I always enjoy the MODDB awards as it's a great way for development teams to look back at all the hard work they've done over the year. When I look back at the amount of things accomplished for this mod, it's truly nothing short of epic. We are now 95% finished for release with only a few features left to add. In this article I will highlight some of our milestones we've had since the last MODDB awards as well as as well as update you on our release date. We started off the year with a HUGE update to the mod with w0dk4 bringing normal and specular mapping to the DX9 conversion. W0dk4 has spent an incalculable amount of hours updating the graphics engine with just stunning results. For more information on how he did it, click this link! Here is the first in-game development video of his outstanding contribution to the mod and Freelancer modding! 

Soon after w0dk4 brought this to the mod, we started to make use of it and FriendlyFire spent over 40 hours making custom and specular maps for the Imperial Star Destroyer. In doing so, he was able to trim over 100,000 polygons from the model and improve performance significantly for the mod. Take a look at his brilliant work below:

In the early summer, our mod went to its Beta phase of development with over 20 testers combing through the mod searching for bugs and errors. Through their tireless effort we fixed over 400 bugs and made the mod that much better and closer to release. While the testing team was busy searching for bugs, W0dk4 pushed the DX9 conversion that much further by bringing anti-aliasing support to the mod. Check out the stunning results below:

Please click the images below and view the original to see the true beauty of this graphical improvement:

We also saw the addition of some incredible models/textures to the mod, largely due the talent of our development lead Sizer. He worked tirelessly on countless models over the past few months and made our Star Wars galaxy that much prettier! Take a look at some of collection below:

Now, I could go on and on about what else the development team accomplished over the year but I feel that would be a bit of an information overload for our fans. Thus, I will save the rest of our accomplishments for another article later on this month.

Release Date

Back in the summer we slated the release of the mod for December 15th 2011. The main reasoning behind that choice of release date was that the Star Wars Galaxy franchise was coming to an end and what better way to start a Star Wars mod like ours in an attempt to fill the gap that SWG left. Over the months since the announcement the development team worked extremely hard in trying to achieve this goal. About two months after our release date announcement, the team was rocked by the news of a release date of an even bigger Star Wars game, Star Wars: The Old Republic. The team discussed frantically about what we should do with our release date. As a development group, we had spent thousands of hours, over three years of development, trying to bring the best Star Wars experience to Freelancer. And now, after all this effort, our release date would be eclipsed by one of the biggest, and most anticipated, Star Wars titles in years. With that said, after weeks of discussion, the mod team has now agreed that it would be best to postpone our release to spring 2012. I know that many of you will be disappointed by this change, but I do hope you can appreciate our reasoning. To end this article off on a bright note, the extra time will give the mod team to add a few more features we wanted to add before release - (mainly graphical improvements that W0dk4 will hopefully show you all in a few weeks time). I hope that you have enjoyed the progress the mod has made over the year and look forward to our upcoming release. We wanted to say thank you for all the support our fans have shown us over the years. You are the driving force that keeps us all working on this mod. We'd also appreciate a vote for the MODDB mod of the year awards if you feel we are deserving. Thank you all and look forward to more updates on this mod in the upcoming weeks!!

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

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We've had a great month of development for the Freeworlds: Tides of War. We've reached several milestones in the mods development. Most notably, we've almost finalized our faction influence, trade and unrest system as well as our trading system. Now that the details have been worked out, Qi, W0dk4 and FriendlyFire will work on implementation.

Another huge development was the work done by our Roleplay Director, DarkForce. He's created an extensive document to help guide players in art of roleplaying. We're very excited to release this document to the public for their consumption prior to the release of the mod. As you can see, we're very keen on making a very roleplay intensive environment for our server's playerbase. Let us know what you think of this document here!

Over the past month the team has been working on tying up loose ends of mod development. With release date 4 ½ months away, we’re dotting our I’s and crossing our T’s. With that, the last few ships on our shiplists are being touched up or being completely remade. Sizer, our Model/Texture Lead Developer, has been working around the clock to get the last few of our models in game and textured. Below you can see his completely redone Corellian Cruiser:

Here’s what this awesome capital ship looks like in game with the normal and specular maps applied:

FriendlyFire has been working on improving the effects with the new graphical improvements of soft shading and dynamic lighting that W0dk4 has worked on. He’s vastly improved upon all the explosions, missile/torpedo trails and laser/turbos of the mod. He’s also

started to work on some special effects that you’ll see littered throughout the mod upon release. Below is a teaser of one of these such effects:

The other big news is the inherent integration of anti-aliasing to Freeworlds: Tides of War. However, I'll let W0dk4 cover this topic since he was the one to bring it to Freelancer: Since we have upgraded the Freelancer engine from Direct3D8 forward rendering to Direct3D9 deferred rendering we had a new problem - lacking anti aliasing. This is a common issue for deferred rendering on Direct3D9. Luckily for us, just recently a new post-process image-based anti-aliasing technique has been developed by Timothy Lottes from NVidia. The technique is called FXAA, which stands for "Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing" and is being used by many recent and upcoming games. It offers a great deal of quality while the performance loss is minimal. We implemented the latest version (FXAA 3.11). If you want to read more on the technique, check out this whitepaper.

Please click the images below and view the original to see the true beauty of this graphical improvement:

Hello, I am Respen, the developer leader for gameplay development. I typically start discussions, and prod along topics regarding how the mod will work and be played. Sometimes I spew out ideas for these topics, other times I just flow along with the discussion. Then there are the summaries... I guess that is what I have been doing most of late, trying to keep us organized. I collect all the various, sometimes spread out, discussion and decisions into large summaries neatly laying out what exactly we have agreed to do, and what we have left to do. While doing this, and reading some of the comments regarding how we were thinking of doing things, I thought that you (the players) would appreciate a bit more information on our plans for the mod and our server (and we would appreciate your feedback).

So, without further ado, I give you a generalized outline of the majority of our planned gameplay systems. I am withholding most of the specific details of these systems, largely because we are still discussing many of them. We, as a team, have decided that we want as few written server rules as possible. To accomplish this, we have needed to think of ways to incorporate what rules we can into the game engine and server structure. Our goal: to have everything you can do in the game be within the rules.