Seven thousand four hundred ninety-six... seven thousand four hundred ninety-seven... Oh hi! I'm just making sure I have enough money for a purchase I've been hoping to make for awhile. Looks like the fees for joining the Axem Fan Club finally came in handy. Seven thousand four hundred ninety eight... Hmm? What am I buying? Why the residual rights to FreeSpace of course! Right here in this totally legit newspaper ad.
FOR SALE: Residual Rights to FreeSpace VG Franchise.
13 years old. Must be to a good home. Housebroken.
$7500 obo. Call JScott @...
Seven thousand four hundred ninety... nine... WHAT. That's it? Oh, well no matter. I'm sure I can wait one day for the rest of the money to come in.
What could possibly go wrong?
Anyway, we have some BIG stuff for this newsletter.
Well except here, there's nothing new here.
This is troubling! What's going on guys! Get cracking!
3.7.0 RC2 was released in early June. We're close to getting that code freeze lifted! Help fight bugs so the coders can start to introduce more bugs to find!
A slightly new version of the
WxLauncher was released! Now accessing FRED from the launcher is easier than ever, just hit F3 to make the FRED button appear. It will boost productivity by 1000%!
And a slightly new version of
WxVPView was released by FreeSpaceFreak! You can now export stuff and use it on a Mac!
mjn.mixael, who can't just do nothing, releases two sets of notepad++ language files, one for
TBL and TBMs and another one for helping to
Debug log files. Hopefully these will make your table editting or troubleshooting much easier.
FelixJim has been hard at work, releasing another newer version of his
Ingame Tech Room viewer with 59% more options and doodads, and a script that will let you run
scripts that require more than 31 characters! He heard you liked scripts, so he made a script that can run a script so you can run a script while you... etc etc...
fightermedic, tired of using his medical degree to revive campaigns, has put together his first ever fighter.
The TF Zelos is a great early Terran era fighter, or maybe something for the mercs?
oliacym has stitched together a neat
Dyson Sphere interior skybox with clouds and more clouds Dyson Sphere. Come for the pretty pictures, stay for the discussions on the practicality of Dyson Spheres.
rscaper has started work on the
CNV-01 Dreadnaught from IWar in the hopes of getting a full fledge IWar mod started. I'd sure like to welcome those aliens to earf with that.
(What, Independence War isn't based off of Independence Day?)
Steve-O lets us have a sneak peek at the
Durga Bomber, still undergoing its facelift. It looks years younger now!
Enioch is back this month with another gorgeous looking ship for
Renegade Legion! And the dude is looking for help! Making mods by yourself is never fun, its always more fun with a partner. Plus you get to play with these awesome ships early!
And headdie lets us take a peek in his own workshop to show off a
cruiser inspired by GTVA and UEF style ideas.
Lepanto has started his first ever model thanks to ShadowWolf's in-depth modelling tutorial. What has he chosen to do first?
Why, a Vasudan Bomber! Zods are in man. Kneel before the Zods.
whitearrow also shows off an early concept of a ship,
a heavy frigate! It's going to have stealth, and electronic warfare, and a pony, and a blackjack table and another pony so the other pony won't get lonely, and maybe some weapons. I may have made some of that up. See if you can spot the lies.
So Scooby,
what are you working on this month?
Uh-huh! Just like an Aluminum Falcon.
And Oddgrim, how about you? Vasudan Steak?
Oh, Setekh!
I'm running out of compliments for you. How does he do it?
LET'S FIND OUT.
An INTERVIEW?! Axem, aren't you busy enough... doing whatever the heck it is you actually do?
Probably, but this was all mjn.mixael's doing, I had nothing to do with it, aside from asking a few open floor questions at the end.
mjn's subject is the God of Vasudan Ships, Oddgrim. Watch him spill secrets and endorse a Vasudan as president!
MjnMixael: So today we have Oddgrim... known for single-handedly revamping almost the entire
Vasudan fleet for the Freespace Upgrade Project.
Oddgrim: Happy to be here!MjnMixael: I think what everyone really wants to know is... is there a limit to your skill?
MjnMixael: More specifically, how did you come to learn modelling and texturing?
Oddgrim: A limit? The sky is I guess, or more fitting in this case the vastness of space in this case is the limit. 
MjnMixael: Heh...
