Freeworlds 2.0

[Sushi]

http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/9955/fwlogotrans.png

 

Now that summer has come, the FW:ToW Development team is back at full steam. We've been busy adding in vessels into the mod, making sure that attention to detail remains our top priority. With 108 ships, and custom hitboxes to be made in Milkshape 3D for each one, it's a huge task. To model/texture, hitbox, hardpoint and code a single ship into game takes upwards of 30 hours. However, slowly but surely, we're working on way through them all. I'm also pleased to announce that we're in the process of working on our capital ship prototype. Hopefully, by the end of the month, we'll have a team of testers from the FW USA and FW France communities test the prototype for further modification.

 

Concurrently, Oma and Deety have been burning the mid-night oil making the FW:ToW systems a spectacular sight to behold. They have just completed the system layouts of all 22 systems. Deety is now busy placing the Non-Player Characters within these systems to bring them to life. I hope to capture a video of these systems, with Oma's explanation of how he designed them, in the next FW:ToW Development video.

 

Now, without further adieu, this is a development video of just a few of the notable ships we have into game. I would have included more of the New Republic Capitals, such as the Quasar Fire, MC40a and MC80 but Arvis Taljik, creator of the Tides of War: Old Republic mod (an example of his work found here Sith Destroyer, has graciously agreed to redo their textures. So, as soon as he's finished with them, I'll be sure to show you all his brilliant work!

 

I also wanted to give a appreciative shout out to Overfiend, who has been working many hours to make sure the FW:ToW hitboxes are perfect. He's already done over half of the FW:ToW 108 vessels.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMfQzd-gDa0

 

Anyways, I hope you enjoy the newest video in the FW:ToW series. As always, any questions or comments are greatly appreciated, as well as your continuing support!

 

And, as a bonus treat, I wanted to show you all the MC-90 we have in game. The model/texture was created by EvilleJedi and the FW:ToW Dev team thanks him so much for his generous contribution of his work to our mod.

 

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d54/mjr6988/mc90-1.jpg

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d54/mjr6988/mc90-2.jpg

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d54/mjr6988/mc90-1-1.jpg

 

Sushi

[Sushi]

The Freeworlds: Tides of War development team has been busy over the past few weeks bringing the mod to life. Deety and Myself have completed putting in all the code for all the mod's small craft including the shuttles, transports and freighters of the mod. Deety has also been busy working on creating new missions for the mod, similar to the scale and nature we previously mentioned in this news piece: Battle of Yavin. We'll be releasing more details about missions as Deety completes more of the project.

 

As for systems, Lilfire has joined the team to help fill in the large empty space we have. By tediously placing numerous ships, bases, shipyards and container fields, we hope to breathe some life into our massive systems. Below are some images of what Lilfire has been doing with the assistance of Deety:

http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/3659/screen6m.png

http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/1277/screen1cs.png

http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/8796/screen2s.png

 

Fondor Shipyards:

 

We also have head some significant development with Fondor Shipyards. The model was originally built by Overfiend and has been textured by Super D. Here are some images of the large base:

 

http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/5120/fodor2.png

http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/3423/fodor1.png

http://img262.imageshack.us/img262/4530/fondormodule1.png

http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/3482/fondormodule2.png

 

Furthermore, Qi has almost completed the groundwork of our economy. Unfortunately, there's not much to show you regarding this, but you'll have to believe me when I say that it's going to be epic

 

W0dk4 has also been busy with FW:ToW by creating many new FL Hooks for us. Some of the creations include:

Having mass of cargo/missiles affect how the vessel will handle (More mass = sluggish)

Preventing players from moving while in cruise (that means that players will have to point themselves in the right direction before they engage their cruise engines)

Speeding up turning rate when you throttle down. Some of you that remember XvT/XWA know that when turning your optimal speed to turn was 33%.

Creating a missile view mode

Creating a key that causes the ships wings to fold prior to engaging cruise:B-Wing, X-Wing

 

And last but not least, this is the latest FW:ToW Development video so show you the amazing new bases that we're going to have populate our systems. The movie also includes some footage of the huge fleets Lilfire has been working on. I hope you enjoy it!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiqjoBpqVIs

 

As always, any comments, questions or suggestions are welcome!

-----

Sushi

[Evaders99]

Neat - glad to see you're still around

[Sushi]

The Freeworlds: Tides of War mod team has been busy over the past few weeks fixing bugs, building an economy and, of late, creating more of the mission systems for players to enjoy (ie. Battle of Yavin). Below, you'll find the latest video of this new mission system Deety has designed called, "Battle of Bilbringi." Essentially, this mission will feature a gigantic ongoing battle between the New Republic and the Empire full of huge capital ships, hundreds of laser beams and a whole lot of fun!

