The Confederation we fought for…

…is not the Confederation we now have.
A brief update this time. We’re focusing on the Confed Silenos track — your last chance to leave an empire corrupted from within and join the peaceful neighbours your government has turned you against. The game doesn’t hold back, hammering home that you’re on the wrong side. Your new Captain even describes the Border Worlders as “subhumans” just to ensure you realise you’re on the wrong side and need to switch. In hindsight, I wonder how many players were left asking what the other four CDs were for?

There’s coffee in that nebula

The Silenos track consists of three missions. The first two of these presented no major issues, and work on fixing the third mission mostly revolved around switching team – but there was one big new task, nebulae!

A nebula was just a palette switch in ’96, even by ’99 Freespace 2 had made WC4’s nebulae look incredibly dated.

As always we aren’t polishing before moving on so that we can get the complete game up and running ASAP, but we thought you might like a glimpse at the volumetric fog in its current state. I think it’s already a huge improvement, and the simplicity of the effect doesn’t feel out of place as a replacement for the old palette change.

We also implemented overrides for the world files. Presumably due to time constraints whilst many levels have specific world files describing the backgrounds, most missions just used “world”. Since we now have WCP style nebulae in the background we are having to set up a per system override for these cases, and all of the missions in this system now have a placeholder distinctive red nebula to match the FMV.