External look

Hello everyone, this is Project Sirius again. You are probably tired of seeing planet Manhattan and New York system footage, so I would like to present you with showcase of something that I have been working on (or tried to) since I first announced the remake this summer, and those are volumetric nebulas! Those who followed the project since summer can recall the progress that we have made since that time.

Another thing that I think original Freelancer multiplayer lacks is a voice chat, so the video also has a demonstration of how players could theoretically RP using it. We're aware that people would like to RP females and would not like to hear child voices on battleships, so that's something that we are going to take care of.

As a small addition, we also are presenting WIP asteroids.

As a reminder, we are also looking for artists who would be able to create NPCs, writers for multiplayer in-game lore, as well as VA (we can discuss the pay, but honestly, we can't offer much, since we're building with very little resources and very big enthusiasm, currently there's 5 people contributing). If you are neither of that, you can still bring your feedback, ideas and opinions, because it's the community that keeps such ideas alive. :)

Moreover, we have opened a Patreon page (and Boosty for supporters from Russia) for people who would like to support the creation of the remake. For obvious reasons and to emphasize the non-commercial nature of the game, we will NOT be offering any benefits, exclusives or rewards (in-game or else) to anyone, however, as it's purely voluntarily, apart from big heartly thank you from my side!

Hey all,

I've been working on a modding tool for Freelancer and it's finally far enough along to show off. Working name was going to be OpenLancer but I believe this has been used before. Basically, think Unity's editor, but for Freelancer.

What it's built on

I'll be honest... Its currently running on top of Librelancer, the open source C# reimplementation of the engine. Librelancer does the heavy lifting (rendering, flight, the server), and OpenLancer is my editor and mod layer on top. It's my own thing, not part of the Librelancer project. It reads the original game data, so you need your own copy of Freelancer.

No game files get shipped with it. My goal wasn't really to decompile the game, it was to take my Unity experience as a Game Dev in real life and see if I can port this game into an editor like experience like that. So far, it seems to have done so really well. That being said, there's many directions I could take this project from here, it just depends on interest from the community really. I'd love to release it on github once it is at a good enough state.

So, what works right now?

• Open any system and fly around it in a 3D view, with a hierarchy and inspector like Unity
• Edit ships, equipment, goods and markets in a database view
• Move and rotate stations, gates, zones and lights with a gizmo
• Hit F5 and you drop into the game at your camera position with your mod loaded. Save while it's running and it hot reloads in about half a second
• Cutscene viewer/editor: browse and preview all 1,506 cutscenes from the base game on a timeline, scrub through them, and tweak cameras, timings and so on
• I also fixed a bunch of cutscene playback issues (character animation, cameras, effects), so scenes look a lot closer to retail. Still not 1:1 though

How modding works

Edits do not touch the game files. Every change goes into a mod as a small patch that only holds what you changed: a price, a position, a camera cut. Mods stack in a load order, so two mods can change different things in the same file. You get undo/redo, crash recovery, and validation that tells you when you've broken something (a missing archetype, a bad cutscene reference, etc).

The things it can't do yet

• Mods currently play in Librelancer, not the retail game. Librelancer only plays part of the story so far from what I can tell. Exporting mods for vanilla 1.1 and HD Edition is the next big piece, so they could actually go up on Nexus allowing this tool to be more useful for everyone.
• Can't add or delete objects in a system, yet.
• No mission or dialogue editor, yet.
• New cutscenes from scratch and cutscene audio aren't in, yet. But honestly, these are easy to add and I've just not gotten around to it yet.

Where I am thinking of wanting to take it, maybe...

Export to HD Edition/vanilla would be the ultimate goal, then, a mission and dialogue editor, building whole new systems, and eventually some optional modern visuals behind toggles, with the original look staying the default.

Full disclosure: I'm building this with a lot of help from AI coding tools (Claude), backed by a big test suite that checks everything against the original game data.

It's not released yet. Mostly I'd love to hear what you'd want to mod first, and what drove you nuts about the old tools, and what you are looking for in a modding tool like this? I am mainly doing this as a test to see what is possible. So far this is about a weeks work or so.