Hi! I’m The_E, and this is my project.
First, a bit of background. I am a long-time member of the FreeSpace Community at Hard-Light Productions. There, I am part of the crew behind the Blue Planet mod for FreeSpace 2. As part of Blue Planet: War In Heaven, the sequel to the first Blue Planet campaign, we did a little mission called “The Blade Itself”, which was an experiment in giving the player control over one of the big capital ships in the BP universe. While the mission itself was fun (and the mechanics we used there were fun enough for us to reuse them later, and for others to build their own projects upon them), I was never entirely satisfied with how it played out.
You see, the engine we’re using, FreeSpace Open, isn’t very flexible in what it does. Everything is based on certain assumptions made by Volition back in 2001, and one of them was that players would never control something bigger than a fighter. As a result, we had to do an awful lot of workarounds to make this little project work, let alone fun, and it shows.
Now, once I made the jump and got myself an UE4 license, I want to recreate that mission and game concept, but with a few more additions that we couldn’t do in FSO. Like most other indie projects here, this is going to be the game I always wanted to play, which is basically Battlestations: Midway IN SPAAAACE (or, to use another reference, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident with less insanity).
So far, I’ve concentrated on importing models from FS, to work out the import pipeline and learn how asset management in UE4 works, as well as setting up basic functionality that’s needed.
I am certainly rather happy with how our ships look in this shiny new engine:
Now to figure out the important bits…
