darius]

Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius - The Director's Cut

As the 14th Battlegroup, led by the GTD Orestes, prepares to lead the GTVA's return to Sol, young pilot Samuel Bei finds himself once more under his estranged father's command. As the two Beis grapple with the open wounds of an old tragedy, the greatest journey any human being has ever undertaken opens before them: a sojourn across universes and beyond death itself, as the destiny of the human race and the secrets of Shiva hang in the balance.

As Samuel Bei, you will guide your elite task force through a harrowing journey - a desperate flight through a nightmare of burnt rock, cold fire, and horrifying visions, drawn inexorably onwards by the pull of your own fate. Give up your humanity and your life to protect those you love in one of the most immersive, emotionally engaging FreeSpace stories ever told.

FEATURES:
Original features

• New music - 3 entirely new tracks with full tabling and synchronisation, plus further tracks that are event-triggered
• New ships - To reflect the next generation of GTVA technology. There is also a new race to discover along the way
• Storyline-based action - Telling a unique story set within the Freespace universe, with its own characters, life-changing events, setting and themes
• Custom communication ani's - Giving new faces to Command, characters and ships

Director's Cut Features

• Full voice acting from a talented semipro cast
• Brand new skyboxes by HerraTohtori
• Wingman personas for Corey and Taylor
• Nameplates for the 14th Battlegroup and other Terran ships
• Overhauled missions, including balance tweaks, skip buttons for long dialogue sequences, and re-directed cutscenes
• New and revamped effects and textures
• New HTL vishnan models courtesy of the Ancient-Shivan War team
• A brand new interface
• Dozens of new techroom entries, including all warship turrets and new Intelligence entries with secrets of the Shivans and the post-Capella GTVA - as well as portions of 'The Rift' and 'Project Nagari', previews for War in Heaven
• A truly epic credits screen: go check it out!
• Much, much more!

Important

Make sure you have every item on this checklist before you begin playing:

• MediaVPs 3.6.12. These are mandatory, but MV_Advanced, MV_Animglows and MV_RadarIcons are optional. Ensure you have the latest version of MediaVPs (including patches if available) installed to mediavps_3612 folder to avoid any issues.
• All required Blue Planet VPs downloaded and placed in blueplanet folder
• Make sure that you're using the builds provided in the download. 3.6.14 or 3.6.15 builds WILL NOT WORK. You have been warned.

Installing Blue Planet: Age of Aquarius

Required downloads

• Windows executable installer: FSMods
• Non-executable archive (for Linux/MacOS): FSMods
  

If your GPU is unable to handle large textures, or if you want to gain a bit of FPS in some scenes, you should delete adv_bp.vp from the blueplanet directory.

Separate downloads
IMPORTANT: You need ALL of these in order to play Blue Planet. It is strongly advised that you use the complete downloads (either the executable installer or the Linux/MacOS archive).

• High resolution textures: FSMods
• Audio files part 1: FSMods
• Audio files part 2: FSMods
• Core: FSMods
• Visuals part 1: FSMods
• Visuals part 2: FSMods

After downloading

• On Windows, simply run the installer, and point it at your FS2 directory. Once it's done, open your Launcher of choice, and select the provided builds (Named fs2_open_3_6_17_SSE2_BP.exe). IMPORTANT: If it turns out that shadows are too much for your graphics chip, you can reduce their quality by entering "-shadow_quality 1" in the custom flags line, or "-shadow_quality 0" to completely disable them.
  
• On other operating systems, you need to extract the blueplanet folder from the 7z-file to your FreeSpace 2 folder manually. To extract them, you need 7-zip
• Open your FreeSpace 2 Launcher (usually launcher.exe), go to MOD tab and select blueplanet as your mod. Open Features tab and select Gameplay as list type. Make sure you have enabled "Use models for ship selection" and "Use models for weapons selection". Then launch the game.
• It is strongly recommended to create a new pilot to play BP: AoA Director's Cut. Seriously, do this and save yourself from unnecessary trouble.
• We recommend setting music volume to 2/3rds and voice volume to full in Options (F2). Please visit the Techroom to read new Intelligence entries and credits!
• Once in-game, in Campaign menu select Blue Planet - Age of Aquarius, click Select button and finally click Continue to start the campaign.

Click here for troubleshooting help

Click here for release discussion

[Fury]

Update to Core package
Changelog:

• Numerous minor bugfixes and tweaks to missions.
• Corrected voice acting credits for Demons of the Past transport captain.
• Balor has been tweaked.
• All Terran fighters and bombers have had their customized default loadouts removed. This ensures better compatibility with other campaigns. Missions have been updated accordingly.
• "in tech database" flags have been removed from all ships and weapons. Instead ships and weapons become available in tech database as campaign progresses.
• Several new intelligence entries that become available as campaign progresses.
• Several new ship and weapon tech entries that become available as campaign progresses.

Note: For these new intelligence and tech entries to show up, campaign needs to be restarted. Preferably with new pilot. New pilot can also avoid possible issues with updated missions.

Update to Visuals 2 package
Changelog

• New credits images by Shivan Hunter (aka DarthGeek)
• Persona animation filenames have been renamed. Updated missions in Core. No more BP personas showing up in other campaigns.

Download links are in the first post of this topic.

[Fury]

IMPORTANT, READ!

• BP: AoA DC now requires MediaVPs 3.6.12 and fs2_open 3.6.12
• bp-adv-core is now obsolete, please delete bp-adv-core.vp, bp-adv-core.7z and bp-adv-core.zip if present on your computer
• This update is required to play Blue Planet 2: War in Heaven

Updates to Core
- Standard FS2 interface is used if resolution lower than 1024x768 is used
- Balor's energy usage lowered
- Tech description fixes
- Minor visual effect tweaks
- Tweaked hull and shield hitpoints of vishnan fighters and bombers
- Tweaked GTB Artemis D.H. to be slightly superior to GTB Artemis
- Corrected max engine overlock velocities of GTB Artemis, GVB Sekhmet, GVB Bakha, SF Aeshma, SB Nahema, SB Seraphim
- Added afterburners to SB Nephilim, SB Taurvi, SB Seraphim
- mod.ini edited to use new "mediavps_3612" folder instead of old "mediavps"

Updates to Visuals 1
- Updated GTL Anemoi model, fixes smoothing and potential crash associated to the model
- Added MOI to missiles
- Fixed missile flare positions

Updates to Visuals 2
- New gauss cannon muzzle flash
- Higher resolution mass driver trail
- Added Vishnan beam warmup particle
- Now unused effects have been removed

Updated download links to Core, Visuals 1 and Visuals 2 can be found in the first post of this topic.

[The E]

Another update in preparation of the WiH rerelease has been released.

This is a maintenance release to address compatibility issues with 3.6.14 RC builds; If you have had AoA installed previously, you should simply redownload bp-core and bp-visuals1.

[The E]

The entire Blueplanet: AoA package has been rereleased. Please follow the install instructions in the first post, and delete all previous Blue Planet installs.