4 years at GG, first blog with images

Well, been around GG for a few years now, made a few posts. I love TGE, have not regretted the

purchase ever since. I have had allot of fun tinkering around with it.

Until recently that is all i have really done. Well not really recent but recent in the way of

serious development work. Myself and another guy have been working 2 game ideas for the last 2 and

half years. Doing most of hte bulk of that work spent working 2 totally separate storylines. It was

fun jumping from one storyline to the other, but it became harder and harder to maintain

separations between the two. So we eventually dropped one of the projects in favor of a game type

that we loved. that being a Space Sim. We are both avid fans of Freelancer, Starlancer, and the

Freespace series. So the natural tendency was to migrate to that type of game. But there was the

love of FPS too. So using TGE 1.3 we started working on our idea. And with some of the fantastic

resources posted here i was able to get a very basic Space Sim/FPS game environment made. But

because i forgot to take a backup at one point i kinda broke the engine. So instead of taking the

stupid amount of time to fix it, i finally bit the bullet and upgraded to TGE 1.5.2. It was quicker

to re-add all the resources than to fix.

So now i do a complete backup of the engine before i make any major changes to the engine, this way

i can step back without losing any progress.

So now i got the engine back where i want it , for the most part anyway. Plus i have added a couple

more resources in that i was eyeing up before that would have been a problem intigrating into older

versions of TGE. Like the Immersive AI, and the modernization kit. I love these 2 resources, they

have added so much to the engine. Now it is down to scripting and art work. There is still some more engine changes that I plan on adding in but those can come later as they are 'nice' to have features or features that can wait and not really required.

My game at this point you can deduce as being primarily a Space simulation game. I am also keeping the 'fps' nature of TGE intact to add to the game play. The games universe is based soley of Microsoft's Freelancer and Starlancer Space Sim Games and therefore i cannot actually charge for it because MS is either unable to or not willing to give me rights to do so in a commercial way, so the game will be classified as a 'community developed game' based on the love of the original and distributed as a free game for all to play and mod (yes i intend to leave the ingame editors

enabled).

If your not familiar with freelancer visit the official website:

http://www.microsoft.com/games/freelancer/ for some detailed information.

there is a massive amount of factions in the game, but because i am sticking with 'Freelancer' as the base game to work from i kinda have to stick with it. Plus i am adding in a few more factions to expland on the game play.

there is so much art work to do it is overwhelming. hundreds of flyable space ships, over 60 usable ground based vehicles, more weapons than you can shake a stick at, fully explorable bases on both ground and space. and this is just the basics. This does not include things like particle effects, or space environment textures, or the scripting and coding to make the space environment work like it does in Freelancer, or a close approximation anyway. So i still have my work cut out for me. But i ain't complaining, i love the process.Seeing these things come togethor even in a small way makes it all worth it, makes me feel good about tackling this project in the first place.

I have no delusions of grandure here, i know i am in over my head. But I am willing to take this road to simpley prove to myself that i can and will finish it at some point to produce a playable fun game.

Now for obligatory screenshots/images that are expected in a blog here is a few dev renders of some of the space ships that will be used in the game.

Before i show them however, i have reclassified the ships in Freelancer to expand on the ship lines to fill missing roles. Liek Adding: Interceptors, Bombers, ect...

Liberty Behemoth Class Cruiser (Replaces the Liberty Cruiser[WIP])

Liberty Medium Fighter (Code named: Guardian)

Rheinland Battlecruiser (New Class)

Rheinland Superiority Fighter (Code named: Stalhlai)

Coalition Yanik Class Frigate

Alliance Victorious Class Cruiser

Outcast Light Fighter (Code named: Dagger MK2, reimaged[WIP])

I have a huge amount more that i am working on including interface art but i don't want to over load my first blog.

In my next blog i will endevour to show some interface work, as well as some of the ground based vehicles and mech's that are in works. Cheers all.