You better not shout, you better not cry, and zod, I'm telling you why. Sathanas Claus is coming to your system so you better get on the evacuation transport and out of there right away!
And while you're waiting for the transport to take off, why not browse the newsletter with all the happenings over the past month?
But first this not-paid for advertisement:
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Slow month for campaign updates… But we'll take what we can get. Maybe there are some mods secretly at work for a Christmas release!
I think
Star Fox: Event Horizon can get bumped up to campaign news now since it’s a bit more than just a bare modding project and it deserves so much cool attention. UndyingNephalim has some details about the upcoming campaigns (yes, plural) that will get released out with the game. I can't wait!
The Hound gives us a bunch of small updates for his Venice Mirror project. New ships, an intro cutscene preview, and super pretty screenshots! He's also looking for some help with his campaign. He needs someone with some great English skills to help put together and edit "flavor text" and some casual beta testing. So if you've got the skill and the time to lend a hand, send him a quick message!
Worry not, Blue Planet fans. There is still a quite rumbling
coming from within! Voice acting for War in Heaven Act 1 + 2 is slowly coming together.
All the voice files are on my PC, the holdup is me processing them and getting them into SVN. I'm working on that now - Simms alone had 4gb of raw audio, and each line has dozens of takes that sometimes need to be stitched together into one master take, so it's an effort.
And we're pleased to see that Earth Defense isn't quite dead just yet. Betrayal gives us a
short and sweet update to why Earth doesn't have its defenses up yet.
Under my command, and with directions from Shiv I will finish and release first Act of Earth Defence with help from my team. As I have other mod known as Mystery Project, I don't have time to work on two big mods at once so I decided to keep Earth Defence in hibernation. We will resume work on Earth Defence after release of Act I of Mystery Project. Not sooner and not before.
But at least we get some pretty screenshots to tide us over..
by niffiwan Jingle Jingle Jingle, and December is here. Will it see the release of the elusive 3.7.2 RC5 & Final? Is
this the last remaining blocker bug? Who knows, find out next month!
New Features List!
- Add area-of-effect capability to Electronics weapons - MageKing17 (Disruption-style missiles can now affect all ships in their shockwave radius)
- Add "interceptable", "turret interceptable", and "fighter interceptable" weapon flags - MageKing17 (more flexibility than the bomb flag)
Here's the current bugs scoreboard, with both Mantis bugs & Coverity issues ever so slightly decreasing this month.
| | |fixed | |new | |delta | |outstanding |
| ---------------------------- | |---------- | |---------- | |---------- | |-------------------- |
| Coverity (this month) | |1 | |0 | |1 | |396 |
| ---------------------------- | |---------- | |---------- | |---------- | |-------------------- |
| Mantis (last 30 days) | |5 | |3 | |2 | |157 |
(Mantis includes 37 feature requests (not including HPC), so outstanding bugs is really 120)
In other coding and scripting news, Microsoft has released a new free version of their Visual Studio compiler suite;
Community Edition. The big difference between the Community and Express editions is that the Community edition includes the MFC libraries, which means it can compile FRED. Considering that previously this required a copy of Visual Studio Professional (worth around $2k, in my currency at least :)) this is really good news.
Swify's
deferred rendering and shadows builds have continued to receive good testing that has revealed a bunch more bugs that Swifty has been diligently squashing. So now that all the bugs seem to have been fixed again, go forth and test, find new bugs!
m!m has released a
LUA utilities package. So far it includes a package loader for modules and Coroutines, which allow the execution of a LUA function over multiple frames. Sounds very cool so go have a look at and see what you can create with it.
Nebula & Knossos continue to see updates. There's some sample Knossos packages available for Windows, OSX & Linux now so go give them a test and report any bugs on the
github issue tracker.
Forumite delt has created another
cmdline VP utility. There's certainly quite a lot of VP utilities around these days! This one is POSIX systems only (sorry Windows), so if you running one of those go give it a spin.
ShivanHunter brings some
very pretty space rocks for you to litter your missions with. They're perfect for your scientific missions, your space parties or a good spot for a smuggling ring headquarters. Download them today!
In fact, I think they would also be good for evading Imperial pursuit… but who would be doing that?
Zookeeper gives us a sneak peek at a sort of familiar ship for Fate of the Galaxy, the
stock YT-1300 Corellian Transport. It may be the Millennium Falcon (see some of the posts before for that), but I'm sure this could still make the Kessel Run in 15 parsecs. Maybe even 14 if you're lucky.
Aesaar has a new restyled TEI ship in the works for Blue Planet. Yes, the last main capital ship left to redo,
the GTD Titan. Oh it looks so silky smooth and curvy, doesn't it? I really can't wait to see this thing bear down on my enemies with those front beam cannons!
Scooby never disappoints with his updates. This month he has
the Valkyrie, and it looks pretty much ready to do with the forces of evil. If his fighters are this good, I'm almost afraid to see what his new capital ships will be like at that level of quality!
Over in the Wings of Dawn board, DahBlount has a pair of neat pics. First is some
pretty glow baking done with the Cycles renderer in Blender.
And he's also got an update on the Kaze being upgraded. That massive heavy gun is now very securely mounted and texturing has begun! I wonder what's more painful, getting hit with that gun, or texturing…
(gun pls)
(I also hear from anonymous that Wings of Dawn is getting closer and closer to completion...!)
We finish off this three part
Lua Tutorial series with a guide on how to make a healing beam and remote activated warheads (think like the Infyrno/Piranha, only the detonation would happen after impact).
Next month there is no special article! Stay strong, I might have something neat to show off instead.
by mjn.mixaelLast month's theme was Wonder.
Two pages of posts and only a handful of entries. Shameful! :p
I had a hard time deciding between Ckid's
Galaxy Iceni and Betrayal's
nicely lit fleet.
But in the end Betrayal takes the month by an inch!
Screencap Scoreboard:
Ckid - 2
Mpez - 3
AndrewofDoom - 1
tnathan475 - 1
The Hound - 1
Betrayal - 2AdmiralRalwood - 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.
We are finally at the last month of the year! Two of you have a chance to tie the score and invoke
Draw Destroyer Protocol. :shaking:
It's not as scary as it sounds. Mostly it's just a forum-wide vote for the best screenshot out of all of the screens submitted by the individuals in the tie.
However, since it
is the last month of the year.. there is some sadness, so the final theme, the theme for December, is
Sorrow.
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.
This will be the last newsletter posted as a forum post. Starting in January, the newsletter will just be on the main page, but worry not if you are a forum-only person. I will still make a discussion thread and it will contain a link to the main page news post!
