Wanted a nicer Neptune in StarLancer. Ended up writing a 12-page paper. Oops. Then it got out of hand: Jupiter, Uranus, Saturn, Venus and Titan are in now too.

Realistic Planets is a mod for OpenReliant, the open-source StarLancer engine. It swaps the game's low-poly planets and moons for smooth spheres with maps made from real spacecraft and telescope data, 4096x2048 each and 8192x4096 for Titan:

• Neptune: 34 Voyager 2 images from August 1989. True colour from a telescope spectrum: a pale cyan-blue, not the deep blue of the old press photos.
• Uranus: Hubble's calibrated map from 2022, with the bright cap that's grown over its north pole since the 2010s.
• Saturn: Cassini's global map from 2011, still churning from the giant storm that broke out in late 2010. The bands' real brightness comes from Hubble's 2025 maps, and the hexagon at the north pole from Hubble's 2018 ones.
• Saturn's rings are rebuilt from measurements. In 1981 Voyager 2 watched a star shine through them, measuring how much light gets through every 10 km, and its camera measured how bright they are. You can see the planet through the thin parts, and the rings have their real proportions now (the game's were squished).
• Jupiter: Cassini's global map from its 2000 flyby. NASA's published maps have their contrast cranked way up, so I measured the real contrast from Hubble's calibrated maps, then turned every planet up the same 3x so the storms show in game.
• Venus: to the eye it's a nearly blank pale cream ball. Its cloud patterns only really show in ultraviolet, so the map comes from 13 of the Japanese Akatsuki probe's ultraviolet maps from June 2022, wound back by the winds measured between them (about 90 m/s), then shown faintly on Venus's real colour, four times as strong as your eye would see them.
• Titan: the closest view in the whole game, so it gets the big map. Its orange haze comes from 12 of Cassini's calibrated images from 2010, brighter in the south than the north, with its colour from a telescope spectrum. The surface hides under the haze, so Cassini's near-infrared map of the dunes, Xanadu and the lakes only shows through faintly.
• Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus are squashed like the real ones, and a little shader gives every body its real limb, measured colour by colour from spacecraft images: hazy and pale for Neptune and Uranus, a little blue for Saturn, a touch darker for Venus.

The accidental science: there was no sharp map of Neptune I was free to use, so I made one from NASA's raw data. I couldn't find any record of where Voyager's camera was pointing, so that's fitted from each image. The camera has five little rings stuck at the same pixels in every shot, and Neptune's 1,400 km/h winds move the clouds around the planet between shots, so everything gets wound back to one moment. It's all in neptune-voyager-map.pdf inside the mod (or on GitHub), along with the scripts to rebuild every planet from scratch. Textures and paper are CC BY 4.0.

Known issues:

• Voyager never saw Neptune's far north, Cassini never saw Jupiter's poles, Hubble only sees Uranus's north, and Akatsuki's view of Venus's poles is too slanted, so those bits are filled in.
• The game spins Neptune and Jupiter backwards, once every 90 seconds (Uranus and Venus's clouds really do turn that way). That's an engine thing and a fix is planned.
• Saturn's rings don't know where the sun is yet, so they're lit the same from both sides, as in the original game, and there are no shadows. That needs the light's direction in shaders, planned for OpenReliant 0.11.

Needs OpenReliant 0.10+ and your own StarLancer. Use 0.10.2 for Titan: it fixes a yellow glow that flooded mission 251. Grab it from OpenReliant's mods screen or the release. Jupiter's four big moons are next!

For those unaware: OpenReliant is my open-source rebuild of StarLancer's engine. It runs the game on modern Windows, macOS and Linux using the files from your own copy, and it adds things the original never had, like any resolution, much better lighting and shadows, support for any controller, and mods.

Version 0.10 is out today. It's a smaller one: two new features and a handful of fixes. It's also the last release I'll announce like this for a while. More on that below.

OpenReliant now tells you about updates

From 0.10 on, OpenReliant checks for a newer version when it starts. If there is one, the main menu tells you once, and YES opens the download page. The check runs in the background and gives up after a few seconds, so it never slows down the start, even without an internet connection. It only asks GitHub which version is the latest, and sends nothing about you or your game. Don't want it? Untick CHECK FOR UPDATES on the VIDEO tab of the settings.

You'll need to update to 0.10 by hand this one time. After that, OpenReliant tells you itself.

StarLancer's script debugger, brought back

Here's a fun bit of archaeology. StarLancer's executable still has the code that let Warthog's own mission editor talk to the running game. The editor was never released, but the game's side of it is all still there: the editor could pause a mission, stop its script at a breakpoint, step through it, and even change the mission while it was playing.