Oddgrim: I am mostly self learned by looking up tutorials as I went on, this is aided by years of drawing by hand and on pc with my trusty tablet. Now I can't really pinpoint where and how I learned to be as good, other then drawing as much I can.Oddgrim: Modelling is much the same, I originally started with blender and moved on to maya later on.MjnMixael: Do you have any professional experience?
Oddgrim: Not any work in the gaming industry really, other then 2 years go I got some Halloween content in Anarchy online in the form of a few posters that players could put up on the wall.MjnMixael: Do you work on modding other games as well, then?
Oddgrim: I was a bit involved in the original half life, by making maps for counterstrike that me and my friends played in, think I used a program called quake army knife back then. And later on in CS:source. But then I had to use Hammer, which today I consider some of the worst GUIs and control I had to tinker with today. Barring Truespace of course... MjnMixael: Haha Truespace... that's where my first models came from! It truly is horrible...
MjnMixael: So FreeSpace is your modding game of choice these days. What draws you to it, in particular?
Oddgrim: Back in 2007 the safest way to port blender to Freespace, you had to use Truespace.MjnMixael: I remember that.
Oddgrim: Hoo, now that takes me back.. I first tried Freespace back in 1998 or 99 it came bundled with my fathers old IBM computer, I put that sucker in and did not stop playing it until I was done with it. A year or two later I picked up Freepsace2 during a family trip to London.Oddgrim: It was sitting on the shelf, all alone in the 2th floor of some Virgin records shop just waiting for me.. I bought it without a second thought to bring it home. Back then I had just acquired my first pc. So I could almost say it was fate.MjnMixael: Ha! that's very similar to my own story.
Oddgrim: Its the setting and my own childlike nostalgia that keeps me coming back to Freespace.MjnMixael: True for many of us, I'm sure.
MjnMixael: You mentioned earlier that you use a tablet to help you work on your textures for Freespace ships... tell me a little more about that.
Oddgrim: It's a very worn out Intious4 (a5) drawing tablet that I bought 4 years ago when working on my Illustration degree in Trondheim. It has served my faithfully and have shown no signs of breaking down yet!. Although I have worn down 2 standard pins for it. I pretty much use the tablet the whole time when modelling and drawing...Oddgrim: Sometimes I even use it to game a bit with!Oddgrim: Although I would not recommend it to play Freespace. MjnMixael: Haha, that would be interesting!
MjnMixael: So, to the other modellers/texturers out there.. why use a tablet over keyboard/mouse?
Oddgrim: A tablet gives so much more freedom for brushwork, also allows you to fix errors in the AO-Bake faster for example. A tablet is needed to draw out the full potential of Photoshop or gimp. While to achieve the same result with for example a mouse you will need to tinker with brush opacity. And not even then it will look right since a mouse, only knows two different pressures on the brush, on/off.MjnMixael: I've certainly found some of those jobs easier since you convinced me to go the tablet route!
(Though, I still need a lot of practice with it.)
Oddgrim: Happy to know it helped for ya.MjnMixael: OK, let's talk a little more about your work for the Freespace Upgrade Project.
MjnMixael: Why Vasudans?
Oddgrim: Tricky question, there's something artistic that appeals to me when it comes to Vasudans, very reminiscent of art deco in the retail textures in places, doubt that was a major inspiration for 
. Form and function unified into one single model, that for me is the appeal of Vasudans. Also they have not seen much love in the prior years. Finally fun to do.Oddgrim: A lot of freedom in the modelling.MjnMixael: I've definitely seen that play out in your version of the
Anuket.. with it's flowing lines and armor plates, but with clear functionality.
MjnMixael: Which model, that you've worked on so far, is your favorite or was the most fun?
Oddgrim: Ack! That is so hard to choose! If I had to have a eeerm... (looking at hos own p3d gallery) I'll go with the Osiris, or maybe Isis. Osiris for finally nailing a good a fast way to work in textures.Oddgrim: Isis for general texture-work.Oddgrim: Maybe even Anuket.Oddgrim: Amun is good too..MjnMixael: Haha.. Are you going to list them all?
Oddgrim: And had a lot of fun work with the_dagger's Sekhmet.Oddgrim: Heh, sorry I can't really make a good choice. Sorry. MjnMixael: Well, all of your work is very impressive, I can see how it would be tough to choose a stand-out.
MjnMixael: Well.. The end is near for the Vasudans. As in, there are not very many left to upgrade. So I think everyone has one burning question for you... what's after that?
