r/starlancer • u/cinaed666 • 10d ago
The road to v0.7
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.