News - Series Resurrecta mod for FS2_Open Source

Release thread on Hard-Light Productions

July 16th, 2003 - July 16th, 2023
Twenty years ago today, on July 16, 2003, Inferno was released. To celebrate the 20th anniversary, the entire Release 1 campaign has been voice acted. The voice acting features many actors and actresses who have contributed roles to previous mods, and it is also the first major release to include Vasudan voice processing by Gamma39er! Gamma39er did an incredible job to exactly reproduce the sound effects used for both the untranslated and translated Vasudan speech. Pay attention to the Vasudan characters in the campaign; they sound just like the ones from Volition.

A few other bugs have been fixed since the last rerelease in 2017, mainly mission event sequence breaks in uncommon situations, as well as a few model bugs.

Both the FSO Installer and Knossos have been updated. If you prefer to install it manually, download it here and here.

Description
In the year 2400, contact with Sol was established, but with dire consequences: a war between the Earth Alliance and the GTVA. A year has passed and both sides have suffered heavy losses. With reports of black ships appearing in the Ross 128 system, the greatest fear of the GTVA has been realized: the Shivans have returned once again.

Released in 2003, Inferno was one of the most anticipated campaigns in the early years of HLP. A massive mod with 140 new models ranging from the smallest of fighters to the largest capital ships ever seen in FS2 so far.

Original release threads: Inferno board | FreeSpace Modding board
Previous rerelease thread: Inferno board

Project Lead:
Woomeister

Senior Staff:
Darkage
Venom
Sadistic Sid

Other Staff:
Alikchi
Knight Templar
Phreak
RoachKoach
Roy Fokker
Sesquipedalian
Si|eNt(\/)inion
Spicious
Stealth
StratComm
Tiara
Untouchable

Voice Producer:
Goober5000

Sound Editor/Designer:
João Guimarães

Vasudan Voice Effects:
Gamma39er

Voice Talent:
Admiral Nelson - EAD Devout
Amy O'Grady - SOSD Olemus, Wingman 2 (Ice Queen), Wingman 7 (Female Vasudan)
Andros Urbana - GTCa Independence
Caleb Smith - GTD Harmonium, GVD Nefertiri, GVCa Rhemet, Vasudan Command
Cobra - GVD Hathor, Lieutenant Higgins, Wingman 1 (Ace)
Colonol Dekker - Briefing Officer
Caiaphas - Admiral Dren (SOC Command)
Darkblade - SOD Orpheus
Dilmah G - EAC Praetorian, Sol Gate
Eamonn Riley - Admiral Falon (EASD Nemesis)
Eleven Labs - GTD Aquitaine
Fusionblaster - Wingman 3 (Rookie)
HulkyKrow - GTD Ramanaya, Wingman 5 (Sidekick)
Kehra - EACv Iasius
Logomancer - GVD Khedess, GTT Mylae, EAI Verdun
Mobius - GTCv Mako
Nicolle Zambrano - GTCv Carolina, GTCv Keyes, GTD Reyes, GTC Yukon
Nyctaeus - GTCv Punishment
RedMageJoe - Wingman 4 (Hotshot), Wingman 6 (Male Vasudan)
Renegade Paladin - Allied Command, Untranslated Vasudan
Sparda - EAD Arethusa
Tim Valencia (The Kunked Slump) - Admiral Ramsey (Command Briefing Officer)
Vindicare Assassin - GTT Azure, Lambda 1, EAC Redavi, GTT Renegade

Second SotGW Anniversary Update
Check out the calendar! Today is October 16th, 2022, which marks the second anniversary of the release of ‘Shadows of the Great War’. As we are making progress on the next release, named Entanglement or Entgm, we at the SerRes team thought it was a good time to share with the public the latest news and updates on the status of SR.

What’s around the corner?
The next SR campaign to be released will be Serendipity - or Srdp - set in 2342. Several screenshots of this campaign have been shared with the public. From these, you can see just how deep the setting ventures into the Reconstruction Era – the Era that followed the Great War of 2335.

The second Entanglement campaign has not been formally revealed - yet. That said, in channels such as our Discord server the abbreviation of its title has been made public: HesT. What “HesT” is short for will be revealed in the future. No further details can be shared yet, but as you can tell from a few of the pictures, this campaign will be centered on the almighty Hades, the Galactic Terran Intelligence Superdestroyer, meaning that it will take place sometime around 2335.

But that’s not all. As well as working on the two new campaigns, we have been busy improving Gehenna’s Gate and The Spirit of Ptah, the two campaigns released in 2020. The next SR update will include these enhancements as well, such as: plot additions, more ships, checkpoints and compatibility with upgraded graphics. These features should boost the gameplay experience of these two campaigns – so not only can you enjoy Serendipity, but you will also have a very good reason to go back and replay GehG and TSoP as well!

