Freelancer Port 1.0 Released!

As evidenced by the volume of updates in recent days, the Freelancer port has been zooming and is ready to release version 1.0 of the mod! L.I.F. actually soft launched to the CIC Forums last week, and he's been working with a handful of eager playtesters to already stamp out a handful of bugs and minor issues. The current iteration of the game replaces Freelancer's original fighters and capships with familiar counterparts from the Wing Commander universe. This even includes some of the interior areas. For example, check out the in-game movie sequence below on a Confed flight deck. It looks super cool! You can grab the package and try it out for yourself at the CIC mirror here (320 meg zip). For the very latest bug fix build, a live copy is also available here. As of this writing, the two are identical, so hit up the first link to minimize the hit to L.I.F.'s personal Dropbox.

And it's done! All combat ships of the game - except for Nomads - have been replaced. The player freighters have yet to be replaced as well, but when it comes to fighters and capital ships, we're good. I'm currently uploading the mod, which should be around 300 MB compressed and 825 MB uncompressed. Once again, this is going to be the first layer of the mod, the most visible but not complete. Beyond the remaining ships, the texts, names, weapons and turrets have not been modified.

The other caveat is that numerous mod features do not show right away in the game or in a single place, making comprehensive testing a bit hard, so if you stumble upon bad textures, invisible ships and the like, please tell me where you found the issue, which ships were bugged and what ship you were flying. Ideally, sending me a copy of the latest save would help me reproduce the issue and fix it in a further release. This post will be edited with the link to the 1.0 version of the mod once it's finished uploading.

CAUTION: the mod contains the modified. exe and .dll files in its folders. If you do not want to use them but would rather make them yourself, do not unpack the EXE folder and edit your own files following the instructions here. Or use the already modified files.