Video showing the particle fx I've been working on

Wow, just wow, those particle effects are simply gorgeous! Looks like I'll have to lurk around here more often now, if you're getting back into the swing of things here.

Question about the ships shown in the video; are the weapons they're armed with placeholders at the moment? Because honestly, the more I see projectile guns the more it distresses me, and it looks like every single ship there was armed with them, so that's a lot of distress. I know this is your mod, creativity and personal likes, yadda yadda, but it really detracts from the "Freelancer" vibe of the mod for me. Kinetic weapons should be really rare, if at all, not all over the place at least.

Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

Are you changing the capital ship system back to the frigate-based  concept you were considering before?

Ohhh freelancer! this looks great!

-Blaz 

New video featuring the Upholder, new Liberty Plasma particle and Liberty Fighter Torpedo Particle

a Liberator convoy escorted by a Dreadnaught Class Battleship:

Some pics from a recent stress test battle:

Have the mod almost ready for Alpha Release, just finishing the updates for the recent patch

I haven't been around much, due to working on another mod, but luckily I just finished a new beta release.

And then I come over here to find the first Alphasfkjdf;gkrdf

GOOOD GOOOD

Well that was good timing for me.  Getting it now.

Hmmm... odd. You have v1.80 of Rebellion right? Also, SotSS should be the only mod loaded as I don't think it would play nice with any other mods.

I haven't experienced any minidumps on autosave at all... Is this happening to anyone else?

I had a little game of it just now. Thankfully it was for 1.80, as Steam updated Sins even though I SPECIFICALLY told it not to do so... Bloody thing.

Oh man, Sins loads up, plays the main theme and zooms in on a Freelancer outpost... I was almost frothing at the mouth. I think that might indicate I like Freelancer a little bit, I guess. Just a tad.

Those particle effects are simply amazing, those engines... MMM

Seeing these new Liberty ships in person was awesome, like the Liberator. Great work there!

Oh, in case you were wondering, as I only set up the music for 6 factions before, I am still planning on doing the Nomad music, I just wanted to wait until I had something to test it with easily, as it was the 7th faction, I believe.

For some reason, the STARFIRE Patriot did not seem to want to fire at gravity well NPCs, but fought fine against player ships. It just flew around. Not sure what happened there.

Also, Patriot Scouts are well suited to fighting normal Patriots, due to the Graviton shields protecting against kinetic damage the normal Patriot's kinetic guns.

So Liberty has damage resistance to everything ever. [/trollface]

But seriously now, lots of bullet guns for a game with no bullets. And a single faction which has resistance to all bullets. This will be a problem.

This could prove to be a major issue later on, requiring mass micromanagement of battles and AI getting stuck fighting things they can't damage, etc, but we'll see how it works out. How in the world do you keep finding ways to do things that Sins hates? It's amazing!

Oh, random thought that crossed my mind while I'm coding some horribly logical thing.

We have credits from planets, metal from asteroids, but how about changing crystals to H-Fuel? Have the crystal asteroids as a little invisible mesh or whatever with a large nebulous particle effect, and "building" an extractor places a mining ship in it. Might have a few different ones according to the factions if it's possible, I'm not sure what models you have at your fingertips.

It'd be cool to send off BMM ships to clouds as Bretonia, or GMG vessels as Kusari, etc. IMG might work with the BHG.

Hmm, well consider this then.

Have the H-fuel clouds rarely around planets, but have large amounts of them in uncolonizable nebulas. This will increase the worth of such gravwells, while also being harder to hold onto. In addition, it would also translate some Freelancer lore into the gameplay itself, in that H-Fuel was a highly sought after and contested resource, causing the 80-Year War and all sorts. Suddenly these fuel filled nebulas are hotly contested spots.

Have fighters require tiny amounts of H-Fuel, but the cost for bigger ships scales up dramatically, requiring you to get a decent source of fuel before you start pumping out capital ships. Colonization capitals should require far less, for gameplay reasons, obviously. Wouldn't want to get stuck with only a trickle of fuel, would you?

With the nebulas, I came up with two different types of Nebula (In terms of gameplay, not looks.) that you can find.

The first is like normal uncolonizable gravwells; there are abandoned miners left about the cloud that can be boarded and crewed. Hard to hold onto, but profitable.

The other is a large central mining station, like the big GMG ones, which acts as a kind of asteroid that looks like a miner. This way, you can establish a foothold on this station, and then build additional miner ships to harvest the clouds nearby. These bases could have all sorts of H-Fuel related planet bonuses attached to them. Some of these bases could be abandoned, some could be captured by pirates or criminals, with some defenders.

Ahh, I'd so love to see the white clouds of the Walker nebula filled with miners, powering your industrial warmachine.

Now that is freakin' cool, I love this idea. I never bother with phase inhibitors in vanilla Sins, as well as most mods, but this sounds like something actually useful to build now. Maybe you can make these wide-area disruptors use the cloak-detecing scanner station's model, from near the end of the Freelancer campaign?

Well, if the Nomads are gonna have the IsPsi identifier, then perhaps the Rogue Titan can have an ability that checks for Nomad player ships in it's gravity well, and changes to their side. Of course, this is probably a bad way of doing it, it could probably be easily exploitable. Hmm.

Man, I really need to get the Sins DLCs. Especially Stellar Phenomena. If there's one thing that Freelancer smashed into my brain with a sledgehammer, it's an utter fear of stellar bodies.

WARNING ENTERIN(*explodes*)G SUN'S CORONA