I hope summer is treating everyone well! You know, if outside is too hot and humid, why not stay inside and play some FreeSpace campaigns? With that FreeSpace installer back in action, it's easier than ever to get some nice content.
Admiral Ralwood (aka MageKing17 if you're on IRC) took some time out of his monster bug hunting to make a voice acted demo mission for his personal project,
Falcons Strike First. Details are a little sketchy but according to him…
"It's not very good."
W-wait. That's horrible! Be sure to play it and give him some nice constructive advice!
Hey, you know Inferno? Everyone loves Inferno. You know what everyone else loves? Screenshots.
Well lookie here.
I'm content now.
TheHound has some pretty screenshots, and even a bit of fluff text for his
Venece Mirror campaign. Like we have this neat little Fenris-like ship.
When LSR risen in Laramis to overthrow the oppressive GTVA goverment, they still lacked numbers, and Midgard was just an answer to this. This ship, nicknamed a "cyan fenris" has been refitted with number of unknown technologies possessed by LSR, and mass produced in their secret shipyard to fill the gaps as screening ships for their battle groups.
Secret shipyards?! Sounds spine-tingly-dingly!
Lepanto gives us an update on his
Sophrosyne campaign:Work on the demo has progressed slower than I'd hoped; motivation has been low, I'm working on other FS and non-FS projects, and building a detailed modpack is tedious. I still hope to release the demo by the end of the month, but no promises.
Take your time! If you rush through it, you'll be cleaning up all these annoying errors for months after release… (I know how that goes) On the plus side, he gives us a preview of his beam flare gameplay concept.
And Rheyah gives us some great screenshots and some great writing for
Shetland/Ephesus!They seem to understand that I am unlike them. I have never seen them eat or speak, even to me and yet day after day a receptacle of some foul liquid is brought to my chamber, if you can call this such a place. The first time, I was forced to choke it down. Now, as the hours, days and weeks pass me by, I grow accustomed to its taste. It has a metallic tang to it, much like I imagine a tube of mercury might taste were it not lethal. I did not ask them for this. They simply seemed to understand.
Yeah, I don't think I'll be having the soup. Maybe just some chocolate popcorn.
That's more like it.
And in just a interesting 7-year bump to a thread, Fregle compiled a list of
chronologically ordered campaigns from the around the Ancient Shivan War to time FreeSpace 2 takes place. Not that you should play them in that order if you're just starting out, but if you've played one campaign there, it might be interesting to play another in the same time frame. See if they connect at all!
by niffiwan The 3.7.2 Release Candidate (RC) phase is steaming ahead with the release of
RC3 this month. RC4 is probably due "soon", we're just seeing if we can get a few more mantis tickets resolved/fixed before its released.
New features! (with a few "big" bugs thrown in)
- Fix a bug in the when-argument sexp - MageKing17 (also known as the "BP: WIH: Her Finest Hour: artillery bugged out" bug)
- Fix a bug in the campaign persistent variable code - MageKing17 (also known as the "BP: WIH: Her Finest Hour: too many spaceframes lost" bug)
- Add support for voice acting in fiction viewer - m!m (now all you need to do is find someone to record the audio!)
- Added multiple scripting features related to messaging as requested by Axem - m!m (Axem has used these to create a scripted HUD messages gauge, see below for details)
- Raise MAX_PATH_LEN to 256 so FSO can run in long paths - niffiwan (triggered by the Steam release, this lets FSO run when installed in locations like "Program Files")
- Fix loadout (Ship/Weapon Select effect) rendering black models or no effect - MageKing17 (fixes a very obvious bug for people with AMD video cards)
- Fix beam sounds not panning correctly - MageKing17 (this is a bug, but its such a visible one that its worth mentioning here!)
- Add arg so end-campaign sexp can ignore the death screen - niffiwan (allows a FREDer to prevent the end-campaign sexp from triggering when the player is dead)
- Fix various issues with ships in nebula - MageKing17 (fixes another very noticeable bug, especially with mediavps_2014)
- Add a new setting to game_settings.tbl, "$Briefing Window FOV:" under Graphics - The E (allow customisation of the FOV used in briefings; which was recently reverted to its retail value)
- Allow missions to exit to mainhall on successful completion - niffiwan (this is a small part of something really cool that Axem is cooking up)
- Text color tags do not work in debriefings. Also allows color spans in text to cover line breaks - MageKing17 (now your debriefs can also look like they have Christmas lights!)
- Adds new section to game_settings.tbl, "$Disable Hard Coded Message Head Ani Files:" under a new section "#FRED SETTINGS" - FUBAR-BDHR (allow TCs to prevent the FS2 retail head anis from showing in FRED)
- Allow any resolution for mainhalls - Yarn (HD mainhalls are coming to you soon!)
