Alright, so this has been due for quite some time.

Let’s get the sad news out of the way first:
Over the last year roughly we’ve had several folks come and go with the project:
RK has for all intents and purposes handed FS over to me (JGZ) as he is switching jobs and will be on the road full time. He still funds the site and some other things,
and started this project with me way back in 2006, so I am keeping him in the Staff list as co-founder.

Several of the team members from Hard-Light, have moved on to other interests or otherwise needed to pick up jobs and/or college so they’ve had to step away. I myself became employed full time back in April, working 14 hour shifts, so that has left next to no time to do much of anything.  To his credit, a large portion of the work this year was done by Shadow Z (more on that in a moment).

Essentially we are down to really 2-3 “regulars,” and 2-3 people that are still “attached” but not actively doing any task for one reason or another. Due to this, we really need new blood and
I will be making several posts out on the net in the vein of Help Wanted ads. A post will also be made here shortly with more details on what we’re looking for. If nothing else, spread our
name and new website around, word of mouth (or social networking) gets around really quickly and may indirectly yield the help we would like to see.

Moving on…  So what have we accomplished?
Well…

We figured out the SBF file format, so we can listen to all Tachyon’s audio.
As such, a Tach fan (docfoo) is putting together all the clips and reworking them into a proper
soundtrack we hope we can make available soon.
We combined all the Tachyon concept art we could find and made one big collection for your enjoyment.
All current fighter craft and weapons were created tables (settings) for by MetalMilitia.
Shadow Z spent a good amount of time on optimizing the Fenris Arena stations so they don’t eat
your FPS down to a crawl, and also fixing some geometry errors.
Rstar created several slick new models, a new Demon, a new Manta, and a regular Tachyon gate.
We 3D printed a 3.5 inch Demon, Manta, and Pegasus. (This was very cool ^_^ )
We fixed/replaced the website…  (ok obvious I guess)

Later on in the year, we were able to get the source code for the old PAK model extractor that had been made by Delphy, as having a way to get non-screwy UV mapped models out of Tachyon would be a huge help with our own project in a multitude of ways. Shadow Z began working on this solely and did make some progress. I’ve also been hunting around for quite some time, trying to offer a bounty on someone who could correct the PAK extractor’s faults for us. Some have tried, no one stayed with it to really yield the needed results. We ARE still looking for someone for this task…  please contact us if you have any experience with picking through raw data, C++ or Visual Basic, or a knowledge of texture mapping in relation to coding.

In other news:

Sort of a sister Freespace 2 mod to ours, Diaspora (Battlestar Galactica related), released a few weeks back. Diaspora actually began as Beyond the Red Line (BtRL) not much longer after we began FringeSpace. So we congratulate them on getting released. You can find their mod here:  http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?board=175.0

Also of note is that Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame, has come out of retirement to propose a new space combat sim game. That being Star Citizen, which he’s trying to crowdsource the funding on. Being that one of the main features is modding for dedicated servers and a current generation game engine under the hood, I’m keeping a close eye on this project. If you’d like to see his trailers or get in on it, his site for the game is here:  http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/

Well that’s about it for now fellow scallywags of the Fringe. Stay gold…

Well a little bit of an update on things:

We’re moving along a little bit better now, Thaeris from the Stellar Assault
mod has been helping us convert models so that we can get a useable set
of regular ships. These will not be hi poly versions, but you should notice
an improvement in texture quality appearance over Tachyon.

Angelus has come back from a long trip and will start on model
upgrades again.

ShadowZ will be off for some time due to work.

The old Tachyon SBF archives were made playable thanks to the Xentax
modder forums. So that’s nice to have available for reference.

The Tachyon Facebook group has been seeing some activity, please stop
by or follow it so you can be aware of updates from plzdie and myself.

Hey guys…

I know I don’t post much around here. Best I can say is sorry…
Time and energy is hard to come by.

As to a status report on things here’s where we sit.

At the moment, Shadow Z is occupied with school classes and that there in. He’s made some progress on powerups,
and some items, as well as optimizing / repairing the fenris bouy and station. Both had geometry “fat” and
errors that needed help.

We’re expecting Angelus to return from business matters within this month, he’s been globe hopping so he
can’t really model much. A lot of his work on objects was lost before he had to leave, so we’re hoping we can
remake those quickly.

RK is pretty much going to be away from the mod for an extended period.
He’d like to do something, but he’s working pretty much every hour of the day and night.

Bax is having a rough time with life currently as well. He could use
some encouragement if you have a minute to drop him a note.

Nutri has made known to me he’s working on new music for the menu screen.

Carl, I’ve still not heard anything from. You alive dude?

Slap, nope not heard from either…

Me – I’m trying to stay afloat myself. Been putting resumes out there trying to get work at some decent rate.
Fighting colds and other life problems. Last thing I worked on was the Gal Span Classic HUD, which I managed
to get a fair ways started. However while new HUD code was released, it has poor documentation and a lot
of features we particularly need for FS… aren’t there. So I’ve been sort of wait n’ seeing on that.
Been gathering links to threads and trying to stay on top of topics related to FSO in the meantime.

So yes, not a lot has been done as of late. Let’s be honest though,
we’re less than a skeleton crew trying to do what 15 full time people
would have trouble with under normal conditions. The last couple of years
I think most can agree have been exceptional circumstances.

Hopefully as we can find jobs, time, or new blood, I’ll have some progress to report back with.

Also I’d like to remind folks to pray for the people in Japan, Haiti, and other places around the world that
have been devastated recently. For those in the USA, we know that New Orleans still remains a damaged
city. How much longer then will the destruction on other countries be felt, at such a larger scale?