Welcome to February! The month of love. And judging by the results in
this thread, the Temeraire is going to be getting a lot of Valentines!
But my heart belongs to another ship, and before I go out and order chocolate for it, lets see what we did in January.
Not quite a campaign, but the aptly named
2014 Mediavps have been released! So many new models, so little room here to tell you about them, so just download it if you haven't already!
Remember how I told you about a crazy campaign in development with Cylons and Shivans and... other things to blow up. Well there's a
demo out now! Its a one man, first mod ever sort of thing, so really keep that in mind if you want to try it out.
Battuta's been a posting madman lately, and some of it
teases you with the inner workings of Blue Planet: War in Heaven Act 4. There's also neat stuff about
Vasudans and BP3, and even a War in Heaven
VOICE ACTING DEATHMARCH. Does this guy sleep?
And Diaspora has an initial release on their
1.1 patch, now including amazingly rendered briefing cutscenes.
I mean check it out!And in our frequently updating mini-mod showcase: Black Wolf, working on
Frontlines teases us with a picture of a new Vasudan Station, and Rheyah working on
Shetland teases us with stock tips that are sure to pay off in 383 years. (I've already put my money away!)
And if you're looking for an updated classic to play, the FSCRP has you covered with a dual release of
Incursion and Return to SOL. (Props to Macfie for pointing out I forgot this!)
by niffiwanOnwards to February... and I'm running out of time to get this to Axem and I can't think of anything decently witty or interesting to put here so have some random blatherings instead...
(and yeah, I should really appreciate the weather I have a lot more!!!
)
And now for a little copy-pasta; 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. 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!
- From December; red-alert will now work with ships that appear at some point subsequent to mission start - Goober5000 (the old behaviour was that a ship that was not present at mission start would ignore any red alert data from the previous mission)
- Add scaling option to Yarns hud gauges - niffiwan (modders can now choose if they want to automatically scale gauges or not; default is the scaling)
- Allow training missions to also show mission goals - karajorma (pretty much self explanatory)
- Add support for replaying briefing and command briefing cutscenes - karajorma (say hello to beautiful briefing cutscenes in Diaspora 1.1)
- add the Call-SSM-Strike SEXP - X3N0-Life-Form (a simpler way to add missiles of subspace doom!)
- add $Velocity Inherit weapons table option - zookeeper (i.e. the percentage of the parent ship's velocity that is inherited by the weapon)
- add $Acceleration Time weapons table option - zookeeper (modders can now change the default 1 sec accelerate-to-max-velocity time for secondaries)
- add "no homing speed ramp" weapon flag - zookeeper (similar to the previous feature, this allows the removal of the 1 sec speed up time)
- scripting access to ship orders; also allows modifying some order values - Admiral MS
- add scripting function to get the wing of a ship - Admiral MS
- add scripting function to get the waypoint-list of a waypoint - Admiral MS (all three of these give more scripting options which will see use in Admiral MS's RTS mod, hurrah!)
- Add -profile_write_file options to write frame times to a file - from m!m (makes it easier to graph framerates when testing performance improvements)
Rounding out the months coding commits, we had more bugfixes and Coverity fixes. Yay!
Echelon9 has created a
Newbie Projects wiki page, a list of easy tasks that would be suitable for any new coders wishing to start working on the FSO codebase. This is a great idea to lower the barrier of entry into coding for FSO, and we're always interested in more coders!
Also from Echelon9 is some work on
rationalisation of the AI code. The AI code is a fairly scary part of FSO and it's easy to break AI behaviour by accident so rationalisation work is good. As long as we don't break the AI code in the process of trying to make it harder to break the AI code...
m!m has done some work on
Shader Refactoring. It's a reorganisation into simpler and more object-oriented code, with a benefit of some performance improvements. The only unfortunate side effect is that this the same area of the code that Swifty has
been working on, so there's a need to sync/merge the changes together to ensure that they don't conflict with each other. Regardless of that, it's good refactoring work
Spicious has released a
new version of PCS2. The main features is an increased submodel normals limit, the limit is now 64k total normals per submodel whereas it used to be around 30k or so. Some extra minor goodies are displaying the vertex count instead of the poly/tri count, and some performance improvements.
FelixJim has posted a planned update for the
In-Mission Techroom Script. It's still a plan at this stage as there's one outstanding bug that needs code review (calling all
code reviewers!!) and to be committed to trunk. Anyway, the plans will remove a number of limitations in the current script - all very cool.
Also from FelixJim is an update to the
Simple Animation Script. Chock full of goodies to help modders create freeform briefings, so go check it out.
Now, call off the hounds of pestering because Goober has released a beta of his
promised cross-platform installer! On time too, with about 5 mins to spare
While there were a few serious bugs in the 1st version, these have been cleaned up (congratulations to m!m for spotting the most serious issue) and it's looking pretty good. While it's not quite ready for a public release more testing is always good, so if you have some spare time download it, give it a go and report back with your experiences.
