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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).
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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.
Over the past few weeks you all have been seeing the wonderful work that has been done to our models/textures. I can now say that all our ship models are complete and only a few ship textures to remain for our entire 107 ships. This is quite an astonishing feat and I have to thank all our model and texture artists for the incredible work they’ve done over the 2 ½ years. You’ll find some of our most recent work below:
Hey, ModDB, Sizer here for FW:TOW with a quick update. Work has been progressing steadily, and the team feels that the time is right for another live 'Ask The Developers' Session. So this coming weekend, (Saturday, 19 March) at 10:00 PM GMT (GMT Time Converter Link Here), we will be hosting said event via our Livestream account at http://www.livestream.com/fwtow. We plan to cover all sorts of hot topics, but what we want to do most is to answer your questions. So go ahead and leave a comment on this news post with your questions and we'll try and answer as many of them as possible during the event. Also, you may have noticed that we recently released a render of the new Kuat Drive Yards. That's a preview. If you attend the event, you will be among the first to see an exclusive in depth reveal of the model in all its three-dimensional glory.
Hey guys, we're trying to be a little more frequent with news posts than we've been for the last few months as we think it is very important to keep everyone updated on the progress we're making. The time it takes is negligible compared to the enjoyment you guys get out of it! You've probably noticed the slew of what can only be qualified as "ship pr0n" that we've released in the past few days. I can assure you this just the beginning. Thanks to w0dk4's latest magic trick, normal mapping is now enabled throughout the game. As such, we are in the process of creating normal maps for all existing models, be they ships, bases or (yes) planets. We have great plans for the latter, actually, although it is too early to speak about it very much. Stay tuned. We therefore have two new models to show off for the time being. The first one is a new masterpiece by experts Sizer (model) and Bouma (texture): the I-7 Howlrunner. An Incom design mainly in use by the Galactic Empire as fighter crafts, they were recognized for their speed and agility. Superior in resilience to the TIE/in starfighter, in large part thanks to its onboard deflector shield generator, the I-7 was mainly used in remote outposts and older fleets due to cold relations between Incom and the Empire. Meticulously recreated and textured, the model possesses its own normal map, making it one of the first few models designed with this in mind.
Welcome back to another Freeworlds: Tides of War update. "Finally!" you might say. We have indeed been very low on developer activity over the last couple of weeks (or even months). Nevertheless, we are still working on the mod and we are committed to actually releasing it. So dont worry, we are here to stay. For those who have been brave enough to follow us, be prepared for some more eye-candy: We recently got Normal and specular mapping working! Now, being a gamer that keeps up with the industry you might not be impressed at all. However, we are talking about a now 8-years old game engine based on Direct3D8. This and deferred rendering have been huge steps towards bringing the Freelancer engine to current state-of-the-art graphic levels. On the technical side, implementing normal mapping was really no easy undertaking, since we had to change the existing Freelancer mesh formats to handle the tangent/binormal data that is required for normal mapping. Normal and specular Mapping can greatly enhance existing models, giving them a lot of depth. You can see the difference in the following dev-video where at some points I switch normal and specular mapping on and off:
Coming back at our developer activity problem, we are actually searching for interested people that would like to help us out. We've had multiple developers go AWOL and others just being plain busy in real life. However, I think we've shown that we are an ambitious project that is well worth the effort. Due to our normal/specular mapping breakthrough, we are actively searching for any talented texture artists and/or modelers that can help us out with specular and normal maps.
Also, if any Freelancer developer is listening, we are searching for an .ini coder to help us with mod development in general. We are only looking for experienced Freelancer developers though, since our mod structure has become quite complex.
Finally, we are looking for C++/C# programmers to help us with tools and engine hacks around our mod and Freelancer. If you're interested in helping us, simply write a short but informative application to
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
or contact us via PMs here at ModDB or at our developer website. Stay tuned for more updates!
As always any comments, suggestions or questions are always welcomed!
