Hello, friends. Welcome to April, where spring is sure to put a bounce in everyone's step and release many new campaigns! …right?
Before we begin, let me tell you about this
great short story that our own Battuta got published in a sci-fi publication. Its about an interstellar alliance that got cut off from their home system because of aliens. And now that they've discovered the ability to go home, they decide to uproot this silly peacemaking movement that took hold while they were gone. I definitely urge everyone to read it. It might even make a cool video game adaptation one day!
Anyway, let's check out March's activities.
Diaspora's got a
new release candidate for its 1.1 patch, this one fixes a problem with landing on the Theseus.
Lorric has released his
unfinished missions for his
on hiatus Wings of Dawn campaign, Evacuation of Alpha Draconis. Be sure to scoop them up before the forum ninjas take them away.
The Hound continues to dig in and work on his
first few missions he's done, and he's been getting a lot of good feedback. He's even started some in game cutscenes and… AND… there are screenies! Yay!
Frontlines has added some new crew members to the small project and
BW reports that he's closing in on getting the campaign finished and out there!
And Rheyah had some
other tidbits about the progress of Shetland. It sounds like its coming along very nicely as well.
by niffiwanThe big news this month is that the The_E has stepped up as the
new leader of the SCP! Congratulations are in order for taking on this new responsibility. Also appropriate at this point is a big thank you to chief1983 for the effort he put in as the previous leader.
And now for a little copy-pasta; here's a list the new features which have been committed to trunk in the last month. These will all be in the latest
Nightly Build which are posted (for Windows at least) each day that there is a change to the trunk code. Check it out if you're feeling brave or are developing mods, or if you just want to help with testing. Just remember that the nightlies also have the latest bugs as well as the latest features (but hey, it's better to find bugs in a nightly build than in the next release!)
New features!
- Add a scripting hook variable that specifies the mouse buttons - m!m (so scripts can tell *which* mouse button has been pressed)
- Add hud-set-custom-gauge-active and hud-set-retail-gauge active - Axem
- New method of handling quotes and comments that examines lines character by character like most languages do - Goober5000 (or, comments inside quoted strings no longer break stuff)
- Stop briefing/credits/mainhall music with scripting - Axem & niffiwan
- Add briefing icons for ship-with-cargo and wing-with-cargo - Goober5000 (more variety in your mission briefing)
- Fix interface graphics scaling/stretching issues - Yarn (i.e. adds pillarboxing or letterboxing to maintain a 4:3 aspect ratio in the interfaces)
Here's the current bugs scoreboard, it's either been a nil-all draw this month, or we're keeping up with the bugs, depending on your point of view...
| | fixed | new | delta | outstanding |
| Coverity (this month) | 1 | 1 | 0 | 433 |
| Mantis (last 30 days) | 13 | 13 | 0 | 187 |
fightermedic started a thread about
navigation subsystems affecting maneuverability, specifically that when they take damage the ships maneuverability drops. This is similar to a
previous thread from Dragon. The thrust of the discussion is generally about where this feature would best be implemented, in the engine & controlled by the modder, or in the mission file and controlled by the FREDer. If you have thoughts on the matter, swing by and leave them in the thread.
ngld has teased us all (and especially Mjn
) with a patch to implement some
new mainhall capabilities. In short it allows new "action areas" to be defined in mainhalls, which would very neatly tie in with Axems
new Journal script! Pretty exciting... except that ngld seems to have vanished
Come baaaaaaack pleeeeeease....
After I mentioned it last month, m!m has now posted a preview+builds of
Chromium-in-FSO. Just what your Raptor WSO needs to be able to post on HLP during the slow parts of a mission. Or you could use it to create custom interfaces in HTML, both out-of-mission and in-mission. Go give it a spin and help find/squash all the bugs!
Uchuujinsan has resumed a thread about the
collision detection in FSO which has generated a large number of posts. The discussion has mostly concerned finding ways to reduce the number of narrowband collision detection checks that are performed by refining the broadband check. While that is far simpler said than done some small improvements have been found by caching the broadband checks.