Here's the current bugs scoreboard. The bugs on mantis have taken a beating - great work! And there have been lots of Coverity issues fixed as well, so it's been a very good month for FSO bugfixing
| | fixed | new | delta | outstanding |
| Coverity (this month) | 38 | 6 | 32 | 407 |
| Mantis (last 30 days) | 36 | 20 | 16 | 176 |
(Mantis includes 34 feature requests, so outstanding bugs is really 142)
DahBlount has put out
a call for info from those people using Intel video cards. Historically FSO and Intel haven't played nicely together, Intel OpenGL support has been a bit dodgey in the past and because of this, none (IIRC) of the current SCP coders use an Intel video card. However, recent Intel cards have come a long way so it's good to re-examine the current "prejudice" vs Intel cards to see if the issues are still valid. After all they're still a very widely used video card (bundling them with an excellent CPU will tend to do that
). Anyway, lots of waffle there, so TLDR; if you're using an Intel video card with FSO, drop by the thread and send DahBlount the fs2_open.log info he's after.
In the news again, DahBlount is continuing to work on the effort to add native DAE support to FSO, see the continuing discussion
here.
ngld has returned to continue work on adding features to mainhalls. There's
two mantis tickets waiting on some code review prior to being committed. You can see an awesome video of how these features combined with the HD mainhalls from Yarn will look
m!m's Chromium builds continue to
make progress, adding support for CSS3 3D transforms. There don't seem to be any new screenshots or videos though :p
Achillon has done some work on
joystick response curves. Every joystick is different, and gamepads are even more different again. The same response curve can't be optimal for everyone, so this is all about letting people choose their own response curve. (IIRC, Scott Manley in his Diaspora review mentioned that he would have liked to have tweaked the joystick response curve). Anyway, if you've got a joystick and you feel that FSO isn't treating it right drop by the thread, grab the builds and post some feedback :)
Flaming Sword has updated his
performance improvements builds, testing & feedback (as always) would be great.
Swifty has continued his work on
deferred lighting and soft shadows and the bugs are being ironed out. Unfortunately it seems that different vendors implementations of OpenGL are not making this an easy process, so always testing & feedback will be appreciated.
Goober5000 has released four updates to
the installer this month. Most of them are bugfixes and polish, but standing out is support for
mod dependencies. As it sounds, this means that if someone selects a mod that requires mediavps_3612, then they should automatically be installed as well (assuming of course that the installer files are setup correctly). And the installer now handles 7z archives much more efficiently, cutting wait times and bandwidth requirements in half! Super good if you're hosting your mods with limited bandwidth.
Over to scripting, and as I mentioned earlier here's Axems
scripted HUD messages gauge. Most obviously it makes the messages much easier to read when you have something like a bright nebula/skybox in the mission backgroud. It also has
some extras like being able to control how fast the text is written to the screen. There's a video in the link so go have a look! (soon to be used in at least four mods/TCs that I know of)
In addition to the message gauge, Axem has also released his
Journal + System Viewer scripts (available separately or bundled!). These both add a lot of options to flesh out a mods background, and I'm particularly impressed by amount of info that BtA has put into the System Viewer. Again, videos are in the link so go have a look!
Betrayal has some 158th related content going for us this month. First a release of a
high detail Evangelist, a carrier with some whirly-spinners (or propellers) for keeping afloat in all that space ether.
And he's also got a mirror up from
158th Exposition content release. There are some neat ships there if you're looking to beef up your own mod pack.
UndyingNephalim gives us an amazing preview for their Star Fox related mod,
Event Horizon. It looks amazing and it's great to see some of the content from Shadows of Lylat get reused for this! I can't wait to see what comes from this!
fightermedic has an update to that
nifty science ship in their Lego inspired ship building thread. I really love the lighting coming off of those cylinders.
Bryan See has completely overhauled his
Shivan Battleship Sabriel, and he's looking for feedback on how to make it look more "shivan". It can definitely be a tricky thing to get down well.
Col. Hornet is back with a slight update on his
GTCa Hera carrier. Something about engine flaps. I don't know, my mind was lost just gazing on this beauty of a ship.
Headdie is also back with some updates on his
Vega-class Killstorm death-ship. (Class may be slightly exaggerated) Some neat multiparts and greebles are making this a fine looking piece of work.
DahBlount has some pretty nice detailing on his
Zephyrus gas miner after Raven gave him some very nice pointers on it.
And then we've got our old pal
Scooby, giving all sorts of Wing Commander ships a very nice makeover. They've got landing gear and everything!
This month isn't so much a tutorial as it is a "hey, look what you could do with this for fun." And "this" is simulated-hits, a mostly hidden variable attached to every ship.
Fun with simulated hull!
by mjn.mixaelLast month's theme was Anticipation. This really brought out some creative shots.
I loved this one from the moment I saw it. Hard to say exactly why.. but it just really makes me want to know what happens next!
Screencap Scoreboard:
Ckid - 1
Mpez - 2
AndrewofDoom - 1
tnathan475 - 1
The Hound - 1As 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.
The new theme for July is
Panic.
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.