 

Battle of Bilbringi

 

In other news, Qi, our resident Economy Guru, has completed the first alpha prototype of our economy and it contains over 1000+ trade runs. He strove to make this economy as canonical as he could to further the immersion factor of the mod and we all really think you will love what he's done. In addition to this, Qi is working on a web interface that will allow players to view the changes in commodity prices based on what is being traded on the server. However, I will release more information about that when the graphical interface is near completion.

 

Lastly, I wanted to show you all the new Pirate factions Deety has created based on what systems you're in. Below is an image on how the territories will be seperated:

http://i49.tinypic.com/2cnte7b.jpg

 

Thanks again everyone for following this mod. We've really appreciated the ongoing support and compliments.

 

And please, if you haven't already, please take the time and give us a vote for the mod of the year awards over at http://www.moddb.com/mods/fwtow

 

Happy holidays,

Sushi

[Sushi]

Welcome to another development blog post First I wanted to say thank you to everybody who voted for us in the MotY 2009. There is a present in form of a 1080p HD ingame video when you're brave and read until the end of this post

But lets get started:

 

I have been working on various stuff since my last update, a quick overview:

- X-Wing Alliance inspired flight model (max turning at 0.3 velocity and some other tweaks)

- new cruise behaviour and cargo affecting ship mass (-> affects ship handling)

- wing folding animations (also with triggers and synced in Multiplayer)

 

I dont really want to go in detail here, so lets skip to the eye-candy feature instead and save the boring stuff for later.

Freelancer has pretty much no built-in functionality for taking hud-less screenshots or shooting videos. This always bugged me so one day I decided to dig into the code and see what I can find. The result has been pretty elaborate and time-consuming, but its definately worth it.

VideoMode is the feature called, and it basically allows you to see awesome fly-bys of your favourite ships. Also, there is built-in functionality for completely disabling the HUD on-the-fly and you can spectate other ships, something completely new in regards to the Freelancer engine.

It has been quite a task smoothing out camera movement: Its one of those things where you start with 100 lines of code but eventually end up with 30 lines of code that work just like you wanted it. In comparison it has been pretty easy to program the actual fly-bys, switching in front of the ship once the camera is too far away.

Videomode has a "shake" effect applied when the ship flys by, which was also quite challenging, but not as annoying as camera rotation smoothing.

 

Enough of the technical talk, here comes the eye-candy. Its a 1080p ingame video.

You'll also see a wing animation on the X-Wing, triggered by entering cruise. Yes, animations are in and also synced in Multiplayer (but was too boring actually filming it).

Also, please excuse me for using yet-again our super-ugly combat prototype system, I'm just that lazy.

I'm sure the testers and other devs will make use of VideoMode in future videos, so stay tuned

 

 

http://www.moddb.com/mods/fwtow/videos/freeworlds-tides-of-war-videomode-feature

 

To vote for our mod at the moddb awards please follow this link http://www.moddb.com/events/2009-mod-of-the-year-awards/top100 under the best upcoming mods under Freelancer!

[Sushi]

We wanted to know how good our Star Wars models are when compared to the best models out there, ones from the Star Wars movies. So, our FW:ToW testing team (Slyder, Cropto, Orac, Avenger, Shadow and Chewie) have taken it upon themselves to use all ingame video recordings to reproduce some of the most epic scenes from Star Wars. Much to our surprise, we found the quality of our ingame models were almost as good as the movies. I don't have a finished video to show you yet, as we still are in the process of filming, however we are excited to show you a sneak peak of what is to come.

 

The following image montage are all ingame screenshots that have not been digitally edited or enhanced.

 

Episode IV Intro

Tantive IV is being chased by Darth Vader's ISD

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen169.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen179.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen176.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen177.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen183.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen184.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen180.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen182.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen181.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

Episode VI

Vader's Lamda undocking from his ISD

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen186.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen192.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen187.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen189.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen196.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen190.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen197.jpg

 

http://i918.photobucket.com/albums/ad29/Cropto/Freeworlds20/screen198.jpg

 

Images courtesy of Cropto

[Sushi]

Over the past few days, Demi, our resident computer guru, has been hard at work making a brand new developer website for the Freeworlds: Tides of War Developer team to use. As a team, we decided to create these boards because we needed more space plus wanted more features for development than our current forums had. Using the webspace provided by Qi, Demi made a wonderful layout. With this new site, you will be able to get the latest news, development blogs, images, 3D representations of the vessels and ask questions on the development forums. As for the layout of the site, below are the two prototypes Demi worked on:

http://demios.org.uk/MiscUpload/rev1_img1.png

http://demios.org.uk/MiscUpload/rev1_img2.png

 

As you can see from the layouts, the Freeworlds: Tides of War Development team has accounts on facebook,youtube, twitter, and google buzz. We welcome everyone interested in this mod's development to follow us there as we are regularly updating the sites.

 

Another special feature that I wanted to mention is the ability to see all of our models in 3D. While we're still in the process of converting all of our ships for viewers to see, I wanted to show you what you can expect 3D Models click me. Demi is still in the process of refining the viewer to optimize the performance, however, for now, I think it's an excellent proof-of-concept that I cannot wait to see running on the site.

