[Admiral Nelson]

The Unification War Project

UW offers you 29 action packed missions using its own unique flight model.  This new release fixes many issues present in the original, as well as incldues an all new conception of the evolution of sensor technology over time.  All older, low poly models have been replaced with new, high-poly assets and modern effects. The soundtrack is courtey of ShadowsOfLight, made originally for the Syrk project.

1) INSTALLATION

[DOWNLOAD] - Use Knossos:
 
Click below to get started. The latest revision is 2.0.0.
 


2) CREDITS

Admiral Nelson - project lead, FREDDing, tabling, asset selection etc
Andreas Rybak - testing, tech descriptions
EatThePath - Texture conversion
FrikgFeek - Testing, balance advice
MatthTheGeek - Constellation model
Matthew.F - testing
Mjn.Mixael - High poly models: Shrike, Kestrel, Mustangs, Falcon; radar and brifing icons
Nyctaeus - High Poly models, including Saggitarius, Wyvern, Pluto, Atlas, Copernicus, Atropos, Goliath, Exos, Nautileon, Achilles; Skyboxes
ShadowsOfLight - Soundtrack
Solaris - Damocles model, various weapon effects

Original UW team

Project Leads
Admiral Nelson
Goober5000

FREDding
Blaise Russel
Exarch
Ferret
Goober5000
Lightspeed
Mustang19
SF-Junky

Textures
freespaceking
Lightspeed

Models
aldo_14
Analazon
Deepblue
GalacticEmperor
KillMeNow
Raptor
Ryx
Shrike
Spicious
Taristin
Woomeister

Command Briefing Animations & Cutscenes
DragonClaw
Lt. Cannonfodder
Tar-Palantir

Interface Art
Flipside
GalacticEmperor
Goober5000
Lightspeed

Story Consultant
Eishtmo

Mission Testing
Admiral Nelson
Goober5000
Herra Tohtori
Mad Bomber
MP-Ryan
SF-Junky
T-Man

Special thanks to FrikgFeek for his tireless testing and debugging.

3) CHANGES IN THIS RELEASE

NEW New concept of sensor evolution - your sesonrs will get better over time!
NEW Full collection of high poly assets
NEW Easy to see weapon effects
NEW Newer background bitmaps and skyboxes
NEW Soundtrack based on ShadowsOfLight's work on Syrk
NEW Many many mission and balance edits
NEW FRED bugfixes and modernization as appropriate
NEW Truetype fonts based scalable HUD

4) SCREENSHOTS

[Trivial Psychic]

SWEET!

[CT27]

This looks great.   

Minor typo though:  on the highlight button for this at the top of the forum main page it says "Unificaion War".

[Mongoose]

Minor typo though:  on the highlight button for this at the top of the forum main page it says "Unificaion War".

Snagged it.

[starlord]

This is awesome. Great to see like left in those old projects.

While unrelated, this still kindles hope in me for TVWP or frontlines.

[DefCynodont119]

I always liked U-war for how unique it was in the FS-verse, so It was cool to see it get upgraded.
Here is my short review, I'm mostly just going to be comparing it to the original version and listing issues I encountered:



I love a lot of the new effects and assets, the Goliath is awesome, the Sagittarius looks killer, and I like the frigate models,
(I can't say I like the Constellation though, a Canberra would have fit better but that's just my opinion )

I LOVE the new music.

The way sensors work now is much better then before, It's less hard to work with, but still forces you to use your radar, though it might be worth looking at whether the radar gauge can be scaled a bit bigger then the rest of the hud,

Speaking of scaling, I had to edit the mod to set the fonts to be much smaller as my 1360 x 768 monitor made them fill the message box with only one line of massive text, I guess that's not to big an issue because of everyone's system is different, but you might want to set the font size a bit lower, also, there is a larger version of the message box used by the current release of BtA that can hold more text, if you want I can grab it for you.

I noticed that a lot of the mission end automatically rather then end when the player lands, I understand why that was done, but some message dialogue gets cut-off in a few places, and

Spoiler:

it detracts from the one mission where you are told to return to base but get ambushed before you can land,

I don't disagree with that change at all, but perhaps giving the player the option to either land yourself or skip with a keypress could be nifty, or at least make sure the player has time to read the last few messages before force-ending the mission.

The balance seems better, I remember U-War was one of those really hard campaigns, but It feels less aggravating and more rewarding now, and that's a big plus.

Over all, I really like what you did here, thanks for taking the time to update this mod! 



And now, some issues and nitpicks:

Hidden Text: Show

You said you were waiting for a stable release build before using the new Bromios, so that's fine. 

The mission "Acquisition" had no music.

The solar system planet bitmaps are alright, but some of them are rotated with the sun-facing side away from the sun in some missions, not obviously noticeable, but I obviously noticed it;    Also the Moon has a black square behind it. But the big kicker that always gets under my skin is when the moon is facing the wrong way,  I can show you how to get nice planet images from SpaceEngine if you want, or I could at least find you a good picture of the moon's hindquarters. 