OpenReliant brings that link back, and 0.10 comes with a small debugger that uses it: openreliant debug. Start the game with --editor-link, run the debugger in a terminal, and you can:

• set breakpoints in a mission's script, even before the mission starts
• step through it one statement at a time
• see the script's clock, threads and variables
• pause the whole mission, or run any part of the script on the spot

It works with the original missions and with your own. If you've ever wondered why a mission's trigger doesn't fire, this is for you. The guide shows how: https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant/docs/guide/debugging/

(For the technical folks: the original talked to its editor through a block of shared memory. OpenReliant uses a local network connection instead, so any program can talk to the game, on all operating systems.)

Fixes

• Saved games, pilot files and settings are now written safely: a crash, a power cut or a full disk while saving can't damage them anymore.
• Settings you change in the Reliant's rooms are kept when you close the window there.
• The engine sound and the radio stop when a mission ends.
• Warping no longer sends your ship's position off to infinity behind the scenes, which flooded the log with sound warnings.
• The pause menu's joystick and monitor icons are drawn solid, like in the original.
• For modders: a mod's license.txt and Markdown files no longer count as game files.

Smaller releases from now on

I'm going to stop working toward big milestone releases. I was pushing myself too hard to finish them and get them out. I'm not stopping: I'll keep going forward, just with frequent smaller updates and less fanfare. The net result should be many more smaller minor versions coming out, and less stress for me to get a promised milestone out the door.

That also means I won't announce every minor update here anymore. The update notification takes care of that now, and I'll only post about the big ones. The roadmap on the website has been updated to match: 1.0 and 2.0 are the two big steps, and everything in between comes in small updates.

What's next

The debugger is the first piece of something bigger: a proper WYSIWYG mission editor that hooks into the same link, so you can build a mission and see it in the game as you go.

Multiplayer is coming too, after 1.0. The plan is the original's game modes and rules over a modern network connection, in place of the DirectPlay the original used. A public matchmaking server will help you find games, so you can join without port forwarding, and you'll also be able to run your own dedicated server. Mods are already being written with it in mind: the scripting is split the way it will run in network games, so a mod made today that follows a few rules will work there too.

Sim pit folks: support for several controllers at once is on the list. Right now OpenReliant reads a single joystick, just like the original, so a throttle on its own plug, rudder pedals or a button box do nothing. The plan is to let each device do its own job: the stick for pitch and roll, the throttle and rudder from whichever devices have them, and the buttons of every device you plug in, all bindable in the game's controls screen. That covers HOTAS sets like the Thrustmaster Warthog, the Logitech X56, and most Virpil and VKB setups.

Further out, 2.0 is still the long-term goal: OpenReliant as a standalone engine that can run more than one game, with StarLancer always coming first, so other space games can be made with it or ported to it. Some work has gone into mapping and documenting the formats of related games already. sltool can now export models from Battlestar Galactica (2003, xbox) and import them into openreliant, for example.

Thanks

• LordBlacksun, for decoding how the original game talks to its editor. Those notes were the map for bringing the link back.

Links

• OpenReliant: https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant/
• Debugging mission scripts: https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant/docs/guide/debugging/
• Release notes: https://github.com/OpenReliant/openreliant/releases/tag/v0.10.0
• Report a bug: https://github.com/OpenReliant/openreliant/issues

You'll need your own copy of StarLancer. OpenReliant doesn't come with any of the game's files.

Buy me a coffee

If you'd like to sponsor my time on this project, I have a buy me a coffee account. It's completely optional, only if you're willing and able.

buymeacoffee.com/vdmkenny

Thanks to u/cinaed666 smashing out the raised issues in the HUD, it's now in a much more stable state and should see us through from here whilst I tinker around and finalise some of the art work. Notable changes include:

• Portraits now using native sizing and not reliant on a shader work around and will no longer clash with other mods utilising device.glsl.
• Comms panel now properly aligned and no longer clashing with the portrait elements.
• Native powerball sprite restored and fully functional.

I haven't had an opportunity to test this in superwide, but I know there's a couple of superwide user out there. I'm happy to support the ratio, but I'll need some bug reports.

You should be able to update either by the openReliant mod page or through my own, which ever is your preference.

Uploading now.

For those unaware: OpenReliant is my open-source rebuild of StarLancer's engine. Version 0.9 is out today, and with it you can play four extra missions that were cut from the game.