Music development
Now, an update from ShadowsOfLight, our fellow music artist!

As the primary composer on the Series Resurrecta team, I wanted to share a bit of a blog about my work on the team, which has been focused on the Serendipity campaign.

My additions to the soundtrack – most of the music, but not all – are quite a whirlwind journey that starts in December of 2020: Mobius, the project lead, messaged me on SoundCloud to ask if he could use one of my recently created tracks in the mod. This was right around the time I was doing a significant refresh of my virtual instrument toolkit, and looking for ways to practice working with my new additions. I happily gave permission to use the track (“Melancholy Revelation”), and asked if there was any other music I could help with. This is where the journey begins… (Note that some details are left out to remain spoiler-free.)

My first task was to write two standard FS mission-suites that had a bit of an exotic element to them – one of which was meant to sound heavy and desperate. The first of these, “Resurfacing Mystery”, went over quite well with the SR team, making use of a moon guitar to create a bit of an exotic vibe. The second, “Losing Our Stars”, while liked by the team, did not have the intensity desired; a tabla and eastern flute were used as exotic elements for this track. Thus, a third mission track was created: “Ruinous”, meant to musically crush the player under the weight of a terrible in-game situation. I think I pleasantly surprised the team with the depths of despair that this track took them to…

It felt good to get back into writing music for FS mods, and from this point there has been a relatively consistent rotation of FS-related composing in my life (both in and out of the SR space). This is a good balance to the more carefree, optimistic side of my usual personal projects…

There were several tracks that I wanted to make, which came without an explicit request from the team. In the spirit of Series Resurrecta, I decided to dig up one of my old mission suites – which was never publicly released – and give it a complete reimagining. This made it into the soundtrack as “Forging Through the Black”. It is a little bit different from the rest of the OST for this reason, with the battle section being driven with more of a rock/metal feel in the drums, bass and guitar. The briefings “Something Out There” and “Starset” were both created without a direct request from the team. I wrote Starset as a way to celebrate the release of the 0.0.7 internal candidate; it was an attempt to capture the feeling of James Bond in space, in the form of a trailer track, and ended up turning into a team favourite. The main menu track, “Into the Abyss”, was something that I wanted to add to ensure completeness to the Serendipity soundtrack – even though players don’t necessarily spend a lot of time in the main menu, I feel that it is important to remind them that this is not vanilla FS, and help set the tone of the mod. The somber mood is punctuated by a middle-eastern guitar called a saz, which also finds its way into a couple of the standalone tracks. Finally, one of the playtesters felt that the original briefing track selected for the first mission didn’t properly fit the mood of the mod, suggesting it would be better to have a briefing track that was anthemic without being peppy, and so “Might of Adhara” was born.

The final requests from the dev team were big ones, and resulted in some of the work I am most proud of on the OST: four standalone tracks that play at key moments in the campaign. The first of these ended up being “Wreckage of Serendipity”, something to keep the player company while they explore <REDACTED>. Meant to be relatively innocuous, not melancholy like much of the rest of the OST; this song sweeps through with some gentle arpeggiations and a steady processed beat. The second, “A Keeper Among the Ruins”, was to take the place of a well-loved track taken from another source, which plays during two of the saddest moments of Serendipity. The original selected track was too short, and I needed to replicate the mood as best as possible while creating something unique. Luckily, the combination of a choir, gentle synth arpeggiation, saz, cello and classic FS-esque synthesizer did the job.

At this time, I shouldn’t reveal the titles of the last two songs, as they contain some spoilers. They were created for epilogue scenes at the end of the game; two possible endings with two different contexts. The first continues with a slightly “exotic” theme, using the saz to drive the main melody - a bit of inspiration for this song was taken from the most ancient song known to our modern world, the Hymn to Nikkal, which dates back to 1200 BCE. The second epilogue track required something that was both unique to Serendipity, and unique to the FreeSpace soundscape in general; it has a folky, celtic feel to achieve this uniqueness. The unique elements are layered on top of the familiar vintage synth beds and cinematic chord progressions, which I’m hoping will result in a fresh, epic track that still feels like it fits in the FreeSpace universe. I couldn’t think of a better way to end the soundtrack than this particular song.

It has been an absolute blast to write the OST for Serendipity. The SR team has been extremely supportive of my work, and puts a lot of their own passion into these campaigns. I am excited for the community to see how it all comes together, and excited to once again share a little bit of FreeSpace into my wider group of fans. The feedback, suggestions and prompts given by the team - especially Nyctaeus and Mobius - have helped push me to make some killer tracks.

Long live <REDACTED>!

