Action stations, action stations, set condition one throughout the ship. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill!

After years of development, the Freespace 2 mod Diaspora released today. The website is getting hammered, so if it doesn't load, the torrent links are listed in the video description. The game is stand alone, you don't need Freespace 2 to play it.

This seems cool, never heard of it until now. As a fan of BSG I'll definitely try this out.

Yay! Time to break out the HOTAS.

I forgot to mention, there is Track IR support. So those of you out there with Track IR (*cough* Flight Club) might want to take a look at it!

Great, I just completed a quest.

I loved Season 2 of BSG... :( It ended so rushed.

Is the game legal?

@SmilingPig said:

Is the game legal?

Legal?

It's a game built on Freespace 2. Freespace 2's engine went open source years ago.

Its distributed as a torrent because the download links were getting hammered. File hosting costs money, torrents? Not so much.

As for property rights, I dunno. It's a fan project that's not for profit. Its also been actively in development, NBC Universal could have slapped them with a cease and desist at any time. I believe that some members of the Diaspora team (or the Beyond the Red Light team, which shared some members.) also did 3d modeling work for the Battlestar Online game.

Alright. Just played through the tutorial, 1 minute into the first mission and I had to pause to come here and say how awesome this shit is. As a fan of both X2 The Threat and BSG this game hits the sweet spot, atleast visually and gameplay-wise, dunno how good the campaign is yet.

THAT CURTAIN OF FIRE DUUUDE!!!

@Zelyre: Thanks for letting us know about it!

for those with legal concerns

The developers Volition released the source code for FreeSpace 2 to the public under a not-for-profit licence (not creative commons derived though) when THQ acquired Volition as with Interplay holding certain rights to the franchise (not relating to the engine) Volition was unable to work on additional FS games. FreeSpace Open has been developed by dedicated fans for the last decade or so hence why it is able to stand up to fairly modern releases in terms of looks, not to mention all the under-the-hood improvements they have made.

On the BSG side as said above its a not-for-profit which has been in open development for about 4 years with some of the modelling team for the project recruited for BSO as a direct result of their work on Diaspora, so while it has been developed without direct approval from the BSG IP owners there has been plenty of opportunity for them to close the project down.

The use of torrents was a data allowance and availability decision, basically hundreds (or as it turned out thousands) of 1.25gb downloads would have required professional (and potentially expensive) hosting arrangements.

Because Diaspora is a Total Conversion using none of the FS missions, object data or Media the only terms it is restricted by are those of the FSO licence and any restrictions imposed by the BSG IP holders should they do so.

For those interested in FreeSpace it can be legally purchased from http://www.gog.com/ for $5.99 and then upgraded with FreeSpace Open and the MediaVPs media improvements for free from http://www.hard-light.net/forums there are also many mod available as well including the highly polished Blue Planet.

A similar project released earlier this year is the WingComander Saga TC that can be found at WCS.com and uses a customised branch of FSO