Meet the Nomad Legacy Engine. It's a new engine based on the disassembled Freelancer: the Freelancer-Decomp project. It's a cool project, though at its core it requires serious rework. And rest assured — in my mod I've already done that and will try to clean up all possible bugs. Remember — it's just a prototype! But I want to release it this year! The engine is mostly being reworked by Codex and Claude, but I'm very successful at this since I know how the engine itself works.

First, the bad news. I found a lot of bugs. For example, I didn't know that Backspace works a bit differently and hides part of my interface. And I found a lot of little things too. The game crashed once, again in Tau-29, due to an unreleased instance of Ipion Virtual Physics. We'll fix it. Also, I still have the cruise speed display limit. Need to remove it!

Now the good news.

1. Reflections, shadows, various custom shaders, and light sources have been integrated into the game. All of it is maximally optimized to run on any potato. For example, normals on fighters only work on the player, while on other objects, like shadows, they're shown at close range and have dynamic rendering quality. So you seem to see shadows, but in fact they're intentionally shown right in front of you. At the same time, I want to make a dynamic configuration, so the option to warm up your RTX 5090 should also be there. But only with the corresponding visual changes!
2. Additional effects for space. Volumetric nebulae with unique styles for edge, crow, etc. Improved atmospheres and planet shaders, animated gas giants, new effects for jump gates, trade lanes, and so on. The funniest part is that the original effects system lagged very badly, which is why the new effects actually run better than the original ones and put less load on the system.
3. UI and UX improvements. The radar is back! It's a mix of the radars from the 2001 and 2002 alphas. Visuals from 2001, objects from 2002 (taken from FL Beta). It adds significantly to the atmosphere during exploration. And finally you can "turn your neck" in cockpit mode. It's not that easy to get used to, but if you manage it, the cockpit view becomes almost fully functional! All that's left is to add better reading of damage from the enemy on the ship status.
4. Advanced Widescreen HUD 3.0. Fully customizable panels, auto-opening of the target window when selecting an enemy, auto-opening of the status window when taking serious damage, and the ability to block this. Choose any ship projection, and you can even enable auto-turrets! For now it's a prototype interface, I want to significantly simplify it. But it works. But it's just too cool to give away auto-aiming. Maybe make it through skill progression? Hmm!
5. A more convenient interface for selecting cruiser components. Specifically for Nomad Legacy gameplay. Now you can immediately see how many lives a part has left. This can be disabled. Of course, a turret shouldn't have that many lives. I'll fix that, but still — its HP is visible right on screen and that's more convenient than staring at the bottom interface. By the way, what do you think — should I port the vanilla game to this engine? Unfortunately, I won't be able to transfer all of Nomad Legacy's gameplay. But the basic graphics, cruiser battles, and animations — I can. If you want, write in the comments. With neural networks it'll be easier to do.
6. All improvements like FLSharp, FLPlusPLus are integrated, visual bugs of the old DirectX8 are fixed, plugins by Adoxa, Whiskas T-Mech, Motah, and others are implemented. The project doesn't try to "steal" these works, all authors are credited in the source code and will be presented in the credits. It's just that now their plugins will work more efficiently as parts of the engine, rather than just memory hacks.

And this is only the beginning. As said above — I want to assemble this this year. Clean up Nomad Legacy, fix the voiceover. Use Voice Clone so there's no difference in the new NPC voiceover. And so on. And if you want us to make something like TLOU 1 Remake, then write. We can think about it! To fly in vanilla with the radar and animations!

It'd be nice to play through the game and explore a bit more between story missions. I had been playing Project Reforge which does this but that has a lot of extra stuff with it, I'd like to keep to a more vanilla experience.

It took a while, but 0.8 "The Fractured Empire" is finally up as a beta:
For the mod: https://www.moddb.com/mods/homeworld-rise-of-hiigara/downloads/rise-of-hiigara-v08-beta
For the engine, LIbrelancer: https://www.moddb.com/mods/homeworld-rise-of-hiigara/downloads/librelancer-rise-of-hiigara-08-beta-engine

This is the biggest update the mod ever had. The headline is fleet command. You can still fly your own ship like before, but now you can also switch to a Homeworld-style RTS view and run a fleet.

Build ships on your carrier, mine and refine ore, put down refineries, outposts and sensor arrays, research upgrades and keep everything supplied.

Your fleet keeps working while you're docked or off in another system. The map grew too, although you can find out by yourself without much spoilers

This is a beta, stuff maybe be missing, bugged out, or needs gameplay loop improvement, anything you see, please let us know, this is what testing are for :)

https://discord.gg/rFQ9Yb9eJe

I haven’t played this legend of a game in about 20 years. What are the best mods out there? Multiplayer would be awesome but discovery’s rules seem pretty heavy learn. Open to opinions that not the case though 🤷🏻‍♂️

Just trying to get back into the game, I managed to get a copy, what mods do I need to install?

