Freelancer-like game in development, testers wanted

    Hello, folks. I am Greg Wolfe. The few old-timers here might remember me as Argh- I wrote a lot of tutorials and stuff back in the old days.


    Anyhow... time has passed, but I'm still making games and the occasional mod. Recently I downloaded Unity, and was quite pleased with how easy it is to build games with. I think I may build a "spiritual successor" to Freelancer with it.


    I can't afford to buy the rights to the original IP from Microsoft, so I can't have Juni and Trent running about or use any of the original setting or storyline. In fact, this will probably be the one and only time I mention Freelancer at all (to avoid getting sued later down the road). That said, Freelancer was never really about the storyline per se- it was about having an awesome sandbox experience. Having built a really cool mod for Mount and Blade last year, I got the itch to build a sandbox game again (it's my favorite concept) and now... well, I have something, and it's mainly a matter of whether I think there's enough interest left in the FL community to find an audience for the project.


    Because I hate announcing stuff like this without having anything that people can play right away, I've spent the last two weeks building this very early tech demo, showing that the basics of flight, FL-style, and a lot of the basic rendering technology (star-spheres, planets, basic special effects etc.) is working. It's not super-awesome yet, and all you can do is fly around, but it works, and I'm hoping to find some people to test it as it gets closer to being a working game.


    Anyhow, long story short, here's a link to the project.


    Simply unzip it somewhere and double-click on test.exe to run it. The controls will probably be utterly familiar to most of you.


    If people want to check it out and give me feedback, or just read about what I think I'd like to do with the project, I can be reached at the wolfegames.com forums.


    Oh, and no, this isn't some elaborate April Fool's joke :lol:

    Hi argh,


    long time no see.
    I am not entirely sure if times really changed that much but out of experience i can say that the storyline is one of the most important aspects of FL today. The majority of players are playing offline which easily can be measured by the big difference between mod downloads/active visitors and the amount of online players.
    The currently most popular mods have large story elements.


    Atm i am even working on a new story campaign.


    I have downloaded your project and will take a short look at it somewhen this evening. The graphics that the unity engine can produce is indeed pretty good but time will tell if its useful to create a new kind of FL.

    I certainly agree that a story matters.


    Basically, what I'm saying is that I don't think that the Freelancer setting mattered that much. Change the names, make different cultural references, and it was all pretty generic space-opera. I think that it's possible to write a new story and have just as much fun.


    Basically, in terms of future plans, the development of the game will go something like this:


    1. Get weapons working, get basic AI working.


    2. Get the fast-travel system working. One of the few major changes I intend to make is to get rid of Tradelanes and use a system of teleportation beacons instead, for instant travel between any point and a beacon... and slow travel everywhere else. This is part of the overall goal of making it more sandbox, as exploration off the "beaten track" will be encouraged, and will improve MP, if I ever get to that point, by making it so that players can't avoid each other so easily.


    3. Get the UI built. Big job, will take some time to do.


    4. Build the single-player adventure elements for sandbox- what the various space empires do, what players can interact with, what kinds of missions there will be (I want there to be a lot more real variety than there was in FL).


    5. Build a basic campaign.


    That's the immediate set of goals for now. Along the way, I'll have to build more art and content, of course, but I'm going to take that all very one-day-at-a-time for now :-)

    Nice start, I'll drop by and unofficially test releases if you'd like but I cannot be a dedicated tester I'm afraid. Trying to wrap my head around FL modding again, :P.


    What I think of your game thus far


    I don't know much in the way of OOP programming (I'm a Web Developer, haha), but I think what you have is pretty cool. Some problems I had were the delay in moving forward, the animation of the jet seems a bit delayed - because the drive is spooling up? - and should maybe have an animation somewhat like in FL as the warp drive is initialising. The mouse-driven controls were also broken for me and not limited to the immediate window - I could move my mouse in other programs (or just the desktop) and it would control the ship. The ship also had a problem going up, where I found myself only gaining slight altitude, and then lowering the mouse slightly would dive the ship quite radically. I literally had to hold space to keep initialising your center view hotkey to attempt at raising the mouse as once you begin to dive, moving the mouse to the top of the screen won't even level you out anymore.


    But it's a good start, more than I could accomplish, :).

    Hehe, nice one Argh. Good to see Unity being used more (I'm not good with Unity, but am lab support for the University module which utilises Unity, ironically :D ).


    There's another project using Unity as well - a little more advanced on the rendering front.
    http://the-starport.net/freela…php?topic_id=3779&forum=6


    May be of interest to you :)


    *edit* Eh auto formatting of a link... eek, try

    Code
    1. http://the-starport.net/freelancer/forum/viewtopic.php?topic_id=3779&forum=6

    keleven : yeah, the control schema is pretty rough in that release, and I agree with the rest of what you've said, although I should note that the leveling-out issue was present in FL as well, to some extent- I think they used a bit of counter-torque on the forward axis to help compensate for drift, though, I'll try that out and see if it works. I've added stuff like proper controls for the throttle and a few other things of that sort.


    There isn't a cruise drive mode atm- IDK whether I'll do that or not, it always seemed like a bit of a kludge to me, and maybe it can be avoided by paying more attention to distance in the level designs.


    It's meant to be played fullscreen in the final version, so I don't know whether I'll do mouse capture (probably yes, a lot of people like playing games windowed) but I haven't coded up the UI for the crosshairs, etc. yet.- still working on getting the AI working well enough to make a mini-game to keep people entertained and test art assets while I build the hard stuff.


    Chips : Checked out the link. Looks interesting, and we'll just have to see what pans out :-)

    Quote from xenoargh

    There isn't a cruise drive mode atm- IDK whether I'll do that or not, it always seemed like a bit of a kludge to me, and maybe it can be avoided by paying more attention to distance in the level designs.

    Oh, I didn't mean that I wanted an actual cruise drive (that satellite was close enough to fly to), I just mean the animation of the engines 'sucking in' energy as the drive spooled. Something to show the engine is building up rather than one or two seconds wait of no engine fire, and then having it start. At first I thought W wasn't to move as the reaction to move wasn't instantaneous (or, as mentioned above, no sign of engines firing), so I thought maybe an animation of things beginning within the engine compartment would eliminate that confusion.