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Comment by dvaun | Hacker News Reader

Happen to have FreeSpace code? Or is that under lock and key still?

I don't. That was developed by Volition. Parallax was split into Outrage and Volition. I never had access to that code, and I think Mike Kulas would need to be the one to release it.

Perhaps if you have some way of shooting a message his way to let him know about the many good folks here that are nostalgic about it?

Thanks again for doing this btw!

Was worth a shot asking :) thanks for the info! Fingers crossed it may happen someday.

Freespace is open source. or at least fs2 is.

I am not familiar with the.. um.. I guess you could call it the landscape of the freespace community but this was a top search result.

https://www.hard-light.net/

and here is a github project that looks correct.

https://github.com/scp-fs2open/fs2open.github.com

And now, for free, an opinion. I enjoyed descent, but did not like freespace, I am sure there is fun subtlety to the game, but I bounced off it hard, combat in open space ended up being just these really boring circle battles. Much funner combat when you have tight claustrophobic corridors to deal with.

Free space has the Knossos mod launcher which will let you play the FS1 campaign ported to FS2 amongst other mods.

I personally loved the Freespace games, and have taken advantage of the awesome work by the FreeSpace Source Code Project to replay them over the years. That said, FreeSpace is Descent in name only, and totally understand how folks who had very fond memories of playing Descent feeling a bait in switch when getting FreeSpace and having it not be very Descent-like. I mean, heck, aside from the Glide mechanic, there's no real Six-Axis style movement, you know, the hallmark of Descent.

They're just different games. I love them both for what they are. It's a shame that Interplay tried to use the Descent name to sell more copies, because even if there was some minor inspirations in development, Freespace definitely stands solidly on its own two feet without the tie.

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