A quick teaser of things to come, the Shivans make their first appearance in 'Freespace: Evolution' - and they're as deadly as ever...
The mod has been making good progress lately with lots of ships finally getting playable. Of course the Shivan ships have retained their evil look and leave quite an impression when encountered in battle. Agile fighters, strong beam cannons and a seemingly endless stream of reinforcements make them a deadly enemy not to be underestimated. Their dark and menacing ships blend in surprisingly well with the environment - don't be surprised, if a few ships manage to get to your rear virtually unnoticed.
The hi-poly Cain model isn't currently part of the Freespace Upgrade Project's mediavps (my main source of models and textures), but was kindly provided by hard-light.net forum member c914. It's still a work-in-progress for FS2 use, but certainly good enough to make it into this mod, as the base model and textures are practically finished. It's several orders of magnitude more detailed than the old Cain, so I'm really thankful for being allowed to use the model. Thanks, c914!
A short explanation why I chose to add engine trails to fighters and cruisers might be necessary here, since those aren't really canon to the Freespace games. The most important reason is playability: in Freespace you're very close to the action, but in Nexus you'll usually look at the scene from a much greater distance to be able to keep track of everything happening on the battlefield at once. Fighters and bombers won't be any bigger than a single pixel on your screen from such a distance. Considering the background "noise" like stars and nebulas and you can image those small craft getting practically invisible to the player. Adding engine trails really helps a lot to spot fighters and visualize their movement direction, improves your battlefield-awareness and thus helps the gameplay immensely... and it even looks pretty cool in motion, too! ;)
So that's it for today. If you've got any suggestions or questions regarding the mod or future news updates, feel free to speak your mind!
well actually in FS2 if a ship used the afterburners you had an engine trail to follow for a little bit, so it could technically be considered canon to have the trails already
Cool.. looking good guys... FS2 reborn... looking forward to i...
Is this going to be a standalone install. I tried doing all the stuff before with the freespace mod thingy and it was all to much hassle so I gave up.
Looks good though.
This is a mod for the sci-fi tactics game 'Nexus: The Jupiter Incident', so it won't be a standalone install. Like always you'll need to have the full game and this mod (when it's released). Installation will be straightforward and easy, though, so nothing you should fear, really. ;)
great space enviroment textures...
NICE :-) Oh man this is a fusion of my two favorite games.
NICE iam a freespace 2 and nexus fan
i definatly looking forward to try this
what focus do you intend? multiplayer or singleplayer?
Singleplayer right now. Since Nexus' master server is down and considering the problems with Vista and Windows 7, its pretty hard to even find a single open match online, let alone for the same mod. Singleplayer also makes it way easier to get the balancing right and fix bugs on my local machine than having to rely on other people for multiplayer tests.
I'm not ruling it out completely for the foreseeable future, but right now I'm concentrating just on singleplayer.
looks great.with each teaser news i am getting more & more impatient for a relase.will you maybe add later when youre mostly done the ship models used in blue planet or is this no option for you?