Winter's coming (for us Northern Hemisphere dwellers anyway). So instead of going outside in the chilly weather, why not stay in, all bundled in blankets and play a few FreeSpace campaigns?
So what went on this month at HLP? Let's find out.
Slow month in the campaign business.
Attention playtesters,
Rheyah is looking for you! The truth behind all these months of compelling previews for his campaign is just around the bend. Help him by giving him feedback!
I'm looking for a limited number of well worn testers who will be willing to help me push through this and finish off the balancing of my missions. At present I have around 9 missions with mission designs in place, however I am restricted in that I am unable to look with a fresh perspective at my own mission design.
BTA has another ship preview for his
Dusk Wars: Side Arcs. I'll let him fill you in on it.
Constructed in 2328, the Arindam serves as flagship of the 3rd Fleet of Deneb, 1st Battlegroup. Unlike her sisters the Bismarck or Valiant, the Arindam hasn't seen much action following up to the events of 2345.
The Arindam serves as the home ship for the player for the majority of the campaign. She is under the command of Commander Paul Jackson, and she is home to over 10 different fighter squadrons.
And let's just end this off with an uncovering of some in-progress
Blue Planet cutscene retakes!
November, another month and 3.7.2 is still in the RC phase. Down to
16 mantis issues... at least that's a little bit of progress
New Features List!
- allow sexps which reference sounds to use either the table index or the entry name - Goober5000 & m!m (sound flexibility)
- Allow fonts to set/change special char indexes - niffiwan (instead of using the defaults for the font being replaced)
- Allow loading more than 32 modular tables of any type - MageKing17 (unlimited tbm files for all modders! Especially -sct.tbm's!)
Here's the current bugs scoreboard. And ohs noes! Both the bugs on Mantis & Coverity issues have increased last month!
| | |fixed | |new | |delta | |outstanding |
| ---------------------------- | |---------- | |---------- | |---------- | |-------------------- |
| Coverity (this month) | |0 | |2 | |-2 | |397 |
| ---------------------------- | |---------- | |---------- | |---------- | |-------------------- |
| Mantis (last 30 days) | |6 | |8 | |-1 | |159 |
(Mantis includes 38 feature requests (not including HPC), so outstanding bugs is really 121)
Moving onto other coding and scripting news of interest, new forum user Sanocon has (quite correctly) pointed out some of the
deficiencies in the FSO animation code and seems like he may be interested in making some changes in this area. This would be really good, maybe with some collaboration with the guys trying to implement OpenCollda support and/or the PCS2 maintainers. Head on over if you have any words of encouragement or advice.
Swifty has outlined some of the
features he'd like to implement after deferred lighting and shadows is completed. It all sounds very exciting, well, except perhaps the OpenGL Core support which while worthwhile is fairly low on the excitement scale. Regardless, if you have some thoughts on graphics changes to FSO, head on over (just don't start asking for the
moon-on-a-stick 
)
More towards the support field, Kolgena has discovered that
disabling sound fixes certain performance issues in FSO. As the bug seems to be configuration dependant, if you have experienced similar issues go and post what you know in the thread. The more info available, the more likely it is that a coder will be able to figure out a proper solution for this.
FSO is continuing to
take over the world be
ported to more platforms. This time subliminal has compiled and run FSO on OpenBSD, congratulations, it's great to see another member of the little red daemon family getting some FSO love.
Continuing his work on SEXPs, Karajorma has released two more test builds,
strict typing for variables and a beta of the
SEXPs collections/containers. Again this is very cool for the advanced FREDers, go forth and test, and create wonderful missions along the way
FSO sound has seen some ups and downs in recent... er... well... in the last few years at least. However jg18 has taken on the task of trying to
improve the FSO soundscape which is great considering that its one area of the engine which really hasn't changed much since retail. The build requires OpenAL Soft, so if you've already got that installed (i.e. some people on Windows, and all Linux usersr) or don't mind installing it then go give the build a test and provide some feedback.
AdmiralRalwood has continued to tweak his
Subspace Beams Strikes code. Now up to 200 portals can open for a given strike allowing the creation of more
interesting shapes Swifty's
deferred rendering and shadows is now closer than ever. All the issues reported so fas seem to have been fixed, so if you want to have any input before it goes into trunk (which ok, don't get too excited since 3.7.2 needs to be released 1st!) then head over and give it some testing.
Nebula (website & mod repository) and Knossos (launcher) (from ngld & Hellzed with input from m!m) continue to make good progress. There's a
test website available which has some test mods in it. Probably not ready for everyone to jump in and use just yet, but it looks like it's close. Keep up the good work guys, I can't wait for a beta to start!
And to finish off, Scooby Doo has released a new version of his
rotation animations script with a small bugfix.
What's up for modding this month? Well…
Starbug got their
Tython-class Battlecruiser up and running into FreeSpace, so hopefully we'll be see it get released soon enough! I can't wait to see it rip through enemy ships!
UndyingNephalim is continuing some steady progress on their
Star Fox: Event Horizon mod. They've posted a pair of new videos showing off some of the characters in the mod! Awesome videos as always!
Over in the Fate of the Galaxy board, rhettro has reported that they've finished UV mapping the
Assault Gunboat and is ready to texture that sweet looking fighter. It should be a breeze after the pain that is UV mapping.
Headdie's got some free to use models up in his revamped
Polaris Workshop. If you need some tech room models for some guns for your mod, why not take a gander? There's sure to be other neat stuff as he adds more and more!
Scooby's got his usual typical
super high quality space fighters. How boring! Where are the space cats? The space rhinos? (I kid of course! Well, maybe except the space cat bit).
Last month we looked at some simple Lua where we just made a SEXP Library. This month we're just going to add on to that same script but introduce
hook variables and handles. It's still pretty simple stuff, it just needs a bit of explanation. Next month we'll get into how to have some real fun with Lua!
by mjn.mixaelLast month's theme was Fear.
Slim pickins this month. I thought for sure that 'Fear' would bring out a good number of pics. In the end I liked the complex composition of this entry by AdmiralRalwood.
Screencap Scoreboard:
Ckid - 2
Mpez - 3
AndrewofDoom - 1
tnathan475 - 1
The Hound - 1
Betrayal - 1
AdmiralRalwood - 1 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 November is
Wonder.
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.
