The Starport

Discovery Freelancer 4.86: Beta Released

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 18:20:00 +0200

Discovery Freelancer 4.86: Exiles Beta released
4.86 really does exist!

After 2 years of work since the last update, the Discovery development team have finally released the first Discovery Freelancer 4.86: Exiles public beta.

The following trailer was released 3 weeks ago, at the same time the release date was announced:

This is still beta, so there are lots of bugs still. Cannon has said "We're thrilled that the server is only crashing once per hour rather than 10 times per hour. We've been going slightly insane trying to fix these problems."
Indeed, the bugs were a big problem from the start of the public beta. Cannon counted over 100 official server crashes in 12 hours.

Since the public beta started, the development team has been working hard on bugs, and have already released a new update that includes minor changes and bug fixes.

This release includes over 90 new bases in 20 new systems in the Gallic Core Worlds alone. It also adds new features like player docking on capital ships, jump drives, different cruise speeds, turret zoom. Some other features are planned but not released as of yet.

Some confusion was caused by the way the release was done on the official community forums; it wasn't made clear that this was, in fact, a beta, instead of a full release. When Cannon was asked about this he promised that the person responsible for the oversight would be shot. 4.86 will remain in beta for 2-3 weeks.

You can find download/install instructions here.

The Underverse 2.26 Arrives Christmas Day 2011

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 21:46:03 +0200

544) this.width=544" />

The Latest Release From Team [RIP] Arrives Before Midnight on Christmas Day
Merry Christmas and happy holidays From all of us at Team [RIP] & The Underverse

A Sneak peek at our latest Ship Addition THE MARAUDER

Thanks for Watching

Soup

Freeworlds: Tides of War - Development Video # 15

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 19:36:39 +0200

Firstly, I wanted to thank all our fans for voting us into the top 100 mods for the 4th year in a row. We're so privledged to have such a dedicated and supportive fanbase and without you words of encouragement, I'm sure we would have packed the mod in quite some time ago!

Over the past few days, I've had some extra time away from my residency program in Emergency Medicine to spend on the mod. In that time, I've been working on closing up some loose ends. One of those is getting the lovely Mon Calamari Shipyards that Sizer designed from scratch into game. After some time getting her prepared, you can see her in game!

You can see just how massive the base is with the MC90 sitting there. The MC90 is approximately 2.2km in length!

DarkForce recently released a Roleplay/Lore update feature. For those of you that are looking for more information on that, please follow this link!

Last night, FriendlyFire informed me that he noticed that MIPMAPs were working properly in game now. As some of the Freelancer enthusiasts may know, MIP MAPs have existed in vanilla Freelancer since release. However, the appropriate utilization has been lacking. With the integration of DX9, we noticed an improvement in the rendering of such textures and coverted all the .dds textures to MIPMAP based. What does this mean to you, the player? Pretty models and performance improvements.

Performance improved so much, I was able to film the notorious benchmarking system, Battle of Bilbringi with its 1000+ lasers and 50+ NPCs without incredible framerate drops.

Check out the development video here:

If you like what you see, please take a moment and vote for us in the MODDB MOTY Awards!!

http://www.moddb.com/events/2011-mod- ... r-awards/top100#vote10662

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

Please follow us also on:

Updated DX9 Engine for Freelancer

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 04:57:15 +0200

With phase 1 of the MODDB awards coming to an end, the FW:ToW worked very hard over the past several days to convince you why you should vote for us.

In the past 10 days, we've been putting out image after image of our new DX9 engine and some tweaks that have gone a long way making the game look even better than before. FriendlyFire has been working, even when he should be studying for exams, at making this nearly 10 year old game really shine. Below is some of his work with summary of what he did:

Planets

Quote:

One of the key points was to make planets actually look like planets and not foggy, blurry spheres. In order to do this, we scrapped the old-style Freelancer atmospheres and implemented a custom atmosphere shader which reacts dynamically to the lighting and viewing angle, after which we implemented normal and specular mapping support for planets.

Old Version:

New and Improved:

With this accomplished FF went at work at figuring out how to apply normal, specular and glow mapping to the planets to really make them look even more drop dead gorgeous. The results below speak for themselves!

Glowmapping

Although glowmapping has existed in Freelancer for some time, the glow maps never really "glowed". They were a brighter texture than the others, however there was something missing. FriendlyFire figured out a way to bring this missing piece of the puzzle to the DX9 engine for our mod. Below are the samples of his work:

Quote:

Glow mapping takes certain parts of a texture, usually called the "emissive texture" since it appears to emit light even if it is not illuminated by anything, and blurs them out, reapplying the result on the image. This gives the impression that the emissive texture is much brighter than it would otherwise appear to be.

Old Version

New and Improved:

Specular Mapping

W0dk4 instituted specular mapping a number of months ago now. However, with that being done, there was still some tweaking to do to get it to really bring our models/textures to life. FriendlyFire again went to work to see what he could...and my lord did he do some excellent work. The video below captures our new and improving specular mapping/lighting:

Updated DX9 Graphics Engine for Freelancer - Mod DB

If you like what you see please don't hesitate to give us a vote for the MODDB awards! We'll be churning out more videos/images over the next few weeks to prove to you why we're one of the best up and coming mods out there!

