As the project lead, I did not approve of this upload, but it was bound to happen eventually, as Admiral Nelson, Goober, and others have tried to make the campaign their own for many years now. Not that I could ever blame them, as anyone who does play and understand BlackWater Operations, would realize its tremendous narrative value in connection to Freespace 2.
Make the campaign their own? Why? Nelson's been too busy retrofitting older campaigns to work with the new MVPs, and Goober's already made Scrolls 1(and is close to Scrolls 2) over the 20 years BWO's been suffering from campaign rot. Even TVWP got a release. Why would they want to make BWO their own when they've already got substantially more than their fair share of creations? Honestly doesn't make much sense. I played through the BWO missions before releasing (which has created a whole new set of bugs and errors, and which we're working on fixing in SVN), and it's at least an average campaign, certainly bigger in scope than most of the minicampaigns people have put together.
On the one hand, the proper course of action would be to take it down as it is an unauthorized release, however on the other, it was unlikely anyone would have ever wanted to FRED the campaign to completion, as it would have required a lot of work. Those that did want to work on through the years wanted to change the story to suit their ideas of what an FS2 Silent Threat/sequel would be, which unfortunately never aligned with what the story was actually meant to be. The biggest work to be completed were of course the assets, but that would have taken professional-level efforts of effort and time.
With all due respect, was it ever actually going to get released any other way? It's been 20 years, the original MVPs the mod's Sol ships were first designed around have all been replaced, and multiple major campaigns(BTA1/2, WIH 1-3, and soon Nu-INF) have either come out or are going to come out before the mod is assembled in any sort of complete shape. I get it, you wanted to gatekeep the story because changing it would've deviated from the purity of the vision - which is totally understandable. Even been in that boat before. But at this point, that's led to the campaign being unlikely to ever see completion past what the dump's at now. So far as the assets go, there's maybe 4-5 ships that might be good for current gen mods (the Herc Mk 3 comes to mind). The rest are either too dated or were early versions of Nu-INF EA ships that came out in their fleet modpack and which have already been obsoleted.
Given that the project is likely never to be finished officially, provided that the upload above consists only of the missions with their story unedited (and the assets that don't belong/match the FS1 and FS2 ones kept to a minimum), that is perhaps the best version the public would ever get to play, provided that the missions are playable, and as bug free as possible. If that is the only thing Admiral Nelson did, then he honored what I asked of him many years ago when he was a part of the project, but refused to do at the time.
As it stands right now the 0.9.99 version was basically "what I got with the Tyr's bug fixed" and "the Sol Coalition old MVP and pre-INF models replaced with their modern counterparts." The mod's a buggy mess due to 20 years of rot (including crashing in the ship selection and crashing 15 seconds into the missionm which apparently also happens in fast debug but NOT full debug), but we have an SVN opened up to get the thing fixed and hopefully playable. No one's gonna mess with the missions or plot, not at this point, so don't worry about the vision as it last existed getting changed. For better or for worse, it'll stay as is.
I am not sure how IceFire or Ace would feel about this, because in refusing to let FREDDers and modders do whatever they wished with the story in exchange for them completing the campaign, I have doomed the project to languish in limbo, which while unfortunate, I always felt was the lesser of two evils.
Ace came back on the Discord and seemed fine with it. Tbh the lesser of two evils would probably have been dumping the campaign at some point, similar to what happened with Machina Terra. That way people would've at least gotten to enjoy what you guys had been able to create, instead of the mystery building up around it to the point where the expectations for what had been hidden away by the team for so long resulted in overinflated expectations - from myself included too, tbh. Not that it's not a large campaign with a lot to do(The Sol ships' weapons were something I was unprepared for), but I'd always thought there was even more to it, to almost a proto-BTA scale, compared to what it is.
As it stands, I am not really against this version of the project being released to the public or on Knossos, as it is the purest one narratively (again, provided no parts of the story were touched).
I'll have a talk with the HLP admins, but in general, provided the story was not edited, and the missions play out as Ice, Ace, and I envisioned them, this version being available to the public is not something I am against, regardless of how illicit or backhanded the process to publish it may be.
If that's been the reason you've been keeping the campaign behind lock and key this entire time, there really isn't any reason to worry. No one's gonna mess with BWO's story. The only thing anyone wants to do is get the thing to actually work so people can play through it and judge the campaign as is on its merits. As mentioned before, it was working fine when I tested it before release - then more gremlins revealed themselves the moment it got released. Once those get fixed, then realistically the campaign will just be another added to the hundreds that're out there already.
Either way, surprising to see you came back to comment on it. You haven't posted for about half a decade - had thought the BWO team had moved on, honestly, so surprised to see any comments on it.
Provided that the story and dialog are not edited I'm fine with a data dump version with a campaign file and making the tables and game crashing issues from the models resolved.
The GTVA plotline is IceFire's and the NTA one is mine and I believe I can speak for IceFire that he did not want to see rewrites after the dialog and mission pass done before leaving the project.
Crashing the big issue since they don't give any info on what triggered it in the logs. Nelson got a campaign file put together based on this order for the SVN. Once the bugs are out, hopefully we can get a proper 1.0.0 version of the mod out that's playable from start to finish without any issues. As said to BD, there won't be any rewrites or story tinkering on this - tbh, with all the projects everyone's working on, I'm not even sure how anyone would have time to, lol.
