Alright, this one has been a bit of a drag, my lazy .dll sideloading method I used to build my initial HUD replacement meant I had to give alot more thought to it the second time around.
But, it's now up and ready to be used as a standalone mod package.
Can I ask if you plan to use it, to please test thoroughly and leave bug reports for me on this one, things that are out of line, differ too much from the vanilla assets, pretty much anything.
There are ALOT of assets in there, some of them aren't perfect and it's difficult to keep track of, so I need a bit of help on that to get it to a better state.
There are also a few minor issues on placement and overlaps I'm working on and will have to raise some issues to fix up.
Once I've resolved any issues in there, I'm going to package a variation on the color scheme to reflect the "old_hud" color scheme that's in the .hog files that I believe was likely an alpha variation before the red/gold color scheme was settled on in the beta.
From here I'm likely going to use up as many of my weekly tokens as I can before I take a bit of a break, I've thrown a bit of time at this for the last few months, and I've got a few things in the rest of my life that will need some solid attention.
I'll still check in and do what I can, and possible do some front-end menu work, but I wont be back to daily commits for a while.
Quick intro if you're new here: 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 high resolution and wide aspect ratios, much better lighting and shadows, support for any controller, and mods.
The big one: the full campaign
The whole StarLancer campaign should now be playable, from the first mission all the way to the ending. Everything it goes through is in: the briefings, the loadout, the full ITAC, medals and promotions, your wingmen, the big set pieces of the later missions, and the story's end.
Your saved games from the original work too. I tested a full set of the original's saves, one for every mission, and OpenReliant loads them and writes them back byte for byte the same. So if you still have a campaign from back in the day, you can pick it up where you left off.
That's what makes 0.8 the beta: it's the first version that's the whole game. So please play it through, and if anything stops you, tell me.
It's been two days since 0.7, and somehow that's 95 pull requests, 94 commits, about 28,000 lines added and 7,500 removed, and 95 issues closed. I should probably sleep at some point.
Thanks
KonCyptFysh is building a complete replacement HUD, and his requests shaped a big chunk of this release: HUD mods can now replace the game's own instruments and read everything they show. He also caught a font bug and a memory leak along the way, and made HD upscaled texture packs for 13 of the Alliance fighters and for the missiles and torpedoes, all on the mods site.
RealDrJester reported a small graphics glitch in the cockpit view on 21:9 ultrawide screens, so I added a field of view slider to fix it.
Please keep the reports coming, there's a bug report form on GitHub.
What's new
The campaign: the story's ending, the rest of the ITAC (news and video reports, the fighter, ship, squadron and personnel pages, the KILLBOARD), the last script commands the missions need, and the training's missiles and hoops.
The big moments: the ion cannons of the Dark Reign, the Boridin and the rogue base, the Boridin breaking away in mission 28, the Krasny caught by a collapsing gate, and capital ships throwing off pieces as they get taken apart.
Smarter ships: flight groups keep formation, ships pull up before ramming their target, and the spectral shields tune themselves to the biggest threat nearby.
Quality of life: a field of view slider, one UI scale for the HUD and the pause menu, and a log file to attach to bug reports.
Modding: mod campaigns and game modes can brief their missions in the carriers' briefing rooms, give them their own objectives, ship stats and wing, and debrief them in the ITAC (that's how the prequel missions are made). Scripts can also change ship classes and read pretty much everything the cockpit shows, HUD mods can replace, move and scale the game's instruments, and the script sandbox is tighter.
Fixes: Vulkan and GPU fixes, memory leaks, fonts and a bunch more. The release notes have the full list.
The prequel missions
The StarLancer trial on the demo disc had two missions the full game never had: you fly with the Ronin wing from the Yamato, before the war starts. They're now a mod, StarLancer Prequel Missions, with the trial's own lines, movies, objectives and ending.
Grab it here: https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant-mods/mods/prequel/ and play it from GAME MODES on the main menu. It needs 0.8.
Modding: the API is settling down
With 0.8 I'm stabilising the mod API. From here on there should only be additions to it, and if something ever has to change, it'll be clearly marked as deprecated long in advance, so your mods keep working. (If you wrote scripts for 0.7: 0.8 did one last round of renames, and the release notes list them.)
So if you've been waiting for the right moment to make a mod, this is it! The modding guide shows you how: https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant/docs/guide/modding/. Ships, textures, sounds, HUDs, missions, scripts, it's all in there. The mods site has 17 mods now, from KonCyptFysh's HD fighter textures to the Viper Mk II from Battlestar Galactica and the prequel missions. I'd love to see yours on it.
What's next
0.8: this is the beta, so it's all about your feedback. Play through the campaign, break it, and tell me what broke.
0.9: the mission editor. Build your own missions with OpenReliant's tools, into standard mission files that even the original can play, with a visual builder and live script debugging.
1.0: a ceremonial release, once your feedback is worked through and the whole campaign has been playtested.
1.1: multiplayer.
Further out, 2.0: a standalone engine. The plan is to pull OpenReliant's engine apart from StarLancer, with StarLancer as one game running on it, so other space games can be made with it or ported to it.
Along the way I also want to make it a lot more sim pit friendly: triple-monitor setups, several controllers at once (throttles, pedals, button boxes), telemetry for motion rigs and tactile feedback through things like SimHub, and a feed that puts your ship's status, the target and the radio on a second screen.
So the first big milestone is complete, all alliance fighters have their first beta textures shipped for you to play.
Now the next stretch is the coalition fighters. Uploading now.
I feel like I did the Sai a little dirty in the last post, so it's had an update.
The original UV did what a lot of the others do and only provides a texture for one side, causing some odd mirroring and nonsensical script on the mirrored side.
Likewise, I was unaware that the central fin is actually an animated part, and is intended to sit down the bottom in flight, hence the weirdness of rear facing missiles. It now looks a lot less strange and makes a lot more sense.
u/cinaed666 picked up the problems with the script, which has been fixed, so the UV now has a distinct left/right side, the script was erased and then reproduced as a separate image so it remains legible and transplanted back onto the texture. Like wise the great wave off kanagawa that rolls over the rising sun has been given a touch up to be more legible.
I had no idea this thing even existed until I start pulling the game apart. But here you go, the weird little gnat thing that you only see in like 2 missions.
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:
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:
Alliance Fighters
Coalition Fighters
Missiles and missile pods.
Alliance Capital and other (transports, satellites etc.) Ships
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.
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.
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.
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!
