Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Fate of the Galaxy => Topic started by: wookieejedi on August 10, 2024, 08:56:55 am
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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 during the summer. A highlight list includes the following:
- Added a fully armed and operational Star Wing, which marks a ship that has waited many moons to see full integration into FotG thanks to the work of both zookeeper and Dark Visor.
- Added new closeup skyboxes for planets and asteroid fields from Dark Visor. Also added nebula and asteroid 'planet' style bitmaps so FREDers can now really create a huge range of custom backgrounds for their missions. FotG has 54 unique planet backgrounds, 15 nebula components to layer in any combination, and 3 asteroid colors to combine (and of course FRED lets mission designers set the position and scale of any background elements along with add many at once to a mission). Hopefully this will give folks who might want to make their own missions a wide range of options.
- Updated all ships to use full capabilities of PBR shaders (by updating all ships with reflect maps). Previously, all internal cockpits had reflect maps thanks to Limbert, but now all the ship exteriors do as well. The benefits include that the Fresnel effect now properly works and is visible for external ships, which provides a subtle cinematic improvement. Also, the fine-scale surface texture is now varied with imperfections so that specular highlights look more realistic, and overall the PBR lighting effects are consistent between ships now. (And for anyone curious, the PBR values are based on the materials the OT ships were made of, along with accounting for dirt and blast marks on the ship diffuse textures).
- Updated all planet background bitmaps to 4k, which allows them to be used in the new closeup planet skybox with relatively better resolution and clarity. Thanks again to Dark Visor for creating that planet skybox and to Lafiel for updating FSO to allow texture replacements on skyboxes (otherwise we would have needed 60 separate skyboxes).
- Updated the U-wing with a set of wing color textures that now match the style and coloring of the rest of the Rebel ships (thanks Limbert!), while also tuning up other texture components on the ship. Recall the U-wing was an asset shared with us by LarsH, and now it's consistent with our internal aesthetic.
- Updated the TIE Bomber, V38, and Action 6 with fully extracted AO maps. This completes the full AO extraction of all textures started many moons ago.
- Updated AI to be a bit smarter in more cases by utilizing newer FSO features, such as ensuring AI will respect the mission designer’s choices when setting which ships can be attacked, optimizing the decisions that turbolasers use when checking Line-of-Sight with a target, allowing ships to send automatic wingmen backup messages in a more spaced out/natural sounding timing, and updated ship-ship collisions involving fighter-sized ships so that they more closely resemble the movies (such as Darth Vader being flung from the Death Star trench).
- Updated Project Alderaan with many fixes, polish, and cleanup.
- Updated and fixed many other components with cleanup and fixes, which are too long to list here!
Community Connections
As always, we want to highlight all the amazing work that the FSO and SCP devs do, too. The dev team has continued adding optimizations, code cleanup, bug fixes, and many other updates that FotG uses. Just to name a few, MJN has added unlimited debris and asteroid types and continues updating the SCPUI, taylor continued to update various internal code components and cleanup some multiplayer standalone code, Goober has added multiple enhancements and cleanup, and Lafiel has provided a skybox texture replace along with graphics cleanup/fixes for MSAA, cockpits, and more. In addition, ShivianSPS, taylor, and Cyborg have pushed many updates for the excellent Knossos.NET launcher, which FotG will be releasing on. As always, there’s many other devs adding great fixes, features, and other enhancements, too.
Moving Forward
We also want to thank everyone for your continued enthusiasm and support! We are getting very close to our internal milestones for a public release and are excited to share the game with you all once those are completed. In the meantime, here are some new shots of a new ship and more. May the Force be with you!
May the Force be with you.
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/664880631586750482/1239663566672498779/image.png?ex=66b86aea&is=66b7196a&hm=5b723e021ae6d06c8253a60fe96e9d277a4af01777bedba4909328ce48ec4368&)
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/664880631586750482/1245546287743635689/image.png?ex=66b8b9a0&is=66b76820&hm=8a74d87717d86c3d5c3c488c2d533531920f8297b030be0d04cd021e6e662893&)
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It's great to read these updates, but shouldn't you really release an open beta by now? Judging from the changelog most entries are only about ship details implying that the campaign itself is finished. Disney is really wearing the Star Wars franchise down, so if you wait too long, nobody might be interested anymore! As for fear of copyright issues, this project has been out for almost a year now:
https://www.indiedb.com/games/open-galaxy/news/open-galaxy-30-is-released
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Good question! And yes, a lot of these changes are not related to the first 3 story campaigns :) Overall, some of the biggest internal milestones we have left are working on expanding campaigns 4-6 (ie the Project Alderaan campaigns), as they are not quite fully feature complete yet. Also, given we want to keep the aspects of Project Alderaan a surprise for release, the newsletter update above only has that one vague line about Project Alderaan work, but really that includes a very large amount of time/work.
Overall, while all the ship content and core game are indeed done and stable, we really want the first-time folks play FotG to feel rich and fully formed in the campaigns. Similarly, we always are operating under the assumption that we might only have 1 official release before getting a letter from Disney. To be fair, this assumption seems not as likely, but we don't want to risk it when there are still campaign features left to enhance. :) We are striving to make sure this situation does not come to pass, as we very much want to support and keep releasing FotG updates after initial launch!
And indeed, that SW project is really quite cool, and we have had contact with the developer for over a year now! It is really impressive work for just one person, and again speaks to probability of mods/public projects surviving. Though, that project is still new-ish and has a long way to go to be feature complete for a whole game that would make it more noticeable in our opinion (again, the dev is great, it's just that FotG is quite a bit more further along since we have had the luxury of a larger team, the FSO devs, and much more time).