It's been a few months since my last update so I thought I'd take you on a little tour across the XWA community and what's been cooking the past few months.

New TIE Fighter and TIE Interceptor

DTM has created fantastic new versions of the TIE Fighter and TIE Interceptor, all brand new and made from scratch! And if that's not enough these come packed to the brim with bonus feature and variations, such as Outland and Mining Guild versions for the TIE Fighter and Royal Guard and Missile Launcher versions for the TIE Interceptor.

New Effects by Blue_Max

No month passes without Blue_Max discovering new, crazy and exciting ways to further improve the immersion of the game:

- It is now possible to add and customize animated Lightmaps to textures such as blinking lights

- We can now use animated images within dynamic cockpits - moving holograms, readout screents etc..

- Danamic cockpits can now be enhanced with event-based damage effects, which allows us to bring back things like broken displays or cracked glass when taking damage, a feature last seen with with the 2D cockpits of XvT.

- A new Throttle bar element has been added to the Dynamic cockpit portfolio which allows us to display ship speed as a visual gauge.

New and updated Skins

DTM has created new Skins for the Assault Gunboat. The pack also includes templates for editors outside the XWAU team to create skins of their own.

User and Editor Guides

Ace Antilles, DTM and Blue Max have created new Guides explaining some of the new features.  There are guides explaining Animations and Skins and Profiles with tutorials of how to use them. Please see the PDF files in the new /Readme/ folder for the full details here

Updates

Additionally the patch contains a multitude of updates and improvements all over the place, including but not limited to:

- Imperial II-class Star Destroyer v2.4 - Several bugfixes, converted FG Colors to skins.

- Interdictor: Added a profile to the ini file that allows the ship to be converted as a Vindicator-class Heavy Cruiser

- Animated Light Maps - some existing models have been updated to include animated lightmaps. More will follow over time.

- Updated hangar maps for numerous ships and stations

- All hooks updated to their latest versions

- Improvements to Patch folder structure

- Updated Game Launcher

- Updated Babu Frick Configurator and modified the default game settings.

... and much, MUCH more!

It's been a few months since my last update so I thought I'd take you on a little tour across the XWA community and what's been cooking the past few months.

TFTC closed Beta launched

On Jan 22nd the TFTC launched their long awaited closed Beta phase and since then participants are busy testing the remake mod for any potential bugs and kinks that might have snuck in. The TIE Fighter Total Conversion will be released throughout Spring 2021 in a standard edition as well as a Reimagined version which revisits the original missions and improves upon them with additional features like vivid environments that feel really lived-in.

New Hook Feature: Stats Profile

JeremyaFr introduced a new feature that allows modders to create several stats profiles within the same ship slot and load these for speciffic missions. With these stats profiles you can change the basic statistics of a ship like shield and hull rating, speed and maneuverability.

GameStar Interview & Features

Last but not least, Forceflow and I had a chance to sit down with the folks from GameStar, a major German gaming magazine. In the interview we talked about the XWA Upgrade mod, the state of the modding community and how it is still so popular after a whapping 20 years. You can find the interview HERE (note, you'll need to be subscribed to view this video). Apart from that GameStar featured XWAU and TFTC in several videos on their official Youtube channel.