Heyall, coming back to the game after 2 decades. I remember there being mods that added back content into the game, like making the CSV and the Blood Dragon's Dragon playable ships. Anyone know where I might find those mods? Lancers Reactor came up with nothing.

Just wanted to share a video because it will demonstrate it better than the screenshots for earlier

Hello there. Are you tired of Sloplancer demonstrations? Look at mine! This is a new Freelancer engine for the Nomad Legacy mod, based on the Freelancer-Decomp project. Vibe-coded by Claude. But I know the Freelancer engine and I know what I'm doing.

I was hoping to have a video demo ready with examples. But there's still too much to do. So for now, I'll limit myself to screenshots. More details will come later too.

Key features:

• perfect adherence to the visual style
• maximum performance optimization
• interesting visuals wherever needed: for example, the tornado on the gas giant is animated!

Besides the visuals, I'm also planning to significantly expand both the interface and the gameplay. At the very least, there will definitely be Advanced Widescreen HUD 3.0. A significant number of my workarounds have already been cut out (for example, the wing-deployment animation with the infinite frame is gone — the native use_animation_oneshot parameter is used for that now). But at the same time, the whole visual side of the project broke, so I have a lot of work to do to replace them with something more harmonious.

Galaxy is now persistent and all systems and ships exists at some degree and doesnt appear from thin air.

Fleet command
You can now flip into a Homeworld-style RTS view and command your own ships. Your flagship is just another unit in that view. Select, group, queue waypoints, set tactics, and use a radial right-click menu. Every key can be rebound in Options.

• Get ships by buying them, building them on a carrier, capturing them or hiring mercs.
• Fleet size is capped by supply units, which grow with your rank. Frigates and destroyers need a faction licence.
• Mine ore, refine it into RU, build ships, research upgrades, and put down refineries, defence platforms and repair docks.
• Ships you leave in another system keep working while you're away.
• Systems have owners now. Factions besiege, claim and counterattack.
• Big ships have subsystems, and you can shoot out their engines or hangars.
• HW1 ship abilities: Defense Fighter field, Missile Destroyer volleys, Minelayer walls, Drone Frigate drones and the Gravwell Generator. The AI uses them too.

Contracts
Random missions are gone. The new contract board has 19 kinds of job: bounties, escorts, convoys, salvage, capital hunts, couriers, supply runs, rescue, sabotage, mining and more. Jobs come with intel, hidden twists, chains, gold/silver/bronze grades and decisions mid-mission.

Docking
The world no longer stops when you dock. Your fleet keeps fighting while you're in the bar. You can look at the live system from inside the station and use trade, shipyard, repair and contracts from a services panel. Buying a hull or gear rebuilds your ship in place, with no reload.

Economy and bases

• 34 new trade goods. Perishables exists now.
• All 101 bases were redone: lots NPCs, rumours and 124 news items.
• Kiith politics: helping one kiith costs you standing with its rivals. Paktu, Soban, Kaalel and LiirHra are new factions.

Combat and visuals

• NPC fighters dogfight, corvettes circle-strafe and frigates stand off.
• Ion cannons, hull burn marks, mines, countermeasures, cargo pods and radiation zones.
• Volumetric nebulas you can fly into. Ships sit inside them.
• Homeworld ship materials and team colours, and the new explosions.
• The sensor map has System, Sector and Galaxy views.

Thanks to Librelancer project and anyone who helped along the way

Hello everyone, it's us again. Recently we started working on starsphere templates, so decided to give a glimple of starspheres that will be present in our remake of Freelancer for the community to judge.

Moreover, recently we got another person joining our team who will work on our project.

Additionally, soon we will release an SDK to generate Freelancer starspheres for Unreal Engine as well as toolkit that our team uses for assets, so people and AI agents can use it to generate nice-looking and faithful looking Freelancer assets themselves.

Starspheres will be generated based on a system position relative to the Sirius Sector origin (positioned at New York system), so it will be highly reusable, and prevent you from having to recreate starspheres from scratch or prevent from making your work more difficult to get a nice-looking results and to get a "geography" right.

Created using a mixture of OpenVDB and procedural noise.

How can I find out which factions use which kinds of shields?
Is there a better wiki than the Fandom wiki?

Do we actually have any idea where the sector is meant to be located relative to the Sol System? I don't think I've ever seen any ingame info that could give a hint to its location, and the only real hint we get at all comes from the intro, where Atticus Rockford states that the sleeper ships set course for the Sirius System after breaking through the Coalition blockade - SYSTEM, not sector...so, assuming that wasn't a dialogue error when they made the lines for the intro, that would imply that the Sirius System is part of the Sirius Sector (which would obviously make sense, given the matching names).

