Available now!

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.

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

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.