![]() ![]() ![]() While the game features additional third-person camera viewpoints, the game's interface - the head-up display (HUD) - can only be viewed from the primary viewpoint, and can be customised with different colours. In both modes, the player controls their craft and other commands through either a joystick, or a keyboard (either on its own or with a mouse), and primarily view the game's environments from the first-person perspective of a cockpit within a starfighter. A sequel to Descent: FreeSpace entitled FreeSpace 2, was released in 1999 to critical acclaim.ĭescent: FreeSpace features two modes of play a single player campaign and multiplayer matches, with the game's main menu designed around the interior of a ship's quarterdeck, with various elements (mostly doors) leading to different options, such as starting a new game, configuring the game, reviewing the crafts featured in the game and various story elements, and replaying completed single player missions. An expansion for the game, which was less well-received, was also released in 1998 under the title of Silent Threat, and focuses on events after the main game's campaign with the player working for an intelligence branch of the Terrans' armed forces that later attempt to overthrow the Terran government. The game's multiplayer mode was criticised, as it was plagued by lag and inaccurate tracking of statistics. The story of the game's single player campaign focuses on a war in the 24th century between two factions, one human and the other alien, that is interrupted in its fourteenth year by the arrival of an enigmatic and militant alien race, whose genocidal advance forces the two sides into a ceasefire in order to work together to halt the threat.ĭescent: FreeSpace was well-received as a single-player space simulation that integrated all the desired features of its genre, from competent AI wingmen, to the presence of large capital ships that dwarf the fighters piloted by the player and explode spectacularly when destroyed. The game places players in the role of a human pilot, who operates in several classes of starfighter and combats against opposing forces, either human or alien, in various space-faring environments, such as in orbit above a planet or within an asteroid belt. In 2001, it was ported to the Amiga platform as FreeSpace: The Great War by Hyperion Entertainment. To this day, the gameplay still holds up well.Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War, known as Conflict: FreeSpace – The Great War in Europe, is a 1998 space combat simulation IBM PC compatible computer game developed by Volition, when it was split off from Parallax Software, and published by Interplay Productions. Thankfully they're using an AppImage now so running FS2 Open is reasonably easy across distributions. See the FS2 Open update announcement here (plus GitHub). Note: You do need to have the original data files for Freespace 2, you can pick up a copy easily on GOG.com. If you've never played it with the MediaVPs, it really does make Freespace 2 look a lot better. The MediaVPs update includes new animations, new sound effects and even more high-resolution art. These are the extra files you can download and enable, which contain all of the enhanced artwork and graphics that take advantage of the new capabilities of the FS2 Open. Wonderful to see it alive and well!Īlong with the update to the FS2 Open game engine, they also put up a refresh of their MediaVPs. There's also now full Unicode text support, pilot files now use JSON instead of the old custom binary format, support for the Discord Rich Presence API, they added support for displaying decals on the surface of an object and loads more. It pulls in various OpenGL optimisations with animations now using texture arrays and "model uniforms get sent to the GPU using uniform buffers for less overhead" plus other apparently minor graphics changes. Version 19.0.0 went up in January and it's quite a big one too. While it's not technically open source, Volition did give the code to the community to keep it alive. One I'm genuinely surprised I missed (Hat tip to Timo) is a big update to FS2 Open, the project that continues updating the game engine for Freespace 2 - one of the best space action games ever. ![]()
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