[Aardwolf]

2D FS will be released for development shortly (probably sometime today or tomorrow). What this means is, a version with all of the features needed to build ships and weapons will be ready.

Send links to any screenshots you may have--this project needs publicity!

If you should choose to try your hand at building the effects, ships, and weapons of 2D FS, please try to keep things as similar to the real game as possible--statistics, images, sizes of things, etc. Any animated effects should probably be made by extracting the frames from .ani's and saving them as .jpg's. That's how I did it. For ships and weapons, use FRED2_Open with -glow. Make screenshots of the same types you see in the Images directory, using a similar naming convention, and include the data in your Images.tbl file.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, it's because I haven't released it yet. Don't worry, and good luck!

[Aardwolf]

http://www.esnips.com/web/2d-fs2

If it works, you should see a link to download Packed2DFS.rar, do so and run the .jar file inside, if you can't, you must compile the java file, and for that you need the jdk. Good modding.

[Aardwolf]

Due to some bugs I have found and additional features I have decided to include, a patched version of the program will soon be released. It will include the .jar file, the .class files, and the .java file, but will not include any Image or Table data. Please reply if you have comments.

Example: You should add a field in the Test.tbl file that controls whether there is fog or not.
Reply: Great idea. In fact, I've already done it, and will release the modified version shortly.

[Aardwolf]

The patch is on the same website, but I will provide the link once again. This should replace the .jar file, and if necessary, the .java and .class files. You will need the other, packed version to get the Images. Tables are included and feature descriptive (or somewhat desciptive) descriptions of what things do. These should probably only be used as guides, because your changes, should you choose to make any, may be impeded by the comments. It's just copy and paste for the most part. And ALT + PRINTSCREEN. When you're done, submit your tables, or the changed parts of the tables, either as attached files or in code using the BBCode code feature.

Once again, the link is http://www.esnips.com/web/2d-fs2.

[Ferret]

What do you do with this.

[Aardwolf]

I'm not sure what you mean, but I'll try to explain how to use it.

You need to have Java, for starters. It's a .rar file, so you'll also need a RAR-extractor. Extract the contents. Once you've done that, try opening the .jar file. It should open in Java, and it will display a small window for about twenty(?) seconds, after which the main game window will display. It starts paused.

Controls:

Pause/Unpause: Enter
Accelerate: A or Up Arrow
Decelerate: NONE
Rotate Left: Left Arrow
Rotate Right: Right Arrow
Fire Primaries: Control
Fire Secondaries: Space Bar
Zoom In: +/=
Zoom Out: -
Zoom Normal: 0
Afterburners: S

There is no display of your shields, but they are evenly distributed around your ship (single variable, not four) and they will absorb damage. Also, afterburner fuel is not displayed, but it is there, and you can get a boost from it.

I may later add a table line $Afterburner Accel: <double> which will determine how much the afterburner increases your speed, and I may work on fixing the fluctuating speed problem that occurs when you hold S after depleting your afterburner reserves.

I hope I answered your question. If I didn't, please rephrase it in a more meaningful way.

[Ferret]

Yes yes I did work out how to control it. I mean what are we supposed to do with it. It just ends up being a Herc sitting there firing in a weird way against a non-parallax scrolling star field.

[Aardwolf]

Well, my intention was to encourage a few modders who are interested in the sort of thing to do some modding, and to compile a table set encompassing all of the best weapons, ships, and image, and to include in the \images directory the corresponding images, so that when version 1.0 is released, it will be more than a ship just sitting there. This is not the finished product. This is just me asking the modding community for some help with a FreeSpace-related project.

Also, if you get any good combinations, post some screenshots showing the weapons and ships in them. Read the guidelines in the first post as well.

[Speeder]

Well, I don't think anyone would go on modding your game here, as noone really did mine ^^
Othervise, when I run it, it loads then it doesn't actually move at all... I have no idea why it does that

[Aardwolf]

This one's pretty simple...

It starts paused.

Controls:

Pause/Unpause: Enter

Also, if there's no action after that other than you flying around, try replacing the original table files with the patched ones.

[Speeder]

Ah, yea, I've tried it out, my bad ^^
First impressions:
The AI's pretty nice, guess it's very fine for a shoot 'em up! The game also looks pretty versatile at first glance.
On my computer (Athlon XP 1500+ @ ~2075MHz, Club3D Radeon 9700, 512MB RAM @ 333MHz) it ran awfully slowly (around 15fps or so). It slows down when it needs to display a few laser projectiles of the player (and I also didn't see any lasers on the other ships) so I think it dies bcuz of the stretch/rotating code to display the many laser pictures.
Some controls don't work on a keyboard setting other than yours, you should capture keys from the onkeydown and onkeyup instead of the onkeypress, that way you assign to a key instead of a generated character. (KeyCode map on MSDN)

Anyway, if you wish to develop a well playable game, I really, really recommend to use DirectX or OpenGL, bcuz without those, you simply won't be able to display nice enough looking graphics on even a high grade computer. GDI is just too slow (And that's experience from FS2D ^^) Of course you can probably optimize the engine much here there and everywhere, but that's not just it.

[Dark RevenantX]

when i use the jar file, it just extracts and does nothign.

[Aardwolf]

What OS do you use? I think, if you can extract from a jar file, you probably have Java on your computer, so try this:

java -jar "Path\Mission.jar"

where Path is the path to the file. I don't know if the underscore is necessary. This is what NetBeans prescribes for running it without Ant. I don't even know what Ant is, although I suspect it's got something to do with scripting. Anyway, run this command, and it should work. I have also recently noticed that there is a bug with making images that are both animated and masked. I do not have a solution for this yet, but I may look into it.

Also, if what I said above doesn't work, try compiling the file Mission.java and running java on it directly instead of through the jar file. To do this, open the directory with the .class files in your command prompt or whatever your OS equivalent is, and run this:

java Mission

I hope this solves your problem.

[Speeder]

uhm, WinACE can unpack jars for sure... I think WinRAR and WinZIP can unpack them too, maybe even Total Commander : >
Is it not possible to compile the game to an executable btw?

[Aardwolf]

The problem isn't unpacking it, the problem is getting it to RUN the jar file without unpacking it.