Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Fate of the Galaxy => Topic started by: wookieejedi on December 04, 2022, 01:40:40 pm
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It's been a few months since our last official forum update, so all of us at Fate of the Galaxy want to share what we have been working on (new ships, better lighting, fixes/optimizations, and more).
Progress Highlights
- Added deferred lighting for cockpits, which is something we have wanted for years (massively immense thanks to Lafiel for adding this in FSO and for pushing for it for over 1.5 years, also thanks to EatThePath for additional poking of various FSO graphics coders). FotG can achieve the lighting distinctions that were not previously possible. Lafiel was also the FSO dev who added self shadowing and deferred lighting to cockpits (and of course Limbert was the artist who modeled and textures the cockpits). Overall cockpits with this lighting make FotG gameplay immeasurably more immersive and we are very thankful to all involved who worked towards this goal!
- Added the Arquitens Light Cruiser (thanks to doci for the original base model and to Dark Visor for updating the model and adding LODs, turrets, and making all new textures which match our Imperial aesthetic!).
- Added 3 new ship captain personas, one each for Empire, Pirates, and Rebels (thanks to Kyle Shive for the voice acting!).
- Added repair weapons and repair IFF. This will allow things such as repair ships/droid automatically heal craft on the same team.
- Added a higher quality version of escape pod for Techroom (thanks LarsH!).
- Added repair droid (thanks DarkVisor!). The droid update includes folding docked animations and a repair gun for either large ships or small ships.
- Added more formation options in FRED (thanks Goober!).
- Added DV-3 Cargo Tug with Container (thanks DarkVisor!). The container has the ability to dock and deploy up to 12 repair droids and has multiple color variations.
- Updated game so that cockpits can be toggled via an in-game menu option, which is much easier then deleting or removing table files (thanks to MJN for adding this feature to FSO). This update also included cleaning up the HUD configuration table in a few spots.
Updated dynamic music scripting to be easier to enable within a mission and sound better. This includes adding crossfades between the main music track and music flourishes (there were just pauses before, so the cross fades sound much smoother comparatively). This update also provides more varied musical tracks within a given mission. It also cleans up the code on the script side of things. - Updated team color shaders to be better optimized (thanks EatThePath!).
- Updated other shaders to fix edge case lighting bugs where rough dielectric surfaces are too shiny at sharp angles (thanks EatThePath and Qazwsxal!).
- Updated all models to use the most recent POF version, which reduces file size by a good amount. The previous size of the 'models' folder was 592 MB and now it is 405 MB (187 MB savings).
- Updated many scripts with optimizations, mainly removing converting expensive `runSEXP` calls. Very large thanks to Goober for the assistance and new FSO scripting functions. Originally FotG the total of `runSEXP` and `evaluateSEXP` was 288, now it is down to 68, with none run frequently.
- Fixed many, many other minor bugs, which would be far too long to list.
Community Connections
We also would like to highlight all the fantastic work continually being done with FSO. Just to name a few, Cyborg and Taylor have now got all critical FSO and PXO bugs fixed, which has allowed us to resume testing on FotG multiplayer; Asteroth has continued to develop POF Tools, which has made rigging and cleaning our models much easier; and Lafiel and Goober continue to add incredibly useful features to FSO. Also, there’s many other devs adding great fixes, features, and other enhancements!
Moving Forward
For folks who want to view more frequent FotG updates, feel free to join our Discord channel where we post most of our informal progress: https://discord.gg/k7ZMdmt
As always, thank you all for your support and enthusiasm! We are continually getting closer to completing our final milestones for a public release. Once those goals are met and polished, we will be extremely excited to share the game with everyone. In the meantime, here are some shots of new craft. May the Force be with you!
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/664880631586750482/1025151011771400222/unknown.png)
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/670015459269279761/1049047380957331477/image.png)
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/670015459269279761/1049047248937431100/image.png)
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Great work, keep it up! :yes:
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Love to read each update from you. Hope to see all this stuff in action. Thanks for your time and effort on this project!
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Thank you, we very much appreciate all the support and enthusiasm!