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Campaign News:

Quote

I will set some time aside for stream on Mission 10 of The Lost Generation Ashcroft, which will alternate between FRED and gameplay while I work to finish the mission. I am still working out the details and exact schedule, but it is going to be either 27th, 28th or 29th.

Coding News:

Modding

Screencap Contest

(maybe)

Almost-Final Words

Also you should try Knossos, it's objectively very cool.

Maybe not a campaign, but still very much related to them, Knossos, the next-generation launcher/installer has seen a lot of activity this month. Modders have been getting their works of art listed on Knossos for everyone to install with zero effort. At the start of the month, there was just 2, (and one of those was a test mod), and now at time of writing, there are 55 mods on Knossos! Great job everyone! Hat tip to mjn.mixael and Pie for uploading a lot of the older campaigns. (Have I mentioned how cool Knossos is?)Spoon has a new dev blog entry for Wings of Dawn. There's some cool preview pictures of ships, progress listing of replacing old eff/png animations with apng, some poor soul redoing old missions, as well as some cool soul making new missions!The ever busy 0rph3u5 has some big plans in case you are curious at how mod making gets done. (Spoilers its a lot of playing the same mission over and over again!)So stay tuned for that critical information! And 0rph3u5 also has a interesting screenshot from a mission in development. Gee I sure hope nothing bad happens to these refuelling lines... :evil:AdmiralRalwood/MageKing17 has embarked on a brave quest to overhaul object types in the engine. Basically how fighters can differ in behavior from transports or capital ships. But instead of just fighters, you could have battlefighters or... Squid-Tunnelers... or something... Yeah. So if that sounds interesting, check out the thread and leave some feedback or ideas.m|m/asarium has their own brave quest: Unicode Support. Translating mods to other languages has been difficult because of the limited font support the engine provides. But now with .ttf font support added last time, one of the final steps to effortless translation is unicode support. Soon translations to any language will be in sight! (And in support of that, there have been a number of other m|m/asarium also had another neat new feature merged into the codebase this month. Sound sets! Now a sound entry can have multiple sounds attached to it. The added variety adds a lot to the immersion!There have been a lot of commits to the github this month, but here are a few noteworthy ones that everyone might find interesting...Hark! The Vasudan bells ring! Christmas (or is that Zodmas?) is here early. Oddgrim comes back showing off progress on the last few Vasudan models that need urgent remodelling. The Bes freighter, it's container, and the Ra Escape pod! (Oh and the Scarab from FS1 And over in What Are You Working On we have... a neat looking Star Wars ship, Last month's theme was BEAMS.And boy, did you awesome people deliver. There were a few... very bright submissions... but the one that I think took the cake was... Tomimaki's Shadowy Beam of Doom!I really like this one because it really feels like it could be from Babylon 5. (This is either a joke about the CGI not aging well, or how good the graphics have gotten!)So the scoreboard is now...Scoreboard:Darius - 1niffiwan - 1thisisaverylongusername - 1Frikgfeek - 1Nyctaeus - 1DahBlount - 1deathsnake - 1BlackWolf - 1Egads, tomimaki is running away with it now! With one month left, they've basically got it in the bag now. But don't let that keep you from entering the last contest of the year...And December's screencap theme is... Freestyle! It's the end of the year, do whatever you like! If it's really special, maybe I'll give you extra points...!(I also accept bribes!)So newsletters in 2018 are going to be different. I don't know how yet... They might be cut down to just bullet points or maybe it'll be quarterly or something. I've been doing this for 4 years and activity around here isn't as fast moving as when I started doing them and my energy levels for this have been inching down as well. I'll still do screencap contests every month though! Or if you want to take over newslettering, let me know and I'll... let you!So there will be one more "full" newsletter for what happened in December, plus a year end review of new and exciting releases for 2017 (possibly with some fake awards or something, we'll have some fun with it).Oh and, we, (the HLP staff) are also looking for people to help write stuff for the main page, make it more appealing for newcomers and get people into this community. So post here or PM me if you're interested, motivated, and have a good amount of free time.