And it seems to be the season for installers, LogicalMadness has come out of nowhere with a
Windows Installshield based installer (the rd in 3 months!). It's also in a beta state and I'm sure he'd appreciate testing and feedback so that it can be improved.
And lastly, since it doesn't seem to be getting much attention here's a reminder about
Antipodes 9: SDL Everywhere. This is a feature we (the SCP) want to be in the next FSO stable release, so it would be great to get some more testing & feedback on it. And I'd like to make a special call to anyone who has a force-feedback joystick since one of the main features of Antipodes 9 is SDL support for force-feedback. Not many of the coders have these so we'd really appreciate more testing so we can ensure that the new code works as expected, and we can move closer to being able to commit this into trunk.
Cool Col. Hornet has continued his amazing progress on the
amazing GTCa Hera. Link goes to the first post with an up to date p3d window and wow, that size comparision with the Raynor! I fear how many fighters that thing could carry!
From the depths of the underworld, peterv returns! With presents! The
GTF Ierax. A Valkyrie-like fighter that is sure to either ruin your day, or your opponents!
Aesaar and Hades are teaming up to
reimagine some of the FreeSpace 2 fighters based on concept art that StarSlayer drew eons ago. Right now there's just the Herc II, the turkiest of all Terran fighters.
An4ximandros has another
ship wip (apparently his 10^100 x 10^100th try), and it sure looks like a fun model to fly through while trying to lose trailing Shivan fighters! (Hey An4x, when can we see the other umpthmillion ships?! Sincerely, your secret fan, Axem)
Whitearrow has announced that his
heavy frigate is done the modelling stage (with only 60,000 polygons!). So while we wait for that monster to be finished lets enjoy some pretty renders.
ShadowWolf is taking an old fighter, Aldo's
Claymore 2b, and given it a bit of a facelift. I can't wait to fly it and pray the engine pylons don't get blown to bits!
In MediaVP territory, those guys are still working hard even with the release of the 2014 mediavps.
Lc4Hunter continues his
Iceni model. Bosch will be able to demand access to the Sirius jump node in so much style, that Command will have no choice but to let him go... (Waitaminute...)
Oddgrim continues to use his
insane texturing powers for good and not evil by starting work on Hades' insane Leviathan. (Can you find the easter eggs he has hidden on the textures?)
As well Hades gives the
Fenris a related update to match the Levithan's new style. Oh Fenris, why couldn't you take more hits and be a little more useful? (FYI Fenris is on the right)
And finally we close this section with Rga Noris's early WIP of a
new Moloch! Hooray!
This month's article is about
Mission Infrastructure and Checkpoints. It's really long, so I put it up on the wiki. Its got fun and colorful pictures!
Basically I explain a semi-simple system of allowing you to divide your mission into chunks so you can skip to parts without having to play the parts before. This helps with testing long missions. And as a side-effect, it makes adding checkpoints a breeze. Adding the checkpoint was the EASIEST PART.
Seriously, this stuff comes in super handy when you have a mission that has
this many events (Thank goodness for multi-monitors!)
Next month: Cutscene sexps, this most idiosyncratic sexps in FreeSpace. And... that's saying something.
by mjn.mixaelLast month's theme was Rage. There weren't too many entries, but some really nice ones showed up in just the last few days.
It took me quite some time to choose the winner this month... I really liked several of the images, but in the end.. I kept finding myself going back to one in particular. I love the angle of the scene and how it draws your eye across the bow of the ship, over weapons and straight to the explosion. Very well composed shot from a great looking mod.
CKid wins the first month of the year with this one.
Honorable mention to
Droid's post because that was full of win. Although, I was properly quoted as saying I didn't care what was in the image.. I thought it went without saying that these are meant to be in-mission screenshots! But I give Droid and Lorric extra props for thinking outside the skybox. (C wut I did thar?)
Screencap Scoreboard:
Ckid - 1 As a reminder, we're going to do things slightly differently this year. Our many campaigns are filled with emotional ups, downs, and/or lackthereof. So we'll highlight that with a whole year's worth of emotional themes. I don't care what's in the image as long as it portrays the particular feeling for the month. And yes, February
is be the month of Love. (I recommend lots of red or pink colored images!)
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.
BlackWolf's started a
CBAni reference wiki drive project march revolution... thing. Help out and... be eternally satisfied with inner peace.
Also, as if Battuta isn't doing enough, he also managed to
kidnap Spoon and reveal all the secrets of his... secrets. (One day I will be kawaii* as Spoon)
(TL Note: Kawaii means cute)Also props to Rga Noris for taking some pics when p3d suddenly stopped working for me!