 

Lastly, we welcome everyone to join us on our forums where you can ask the developers any questions, comment or give suggestions. We welcome all feedback from our followers.

 

To view the sites main page, go here: Freeworlds: Tides of War Development Site

To join our forums go here: Freeworlds: Tides of War Development Forums

[Evaders99]

Personally I never liked gray-on-gray. No contrast so cannot read

But the graphics and design look good

[Sushi]

Ya, it comes down to preference, in the end. Overall, though, it's much better than what we originally had.

[Sushi]

Over the last few months, I've been working a lot on the graphics engine of Freelancer. Inspired by Timeslip's work. I wrote a Direct3D8 to Direct3D9 wrapper for Freelancer to be able to directly access the graphics pipeline.The ultimate goal is to somewhat modernize Freelancer's graphics engine. I'm not sure about the features I will be able to add further on, but let me show you the first enhancements that I already implemented.

Before getting to the eye candy, let me quickly talk about mouse lag. I guess almost everybody is familiar with the mouse lag problem that occurs in some games. In almost every case, the laggy/delayed input is to blame on VSync. If you turn VSync off, it solves a lot of the mouse lag problems for many games, including Freelancer. I did some research on the topic and found this article on a private blog by "Vorlath". Basically, to fix mouse lag in the DirectX pipeline, you have to make sure that after any present call, the screen has really received the frame you just rendered. This is easily done in Direct3D9 as stated in the article and it was one of the first things I implemented. Thank god, no more VSync-related mouse lag in Freelancer!

Lets get to the eye candy. One of the top wanted post-processing effects in older games is bloom. As of now, I added a relatively cheap and subtle bloom effect, but in the future I want to do a proper HDR lighting implementation. Another post-process effect is Color Correction, which to me seems to be very underrated. You can completely change the feel of the game by including a nice color correction effect. The implementation I chose was very simple, yet powerful, based on this article.

 

The vast benefit of this method is the what-you-see-is-what-you-get effect. We simply take an ingame screenshot, load that screenshot in Photoshop and do some color correction with the Curves or Levels tool. We then apply the same color correction to a special texture that will be used by the game. Very easy to do, yet very powerful.

Here is a comparison, with color correction added in the second screenshot:

http://media.moddb.com/cache/images/mods/1/11/10662/thumb_620x2000/colorcorr_0.jpg

http://media.moddb.com/cache/images/mods/1/11/10662/thumb_620x2000/colorcorr_1.jpg

The color correction effect is implemented per-system. Its a very good tool to give systems their very own feeling, making the ingame experience as varied as possible. For example, we could give rebel and imperial systems their very unique color correction, so you quickly know in which territory you are.Finally a little video to show the effects in motion:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/fwtow/videos/bloom-color-correction-shader

[Sushi]

Thought you guys might want to check this out! Freelancer gets a whole new graphic engine:

 

http://www.moddb.com/mods/fwtow/news/deferred-rendering-dynamic-lighting-soft-particles

 

http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/11/10662/fw_softparticles.jpg

[Sushi]

Over the past two weeks, ChewieBacca, one of our testers decided to make a teaser trailer for our followers. This is just but a very small, short, glimpse of what you can expect to see when you play FW:ToW this Spring!

 

Official Freeworlds: Tides of War Teaser Trailer - Mod DB

 

Stay tuned for more updates over the next few weeks! And please, if you haven't already, and you want to support our mod, don't forget to vote for us at the MODDB Mod of the Year Awards!!

[Sushi]

Today, we are proud to present to you the demonstrational package of our mod.

 

Since it has been taking time for us to finesse the gameplay elements for full release, we wanted to get something out there to our loyal fans. The demo version features prototype systems where you can check out all the ships that will be available in the final build. Also, you can fight in basic NPC battles.

 

Another reason for a demo release was the opportunity to test our multiple enhancements to the Freelancer graphics engine on a multitude of different systems. Please note that some of our more recent achievements (shadows, distortion mapping, etc..) did not make the final cut. However, rest assured that we will be updating the demo with fixes and improvements. Also, we plan on expanding the demo later on - stay tuned for more details!

 

But now, have fun flying around and shooting stuff in our demo! Download links below:

 

http://www.moddb.com/mods/fwtow/downloads/freeworlds-tides-of-war-demo

 

http://www.the-starport.net/freelancer/download/singlefile.php?cid=7&lid=2672

 

https://www.rapidshare.com/files/2676992275/freeworlds_tow_demo.exe?bin=1

 

http://www.thepiratebay.se/torrent/7167769 (recommended)

 

For those having issues with the demo, please go here: http://freeworldstidesofwar.com/viewtopic.php?f=117&t=1362

 

From the Freeworlds: Tides of War development team, we thank you for your continued support of this mod.