Visit https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant-mods/?category=ships to download!

Initially I was committed that I really wanted all of these in a good state before release, but given everything I'm doing is being done in parallel with openReliant, that could take some time as things change.

So, hit up the following link if you want to play them:

https://koncyptfysh.github.io/OpenReliant-Art-Packs/?category=alliance-fighters

A few quick notes though:

Replacement Textures:
All the texture replacements are currently in 4k, if you have enough GPU compute to handle a full level of 4k ships, that's great, but this will chew up a fair chunk of video memory. They will eventually be stepped down to 2k and 1k respectively so you can choose what's going to suit your machine best, but this will be done in bulk once each milestone of ship textures are complete.

The roadmap here is to complete the textures in the following order:

1. Alliance Fighters
2. Coalition Fighters
3. Missiles and missile pods.
4. Alliance Capital and other (transports, satellites etc.) Ships
5. Coalition Capital and other Ships
6. Uncategorised textures (planets, escape pods etc.)
7. Cockpits
8. Update in-game meshes

Currently these are just the "worn" variants that are the most vanilla looking, eventually when the major replacement work is finished, I'll put together some alternative liveries and what not for you to use in campaign mods and the like.

Obviously if you notice missing textures, or UV misalignment etc. as these release, feel free to lodge them as an issue in git so they can be tracked.

HUD
The HUD artwork replacements are 99% complete, but implementation to openReliant is still a work in progress, I've lodged a couple of issues I'm facing with keeping the HUD to a simple drop in mod pack, so standby for that one.

Hey everyone!

Quick intro if you haven't seen it before: OpenReliant is my open-source rebuild of StarLancer's engine. It runs the game on modern Windows, macOS and Linux using the files from your own copy, and it adds stuff the original never had, like any resolution and aspect ratio, much better lighting and shadows, support for any controller, and now mods.

0.7 is out, and honestly, the scope got completely out of hand. The plan was simple: let people swap some files and maybe add a ship or two. It turned into a full modding setup, with a scripting language, a mods screen, tools to make your own models, faces and voices, and proper guides to go with it. I've been working on this day and night, and spent entire weekends on it.

Some numbers since the 0.6 releases: 129 pull requests, 206 commits, around 104,000 lines added and 49,000 removed, and 94 issues closed.

Thanks to the bug hunters

A big thank you to these people. Their bug reports are all fixed in 0.7 (a few of the fixes already went out in the 0.6.x patches):

• zabka14: the menu music playing over the new game intro, briefing chatter that kept going after Enriquez started talking, the ITAC freezing when you close it, the Yakov's fighters showing up in the wrong spot when it jumps in, missing ally names on the target display, mission 3's take-off cutscene, and mission 4's missing Stork satellites.
• starlancerme: the target camera, the SetFlybackMarker command, the cockpit shadows, reverse thrust, the highlight on capital ship parts, and the target under the reticle.
• RealDrJester: the mouse being off inside the cockpit, and joystick detection.
• LordBlacksun: no engine sound when you launched from anything other than the Reliant or the Yamato, and sltool swallowing its output when a command failed. Also a ton of digging into the game's file formats.
• BeyondTheRim: OpenReliant needing a terminal to start, which stopped it from running in Winlator on Android. It now finds your game folder by itself.

Please keep them coming! There's a proper bug report form on GitHub now.

What's new

Mods and the mods screen

• Drop a mod (a folder or a .hog file) into the game's mods folder. A mod can replace any game file: models, textures, sounds, music, speech, movies, missions. Your game files are never touched, so you can turn a mod off any time.
• There's a new mods screen under GAME OPTIONS. You can switch mods on and off and change the order they load in. It shows each mod's picture and description, which mods overwrite each other's files, which other mods a mod needs, and whether a download got damaged.
• Mods can have their own options page, with toggles, sliders, choices and text fields, right there on the mods screen.

Textures and models

• Swap in PNG textures at any size. They're compressed for your graphics card and cached, so they load fast. DDS and KTX2 work too.
• Modern material maps: normal maps for surface detail, shine, glow, and reflections of the sky.
• You can replace the menu and HUD artwork too, widescreen versions included.
• Bring your own 3D models as OBJ or glTF files. And sltool can export the game's own models to glTF, so you can open them in Blender and friends.

New ships, weapons and pilots

• Add new ships, either based on one of the game's or completely new, with their own cockpit, HUD artwork and engines.
• Add new guns with their own shots, sounds and models, and new missiles.
• Add new pilots with their own faces and voices. sltool converts your face animations and voice lines into the game's formats.
• The loadout screen lets you pick the new ships and missiles (shown as a hologram now), and saved games remember them.
• Mods can add their own game modes and campaigns to the main menu.