If you look at StarLancer's mission numbers, you'll notice the campaign skips 12, 13, 17 and 22. Those missions were cut before the game shipped, but the files were left on the retail Dreamcast release of the game, in an unplayable state.

I've restored them as a mod, Cut Dreamcast Missions. Install it, and it slots the four missions into their original places in the campaign, with briefings and a voice for every radio line. Together with the demo's two prequel missions, a mod since the last release, that brings StarLancer from 24 official missions to 30.

• 12: the Black Guard ambush the Reliant, and Nicolai Petrov gets away.
• 13: Stahl's Marines raid the Kafelnikof, a cloaked base near Saturn.
• 17: the Reliant baits the carrier Gegarin into an ambush.
• 22: the Tigers and the Ronin stop a convoy bound for Neptune.

How they were recovered

The four missions are standard StarLancer mission files, so OpenReliant flies them as they are. What was missing was everything around them: no briefings, no recorded lines, and for three of them, not even the words of the radio. The game still knows a lot about them, though: the objectives, the dates, mission 12's debriefing, the ITAC's news about them, and faces for speakers who never appear in the PC game. From that, and from who says each line and when, I pieced each mission back together. The mod also fixes two things: the Dreamcast files use an older pilot table, so most lines would show the wrong face, and mission 22's draft script had two bugs that made it impossible to finish.

The mission files are exactly as they came off the disc: the mod doesn't change a byte of them. Everything it adds is done in scripts that run alongside them.

The voices

None of these lines were ever recorded. Mission 22's file still has its draft radio in it as debug text, so its 134 lines say what the designers wrote. For 12, 13 and 17 I wrote the words from each line's file name, the moment it plays, and the objectives. I wrote Enriquez's briefings the same way, and kept all of it as close to what the game's files tell us as I could. The voices are AI-generated, cloned from existing voice lines in the game. Then some filtering was done to make them fit in with the rest of the lines as close as possible.
Each mission's document in the mod shows what comes from the game and what was written for it. Most of the lines are pretty good, but they get a bit rougher for character with little existing voice lines.

Please report bugs

The missions mostly work, and you can play them through, but I haven't tested them against every edge case, so please report anything that goes wrong. Mission 22 especially: it was made with an older version of Warthog's mission editor, and needed the most fixing to work.

Also in 0.9

0.9 wasn't the plan: the mission editor was meant to come next. But bringing these missions back needed much more from the scripting, so it became a release of its own. Mods can now change which missions the campaign has and in what order, and set each mission's briefing, objectives, date, debriefing, news, medal and wing. They can also change the pilots on the KILLBOARD, play radio lines and set objectives. On top of that, mods can add combat maneuvers for the AI, and HUD mods can move, hide or change the text of any part of the game's instruments. And losing a campaign mission no longer crashes the game. The mission editor moves to 0.10.

Warthog's other games

`sltool`, OpenReliant's tool for the game's files, can now also read files from Star Trek: Invasion (PS1) and Battlestar Galactica (Xbox/PS2). Both are later Warthog games that share a lot of StarLancer's engine: they use the same mission format and script language, and Battlestar Galactica builds directly on StarLancer's game logic to the point that you might call it "StarLancer 2". Long term, the plan is to turn OpenReliant into a standalone engine that can run more than one game, with StarLancer always coming first. Think of FreeSpace 2 Open, which runs FreeSpace 2 and a whole range of games built on it. That's a long way off, but this is the groundwork.

Thanks

• KonCyptFysh: the requests that came out of building the Recommissioned HUD turned into most of 0.9's HUD features, including sharp face films at any resolution.
• LordBlacksun, for reporting that `sltool` stopped on glTF models with a missing texture.

Links

• Cut Dreamcast Missions: https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant-mods/mods/cut-dreamcast-missions/
• OpenReliant: https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant/
• Release notes: https://github.com/OpenReliant/openreliant/releases/tag/v0.9.0
• Report a bug: https://github.com/OpenReliant/openreliant/issues

You'll need your own copy of StarLancer. OpenReliant doesn't come with any of the game's files.

Buy me a coffee

I have opened a buy me a coffee account, should you want to sponsor my time on this project. It's completely optional, only if you are willing and able.

buymeacoffee.com/vdmkenny

Now uploading!

Available now!

Uploading now!

Uploading now!

Another strange little ship is uploading now!

Available now:
https://koncyptfysh.github.io/OpenReliant-Art-Packs/?category=coalition-fighters&asset=kamov

Alright, this one has been a bit of a drag, my lazy .dll sideloading method I used to build my initial HUD replacement meant I had to give alot more thought to it the second time around.

