Exit your spacecraft in FFE
Posted: Thu Nov 05, 2026 11:10 pm
I'm working on a new Frontier First Encounters bootleg that will add the ability to exit your spacecraft.
I was working on my own game engine for retro style 3d games using fairly modern technologies, opengl 3.3 and reactphysics3d. I called it the Schlock game engine or framework.
I was playing FE2 for a while and wanted to get back into FFE and remembered that the version I last enjoyed for months was Nic's Mod of which I had my own build and made some aesthetic changes a couple of years back. So I looked that up and started thinking that it would be a nice exercise to implement my own back end for the game using what I learned about opengl while programming my own engine. When that was done I realized that it was fairly easy to add my own game framework to the project and use this to add gameplay to the base FFE game. Sounds like a Frankenstein and it is but it does make it possible now to add out of your spaceship elements to FFE.
What I now have is FFE running while you can switch back and forth between it and my game loop while FFE keeps running in the background. This is running quite stable but it just keeps loading the same segment the whole time so the games are not connected yet. Not something that I think is very interesting to show off.
It should be the case that my game loop takes the current FFE state into account when loading the segment so you can walk around space stations and ports etc. I want that to be done in the same retro graphic style fitting the original game and make it look one whole game, and not a Frankenstein.
Anybody think this might be an interesting project? I know this is the home of FFED3D but I want to keep to a retro style and make the new gameplay elements fit that style.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could exit your spacecraft in FFE?
I was working on my own game engine for retro style 3d games using fairly modern technologies, opengl 3.3 and reactphysics3d. I called it the Schlock game engine or framework.
I was playing FE2 for a while and wanted to get back into FFE and remembered that the version I last enjoyed for months was Nic's Mod of which I had my own build and made some aesthetic changes a couple of years back. So I looked that up and started thinking that it would be a nice exercise to implement my own back end for the game using what I learned about opengl while programming my own engine. When that was done I realized that it was fairly easy to add my own game framework to the project and use this to add gameplay to the base FFE game. Sounds like a Frankenstein and it is but it does make it possible now to add out of your spaceship elements to FFE.
What I now have is FFE running while you can switch back and forth between it and my game loop while FFE keeps running in the background. This is running quite stable but it just keeps loading the same segment the whole time so the games are not connected yet. Not something that I think is very interesting to show off.
It should be the case that my game loop takes the current FFE state into account when loading the segment so you can walk around space stations and ports etc. I want that to be done in the same retro graphic style fitting the original game and make it look one whole game, and not a Frankenstein.
Anybody think this might be an interesting project? I know this is the home of FFED3D but I want to keep to a retro style and make the new gameplay elements fit that style.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could exit your spacecraft in FFE?