Oddgrim: I was thinking of trying my mettle on some of the Terran ships, or maybe do that station concept I have lying around.MjnMixael: Any, in particular, catch your eye? (or do you not want to reveal that?)
Oddgrim: No, sorry I wont tell Since that might be quite a while in the future and I don't want to potentially discourage others from working on them.MjnMixael: Heh, all right.
MjnMixael: Well that's all the questions I have.. let's open it up for a few from the gallery.
Axem: Where do you get your inspiration? is it just trying to guess what the
artists were trying to do, or is there more?
Oddgrim: Tumblr sometimes, just general search for artwork (I'm terrible remembering names) But one book that is a heavy inspiration for me when drawing mechanical stuff is Doug Chiang's Mechanika.Oddgrim: But a lot of when trying to update or evolve old texture-work from volition is done by interpretation, and filling in the blanks.Axem: Is there a balance for you between realism and artistic when making a new ship? your Vasudans definitely have that perfect blend between the two.
Oddgrim: Heh, I do try to when drawing textures and adding bits when modelling is to have them make some kinda sense. But sometimes not often, I'll add a extrude bit or texture just because it looks cool. MjnMixael: Well, if there are no more questions...
MjnMixael: Thanks for taking the time, Oddgrim.
MjnMixael: This interview will be featured in the next HLP Newsletter!
Oddgrim: My pleasure MjnMixael.
Rogue Intentions is an interesting campaign to look at how the styles and methods of FreeSpace campaigns have evolved. There's nothing "new" in Rogue Intentions, but there is the refinement and evolution of what passes as a more modern campaign. It's just too bad there is no second part to it all, since the sequel hooks didn't forecast a likely path. Just some mentions of mystery containers, mystery science ships and NTF ships heading off into an unknown Jump Node. Really, it could be anything! Maybe the campaign is all about tacos. We'll never know.
One thing is for sure, we still got tons of beams!So let's talk a bit about the campaign and the snapshot of campaign development ideas. You're a GTVA pilot assigned to fly with a pair of Deimos corvettes, along with a bunch of other snarky and chatty wingmen. The campaign starts off pretty light as the wingmen joke around, wanting some excitement. Sound familiar? Why yes, the campaign is heavily influenced by Homesick. In fact in the wiki page, Nuclear outright says the campaign draws large amount of influences from Homesick and Derelict. The chatty wingmen trend from those two campaigns is displayed here and goes on to this day with campaigns like Blue Planet. Of course Blue Planet's wingmen are a lot more grounded and act like real military pilots would. There's nothing better or worse about light hearted wingmen vs real military pilots, they just need to fit the atmosphere of the mod. An atmosphere that can be twisted.
It also continues the trend of having I-Spy games in campaigns! We need to bring that back!I know Nuclear enough to guess what he may have been up to for a sequel. Again from the wiki page, the second part would have been influenced by Into the Depths of Hell, a campaign about a group of GTVA ships trapped on the wrong edge of the collapsing nodes in FreeSpace 2. And knowing what I know by the posts that Nuclear has made, its clear that he wouldn't just take a subject straight. In Homesick, we started with a happy go lucky world and completly twisted it by taking the pilots way out of their comfort zone and into a hellish place. These Rogue Intention wingmen are just asking for the same. The fleeing NTF ships are most likely going to lead our intrepid heroes into Shivan forces, by accident or intent, who could say. Would our heroes have to work with the NTF ships to survive, how would that affect a wing of Vasudan bombers that joined in the hunt to avenge a lost cruiser. Whatever MacGuffin we sort of glimsed at in some of the beginning missions would obviously stay there, so I'm guessing the NTF has another one of those, or components of it.
It's fun to guess anyway, its what we do when there's a giant question mark at the end of a game released 14 years ago.
So is Rogue Intentions worth a play? If you liked Homesick's low-action high-word missions, sure! If you like fast paced campaigns with lots of action, maybe not. It spends time setting things up, but without a sequel, the effort can feel empty. But the campaign does help fill the mosaic of the actions around FreeSpace 2. In retail campaign, we see a single path of one pilot. In this campaign, we see the path of another pilot. When we look at all the other fan-made campaigns that take place around FreeSpace 2, we get some depth into the hectic times. There are countless books about a soldier's journey in World War 1 or World War 2, so these campaigns are sort of like those; tales of the GTVA pilots around the final days of the Neo-Terran Rebellion and the Second Shivan Incursion.