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

Please follow us also on:

4.86 Release Date and Teaser

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 02:44:59 +0200

The Discovery FL development team are pleased to announce that Discovery Freelancer 4.86 – The Exiles will be released on the December 30 2011.

The development team including infocard writers, system coders, ship designers and testers have been and are still frantically busy completing the remaining tasks. We’re pushing hard and will do everything possible to hit this release date. In the last 2 months we’ve made awesome progress and we are excited share the first trailer.

Official Freeworlds: Tides of War Teaser Trailer

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:10:28 +0200

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!

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!!

As always, any comments, suggestions or questions are welcomed!
-------------------------
[center]Please follow us also on:

[/center]

A year in review and mod release date change!

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 05:16:24 +0200

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:

Imperial Star Destroyer Normal Map - Mod DB

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!
-------------------------
[center]Please follow us also on:

[/center]

MODDB 2011 Awards

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:00:09 +0200

550) this.width=550" />

Well, it's that time of year again, folks, for the MODDB Mod of the Year awards. This year Freelancer saw some incredible updates to a number of mods and now we need the community support to get our mods in the Top 100 mods of the year. If you can all take a moment and vote for your favourite mods, I'm sure many modders would be appreciative!

http://www.moddb.com/games/freelancer/mods

IONCROSS Freelancer: Total War

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:53:50 +0200

300) this.width=300" />

IONCROSS Total War is a new multiplayer game created by modification of Microsoft's Freelancer game universe. You must have a legal copy of Microsoft Freelancer to play this game. It is not designed for single player use.

The game has taken over 18 months to complete and relies not only on sophisticated modification of the Freelancer universe, but on proprietary server programs that monitor game parameters, introduce dynamic change and enforce compliance with the game rules.

IONCROSS Total War (ICTW) is a battle for dominance between the forces of Liberty and Rheinland and you must choose to join either of these major factions or one of the two pirate clans that prey on them. The Ioncross Web site provides constantly updated statistics on the progress of the war. House scores, player performance data, rank ladder and player information are updated automatically.

If you wish to participate in ICTW you are welcome. However, before you make a decision to join, please read the information below to prevent any misconceptions.

The Universe is a dangerous place...
To survive in ICTW you need good flying skills, good aim and the ability to accept occasionally losing shields and sometimes pieces of equipment. Most importantly, you will need to work well in a team. Player vs. Player combat is possible in Total War, but will usually be avoided due to the consequences - damage or possible death.

You only have ONE character and dying is something to be avoided at all cost. Lose your life and you lose your ship - your cash and points will also be severely depleted. Die a few times and you cannot continue. You will need to delete your character and restart.

For a cautious player with average flying skills and the ability to learn, survival at the lower levels of the game is not hard, but it is unforgiving. We suggest you read this manual and scan the forums for tips to enhance your survival.

There are only 4 systems in IONCROSS Total war and there are no trade lanes. Cruise speed is faster than normal Freelancer, but ambushes are frequent, thrusters use fuel and everything uses cargo space. You will always need to be balancing the space taken up with your protection, against the free space needed to pick up valuable dropped objects.

Cheating is unfortunately common on FL servers. Cheating on this server will be automatically detected and penalties will be applied - which include removal from game and/or banning.

For more information on one of the best Mods freelancer has to offer please visit http://www.ioncross.com/
800) this.width=800" />

Official Roleplay guide and DX9 Updates

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:50:00 +0200

All I can say it has been a heck of week in development. That's to do with a few factors, one mainly being I've been on vacation for a week from my residency program. Fortunately, this has allowed me to dedicate my time working on some of the models in the mod and getting them to use the full capabilities of the DX9 engine. As a result, I've been able to upgrade all 107 ships of our shiplist. To see that link, click here. About 85% of those ships have normal and specular mapping applied. The rest will be added at a later date when we upgrade the XWAUP ships we're currently using for the mod. For those of you that have missed some of the videos, here's two of my favourites:

YT-2400

YT-2400 - Normal and Specular Mapping - Mod DB

Gallofree Transport

GR-75 Gallofree Transport - Mod DB

Now that the ship models have been completed, I've focused my remaining vacation getting our stations up to par with our ship models. The list is only 30 models, however, the models themselves are more intricate because of the way they were designed. That being said, I've completed about 40% of the list in the past few days and hope to have the remainder done in another week or two. Here's some footage of that:

Avatar Station - Normal and Specular Maps - Mod DB

Corsec Outpost - Normal and Specular Mapping - Mod DB

I've not been the only one hard at work this past week. Qi, a mod development lead, and website designer/creator/coder, has been working on improving the website where the official server will be hosted. He's currently working on putting the shiplist, including in-game screen shots, onto the website. This will allow players to look up the ships, their stats, images and where to buy them almost instantly. It's quite a great design and I cannot wait to see when it's fully completed. For those that want a preliminary look, please click this link here. (Note: the NR/GE starfighters are completed so please click those ships to see what the final result will look like as the rest are still pending)

Also, for those of you that are interested in following the day-to-day progress of the mod, I'd take a look at Qi's worklog for all his doings...he's going to be creating some wonderful things for the mod. Take a look at that link here.

Not only Qi has been working on the site, Darkforce, our RP lead writer/developer, has been putting the Official RP Guide, onto the website for ease of use of the players. Take a look at this preliminary work here.

Quite a week, I must say.

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

-------------------------

Please follow us also on: