Slashdot Mirror

All I want is a cockpit-view starfighter type thing where I can attack huge capital ships in an online multiplayer setting. It doesn't even have to be a Massive one, just me and a few friends with headsets doing strafing runs. That would be great fun.

You want Freespace 2. It has capital ships, network play, and a mission editor. The source code is open and there is an effort to improve the game. You can get freespace 2 from HOTU.

I know it's not a popular choice, but Volition's "Freespace 2" is still one of the best damn games I've ever played. It had a genuinely interesting storyline with good voice acting and some truly terrifying moments, graphics which were unbelieveably good for the time, and the best space-sim game play of all time, Tie Fighter be damned.

...look damn nice. Not that it's a surprise, since it's based on the Freespace 2 engine, a sadly underrated game, which looks incredible on modern hardware as well. I'm eager to try that one...

You should try the Freespace series of games. They're getting a little long in the tooth these days, but they work perfectly well under Win2K and XP. As well, they really take up the slack where Wing Commander III dropped the ball -- screw the FMV, Mark Hamill, 5 minutes of gameplay for 30 minutes of movie crap. The Freespace series has a decent story (not groundbreaking, but still good for what it is) but more importantly great action and lots of it. You won't spend your gaming time watching poorly acted or rendered video sequences. You'll spend it in the cockpit of your fighter, blowing away aliens and fighting massive capital ships.

Of course, the Freespace games are a couple years old now, and it'll probably be pretty difficult to find them in stores. Your best bet is to hit EBay and see what you can find.

Since I don't have the game installed anymore, I wasn't able to try out the code, but it did successfully compile under MSVC 6.0.

Is this the complete source code of the game and if so, why couldn't the author try out the code without having the game installed?

Also, I had never heard of this game before now (I live under the third rock on the left) so I'm wondering if it is still available for sale somewhere or if I need to start scouring the web for a used copy? From the screenshots, Freespace 2 appears to be similar to Homeworld and Terminus. The latter is noteworthy as a there are versions for Linux and Mac OS 9. I was quite suprised (and very pleased) to find all three versions included in the same box.

Freespace2 is a space combat simulator - take a look at the official site for some info and screens.

Beautiful graphics, huge battles between capships, great gameplay and a fun story. :-)

The game still hogs hard drive space though, me and my friends still play it because of the Babylon Project mod. As is well documented, the official Babylon 5 game; "Into The Fire" was shaping up to be a very cool game until it got bounced from distributer to distributer and finally pulled (a real shame as seen as they got Joe Straczynski to write the script and all the cast in to film it, but hey ho :-( ).

This mod captures the feel of the series very well, sure it is rough around the edges, but small complaints against actually having a game based, IMHO on the most intelligent Sci-Fi show for quite a while.

Credit must be given to Volition for providing the mission mod as standard with the game as well, again it is good to see a company with the foresight to provide extra value with their products, many a stupid mission has been created with that tool! It certainly makes another space shooter based on a certain franchise look very poor indeed