[wookieejedi]

It's been a busy season since our last official forum update, so all of us at Fate of the Galaxy want to share what we have been working on during the winter. A highlight list includes the following:

• Updated the AI flight patterns to improve their behavior to better match the Original Trilogy. For example, FotG AI will now conduct proper looking strafing attack runs on large ships by flying far away from the target then turning about and firing guns while flying towards the target while veering off once near and then circling around to continue another run. (Previously, ships would attempt to sit and park behind large ships, which did not match the behavior of the movies of course!). Another AI tweak includes updating guarding behavior to always move in formation with an escort if there are no hostiles nearby and improved collision avoidance when there are many large ships in tight escort formation.
• Updated some font aspects related to Aurebesh. For example, the Aurebesh writing on HUD gauges was tuned to actually show the name of the gauge instead of just the random gibberish the letters were using before.Updated files with an added free-for-non-commercial use Aurebesh font, thus if anyone ever wanted to replace all the font in FotG with Aurebesh they can do so easily by just renaming one file.
• Updated to expand control usability. For example, FSO now allows more axes and buttons on input devices. Specifically, players can now use input devices with up to 128 buttons and 8 axes (previously there were 32 buttons and 6 axes per device). The default key bindings for the `Look` feature were also updated to make it easier to use with just a keyboard, which will help our keyboard only users with tracking in-mission visibility.
• Updated Project Alderaan with many fixes, polish, and cleanup updates.
• Updated and fixed many other components with many dozens of cleanup and fix related updates, which are too long to list here!

Community Connections
As always, we want to highlight all the fantastic work completed by the FSO devs, too. They have continued adding code cleanup, bug fixes, optimizations, and multiple other updates that FotG uses. Just to name a few,  Lafiel has constructed a new and very robust particle system that integrates highly modular curve functions, Goober has added multiple enhancements and cleanup, and MJN has continued refining and augmenting SCPUI. In addition, ShivianSPS has created a Custom TC mode for KnossosNET and UI update, which FotG will be releasing on. As always, there’s many other devs adding great fixes, features, and other enhancements, too.

Moving Forward
We also want to thank you all for your sustained support and enthusiasm! We are getting very close to our internal milestones for a public release and can’t wait to share the game with you all once those are completed. In the meantime, here are some new screenshots including from the upcoming KNet update. May the Force be with you!

[chief1983]

And also with you!

[jg18]

Best of luck with (what sounds like) the home stretch! Go FotG team go!

[wesp5]

Okay, so you basically post the same thing for five years now, I cite the announcement from 2020: "Ultimately, we are nearing the final milestones for a public release." Don't you think you should finally release something before Disney destroys the Star Wars franchise so completely that nobody will be interested anymore?

[perihelion]

Dude... if you are excited to try what they're making, sure let them know that!  But don't act like you are entitled to anything.  This project is made entirely of volunteers with no hope of any return on the time invested.

And if you don't like all the new Disney SW crap, do what I do.  Ignore it.  The world is full of artists that keep producing music long after they've run out of things worth saying.  Doesn't mean the original records I fell in love with are any less amazing.  SW has always been a mixed bag (anyone else remember the Ewok movies?), so this isn't anything new.  My kids love the original trilogy far beyond anything that came out afterwards, and they were born after the prequels were old news.  Good movies are still good even if they are followed by mediocre ones by a bunch of of people more interested in milking a cash cow than quality story-telling.  And even there, there have still been some exceptional stories released despite Disney.

[wookieejedi]

I think perihelion covered the first point nicely

Regarding the second point, that is a good question, regarding how has FotG been close to release for so long? Overall, we could have released the first 3 campaigns of FotG and all the assets and gameplay by now, but we are striving to be strategic (double edge sword of working with Star Wars). In addition, each year since 2020 has seen very large improvements to both FotG and FSO. For example, new ships, cockpits, and large additions to the Project Alderaan campaigns have been added along with many vital FSO features (deferred lighting, improved shadows and self-shadows for cockpits, updated animation systems, updated particles systems, and much more from awesome FSO devs).

Finally, but certainly not least, is the newest iteration of the FSO launcher KnossosNET (KNet), which was driven by the hard work of ShivanSPS. The newest addition of KNet, which just came out weeks ago, was something we have been waiting on for many years, a standalone launcher for new players to easily launch FotG. Previously, players would have to download Knossos, manually set up folders, flags, and more, start the game, set joystick controls, then restart the game, then they could finally play. Now, players can just download and run the standalone portable launcher, click the big green Play/Install button, then play FotG (no folder or flag setup needed, and with the added bonus that they can set control joysticks in-game without restarting FSO).

With these large, longstanding features and frameworks our final goals before release are augmenting Project Alderaan a bit more and updating a few small things now that the large goals are now all done 

[wesp5]

I didn't know about KnossosNET and will need to test it, but I posted because I fear that feature creep might prevent this mod to come out in the first place. Something similar almost happened to The Babylon Project where as far as I know the origial developers lost interest or didn't have any time anymore, but somebody else stepped in and finally released it years after the show was over! So I don't know how many people are involved with this SW mod but in case something would happen to you, everything would be lost?

[wookieejedi]

Ah yes it is indeed vital to avoid feature creep. Overall, our milestones are more needed frameworks in place in order to create a modern game experience (such as now having KNet be able to just launch the game without having to fiddle with command line flags). Our current work is not just testing everything now that those major milestones are in and tuning up the Project Alderaan campaigns to take full advantage of the upcoming FSO 25.0 stable version release.

To answer you other question, fortunately the entire project is synced online on GitHub and backed-up on multiple separate hard drives. 5 people have write access and >15 others having read access--so rest assured FotG is safe from ever disappearing into the ether