Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, strap yourself in because we're going on a wild ride! After almost 4 years we finally are proud to announce the release of our second mega patch, XWA Upgrade 2024!

Packed with all the upgrades of the last mega patch and all subsequent major updates, this release includes a whole host of new features from small tweaks in the background to huge game-changing updates that make you feel like you're playing a whole new game! To name a few

HD Concourse

MechDonald completely overhauled game UI ranging from individual buttons to the whole concourse environment and transition videos. Both the Main Concourse and The Crew Quarters scene including all trophies have been fully reconstructed from scratch and rerendered in HD. In addition Forceflow has rerendered all the many, many Simulator images for ships and missions to work in a modern era widescreen environment.

New and updated models

A number of high-profile models have been introduced including the Imperial II-class Star Destroyer, X7 Factory and Container Hangar by Vince T. Additionally and for the first time ever, we have to decided to introduce new craft to the patch, which were previously not in the game, to add a bit more variety. These include the Imperial Nebulon-B Frigate, Gozanti-class Cruiser, VCX-100 Freighter and U-Wing by DTM and the Quasar Fire Carrier by Driftwood. Additionally several existing models have seen a facelift with improved textures or model overhauls, such as an updated T-Wing and Z-95 Headhunter by DTM, Corellian YT-1300 and Falcon by Master Qui-Gon and Prime, Firespray Attack Ship and GR-70 Medium Transport by Master Qui-Gon. Finally, Ace Antilles has added more flavor models to be used in launch hangars, such as ladders and catwalks, to improve immersion.

Visual optimization

Ace Antilles has given pretty much every model, upgraded or vanilla, a treatment to improve the way it appears ingame, by recalculating face normals, converting tri-faces to quad-faces and adding individual materials with shield, beam and damage effects to each of them.

Hooks and Effects

Of course, the new patch contains all the latest hooks by JérémyaFr and effects ddraw by blue_max, those magical items that transform the XWA from an aging 1999 game to stand tall and proud in 2024.

Updated tools

All the accompanying tools have received a facelift and various improvements. The many ship configuration options have been extracted from Babu Frik's Configurator and put into their own little tool XWA Craft Manager, which will let you how certain ships appear in skirmish mode, including profiles and skins. This tool will also allow you to customize the appearance certain trophies in the crew quarters.

ATTENTION COMPATIBILITY NOTE:

At this point, this version of XWAU is not compatible with TFTC 1.3.4. Installing it ontop anything but a clean XWA Install, will cause various incompatibility issues and potentially cause the game to be unplayable. TFTC will in time be updated to use XWAU 2024 as a foundation and restore compatibility.

Thank you!

Work on the new patch has commenced as early as late 2020 and it wouldn't have been possible to make without the technical brilliance of JeremyaFr and blue_max. We owe them a massive thank you!

Also, the XWAU wouldn't be here without Forceflow who has been maintaining the website and forums, dealing with overzealous bot crawlers and dutifully paying the hosting costs for 25 years straight.

The whole team has been involved in one area or another of this release, and it's the collaboration of teamwork, sharing feature ideas and striving for the best releases that makes up what we do. A big thank you also goes to the people beta-testing the content and helping us squas the multitude of bugs that surface with a mega patch of this scale! In short: Thanks to everyone that supported us over the years and made this whole thing possible!

And last but not least, thank you to our community, who stuck with us for 25 crazy years! Every one who came, went, returned or just happened by. You are awesome!

For more detailed information and discussion visit our Website and Forum or the TFTC Discord !

That's all, now get out there and have fun!