Star Trek: Freelance which was slated to be an up and coming RPG style modification for Elite Force has announced that they are changing their project. Instead of being a modification, Freelance is now slated to be a stand alone fan game with its own engine and more!
Hailing Frequency originally reported on Freelance back in Janruary 2010 (see original article here) and in Episode 74 of our podcast, we interview the lead programmer for the mod, Griffin Endurance.
Since that time, the team behind the project decided that the limitations of the Elite Force Engine were simply too great, and have therefore decided to branch out onto a new engine and become a fully featured fan game.
On their website they said:
After careful thought from all of us here at Star Trek : Freelance, we have decided to create an engine specifically for the game. As a result it will no longer be a modification for the original Elite Force game created by Raven Software. Below are some images of the Archer Class Bridge that have been successfully ported over to our new graphics engine IrrLicht.
IrrLicht is an open source graphics engine which supports DX9, “instead of EF’s original DX7″ and some advanced features such as dynamic lighting, bump mapping and higher model complexity. It might take some time before we are able to fully integrate what we have in EF into the new engine, and we will need to code all of the existing features and game play from the original game into IrrLicht.
We will be attempting to bring in some more people to help with this transference. This creates an exciting opportunity for Freelance and the future players. We will if course keep everyone informed of our progress, but expect a drop in visual media over the next few months while we focus on the code.
Several screenshots we’re released with the annoucement, demonstrating the new engine’s suprerior graphics capability – here are those shots along with a couple of older ones for comparison:
(Older Screenshot from Elite Force)
For more information on Freelance, visit the official website at www.stfreelance.com and keep those browsers trained to Hailing Frequency for more news on this fan game soon!
