Ho ho ho! Merry Shivanmas, everyone! Bring out your trees and get ready for a visit from Sathanas Claus! If you've been a good boy and/or girl, he'll invite you for a tour of his workshop. If not, your homeworld gets glassed over.
So what presents did we get last month?
What's this? A picture heavy preview post for a total conversion?
Yes, please! Check out all of Eiswolf's cool pics for his Aerotech TC, which I've touched on before.
Two FREDders have made announcements for their small mini-campaigns! First is Bullhorn and a GTVA-NTF campaign called
Ex Orbito. 3-5 missions, done in about a month? Sounds almost perfect... just need some pics in there... hint. Hint.
FIZ is also looking at making a
campaign based on the squadrons of FS2 before Alpha 1 came by and stole all the fame for himself. Let's all give him the feedback to go make an amazing set of stories!
Going back to Bullhorn for a second, he's started a FRED game of sorts,
Operation Dynamic. Two sides, each controlled by a FREDder, plan their own side of an operation, with Bullhorn being the ref. This really sounds very good and fun. I have high hopes to see something great come from this. (It's like Squad War, only for FREDders!)
And of course we have our three usual campaigns dealing out bite-sized chunks of updates.
Frontlines has tugs, dynamic action reports and bombs.
Shetland has more WORDS (but very soft and fluffy words). And JAD has...
a race course with beams and ego.
by niffiwanAnother month so soon? And for those welcoming the cold weather in the northern hemisphere, spare a thought for those in the southern currently sweltering their way towards summer... I wish you could send some of that cold weather our way
Anyway, on with the show, 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. So 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!
- excluding weapons from linked fire penalty - Wanderer (i.e. a per-weapon flag in addition to the existing AI profiles flag)
- scramble messages on a per-ship basis - Goober5000
- model point shields - zookeeper (switch your deflectors on double front)
- allow modder to specify countermeasure type on a per-species basis - Goober5000
- Persona-specific promotion debriefings - Yarn (i.e. you can switch between different personas in the same campaign/mod)
- Add support for the framecap menu option - chief1983 (for WebUI standalone servers)
- WebUI features including support for an alternate management port, non-default usernames/passwords, and writing to the fs2_standalone.log - Echelon9
- Adds depth buffer access to post processing shaders (via use of the depth_tex uniform) - The_E (this allows cel shading, see below for more detail)
- Allow briefing icons for ships & wings to be specified per ship & per wing - Goober5000 (the old way was per species only)
Apart from the features, there's been more bugfixes, more support for XCode5 on OSX, Goober5000 has finished his memset/memcopy refactoring and a few more Coverity related fixes.
Wanderer is looking to restart work to complete
Objecttypes support. This is pretty cool, and here's an example which will show some of that coolness. Say you have a cargo depot and you want a cruiser to arrive and blow away all the cargo (thanks to BlackWolf for the example). Currently FSO will not let the cruiser open fire on the cargo, probably due to various missions in FS1/FS2 which required this sort of behaviour. If you do want the cruiser to open fire, you need to add a hack like putting an invisible no-collide enemy ship inside the cargo (thanks to zookeeper for the solution). However, objecttypes gives an alternative, you could add a new class called "cargo_killin_cruiser" and add cargo to the allowed targeting list, or just change the existing cruiser entry if you don't have any missions where you need cruisers to ignore cargo. Pretty cool eh? There's more info on the
wiki. And if you're a modder with an opinion on the default object type for non-retail ships, go post in the thread linked above. Feedback is good!
Moving along, Hellzed has posted a
bash installation script for Linux that extracts the VPs from the GOG installer. Very useful if you don't want to mess with WINE, or install on Windows. There also seems to be a followup in progress that could do also install mods, intriguing...
In wxFRED2 land, z64555 has posted another
progress report. The wxFRED2 code has now been linked into the rest of the FSO code for all platforms, which means the way is clear to work on more than just the interface. Happy days
Swifty has given us all a real treat with a preview of his
Variance Shadow Maps (aka Soft shadows) WIP. That's a mighty fine looking feature, looking forward to seeing it added to trunk in future
On the scriping front, Scooby_Doo has updated his
rotating animation scriptAnd lastly, in the new features section I mentioned CEL shading, and here are the results. Kobrar has created some
GLSL shaders to give that objects that cartoony look, perfect for mods with a certain feel/theme. Some ships work well without any changes, others may need some texture tweaks in order to look their best. There's another pic and a video showcasing this over in the
Celebration of Freespace thread. I don't believe that all the issues have been ironed out yet, but it's still a great effort.
The Media VP team has released an
open beta of the 2014 Media VPs! Loads of new and exciting ships! Check it out, dudes!
Are you ready to ROCK OUT?
fightermedic's got some giant asteroids ready to crash into your ships. Or for you to crash into. Point is, something's going to be crashing into these things. Because why else would you add them?
The Inferno team has showed off their giant
Sol Gate. This being Inferno, we need to ask: Just HOW big is it?
AFAIK even Gigas or Icanus would suit in the current Solgate...
