[KARMA]

I've started playing at it these days with some friends, and it's surely excellent.

It is like Natural Selection (mod for Half Life) but much more complex and difficult. It is SO difficult that you will hardly realize what's going on the first games and you'll need many hours of play to begin understand it (I'm hardly beginning to)

Each team has a commander who decide the strategy and manage the RTS side of the game, collecting resources, building structures, placing minefields, deciding what technologies to research.

Players will choose the ship from what's avaiable and decide the loadout. They can also choose capitalships, or big bombers and transports, and they'll need other players to play on their turretts. When you get destroyed, you are in a pod and you have to return home, if you get killed you return imediatly at home, the same if other players recover you.
As a pilot you'll have to explore the different systems of a map, kill/protect resource collectors, kill/protect/conquer installations, dogfight, etc.

The game also has a semi-realistic inertial physic, which makes the combat action very funny

A good commander will organize the actions because obviously an organized team will win easily against a non organized one with the players doing whatever they want.

I've played in a server with 58 players, I have a sucking adsl and I'm from italy, but nonetheless there were NO (perceived) lagg at all!

The graphic is...mmm....of a game of the same fs2 period, which mean that almost any system will handle the game (min requirementes are a p 200 IIRC), even mine!.

The game is free  and can be downloaded here with the patch : http://www.freeallegiance.org/login.shtml
You'll also need ASGS, an authentication program built by the community. follow the instructions

I heavily suggest you to play all the training missions and to read the manuals here  http://web123.s1.okayspace.de/MyAcademy/index.htm before getting to real action.

Considering that MS has recently released the Source Code, it could really become a kickass game if they'll be able to start a project even only 50% as good as the SCP
check it out;)

[Zarax]

Maybe taking a look at their source may give the SCP guys some ah... inspiration... *wink**wink*
Seriously, even though the code is pretty different it can give some ideas about implementing some features...
I'm sure a lot of FREDers would appreciate some real campaign management feature...
There was a MOD which once attempted at creating a dynamic campaign where the player took the decision about which system to go and so on but i cam't really remember the name...

[KARMA]

but it isn't a single-player game, it's a team based multiplayer only game (with the possibility to have more teams on the same gme)
The commanders manage the resources and the strategy in an homeworld-like interface.
It isn't a dynamic-campaign/mission based game.

[Zarax]

I'm aware of that, and i'm not saying, "hey, just copy and paste the code guys", but nonetheless there is (or at least there was) a certain request for new campaign management features, and what i mean is that it might be a source of ideas, not a place where to randomly pick bits of code and put it somewhere else...
Games are the least place where you will find reusable code...

[Singh]

looks good so far...considering joining this - provided i have the time

[Rampage]

Wasn't this the game that came out years ago, released by Microsoft, and closely resembled Freespace?  After it became costly to play on the Zone, I really don't know what happened.

[KARMA]

yes, exactly.
MS stopped supported it years ago, making it abandonware, but the community was able to host a dozen of good servers, and a week ago MS released the source code of the game.
There's a community history btw in the second link I posted above

[demon442]

I've downloaded the game and patch(both painfully and with many attempts), but that ASGS link does not seem to work or the forum it was hosted on is/was down.  As soon as I can get ASGS, you can count on me to shoot down torpedos for you.