Freelancer Mod Certifies Campaign & Makes Big Future Plans
L.I.F. has completed his campaign run Freelancer port with Wing Commander ships, which marks a big milestone for the project! As he went through one set piece to the next, he's been steadily stamping out miscellaneous bugs and glitches so that Wingnuts can play through the whole story now with a huge dose of WC immersion. The next stage of the project is massively ambitious and potentially changes the entire dynamic of the core game. Similar to Privateer, he's going to start working in a greater ability for ships to customize their weapons, engine power, cargo space and more. This should allow most all ships to stay relevant and be competitive as players move throughout the various factions' home regions. One of the biggest gripes about the original Freelancer was that it had an unrealistic progression of each fleet's relative strengths as the main character made progress. Rather than incrementally upgrade any ship, people were forced to upgrade into each faction that had innately better gear, which was an odd design choice. This is already a cool project, but phase two sounds fantastic for sure! If you have a copy of FL, download version 1.0 of the mod here (320 meg zip) or here.
Pictured above, part of the end-scene, meanint that my campaign test run is successful with the core features! The mod can be downloaded and played quite safely (the only outstanding one AFAIK is in setpiece battles involving battleships, some collisions can still trigger an amusing but FPS-breaking battleship spinning, though it doesn't happen every time). I'm also glad to announce that I've managed to get the game to separate the Osiris from the other Liberty battleships when it comes to deck scenes, so you'll have the Lexington for normal ships and the Intrepid for the Osiris. Enjoy! :)
Bit of an update on the second phase of the modding. First of all, I'm looking more closely on the texture part, to integrate better effects on the ships (glow and that stuff). Second part is the start of the rebalance work, which is intended to eventually make most fighters decent choices for the player to use all over the game, and one of the big points, particularly to make the game more Privateer-like, is to set up power plants and engines customization.I think this way of balancing things would be a lot more comprehensive and could make various gameplay options valid, as well as keeping most fighters competitive all the way to the endgame. Of course, it also means some massive Excel spreadsheets on my way to plan the specifics of the balance, which is work that is going to take several weeks at the very least.
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