Rogue Intentions may not be a prominent game-changing campaign, but it still adds to a universe we're creating.
This review is a little short because Nuclear was so thoughtless not to know I would pick this campaign, 8 years after he made it, and didn't include any jaw dropping moments I could talk about. The nerve.
So to fill the remaining length, I'll link to Nuclear's amazing posts about campaigns and the concepts that any FREDder should read (as preserved on the wiki)
Capital ships and YOU!Five Things You'll Forget To Do Before You ReleaseFreeSpace Characters 101Immersion and EmotionMission Variety MattersPublic Relations and Advertising for Your ModCampaign Designers are People too!So if Nuclear won't lead us into a strange system, cut off from the rest of the GTVA. We'll just find someone else who WILL. We're going into...
Uncharted Territory!
Last month's theme was The Quiet Life. So who posted the quietest screencap?
Why MatthTheGeek did with his calm screenshot of an Arcadia and the GTD Intrepid.
Honorable mention goes to Darius and his increasingly
insane cityscapes and Arpit for his cool
interior hangar shot of an Arcadia.
Screencap Scoreboard:
ssmit132 - 1
X3N0-Life-Form - 1
FreeSpaceFreak - 1
mjn.mixael - 1
Belisarius - 1
MatthTheGeek - 1And with that, there's going to be some CHANGES to the contest! I will be peacefully stepping down as screencap contest runner and mjn.mixael will be stepping up!
Here's mjn to tell you more!
So I'm the new host of the Screencap Contest.. and boy do I have some fun things planned! First, however, you need to know some of the changes.
The biggest change is that by entering you are now putting your reputation on the line.. in the form of badges! The winner of the month gets this badge.
The badge is removed and placed on the winner of the following month. So... if you want to prove you are the best at getting screens, you need to keep that badge multiple months in a row! Now, since we are starting this mid-year, all previous month-winners will get the badge this month. At the end of the year, the points are tallied up. Whoever won the most months gets this badge for a WHOLE YEAR!
Wow! So if you manage to keep that badge for multiple years.. you are most definitely the Screencap King. (Yes, this is a challenge.) But Mjn, you say, what if no one has won more than one month in a year? Well... then the best screenshot from all 12 winners will be chosen and that person crowned king with the Golden Badge of Screencap Glory. (That's the official name.)
Now with that explained... here's how you can win. Be sure to check the new Wiki article. It lists all the things I am looking for in screens to be deemed winners. Especially check the article I linked to in that list. It's really good. The Wiki article will also have a section showing off the Year's winners so far.
Finally.. I know I have a winning screen in the 2013 season. While it will remain on the list.. I will be ineligible to win any further months or even the 2013 year. The cost of being your most favoritest host, I suppose. Now, without further ado...
This month's theme is... Turrets! Ready... Aim... FIRE! As always, check out the Screencam Script to help you capture that perfect memory... moment of violence.Now if you'll excuse me, I have to count the money in these large sacks that just appeared... Aw shucks, if I did this last month I could have nabbed the FS rights. Now the world will never see the greatness of FreeSpace 3: Rise of the Disco.
A few links to ultra-good posts:
Luis Dias has put forth a very cool
literary theory about FreeSpace 2 being a retelling of the Book of Exodus from the Bible. Very cool stuff! 13 years later and we're still coming up with cool neat theories, that's usually pretty hard to do!
And if you remember I linked to this guy making a hybrid RTS/Space Sim called Void Destroyer, which was trying to get funding from Kickstarter. And since I posted it, it got funded! Naturally, I will take MOST the credit for the success and will only ask for a simple... 50% take...
no? 49%? We'll talk later!And MatthTheGeek is dead-set on making sure the FreeSpace universe invades ALL the games. Here's a pic of him modding the
Fenris into Faster Than Light. And here's a link to him flying a
Karuna in Void Destroyer.And finally, are you tired of making models for nothing? (aside from the great feelings of making things for others to use in their epic sagas)
BlackWolf has put together a
modelling contest with MONEY prizes. Yes, MONEY. There's a prize for best overall ship, best Terran, best Vasudan and best Shivan. There's also a Best Newcomer Award for people that think they don't stand a chance against Oddgrim.
Get busy, modders!
