Welcome to the wooooorld of tomorrow! Yes, its 2014! Which means that things like personal spaceships and subspace are a year closer! Also Shivans are a year closer, but lets ignore that for now. We should probably take a look at what happened last month before venturing off into the future.
First off, congrats to everyone who released something in 2013! Apologies for the delay on the annual video, but it is here now!
But specifically for December, I actually got something released! Go enjoy
Just Another Day Xtreme Arcade as a way to make up for the late newsletter and late video! It's got explosions and pewpew and... things... Oh and fun. Can't forget fun.
Otherwise, you ARE checking out the other promising campaigns brewing up in the Missions and Campaigns board, right? Well, if not, allow me to summarize:
Rheyah
continues his steady work with Shetland, teasing a cool screenshot and mentions of cool script integration.
My work exposing these new campaigns, has gotten FIZ to leak
a little bit more intriguing info about his "Aquitaine Chronicles" mini-campaign. And wait, there's no pics!
As well, bullhorn has given some more info on his
Ex Orbito campaign, it'll feature NTF victories before the GTVA deploys their secret weapon known only as... Alpha 1. And yes, we have a pic here too!
And Bryan See has a rather
interesting crossover campaign started. It's got the GTVA battling the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica! What more could you ask? Also there's pics. Wonderous pics.
And last but not least, Inferno is teasing us with a
discussion thread for their campaign that isn't released yet! But it makes up for it by having pics and the chance to get some info about the campaign by asking the devs.
by niffiwanAh summer. Humid heat from 7am followed by afternoon storms :blah: I should invest in a good UPS / power surge protector so I don't have to keep turning my PC off in the afternoon/evening!
(ED Note: I don't know, I'd sure take that over being colder than the North Pole!)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!
- For wing names with hash symbols, put the ship number before the hash (plus refactor part of wing names code) - Goober5000 (useful if you want wing members to have correct names in identically named but different wings)
- Bump model insignia faces/vertexes limits - niffiwan (so insignia can be placed on curvy models)
- Added an $On Ship Arrive scripting hook - zookeeper
- Made +delay and +acceleration in animation code optional and default to 0 - zookeeper
- Enabled fighterbay door animations to better define which bay path must be used or not used for the animation to trigger - zookeeper
- Yarns Adaptable HUD - Yarn & m!m & niffiwan (a new way of configuring HUD gauge positions, including a non-stretched HUD for retail without requiring a table. There's a few things still being added to this)
- Added scripting function for drawing filled and unfilled arcs and made drawCircle able to draw unfilled circles - zookeeper
- Added support for multiple control presets - zookeeper
- Allow game_settings.tbl to define the FS2NetD port, so TCs can work out of the box on *nix, etc - chief1983 (currently, setting the port in multi.cfg only works because on Windows the game and user data folders are still in the same place)
- Add the was-destroyed-delay SEXP by the WCS team. Add support to alter-ship-flag for hiding ship names - karajorma
- Add lua on-collision hooks for beams - Axem & Wanderer
- Ported the $On Action and $On Action Stopped scripting hooks. Also bumps the char limit for conditions from 32 to 64 - zookeeper
Apart from the features, there's been bugfixes, in particular zookeeper has been squashing bugs in the new model point shields code, and of course MOAH Coverity & Address Sanitizer related fixes (as an aside, compared to similar size open source projects (100k-500k lines of code) FSO currently has a defect density of 1.15 (per 1000 lines of code), compared to the average of 0.6 - so there's still quite some room for improvement).
X3N0-Life-Form has
submitted a patch to add a simple SSM sexp. It looks like it may be ready to commit soon.
There was a discussion about moving some
command line parameters to be tabled options instead. There was also a similar conversation about having
bloooooommm and other default lighting settings in a table as well. Both ideas sound good to me, so it just seems that we need someone with some time to pick this up and make it happen :)
And now... the question of an
installer! I wonder if us regulars at HLP sometimes forget how tricky it can be to install FSO and its mods when you're just starting out. The documentation is pretty good but finding it can be difficult if you're arriving via google, none of the 1st page of results in my google search returned the new & updated installation threads by jg18 :( And of course, for better or for worse, many game players these days expect a simple click and point style installation process, and we need players to play all the awesome work that our members create! Towards the end of that thread Goober implied that there'd be some news after the holidays were over, so I'm now charging all you readers,
PESTER THE GUY (in a good natured way of course) if he hasn't delivered some news by the end of January! :p
If you've been following Star Citizen, you'll know that they pushed back the dogfight module. But MatthTheGeek said "Oh yeah?" and
managed to pull the P52 Merlin (all 100k+ polys) and threw it into FreeSpace for a quick standalone experience.
Steve-O has also released the
latest version of his Fighter Pack (weapons included!). This includes all the redone ships, including the redone Saracen/Durga. Great looking ships if you need some custom ones.
Col. Hornet has
started work on a TCa Hera, a carrier that bears a strong similarity to Aesaar's Diomedes in BP. Which is awesome. Getting a strong air craft carrier vibe from this.
Betrayal's got a neat looking ship in the works, the
TFg Vengeance. A pocket destroyer, with few anti-capital weapons, but lots of anti-fighter ones. It looks like quite a blunt instrument.
Speaking of...
blount instruments...
DahBlount's finally shown that
new version of the Nuadha that I mentioned last month. I see its still got its giant beam cannon, very good. Keep up the good work!
And making a surprising debut in the FSU forums, Lc4Hunter not only shows off a
new Iceni, but also a
new Demon! The Demon sorely needs an upgrade, maybe then it can get some love in campaigns again.
Oh Oddgrim, what is this.
ANOTHER Vasudan ship? Ho hum.
Oh AND a high poly version of the
Vasudan support ship from FS1? You make me sick.
And Scooby.
TWO more ships? Give other people a chance. C'mon bros.
by mjn.mixaelLast month's theme was Free-For-All. There were a lot of very, very good entries and it took me a while to narrow it down. In the end, though.. it just has to go to..
CKid with this pic from BP. Wowzers, that looks nice. Who do I pay to get my mods to look that good?
Here are a few runner ups that I also really loved.
Darius MatthTheGeekAndrewofDoomMpez Screencap 2013 Final Scoreboard:
ssmit132 - 2
X3N0-Life-Form - 1
FreeSpaceFreak - 1
mjn.mixael - 1
Belisarius - 1
MatthTheGeek - 1
knossosfs2 - 1
Betrayal - 1
Aesaar - 1
Axem - 1
CKid - 1
Review the year's worth of winning screenshots
here. The goal was to show what FSO can do, and I think that was easily achieved. As for the year's winner? The scoreboard says it all. ssmit132 wins with 2 points where everyone else has 1. Enjoy some more pixels in the form of a badge, ssmit132!
Guess what. It's 2014! That means a new screencap season! I'll be interested to see if ssmit132 can hold on to that golden badge of glory next year. :) We're going to do things slightly differently this year. Our many campaigns are filled with emotional ups, downs, and/or lackthereof. So let's 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. And yes, February will be the month of love. However, January is the month of Rage.
So get out there and capture all the Rage you can in an image!
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.
Let's keep this nice and easy, what campaigns are you waiting for in 2014? Planning on starting your own?