But what about the Gargants! WHAT. ABOUT. THE GARGANTS?!
Headdie's also been updating his workshop thread with two new ships. A
Vasudan cruiser and a
Terran corvette. We've even got some sights of some texturing going on... Always a fantastic sign!
DahBlount has apparently made some big changes to his
GTD Nuadha... but I can't seem to find them. No pics and the p3d link seems to have vanished... Someone, halp.
But what he DOES have an update on is his sleek looking fighter, the
Ningirama. Such a fin-e ship. Okay, that pun doesn't work... I'll think of something later.
Hey Col. Hornet, how's your super cool
GTF Hydra going?
I decided to stop the modelling process. The model is now undergoing the UV mapping.
Aw, I can't make a screenshot of that! I'll just use this pic instead.
Oddgrim, what is this?! ANOTHER Vasudan Cruiser? What are we going to do with all these ships? Make some sort of... campaign with them?
Scooby's got a
brand new thread for his WIP ships! Now with p3d embedded stuff! Anyway, his pair of new ships this month is the Imp and the Super Hornet.
So, hey. p3d has quickly become an integral part of showing off our works in progress.
whitearrow has taken it upon himself to begin to maintain
a list of us with p3d accounts modellers are using around HLP!
Windmills.
How do I even start with you? There's just too much to talk and discuss. So many weird and unrelated angles to approach this. It's so different and unlike all other campaigns in nearly every way.
Let's start off with a quick description of Windmills for people who haven't played it (who could those people possibly be, anyway?!). You're part of a simulation where you play as GTVA Command. Give orders to ships for them to act. Your actions will draw reactions from your opponents. Send in a reinforcement cruiser? Enemy sends bombers. Don't save a specific ship? Well, that will cost you later. So simple, yet so highly nerve wracking.
Everything's got a very Defcon-ish feel to it . Since this is, supposedly, a simulation, we're treated to retail ships with super glowing colors. Red or Green. (Guess which ones are yours.) The sound track is quiet but still creepy. You see everything, and control everything, but you're so helpless. The sounds are so distant that all you can hear are the beams, ships warping in, and their deaths.
Fight valiantly? Use your ships wisely in cunning tactics? Well, the enemy doesn't care. They'll send in a destroyer from nowhere with little for you to react other than "accept you just lost 5,000 brave men". There is no fairness here. You complete the missions to the best of your abilities, and even then its never good enough for the war effort. There's so many mutually exclusive choices you're forced to make with no idea how they will pan out later on. Does that convoy really mean anything? Does that disabled cruiser?
In typical Ransom fashion, we're treated to a blurring of every sort of line. From morality, motivations, and of course, reality. (Funny story, sometimes Windmills likes to crash with newer builds and I was wondering for a few minutes if this wasn't one of Ransom's tricks. But alas, it was real crashes) The campaign is short, but densely packed with ideas that you really need to go and experience in the campaign. I don't want to give too much away because so much of the campaign is atmosphere and the raw experience.
I know this review is kind of sparse and short, but the less you know what you're getting into, the better. It's just one of those weird and awesome campaigns.
The idea behind this is just so great and awesome and just highlights the modding scene here. I'm not just talking about the campaign, but the idea that we can do things with the engine that just goes completely out of the box. If, in 1999, you told me half the stuff we have in campaigns these days: GTVA command simulators (Windmills, RTS Script), shoot-em-up inspired adventures (The Antagonist, SHUMPSpace), complex player controlled dialog (BP:WiH), and even teenaged girls buying food at the store (JAD), I would go "Are we still talking about FreeSpace? (Also that last idea sounds interesting)".
I can only hope that we're going to see more Windmills and other insane campaigns in the future.
No idea what or when the next campaign spotlight will be! Stay tuned for how this is going to change!
(In the meantime, look around the forums for InsaneBaron's most excellent reviews! Quite more indepth than mine that talk about everything in the mod, rather than just my general musing about it)
by mjn.mixaelLast month's theme was 2013 Modding Contest. There were
very few entries. It was a tough choice. Son I am dissapoint. However, the winner is...
ssmit132 showing off two of neat new models in an asteroid field.
Screencap Scoreboard:
ssmit132 - 2X3N0-Life-Form - 1
FreeSpaceFreak - 1
mjn.mixael - 1
Belisarius - 1
MatthTheGeek - 1
knossosfs2 - 1
Betrayal - 1
Aesaar - 1
Axem - 1
ssmit132 is now the year's leader! December is the last month for the year and it's still possible to tie up the score and win the year if you've already got a point on the board!
That said, December is the perfect month for you to jump in for the first time because December's theme is '
Anything Goes!'. Any shot of anything doing anything is eligible for entry!
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.
The newsletter is going to be a little different next year! Instead of monthly campaign reviews, we're going to jazz it up a bit. The segments will go into a rotation, one month a FREDding tutorials/tips article, another month: interviews, and then a campaign review the next. But January's issue won't have any of those, because I'll be working on the mega 2013 release video instead.
But if you have an idea and are able to write something up all by yourself, please feel free to submit it!
Or just general ideas is fine too!