Screenshots by team member Colt

New Year's Update
Hi there, we are wishing everybody a happy new year, and to brighten everyone’s mood, we have some good news to kick 2021 off with. We have been a little quiet on the ‘developer updates’ front recently, and the flow of screenshots has been a mere trickle. Some of you may have wondered “Is the project still being worked on - at all?”

We can gladly say now that the answer is a resounding “Yes, it most definitely IS still being worked on - a lot!” We haven’t shared many screenshots due to the eye candy being rather ‘spoilerish’, and we have simply been too busy modeling, FREDing, composing and writing to keep the dev blog up-to-date. Oops! Sorry about that. Hopefully, we can make this up to you all with the good news we are announcing today. We are proud to announce that progress has been going very smoothly, despite ‘the cough’, and notable milestones have been achieved in the past couple of weeks. So, what’s the latest with Series Resurrecta? Good question, but where do we start? Starting at the beginning with the campaigns that have already been released seems like a good idea, so…

Gehenna's Gate and The Spirit of Ptah
Thanks to the great efforts of Nomad, our pet scribe, the writing overhaul project of Gehenna's Gate and The Spirit of Ptah is pretty much complete. The next release of SerRes will feature revamped versions of these campaigns, with enhanced eye-candy, improved writing, more tech room entries, checkpoints and much, much more…

We can't wait to show them off with you all. We will let you all know when it comes out. Or keep a sharp eye out for the magic blue ‘Update Avail!’ box on Knossos.

Serendipity [Srdp]
A while ago we announced the development of Serendipity. We had to let the campaign simmer for a bit as we were putting the finishing touches to Gehenna’s Gate and The Spirit of Ptah, whilst also laying the foundations of the campaign that was to come after it. (We know, we know, ‘finish one campaign before starting work on the next’ and all that, but doing so is asking for way too much patience from our hyperactive little crew).

Since we went back to it properly work has developed apace. Not only has the campaign had a major facelift (i.e. eye candy!), it has now been completed and is ready for its dates with the playtesters and bug squishers. The following, non-spoilerish screenshots come straight from Srdp. We'd love to show you more but we really can't right now. Info regarding two of the main factions seen in Serendipity, as well as the main ships they use, can be seen here. FYI, the final versions will include even more content.









[REDACTED]
Serendipity won't come out alone, as we are continuing Shadows of the Great War's two-campaigns formula for our next release. We can't tell you any more right now, but details will follow soon(ish). Oh ok, one little tidbit, since you asked so nicely. While Serendipity goes deep into the Reconstruction Era, the other campaign will be far, far closer to the Great War timeline.

New Music
ShadowsOfLight has composed several new tracks for Series Resurrecta, many of which have already been released in a new album. These tracks will help generate the atmosphere we're looking to create for Serendipity in particular.

How to get in touch with us
Would you like to keep up-to-date with developments, see the latest content and contact the devs directly? If so, we would love to be contacted by you, so let’s make that happen. Here’s how:

If you're on Hard Light Productions, either as a registered member or as a ‘lurker’, visit the official Series Resurrecta board.
Discord also features a dedicated subchannel devoted to this project, under the tag #serres, and you can get in touch with us over there as well.
And finally, if you want to dive into the details concerning this project, the Series Resurrecta category on the FreeSpace Wiki features many articles, including walkthroughs and trivia. Just be aware that the Wiki contains heavy spoilers, so perhaps hold off visiting until after you have completed the campaigns, or if you are having real trouble beating a mission.

That’s all for now. We had best get back to it, those missions aren’t going to FRED themselves after all.

Development Blog
After the release of Shadows of the Great War, we are now proud to announce the creation of the official SerRes Development Blog, which will help you uncover what's next to come in Series Resurrecta. That's right, we are already working on the next release!

Nyctaeus' take on the Blog
Let's hear what the second in command of SerRes has to say on the newly launched blog. His post can also be found on the official Series Resurrecta forums.

I always wanted to have a dev blog and ModDB page such as this. This is the place where all of the updates regarding our upcoming projects set within SR will be posted, usually with some [fingers crossed] pretty pictures and a wall or two of text.

I'm Nyx, right? My job is to keep things shiny. So, I have several shiny things to show you!

I'm happy to announce that development of a third campaign set within Series Resurrecta is underway. Although we still work on improvements to Gehenna's Gate and The Spirit of Ptah, we also have the mod pack required for the third instalment largely completed. Mobius begun ‘FREDding’ (FreeSpace speak for coding) M01, based on an old and unused concept design from 2008. In the meantime, I am assembling some cosmetic things which are not critical but certainly nice to have.

The title of the next campaign is classified, but for now, I will refer to this project as: Srdp.

