The Greatest Space Combat Sim Lives On: The Freespace 2 Source Code Project!
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
game engine on the Internet. Immediately afterwards the game vanished
from store shelves and you couldn't even buy a copy of the game online
for a long time. The only way to find find it was to search Bittorrent
sites to download a copy of the game.
Now a group at http://www.hard-light.net has resurrected the greatest
space combat sim of all time and have given it some badly needed
upgrades. The biggest change is the lack of Direct X. The game runs
entirely on Open GL for graphics with real-time dynamic lighting and
environmental lighting. Open AL powers the sounds system of the game
instead of Direct Sound. Because of these changes the game is easily
portable to the Mac and Linux platforms.
The JAVA based installer downloads over 3.25 GBs of game data to your
system, this includes the original retail version of Freespace 2, all of
the in-game video cinemas converted to the Ogg Vorbis video format,
several mods and a port of the complete "Descent Freespace: The Great
War" game to the new Freespace 2 SCP game engine. A working, rewritten
version of the Fred2 mission editor is included with the game allowing
you to build your own missions and combat campaigns.
A few full-conversion projects were born from the Freespace 2 SCP. One
is "Beyond The Red Line", a stunningly well done "Battlestar Galactica"
space combat sim, "The Babylon Project" which is a "Babylon 5" space
combat sim, and "Wing Commander Saga" which is a homage to the "Wing
Commander" games done using the new engine.
All of these are free to download, burn to a blank DVD and share with
anyone you like legally.
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Michael "TheZorch" Haney
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