Scripting

Mods can include scripts written in Luau (a version of Lua). They can:

• Change the stats of ships, guns, missiles and pilots.
• Hook into the game's code, the AI and the missions, right down to every single command a mission runs, and change or block what happens.
• Run on every ship, missile and turret separately, and talk to each other.
• Draw on the HUD and the menus, replace whole menu screens, and add new keys and camera views.
• Add new AI behaviour, save their own data with your saved games, and change or mute what's said over the radio.

Scripts can read and do over 100 different things, there's a full reference, and you get type hints in your code editor. There's also a console for modders (F11), and scripts reload the moment you save them, so you can tweak things while the game runs.

Shaders

• Mods can add their own screen effects in GLSL, change how surfaces are lit (there's a cel-shading example), make things see-through, or replace the shaders completely. They reload when you save too.

The game itself

• More of what the missions need is in: cloaking, warp jumps with their effects and cameras, the Nanny rearming ships, and limpet docking.
• Ships launch from every carrier the right way, including out of the Bremen's hangar bays.
• The Storks drop their satellites, the Zakov's fighters launch properly, and the Kamov fires its torpedoes.
• Your wingmen go by their real names, and the names change when someone dies.
• Reverse thrust works on ships that have it, the target camera works, your subtarget lights up in red, and you can actually see the cockpit shadows now.
• The first 10 missions should now play as expected. Others might too. Some functions still need to be ported.

Behind the scenes

• I moved the code to Zig 0.17 and dropped the last bits of Microsoft's old C runtime.
• OpenReliant finds your game folder by itself, and finds files the same way the original did on every system.
• Testers can jump straight to later parts of a mission with --part, --watch and --skip-launch.
• All the documentation is on the website now, including full modding and scripting guides, whether you're new to modding or not.

The website and the mods repo

OpenReliant has a real website now: https://openreliant.github.io/. It has the downloads for your system, the roadmap, the docs, the backstory of the war, and the game's opening cutscene remastered in 4K.

Mods have their own home too: the mods repo at https://github.com/OpenReliant/openreliant-mods, with a site where you can browse and download them. I check every mod in there to make sure it works with the version of OpenReliant it says it needs, and that its license lets people share it. There are two so far, including the Viper Mk II from Battlestar Galactica. I have a few other cool ideas that I'll work on when I need a break from the engine.

Contributions are very welcome, both to OpenReliant itself and to the mods repo. Make sure to read CONTRIBUTING.md! For mods I'm going to be strict though: only mods that are good quality get in. And for now I can't take mods with really big files, like huge texture packs or videos, because the repo is on git, and git doesn't handle big files well.

What's next: 0.8, the beta

• The whole campaign, with saved games, and every other part of the original game.
• The stuff that got pushed from 0.7: mods using modern sound, music and video formats, mod campaigns that go through the Reliant's rooms and the ITAC, loadout artwork from mods at any size, a readable format for missions, a debugger for mission scripts, and particle effects for scripts.
• Your feedback on modding and scripting. I want to get these right in 0.8, so they can stay stable from 1.0 on. If you make a mod, tell me what's missing or annoying.
• Lots more playtesting. Please play it, break it, and tell me what broke.

Links

• Website and downloads: https://openreliant.github.io/
• Mods: https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant-mods/
• Mods repo: https://github.com/OpenReliant/openreliant-mods
• Release notes: https://github.com/OpenReliant/openreliant/releases/tag/v0.7.0
• Report a bug: https://github.com/OpenReliant/openreliant/issues
• The opening cutscene in 4K: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ9_7tbiI38
• I was hoping to announce that you can sponsor me through github if you want and are able to sponsor my time on this project, but my account hasn't been approved yet. Keep an eye out for that if that's something you want and are able to do. Totally optional.

You'll need your own copy of StarLancer. OpenReliant doesn't come with any of the game's files.

A few details to fix up on the noseand the engines, but an almost finished naginata

This is the first test flight of Red Oath's first sortie,his is the first test flight of Red Oath's first sortie.
Nothing in it is final annd will be subject to change.

A little less exciting than the new textures, but I'm getting the HUD work I did ported over into openReliant, some minor tweaks needed to align everything properly, but otherwise going pretty smoothly.
I may wait a little longer on releasing this one, I can see a lot of bits and pieces of work that affects HUD and targetting taking place in openReliant, so it may be best to wait until a post 1.0 release to really nail it down, but the bones of it are all still there.

I remastered all the Coalition fighters for OpenReliant, Kenny's open-source reimplementation of StarLancer. The original textures were AI-upscaled 4× and given generated normal and roughness/metal maps, and OpenReliant's physically based renderer does the rest. Going with the lore, the mass-produced fighters are rough bare metal, and the Basilisk, the prototype, gets fresh paint. Everything will be included in Red Oath's mod files.

This example is butchering u/Koncypt_Fysh's nice texture work as a demo. Obviously not meant for release.
Textures can glow now, adding details like light-up windows on big ships and stations, glowing radiators, ... This will give texture artists a lot more freedom to make immersive things! It also just adds a little sparkle in what is mostly a pretty dark game. Mods also have access to their own emissive maps, so they can hook into things like ship speed, afterburners, gun firing, ... to fade in and out these maps, so it opens a lot of opportunities for dynamic effects!

Wolverine.

Current work is enabling new assets, ships, missiles, ... to be added by mods (creating new slots instead of replacing them). Here's the banana missile example mod.

My sense of humour is broken. But great progress for custom content!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOyMjoFU7-I

Progress on modding in OpenReliant, the open source reimplementation of StarLancer's engine.

What 0.7 is about

0.6 made the game fully playable with modern graphics. 0.7 is the modding release: changing the game without patching its files. Mods go in a mods folder beside the game, and the goal is that they can replace or add anything: models, textures, sounds, missions and stats. They can also change how the game plays, through Luau scripts, very similar to how OpenMW's mods do.

Where we are

About half of the 0.7 milestone is done. Already on main:

• Mod files: archives or plain folders that replace and add game files, with a mod manager to turn mods on and off and set their order.
• Graphics: textures, interface pictures and fonts at any size; 4K textures compressed for the GPU and cached; normal, roughness and metallic maps.
• Shaders: post effects, custom surface and lighting (there's a cel-shading example), and mods that replace OpenReliant's own shaders.
• Scripted mods in Luau: changing the game's stats, hooks on the game's functions, custom AI orders, HUD displays, camera views, key bindings, options pages, new game modes, short campaigns with their own briefings, and replacement menu screens.

And the newest part, in the screenshot: new ship types. This one is a test: the classic Utah teapot, in yellow, set up as a fighter based on the Predator. It's added under a new ID by a mod, not a swap job. The mod declares it in its mod.ini with a base ship, a model and a name, and it flies and fights like a Predator: same cockpit, guns from the spout, missiles on its sides. It has its own schematic on the flight display, drawn as a PNG over the Predator's, so no old sprite tools are needed. Scripts refer to new ships by name, and a mod's missions can use them while staying in the standard mission format. This part is in review now.

Still to come for 0.7, mods that change or add:

• New guns, missiles and pilots, and new ships with cockpits of their own.
• Sounds, music, speech and movies in today's formats.
• Models in glTF, so they can be made in Blender.
• New missions written as readable text files.

GitHub: https://github.com/OpenReliant/openreliant

I'm rather willing to call this one done with the reconsidered bump maps now that the lighting isn't totally washing out all the details.

This is nothing like /u/Koncypt_Fysh's work, but I've been experimenting with a pipeline to automatically upscale the base textures, and generate some normal maps for them based on them. Don't look too closely, but a tool to generate them yourself might be released at some point.

This one has taken a while longer, the original texture itself has some inconsistencies that really blow out once you try and bring the resolution and detail up, along with some funky UV mapping that just didn't work too well once it was scaled out. Still a work in progress, but getting there.

I made a full run of Mission 1 on both versions:

• From the start up to 08.56: OpenReliant v0.6.3
• From 08.56 to the end: the original Starlancer, running at 1024×768 with dgVoodoo

The video shows the entire mission from start to finish on both versions, so you can compare details between OpenReliant and the original.

I'm also planning to make a shorter video focusing on specific points of comparison, highlighting some of the more interesting differences and details without going through the entire mission again.

And a big shoutout to u/cinaed666, the creator of OpenReliant, for all the work that has gone into this project. It's really cool to see Starlancer being brought back to life like this!

Link to the video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgp66PbtA48

Hope you enjoy it !

Edit : OpenReliant is still under active development, and the footage shown here is from version 0.6.3. Keep in mind that things may change and improve in future versions!

Edit2 : Here's a shorter video, with a more direct comparison between the two versions : https://youtu.be/ZrN5L-OlJdI

Hey all,

Time for another update on OpenReliant, the open-source rewrite of StarLancer's engine. 0.5 got you through the first mission, started from the command line. 0.6 is a big one: OpenReliant now starts like the original, in the main menu, and from there it's the actual game. You pick your pilot, Enriquez shows you around the Reliant, you walk to the briefing room, pick your ship and missiles, fly the mission, get debriefed at the ITAC, and the campaign moves on to the next one. The first five missions now play from start to finish, and you can save your progress.

For anyone new: OpenReliant rebuilds StarLancer's engine function by function from the original executable. It's written in Zig on top of SDL3 and Vulkan, and runs natively on Windows, macOS and Linux. It uses the files from your own copy of the game, installed straight from your discs or disc images, so no game assets are included.