I can officially reveal that the next campaign will feature several original factions. Some of them are canon, others are not. Some of them are Terran, others are not. The first two I can reveal are:

The Adhara Coalition - one of the major Terran blocks formed after the collapse of the GTA. The Player Character is a pilot in service of the Adhara Navy, onboard the ACD Uhuru.

The second faction is the Regulus Syndicate. As a small reminder, both are canon to the FreeSpace universe just like the Luyten New Alliance and the Antares Federation.

One of the staples of Series Resurrecta is a large and fancy modpack, featuring several, new, carefully picked classes of starships. Srdp is no different in this regard, and as your local provider of polygons covered in shiny bitmaps, I feel obliged to not disappoint you.

The Adhara Coalition
The Adharan fleet is based mostly on Fenris and Leviathan cruisers, and Orion destroyers. However, they have also introduced their unique corvette - the ACCv Midgard. The Midgard was developed by the Mirfak Fleet Yards as the Terran counterpart to project Sobek, commenced by the reformed Vasudan Empire. The GTA commissioned several prototypes of this revolutionary vessel, right before its eventual downfall and dissolution. Those vessels significantly contributed to the power of the Adhara Coalition, providing exceptional subspace agility, and due to a shortage of capital ships, they also provide the direly needed housing for fighters to secure unstable borders of Coalition space. They continue to do so to this day. Another new design is the Sigrun, the elite Adharan interceptor based on the Valkyrie. The Sigrun was designed to hunt pirates, outlaws and the Hammer of Light, all of whom were threatening the citizens and trade lines of the Coalition. The Sigrun continues to overwhelm its enemies by using its exceptional primary firepower (i.e. guns) and the power output of its next-generation engines.

Adhara Coalition Cruiser - Fenris class
As expected, the Coalition inherited several Fenris class cruisers from the now-defunct Galactic Terran Alliance. The Adhara Coalition retrofitted these cruisers with improved weaponry and systems, and also repainted their hulls to make them more easily distinguishable from similar cruisers used by other Terran blocs.

Adhara Coalition Destroyer - Orion class
The Orion destroyer, even after the end of the Great War, maintained its role as the primary asset for any Terran faction. The Adharas inherited a limited number of Orions in working condition, but also begun to build at least one destroyer of this class from scratch.

Adhara Coalition Corvette - Midgard class
Following the introduction into active service of the Vasudan Sobek corvette, the Adharas also developed and fielded a small number of corvettes, the Midgard class. This warship fills the gap between cruisers and destroyers and packs a massive punch, which can change the tide of a battle in the Coalition’s favor.

Adhara Coalition Fighter - Sigrun class
Using the aging Valkyrie design as a root, the Coalition developed a fast and deadly fighter, the Sigrun, which marks the beginning of a new generation of combat spacecraft. This extremely effective fighter, although not durable enough to counter larger assets such as warships, is the perfect tool for gaining space superiority.

The Regulus Syndicate
But while the AC inherited large resources, industry and science facilities, they are dwarfed by their neighbour in sheer fleet tonnage. Featuring an immense fleet of 5 Orion-class destroyers and countless cruisers, the Regulus Syndicate is one of the major Terran powers in the former GTA space. The Syndicate was mostly formed from former officers, crewmembers and soldiers of several GTA fleets, thus contributing many loyal hands to their cause and establishing their position as a military power. The RS inherited three star systems desolated by Shivans during the Great War. As a result, their economy is insufficient to support expansion or even provide enough resources to keep their large fleet in working condition. Additionally, they border the even more powerful Vasudan Empire. Life in RS-controlled space is hard, but the Syndicate is a proud nation with great dreams and high ambitions. They have introduced very few new technologies, the most significant of which is their unique Proteus-class heavy fighter. Instead of relying on new technologies, the RS relies on loyal and well-trained crews with years of experience. They use mostly Great War-era craft with dedication, believing that simple, reliable and trusted weapons are all they require to ensure their superiority.

Regulus Syndicate Cruiser - Fenris class
The Syndicate is no exception in adapting the surviving Fenris cruisers from the Great War to modern-day use. Although they're beginning to show their age, these cruisers are still expected to be the mainstay of Terran fleets for several decades to come.

Regulus Syndicate Destroyer - Orion class
The large Orions are the Syndicate’s premier warship class, the tools by which they maintain peace. Retrofitted and equipped with more efficient systems, RSD Orions are considered the most important assets of the Regulus Syndicate, and frequently participate in key operations.

Regulus Syndicate Fighter - Proteus class
The Syndicate combined the retrofit of old Great War designs with the development of entirely new ship classes. One such example is the Proteus, a fighter which can unleash swarms and swarms of missiles at slow-moving targets, effectively replacing bombers in combat environments where torpedoes could be intercepted by enemy defence barrages.