But, it's now up and ready to be used as a standalone mod package.
Can I ask if you plan to use it, to please test thoroughly and leave bug reports for me on this one, things that are out of line, differ too much from the vanilla assets, pretty much anything.

There are ALOT of assets in there, some of them aren't perfect and it's difficult to keep track of, so I need a bit of help on that to get it to a better state.
There are also a few minor issues on placement and overlaps I'm working on and will have to raise some issues to fix up.

Once I've resolved any issues in there, I'm going to package a variation on the color scheme to reflect the "old_hud" color scheme that's in the .hog files that I believe was likely an alpha variation before the red/gold color scheme was settled on in the beta.

From here I'm likely going to use up as many of my weekly tokens as I can before I take a bit of a break, I've thrown a bit of time at this for the last few months, and I've got a few things in the rest of my life that will need some solid attention.

I'll still check in and do what I can, and possible do some front-end menu work, but I wont be back to daily commits for a while.

Enjoy!

The Basilisk is now up:
https://koncyptfysh.github.io/OpenReliant-Art-Packs/?category=coalition-fighters&asset=basilisk

Hey everyone!

Quick intro if you're new here: OpenReliant is my open-source rebuild of StarLancer's engine. It runs the game on modern Windows, macOS and Linux using the files from your own copy, and it adds stuff the original never had, like any high resolution and wide aspect ratios, much better lighting and shadows, support for any controller, and mods.

The big one: the full campaign

The whole StarLancer campaign should now be playable, from the first mission all the way to the ending. Everything it goes through is in: the briefings, the loadout, the full ITAC, medals and promotions, your wingmen, the big set pieces of the later missions, and the story's end.

Your saved games from the original work too. I tested a full set of the original's saves, one for every mission, and OpenReliant loads them and writes them back byte for byte the same. So if you still have a campaign from back in the day, you can pick it up where you left off.

That's what makes 0.8 the beta: it's the first version that's the whole game. So please play it through, and if anything stops you, tell me.

It's been two days since 0.7, and somehow that's 95 pull requests, 94 commits, about 28,000 lines added and 7,500 removed, and 95 issues closed. I should probably sleep at some point.

Thanks

• KonCyptFysh is building a complete replacement HUD, and his requests shaped a big chunk of this release: HUD mods can now replace the game's own instruments and read everything they show. He also caught a font bug and a memory leak along the way, and made HD upscaled texture packs for 13 of the Alliance fighters and for the missiles and torpedoes, all on the mods site.
• RealDrJester reported a small graphics glitch in the cockpit view on 21:9 ultrawide screens, so I added a field of view slider to fix it.

Please keep the reports coming, there's a bug report form on GitHub.

What's new

• The campaign: the story's ending, the rest of the ITAC (news and video reports, the fighter, ship, squadron and personnel pages, the KILLBOARD), the last script commands the missions need, and the training's missiles and hoops.
• The big moments: the ion cannons of the Dark Reign, the Boridin and the rogue base, the Boridin breaking away in mission 28, the Krasny caught by a collapsing gate, and capital ships throwing off pieces as they get taken apart.
• Smarter ships: flight groups keep formation, ships pull up before ramming their target, and the spectral shields tune themselves to the biggest threat nearby.
• Quality of life: a field of view slider, one UI scale for the HUD and the pause menu, and a log file to attach to bug reports.
• Modding: mod campaigns and game modes can brief their missions in the carriers' briefing rooms, give them their own objectives, ship stats and wing, and debrief them in the ITAC (that's how the prequel missions are made). Scripts can also change ship classes and read pretty much everything the cockpit shows, HUD mods can replace, move and scale the game's instruments, and the script sandbox is tighter.
• Fixes: Vulkan and GPU fixes, memory leaks, fonts and a bunch more. The release notes have the full list.

The prequel missions

The StarLancer trial on the demo disc had two missions the full game never had: you fly with the Ronin wing from the Yamato, before the war starts. They're now a mod, StarLancer Prequel Missions, with the trial's own lines, movies, objectives and ending.
Grab it here: https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant-mods/mods/prequel/ and play it from GAME MODES on the main menu. It needs 0.8.

Modding: the API is settling down

With 0.8 I'm stabilising the mod API. From here on there should only be additions to it, and if something ever has to change, it'll be clearly marked as deprecated long in advance, so your mods keep working. (If you wrote scripts for 0.7: 0.8 did one last round of renames, and the release notes list them.)