Pilot is referenced as "him" but is also named after the pilot file's name, so that can be inconsistent for any non-him pilots.

I'm still not sure why I had issues with firing the Balista, I don't think the pilot file would hold anything regarding weapon table stuff like lock type, but it's not worth stressing over at the moment.

[Admiral Nelson]

Thank you for the write up!

I always liked U-war for how unique it was in the FS-verse, so It was cool to see it get upgraded.
Here is my short review, I'm mostly just going to be comparing it to the original version and listing issues I encountered:



I love a lot of the new effects and assets, the Goliath is awesome, the Sagittarius looks killer, and I like the frigate models,
(I can't say I like the Constellation though, a Canberra would have fit better but that's just my opinion )

The "lore", such as it is, talks about the early ships having no aritifical gravity - thus the choice of a ship with a spinny section for gravity.  The NuCanberra was not available until very recently, after I had made decisions about ships, and the old one would have stood out as inferior to the others.

I LOVE the new music.

ShadowsOfLight is a great artist, yes.

The way sensors work now is much better then before, It's less hard to work with, but still forces you to use your radar, though it might be worth looking at whether the radar gauge can be scaled a bit bigger then the rest of the hud,

Speaking of scaling, I had to edit the mod to set the fonts to be much smaller as my 1360 x 768 monitor made them fill the message box with only one line of massive text, I guess that's not to big an issue because of everyone's system is different, but you might want to set the font size a bit lower, also, there is a larger version of the message box used by the current release of BtA that can hold more text, if you want I can grab it for you.

The text is scaled according to resolution.  I must have missed that more unusual resolution in my testing.  I'll retest and assign it the right values.

I noticed that a lot of the mission end automatically rather then end when the player lands, I understand why that was done, but some message dialogue gets cut-off in a few places, and

Spoiler:

it detracts from the one mission where you are told to return to base but get ambushed before you can land,

I don't disagree with that change at all, but perhaps giving the player the option to either land yourself or skip with a keypress could be nifty, or at least make sure the player has time to read the last few messages before force-ending the mission.

This one was the biggest complaint I had seen about the old release - some people even did not use their afterburner at all in missions so that they could use it at the end to get back in the hangar faster.  I thought I had caught all of those cut off messages, but I'll check again. Making landing a keypress or optional would have been a lot of extra work that also wouldn't have handled the case you mention above, so I opted for fade out.

The balance seems better, I remember U-War was one of those really hard campaigns, but It feels less aggravating and more rewarding now, and that's a big plus.

Over all, I really like what you did here, thanks for taking the time to update this mod! 

The missions were rebalanced, based mostly on feedback from FrikgFeek. I am glad you enjoyed it!  I'll go thru your issues and nitpicks for the next point release.

[Trivial Psychic]

I haven't played it yet, not wanting to get too distracted from working with TBP, but I noticed that you haven't included the new Faustus model or the terran probe model from FSPort.  I could understand regarding the Faustus model, since it doesn't match the one you've included with the dish.

[Admiral Nelson]

The Faustus is just a beta release now - it isn't in the MVPs yet.  The Terran Probe has its own texture - it is the same model as in the port.

[Solatar]

This was a real treat to play! Loved the aesthetics, the rebalancing, and the new music.

[Admiral Nelson]

I'm glad you enjoyed it!

[Trivial Psychic]

I see there's an update.  Any breakdown of the changes?

[Admiral Nelson]

Minor table fixes, such as removing the incorrect energy usage of the Ballista dumbfire.

[Colonol Dekker]

Blaise Russell missions with Aldo models make me feel young again.

[Lucika]

Nice to see the soundtrack find a new home.

[DefCynodont119]

Nice to see the soundtrack find a new home.

I never heard the soundtrack before, it's really cool and I like how it has snippets of Freespace's motifs in there, it works really well with Unification war's slower combat as well.

[Trivial Psychic]

I've finally decided to give this a try, but I've encountered something wrong... many of the missions have no debriefings.  I'm not sure exactly why.  It may have to do with the use of is-event-false in the winning debriefing stage.  Or its something about newer builds.

[Admiral Nelson]

Thanks for the heads up.  No debriefings would have been noticed a long time ago, maybe there is something that has changed in newer builds.  Do you have  a specific mission example?

[Trivial Psychic]

Chapter 01, M03, Green Eyes, among others.  I've modified the debriefing conditions, but I haven't had the chance to test it yet.

[Trivial Psychic]

Well, my first test was unsuccessful.  After looking through the events and the debriefing stages, I decided that since the winning contingency automatically excludes the possibility of loss, there's no need to include a check to make sure that the mission wasn't a failure, so I just eliminated the "and" section, and just went right for the mission success event ONLY, and that works.