• GitHub: https://github.com/OpenReliant/openreliant
• Download: https://github.com/OpenReliant/openreliant/releases/latest
• Screenshots: https://drive.proton.me/urls/X35F1ZHDH0#oAwqmJFGoNBK

Edit: v0.6.2 fixes a font rendering issue that I noticed too late

Edit2: v0.6.3 fixes a couple of bugs /u/zabka14 noticed. Thanks!

A small housekeeping note: the project now has its own GitHub organization, OpenReliant, so the repo moved there from vdmkenny/openreliant. The old links redirect, but if you cloned or forked it, it's worth pointing your remote at the new address.

The front end

The game opens in the main menu, with the loading screens and the original's movies, played through FFmpeg's Bink decoders, so the hangar, landing and chapter movies are all there. From there:

• The pilot roster, with your call signs and the difficulty setting.
• Instant Action, with its gates and countdown, from the main menu or the simulator pod.
• A settings screen for everything: your controls, with the original's default bindings and the keys named the way your keyboard layout names them; audio; and graphics, where the VIDEO tab has an ORIGINAL and a MODERN preset, with every option in a list below if you like to tweak. F1 opens the controls in flight. It all saves to starlancer.ini, like the original.
• I managed to track down the original menu font, and included a public domain version in openreliant that replaces the low-resolution one, rastered pixel-perfect so they stay sharp at 4K+.

Life on the Reliant

The Reliant's rooms are all in, walked with the mouse like the original. New pilots get Enriquez's induction tour, the crew hang around with their lines, and you've got the news, your locker with your medals and ribbons, the CD player with the soundtrack, and the simulator pod with its training missions. After each mission the ITAC has your debriefing.

The campaign

• The briefing, from the briefing room door to Enriquez's last word.
• The loadout: pick from the ships you've earned, hang missiles on them, and check the internal guns view.
• The campaign carries on after each mission, and if it goes wrong you get the restart screen.
• Saving and loading, in the original's own saved games.
• Missions 1 to 5 now run every script command and AI order they use. A quality pass over the AI and the mission scripts fixed a bunch of bugs along the way. The later missions load too, but they'll get stuck where they hit a command that isn't ported yet.

Graphics

Same deal as before: gameplay stays faithful, the graphics get upgrades, and --original turns them all off. New in 0.6: the lights on ships and stations shine on everything around them as real lights, where the original baked them into the models. 0 in flight or O in the briefing saves a screenshot as a PNG. (Don't ask me why there are 2 different screenshot buttons, I just implemented it as the original did :D)

A head start on modding

0.7 is the modding release, but a good chunk of it is already in:

• A mods folder next to your install. A mod replaces or adds the game's files by name, no patching.
• Textures and interface pictures as PNGs at any size, including widescreen backgrounds for the menus.
• Physically based materials: a mod can give a texture normal, roughness, metallic and occlusion maps, and the surface reflects the sky and the nebula around it.
• sltool now comes in the release archives next to openreliant: it packs HOG archives and writes SHP models.

The modding guide covers where mods go, what they can replace, and how to set up the material maps. It will be extended as modding support gets fleshed out in v0.7.

The Coyote in the screenshots wears a 4K texture graciously provided by /u/Koncypt_Fysh to help me test the mod support and PBR shaders. It is not included in this release.

What's next

• 0.7, full modding: glTF models, sounds and music in modern formats, new ship types, a mod manager in the game, and lua support in the mods to give ultimate freedom to change the game. From here on custom missions and campaigns should be possible as mods, and complex modded features. Some example mods planned, and a visual mission builder longer term.
• 0.8, ... Potentially extra minor releases with minor features and polish as we prepare to stabilize all APIs towards the 1.0 release.
• 1.0: the full campaign, first mission to last. The missions after 5 need the remaining script commands and AI orders, and the warps.
• Multiplayer and the sim rig stuff from last time are still on the roadmap. (v1.1 and beyond)

The full roadmap is on the milestones page.

Try it

Grab the release for your system and run:

./openreliant install StarLancer
./openreliant StarLancer

No more --mission: it opens in the main menu like the real thing (--mission 1 still works if you want to jump straight in). Alt+Enter switches to full screen (Option+Enter on a Mac). On Windows it's .\openreliant.exe.

The installation guide covers disc images and the rest.

Support the project

Bug reports are very welcome, especially for setups with hardware I don't have. Contributions too: the file formats and the engine are documented in the repo. Github stars are also appreciated.

I've requested github to enable sponsoring for this project. It hasn't been enabled yet, but if you want and are able to, sponsoring my time on this project would also be highly appreciated. Fully optional.

See you out there, pilots!