Only problem is...the real Sirius is only located about 8 1/2 LY from Sol, which seems way too close for what was supposed to be a journey trying to flee a massive civil war, one that could've easily tracked and followed them at such a close distance, relatively speaking.

There's also the fact that the system is a binary star system containing a blue-white main-sequence star and a white dwarf, and I'm not sure there are any systems in the game like that (admittedly, the only three binary systems I can actually remember are Kyushu, Tau-37, and Edinburgh, and none of them have the correct type/color pairing), though it could just be a system that was passed on the way by the sleeper ships and not yet settled by any house or corporation/independent/unlawful group.

[SOLVED] I remember back in the day there being a mod or editor that would allow you to change Trent's outfit. Anyone know where I could find it? Looks like Lancersreactor doesn't exist anymore

SOLUTION: FLAtlas save game editor has this capability and works with the FL HD update.

With all of the crazy decompilation/modding stuff going on, I thought I'd try something silly with the LibreLancer code by trying to jam everything into Unreal Engine and use some of those features to improve the old Freelancer graphics.

I tried a few things here:

1) Taking the old models from a few different angles and then doing an AI upscale pass of their textures, then converting those images into replacement models with a higher polycount. This did...OK. Sometimes it made changes that were too radical (like adding a second engine to the Starflier), but as a proof of concept it works fine.

2) Replacing the particle effects from the old Alchemy engine with Unreal Engine's Niagara engine. This just looks better. The shield effects and their collapse were really straightforward upgrades.

3) As a hail mary I tried converting the character models to Unreal Engine Metahumans...that process needs some work. The last shot shows a rough preview but it's pretty awful looking to start with.

Given that a full Freelancer decomp just dropped today, I wanted to share this as I'm sure there's FAR more talented modders out there which could take that decompilation and really run with it. I'll keep plugging away on this, but wanted to make sure folks knew that you can go waaaaaay beyond just decompiling this stuff if you throw enough tokens at the problem.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

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). These are things often missing from a lot of modding tools these days and hopefully it'll give people confidence to use the program.

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. I also want to turn all the assets into props that can be easily imported/exported, placed and moved. Then build out a scripting system to bring life to the verse. This includes a more feature rich cut-scene editor with built in tooling to help with the scripting of scenes, character animations and dialogue etc.

I want to try make it easy for players to create interesting movies. Currently the data is broken down into its most basic form and there's no guardrails around the properties/parameters. This is something I'll work on until I've got it to a point that making a character animate and run from one location to another is as easy as a few clicks.

This also extends to the spaceships/stations/environment assets as well. I hope to try and break down these assets into components/prefabs that can then be used to combine into different shapes to make different ships/stations and so on. This should be rather easy to do with the tools I have available to me today, and it could be extended further into letting you create your own custom assets, either blender imports, or even in-scene sculpting of the meshes themselves.

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 crazy 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.

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!

Any ships you own can now be commanded like in Homeworld. Hit the tilde key (configurable) and the camera pulls out to a HW style orbit view, and the ship you were flying just becomes another unit in the fleet. Hit it again and you’re back into FL flight mode.

I tried to keep the controls as close to HW2/Remastered as I could. Drag select, right click to move, the move disc with shift for height, waypoints, ctrl+click to attack, guard, dock, strike groups, tactics on the F keys and a radial menu for the rest. If you’ve played HWRM your hands should mostly know what to do.

You can get ships a few ways. Buy them at a shipyard (they go to the station hangar), build them from a carrier, hire mercs, or capture them. Carriers work like actual carriers too: fighters dock, get repaired, you launch them from the launch manager, and if the carrier dies everything inside dies with it.

Librelancer and Homeworld uses Lua, so I was able to import explosions easily

Since engineers used REA to reverse engineer fu*king photoshop and rewrite it in rust in matter of months/days.

anyone have tried using it with claude/codex to do the same thing with freelancer executable?

I think this would be an awesome experiment that I would do myself if no one have tried it now!

PS: I know that there's many trails of replicating the source on github ... but I'm talking giving the executable to claude and let it do it's job for day or 2 and see maybe we may have Rustlancer soon 🤣

The tool link is here: https://rea.tools/

Cheers freelancers

Hi,

I remember of a capital ship used by pirates or corsairs and it looked like Liberty ones. I had the project to edit it to make it a true Liberty capship. That's nothing hard or long to do.

Does somebody has a mirror to download the mod ?

Edit : Here is the mod download : https://www.mediafire.com/file/t68l3op79s5qm19/2112v5B.zip.flmod