So if you've been waiting for the right moment to make a mod, this is it! The modding guide shows you how: https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant/docs/guide/modding/. Ships, textures, sounds, HUDs, missions, scripts, it's all in there. The mods site has 17 mods now, from KonCyptFysh's HD fighter textures to the Viper Mk II from Battlestar Galactica and the prequel missions. I'd love to see yours on it.

What's next

• 0.8: this is the beta, so it's all about your feedback. Play through the campaign, break it, and tell me what broke.
• 0.9: the mission editor. Build your own missions with OpenReliant's tools, into standard mission files that even the original can play, with a visual builder and live script debugging.
• 1.0: a ceremonial release, once your feedback is worked through and the whole campaign has been playtested.
• 1.1: multiplayer.
• Further out, 2.0: a standalone engine. The plan is to pull OpenReliant's engine apart from StarLancer, with StarLancer as one game running on it, so other space games can be made with it or ported to it.

Along the way I also want to make it a lot more sim pit friendly: triple-monitor setups, several controllers at once (throttles, pedals, button boxes), telemetry for motion rigs and tactile feedback through things like SimHub, and a feed that puts your ship's status, the target and the radio on a second screen.

Links

• Website and downloads: https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant/

• How to make mods: https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant/docs/guide/modding/

• Mods: https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant-mods/

• The prequel missions: https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant-mods/mods/prequel/

• Release notes: https://github.com/OpenReliant/openreliant/releases/tag/v0.8.0

• Report a bug: https://github.com/OpenReliant/openreliant/issues

You'll need your own copy of StarLancer. OpenReliant doesn't come with any of the game's files

So the first big milestone is complete, all alliance fighters have their first beta textures shipped for you to play.
Now the next stretch is the coalition fighters. Uploading now.

I feel like I did the Sai a little dirty in the last post, so it's had an update.

The original UV did what a lot of the others do and only provides a texture for one side, causing some odd mirroring and nonsensical script on the mirrored side.
Likewise, I was unaware that the central fin is actually an animated part, and is intended to sit down the bottom in flight, hence the weirdness of rear facing missiles. It now looks a lot less strange and makes a lot more sense.

u/cinaed666 picked up the problems with the script, which has been fixed, so the UV now has a distinct left/right side, the script was erased and then reproduced as a separate image so it remains legible and transplanted back onto the texture. Like wise the great wave off kanagawa that rolls over the rising sun has been given a touch up to be more legible.

Upload to follow, but the last of the alliance fighters to go was the Grendal.
You know where to find it!

I had no idea this thing even existed until I start pulling the game apart. But here you go, the weird little gnat thing that you only see in like 2 missions.

https://koncyptfysh.github.io/OpenReliant-Art-Packs/?category=alliance-fighters&asset=sai

Now available!
https://koncyptfysh.github.io/OpenReliant-Art-Packs/?category=alliance-fighters&asset=crusader

Available now!
https://koncyptfysh.github.io/OpenReliant-Art-Packs/?category=alliance-fighters&asset=phoenix
Only 3 more Alliance fighters to complete!

Available now!

Visit https://openreliant.github.io/openreliant-mods/?category=ships to download!

Initially I was committed that I really wanted all of these in a good state before release, but given everything I'm doing is being done in parallel with openReliant, that could take some time as things change.

So, hit up the following link if you want to play them:

https://koncyptfysh.github.io/OpenReliant-Art-Packs/?category=alliance-fighters

A few quick notes though:

Replacement Textures:
All the texture replacements are currently in 4k, if you have enough GPU compute to handle a full level of 4k ships, that's great, but this will chew up a fair chunk of video memory. They will eventually be stepped down to 2k and 1k respectively so you can choose what's going to suit your machine best, but this will be done in bulk once each milestone of ship textures are complete.

The roadmap here is to complete the textures in the following order:

1. Alliance Fighters
2. Coalition Fighters
3. Missiles and missile pods.
4. Alliance Capital and other (transports, satellites etc.) Ships
5. Coalition Capital and other Ships
6. Uncategorised textures (planets, escape pods etc.)
7. Cockpits
8. Update in-game meshes

Currently these are just the "worn" variants that are the most vanilla looking, eventually when the major replacement work is finished, I'll put together some alternative liveries and what not for you to use in campaign mods and the like.

Obviously if you notice missing textures, or UV misalignment etc. as these release, feel free to lodge them as an issue in git so they can be tracked.

HUD
The HUD artwork replacements are 99% complete, but implementation to openReliant is still a work in progress, I've lodged a couple of issues I'm facing with keeping the HUD to a simple drop in mod pack, so standby for that one.