Freelancer:Black Dawn mod for Freelancer

Update At Dawn , May 5th, 2008

Worry not, we're all still here!
First of all, happy Cinqo de Mayo to anyone and everyone who may be celebrating it!

Secondly, it's been a fairly long time since we last had an update for Freelancer: Black Dawn, so I felt it important that I post something so as to reassure our public that we are, in fact, still here. More important than just being here, however, we are still making excellent progress.

Evidence, you say? As I'm certain many of you have seen, Dark Angel and ApocSky have been frequently updating their models threads in the "Showcase" board, and Kerrigor has been busy creating fantastic graphics for the mod, including the banner posted at the top of this news post! Most of the other evidence I'd get to show you are all... well, technical. Weapons coding and such that isn't terribly interesting. However, the mod team is still active and working frantically to bring you the next big thing in the modification! Read on to find out what!

GREEN vs. GOLD event being totally revamped!

And in other unrelated news, I continually change my colors of my Halo character from Green main and gold secondary, to Gold main and Green secondary. Support for both sides! *thumbs-up*

The Mod Team has been exploring the possibilty to having a much more in-depth version of the Green vs. Gold event that would, we hope, prove to be far more entertaining than the "here's your ship, now go shoot". While details are still fairly tight-lipped, I can tell you that we're aiming for something similar to an RTS thing, including harvesting resources and building new buildings to "unlock" certain ships for purchase! I'm running a few tests on paper as we speak, making sure that all the kinks can be worked out, but we're excited to give it a try! And our good friend, ShawnCowles, should be pleased with one factor that will become important to this particular "Engine".

Other important Mod details you might like to see:

As we continue to make progress, we want to avoid something a similar modification *cough cough* has done: kept everyone else in the dark. So, I've looked at what you might be interested in knowing, and posted them here.

--BALANCE: One thing the Mod team is desperate to make nigh-perfect is "Class Balance". I'm sure you've all seen it; we have fighters, bombers, frigates, cruisers, carriers, and everything in between. So, we're doing our best to ensure that while one class will be powerful in one aspect, it will lack in the latter, to make each and every ship important in it's own way. We want to avoid having the bigger vessels simply trump the fighters and similar vessels. If all goes according to plan, there will be both capital battles... and fighter battles, as well.

--WEAPON TYPES: To go along with our theory of balance, we will have various types of weaponry, as well. Sometimes, there will be multiple classes of the same weapon! A perfect example is the Magnetic Linear Accelerator, or MLA. While this has been viewed as a wonderful anti-fighter weapon, we now have both a Light and Heavy version of the weapon. The Light varient will be much faster, able to track fighters easily, and works well as a PD type of weapon. The Heavy varient, on the other hand, will hit much harder, making it perfect for anti-capital type of engagements.

These are just a few examples of the awesome we have planned for Freelancer: Black Dawn, and a couple of the proposed changes we've been working on. Really, everyone, we're making progress and are meeting internal deadlines! No promises, but it shouldn't be too much longer before GREEN vs. GOLD really gets under way. For now, continue joining and bragging, and be understanding if your team leads are a little.... unresponsive.

Also, feel free to post in the "General" Board about this news post with comments, questions, etc. for the mod team!

~Dark_Angel. Lead Coder