Post news Report RSS Six Years of Slipstream!

It’s been six years since Slipstream: The Price of Freedom ended full-time development. There has been an attempt at revival several times since then, but nothing has been built past v3.0 which was originally released in 2010. People move on, life gets in the way, things like that. But one thing is for sure, I’ve never forgotten my roots...

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It’s been six years since Slipstream: The Price of Freedom ended full-time development. There has been an attempt at revival several times since then, but nothing has been built past v3.0 which was originally released in 2010. People move on, life gets in the way, things like that. But one thing is for sure, I’ve never forgotten my roots.

Slipstream catapulted my career forward as a software engineer and opened the door to greater success before I finished college. Because of that, I’ve never forgotten the experience attached to it. The community and fanfare surrounding every teaser screenshot and news bulletin was enough to keep the lights on, even as life was starting to get too busy. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with this mod, but now it’s time to pay due respect to it and explain why.

The Price of Freedom started out as a chapter in the Homeworld universe in the same vein as Homeworld: Cataclysm, which served as inspiration. However, things changed quickly. Our story writer had second thoughts and left with his/her intellectual property, leaving us with a lot of content without context. At the time I was creating a universe to serve as a basis for a much larger, future game franchise called Slipstream. I took full control of the project, and delegated few tasks, leaving a lot of the grunt work to myself. I retooled the original TPOF story as a prequel chapter to what I had been writing, and built an entire universe around it in about three months. The idea was to build out the content we had until we could afford to have original models and content made.

Unfortunately, I had never gotten around to finishing the mod. By the time 2010 came around, there was only Erik, Matt, and I actually contributing to the project. Matt had finally tuned the fighters into usefulness, and Erik seemed happy with the way the game played. At the time, I had to call it quits. I was angry…disappointed that TPOF was unfinished; its quirks and glitches were cringe-worthy to me. So I tried to bury it away.

Fast forward to 2015, I had published v3.0 to Steam and it immediately was well received. It hasn’t ranked too significantly, but it returned impressive numbers for something that hasn’t seen active development in five-to-six years. I don’t want to sound “full of myself”, but when I went to play the mod for the first time in years, I was shocked. It was very well done, very polished and well built. It’s not perfect, but for someone who has worked on professional software since the end of TPOF, I was impressed.

I told myself that once I had some downtime, I would clean up the Moddb page and remove the awful v3.1 that was supposed to be the v3.x revival in 2011. So, here we are. I’ve added some new screenshots and linked a video provided to me by a community member. I’ve also updated the description, and fixed the download link. Lastly, I’ve contacted Moddb support and had the mod un-archived so now it will show on all the relevant pages and search results.

Thank you all for being supportive throughout the years. You’re the reason I keep coming back to this universe. However, there’s one more thing: Myself and a few of my colleagues are looking quite seriously at this mod and we see some potential. Does that mean we’re going to resume development? Not quite. Some of you have noticed that The Price of Freedom is now a mod for Homeworld: Remastered, but without the Slipstream. While there has been some significant development in that area, it is currently on hold while myself and others take a good, long look at the IP and gameplay. Any official announcements will come through this page, but don’t get too excited just yet. We’re still in the planning phase.

If you have v3.1 installed, you can safely remove it and download v3.0 again. V3.1 doesn’t have the polish that v3.0 has, and consider this a “reset” of the mod back to that version. The Steam v3.0 and Moddb v3.0 are slightly different, but I’ll correct this in the next couple of days once I get my tools set back up. Also, if anyone wants to submit fixes or changes to the mod, please feel free to contact me.

Enjoy your stay in the Slipstream universe once again; hopefully there will be more to come!



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conscript19
conscript19

And your mod was never forgotten ;)

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SpaceCowboy730 Author
SpaceCowboy730

I'm glad it wasn't :)

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