Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Fate of the Galaxy => Topic started by: wookieejedi on May 04, 2023, 06:49:43 am
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Happy Star Wars Day everyone. All of us at Fate of the Galaxy want to share an update for May the Fourth.
First, we want to thank everyone for their outpouring of support and remembrance for our fallen community member TopAce. A little over a month ago we received very sad news from his brother that TopAce had passed away. Known as the ‘Stalwart Contributor’ in our community, TopAce has worked on many projects since first joining HLP in 2003 at the age of 17. He completed a long list of highly impressive accomplishments and was one of the founding members of Fate of the Galaxy (https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/User:TopAce). To honor TopAce, we created a tribute post and video (Tribute to TopAce (hard-light.net) along with an ‘in memoriam’ badge. The community here has also expanded that remembrance with many thoughtful and heartfelt remarks.
As we continue to work on Fate of the Galaxy we do so in dedication to TopAce and his stalwart support of the entire community. Over the past few months we have updated FotG with multiple additions, enhancements, and fixes:
- Added Golan 120 Station, massive thanks to Dark Visor for his terrific and long amount of work on this. This addition includes modular elements that will also be used in the upcoming shield gate version.
- Updated wingmen message playing of ‘They are on me tight, I can't shake them' style messages to finally only play when the attacking ship is actually a small ship. Also updated wing arrival messages to more easily play in many cases (very large thanks to naomimyselfandi for giving us the tools to fix those).
- Updated select maps on satellite and cargo container models (thanks Dark Visor).
- Updated subsystem names in mission log to properly show display names (thanks MjnMixael).
- Added new wing orders that allow the player to change the wing formation spacing with three orders, 1) tighten formation, 2) loosen formation, and 3) restore formation (thanks Lafiel for all the work on the LUA AI orders and Goober for adding wing formation scripting access).
- Updated to use random rotation and curves for lifetime and size for particles, so now hit effects and smoke have a more natural looking effect (thanks Asteroth). Also this approach allowed a way to fix the texture artifacts shown on multiple ember particles.
- Updated a few turret subsystem flags on select ships to remove or add the `check hull` flags that had not had them updated yet.
- Updated to use new particle performance features within FSO to help particle heavy scenes run faster (thanks Asteroth).
- Fixed many other minor bugs.
Community Connections
We also would like to highlight all the terrific work continually being done with FSO. As you might have noticed in the above section, multiple fixes, features, and enhancements have been integrated into FSO by many different developers. Just to name a few, Lafiel and Goober continue to add highly useful features, MjnMixael has completed the massive goal of completing a high-resolution interface for single-player, TheE has fixed custom glowmap shaders and continues to work on ensuring FSO graphics work with modern drivers, EatThePath and Qaz have integrated additional shader updates, and Asteroth has greatly enhanced the power of options of particle effects, while also optimizing them. As always, there’s many other devs adding great fixes, features, and other enhancements, too.
Moving Forward
As always, thank you all for your support and enthusiasm, and especially the support for TopAce. We are steadily moving closer to completing our internal milestones for a public release. Once those goals are met and polished, we very much look forward to sharing the game with this amazing community.
May the Force be with you.
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I like the use of the music in that video, avoiding direct use of copyrighted materials, by making something that feels similar and approaches the same score, but is different.
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Thanks, that is an example of one of the many tracks that swashmebuckle made custom for FotG, which he did a fantastic job on. Thanks to swash, we will ship with a completely custom soundtrack. :)