It's been a bit quieter on the installer front this month with a single (just one!) release for
Goober's installer. The new features include OpenAL installation on Windows, localisation support and some preliminary support for installing retail VPs from the GOG installer.
In scripting land I've posted some builds+patch that workaround the
32 character limit for the script-eval sexp. This opens up a way to call any LUA code from a mission which greatly expands the toolkit available to FREDer-scripters. Admittedly it's a little clunky but when combined with
Karajorma's patch (which increases the limit to 64 characters as well as adding Multiplayer Key-Pressed) some highly annoying LUA workarounds can be tossed out. And there's always 6500% hull integrity fighters to watch out for in the next JAD!
And lastly, Swifty has posted builds+patches for
Deferred Lighting and soft shadows!
Veeeery nice
Unfortunately there's a few teething issues to be sorted out before this can be added to the code, so keep an eye on that thread and jump in to test new revisions as they become available.
Col Fishguts released a
new version of a very iconic ship. The Omega Destroyer from Babylon 5 for The Babylon Project. (Download link at the bottom)
I… I want to hug it.
Speaking of iconic ships, zookeeper has some very nice pics of the
Home One for Fate of the Galaxy. Your eyes can't repel beauty of this magnitude!
Fightermedic's got his
bomber nearly finished (though with a lot less red than before. He's also got a neat looking corvette with a lot of neat looking guns. Can't wait to see that in game. (Also where's the campaign for all of these ships?!)
Betrayal is trying his own hand at HTLing an old user made Shivan standby, the
SCv Scylla as first seen in Inferno. It looks… hungry…
Enzo03 has picked up the modelling… brush… again and shown off some
pretty neat and sleek fighters. Loving the swing wings!
Cahdoge continues with his glorious
Space Galleon so you can sail the sea of stars in style. I wonder who would win between this and the Volition Bravos?
Hey, look who's back! It's Scooby! He's got a cool new ship in the words, the
Tigerclaw! I'm sure we'll see this thing finished up real fast!
On the MediaVPs front we have two WIPs!
First, DahBlount has started on an upgrade for the neglected
Zephyrus. A great start so far. I can't wait to blow it up. (I kid!)
Esarai.
Demon HTL. Do I need to say anything else? Anything besides… FINISH PLEASE?!
And now for a special Wings of Dawn section of the modding section:
First Spoon shows off the completely
reimagined Champion-class carrier. The ship on the right is the old Champion. It's okay, I'm sure Spoon won't mind if you laugh at that old ship.
And here a truly multi-talented ship. Thaeris made the concept art, Hades modelled it and Spoon textured the
Dragonfly-class fighter. Those wings? Of course they move, why wouldn't they?
And in another team effort Enzo03 modelled, and Andrew textured the
Excalibur-class fighter.
And finally, Andrew shows off the
giant Knight-class battleship. Can you say, overkill through superior firepower?
The ship set for the new Wings of Dawn is looking a-maz-ing!
This month we take a look at
PCS2 and kitbashing subobjects from one ship to another. It can be as simple as importing a docking port model or a turret to combining two ships together in some unholy marriage of metal and durasteel.
Check it out.
by mjn.mixaelLast month's theme was Loneliness. I was surprised at how many different takes on the idea of loneliness there were. So, uh, good job on that!
I couldn't decide, so I polled a few people on what they thought. Ended up with Mpez winning for the second month in a row with this one.
This one came in at a close second! Screencap Scoreboard:
Ckid - 1
Mpez - 2As 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.
It's April, and the new theme is
Satisfaction.
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.
While we're still in a Wings of Dawn mood, the Wings of Dawn forum game has ended and to celebrate this, Spoon has made an
amazing video of the ships his stalwart players commanded blowing up the evil fleets he had brought against them. A recommended view, for sure.
