Recruiting Playtesters!

After a long hiatus due to hardware problems, and a slight diversion
to the WCFL project, the Privateer: The Reckoning mod for Freelancer
is back on. Most of the work has been completed, with code tightened
up and new features added. All that's left now is the work of
playtesting the thing till the bugs are dead, dead, dead.

That's where you come in. We need beta testers to inform us exactly
where the problems are in the mod, since one person with a day job
programming the mod in his spare time can't possibly find them all. If
you've played Reckoning before, you'll find new ships (the Bearcat,
Panther and Hades) and weapons (Stormfire and Dragonfly). If you
haven't, give it a try!

If you're interested, contact warzog@netmdc.com . With work shifting
to the Epsilon Sector mod, this will very likely be the among the
final versions of Reckoning set in Gemini. Now may be your last chance
to be part of the greatest Wing Commander Privateer Total Conversion
for Freelancer ever!

Wing Commander FL v2.7 has been released!
Barring any undetected bugs, work is proceeding on Wing Commander FL-Epsilon.
Ships and Stations have been repaired, and are ready to go!
A new list of factions, including the new, "Union of Border Worlds," are completed.
All of the DLL's have been updated, and work on several new weapons is under way.
The Reaper Cannon, a high-speed Ion gun is done, as is the Steltek gun.
The Steltek ships are temporarily in the mod, but will be very random encounters, if they stay in.
Proposed additions include the Stormfire & Stormfire Mk II guns, the Flak Gun, Dragonfly Rocket Pod, and possibly the Scatter gun.
(The Scatter gun may not be doable in Freelancer, but I'll check it out.)
I've been scouring the internet for information on the Epsilon Sector, and believe I have enough to get started.
Except for the K'Hotan system, which isn't accessible from any other system in Epsilon, I plan on recreating the entire sector.
To make things a bit more interesting, I plan on having the more profitable mining operations in Kilrathi space, and the highest fees for refined goods will be aboard the many small outposts along, and beyond, the frontier.
The primary goal of "Wing Commander FL-Epsilon" is to push the "Privateer: The Reckoning" experience right to the edge!
The Reckoning's Gemini sector is on the edge of nowhere, while "Wing Commander FL-Epsilon's" smack in the middle of it.
There'll be Border World's bases friendly with Kilrathi, and those friendly with Confed.
I want to make "Wing Commander FL-Epsilon" a sort of "shady side of war" kind of a mod.
I'm still hoping to add a few more ships, and stations, but that depends on my sources.
Wish me luck!

- warzog

Wing Commander FL
This latest release in the Reckoning series of mods may seem like a step backwards, but in terms of stability and playability it is a huge step forward. Development on the main Reckoning mod has, sadly, temporarily halted, as noted in the last post - but a new mod has come to take up the flag.

Wing Commander FL takes the primary features of Reckoning - the ships, weapons, and equipment unique to the Wing Commander/Privateer universe - and plants them in the main campaign of Freelancer. That is to say, you can play the Nomad story of Freelancer with Wing commander ships, guns and shields.

I'll let, warzog, lead developer, take it up from here:

Development of this mod came about while working on the old "Privateer: The Reckoning." That project had several bugs in it that I've been wanting to fix, and I had a couple of new and improved models.

Unfortunately, I soon began getting bug reports that were almost identical to many of the ones from The Reckoning. I decided to eliminate the ship-related bugs before proceeding any further. With a crew of beta testers, we've managed to hunt down all of the glitches that we could find.

This resulted in changing many of the ships' hardpoints, adding missing hardpoints, eliminating one of the new models, and the unfortunate removal of the TCS Vesuvius. Along the way, weapons and equipment were converted over to Wing Commander gear, some Wing Commander/Privateer music was added, a new AI was developed, the ship's explosions have been reworked, and the missions have been modified to work with the Wing Commander ships.

Currently, there are only two known issues with the mod, and they're both unavoidable:

1) Sometimes, when docking with the Carriers, your ship will bang about, forever. Simply fly past one end and try again.
2) On computers without a good graphics card, the top texture of the Bearcat will appear white.

You can grab the mod here! Don't forget to delete your savegames to ensure a clean and uncorrupted install.

Downloads
Note: All of these mods require the Freelancer Mod Manager to be installed prior to installation. Once downloaded, just run the .flmod file and it'll automagically install itself. You can then use FLMM to activate and play.

If you encounter errors upon starting a new game, you probably have existing saved games that are conflicting with the mod. Go to My Documents/My Games/Freelancer and move or delete the OriginalSavedGames folder.

The Wing Commander Freelancer Ship Pack v. 2.2 was released at the beginning of January 2006. It replaces ships, weapons and equipment, keeping the Freelancer universe (and storyline) intact. Grab it here.

In January 2005, Privateer: The Reckoning OpenSP version 4.65 was released. This was the final major playable release before team leader warzog left the project due to health and computer problems.

Features:

• 22 flyable ships from the original Wing Commander to The Price of Freedom
• The entire Gemini Sector - 70 systems, 99 bases, and 540 unique characters
• Authentic Privateer weapons, equipment and commodities
• OpenSP Gameplay - no story, just trading, bounty hunting and money making.
  
• High-quality renderings of the original Privateer soundtrack
• Rotating planets and moons
  

Version 4.65 can be downloaded here. Dial-up be forewarned, the download is 27 megabytes.

Welcome to the weblog for Privateer: The Reckoning. Here you will find all the latest updates and information to get you up to speed on the premiere Wing Commander/Privateer mod for Microsoft Freelancer.

Reckoning started out as a simple project to replace several of the ships from Freelancer with Wing Commander ones ... but it quickly became much, much more. And by "quickly" I mean quickly ... the mod was already in progress before the game had been out one month. Granted, there were mods made using the Freelancer demo that were released before the actual game was, but I'm particularly proud of Reckoning because it sprang up totally spontaniously from a three-paragraph post on the LancersReactor message board with the goofy name "Wing Commander Privateer X-Mod" to become one of the monoliths of the Freelancer mod library. There was very few deliberate planning, especially in those wild early days - Reckoning has been blessed from the start with the very best talent of the Wing Commander and Freelancer communities.