Realistic Planets 1.1 for OpenReliant is out, and it adds two bodies the original game doesn’t have at all:
Mars, in true colour from real orbiter mosaics, with its polar caps and a thin, dusty haze at the limb.
The Moon, from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imagery, with a normal map made from laser altimetry. Craters and mountains stand out along the terminator and fade toward full Moon, as they do in real life. Craters catch realtime shadows, and peaks on the shadow line catch light at their tops.
Both use 4K textures and lighting models fitted to real photometry.
StarLancer has no Mars or Moon models, so no mission of the game shows them. The mod adds them as new objects for mission makers to place, by the names realistic-planets:mars and realistic-planets:luna.
I've been building a companion app for OpenReliant, the open-source reimplementation of StarLancer's engine: OpenReliant Editor, a mission editor and script debugger. Version 0.2 is out, and it's far enough along to be useful, so here's what it does.
Missions as readable source. The editor opens any mission, the game's own or one from a mod, as readable source in a small Luau-like language, and builds it back into a mission file the game plays. All 44 of the game's missions open as source and build back to exactly the same mission. While you type, it checks the mission, completes the game's commands and conditions, and shows the developers' own descriptions of them on hover. One click plays the mission in OpenReliant, from its start or from any part.
Forms for the records. Ships, markers, triggers and the rest can be edited as forms in the inspector instead of as text, and new ones added from the outline.
A map of the mission. The Scene view shows the mission from above, the side or the front:
Every ship and marker where it starts. Drag one to move it, which rewrites its position in the source (and Undo puts it back).
The ranges the triggers watch, such as the distance a nav point counts as reached.
Routes: where the script sends each ship and group, from where it jumps in to where it flies and where it jumps out.
Missions spread over several areas millions of units apart open as an overview. Click an area to zoom into it.
A debugger for the mission script. Set breakpoints on lines of the source, play the mission, and the game holds the script there while you step through it, with its threads and values in view.
It's a native app for Windows, macOS and Linux, on x86-64 and Arm.
Coming next: the debugger's conditions, log points, watches and a timeline of the script's events. Later: the live scene (ships on the map where they are in the running game), changes that reach the running game as you make them, a visual Blocks view of the script, and a Mod mode for whole mods.
Getting it: download it for your system from the releases page. It needs OpenReliant with your own copy of StarLancer (installation guide). The macOS builds aren't signed yet, so the README says how to let macOS open them. If you've never written a mission, OpenReliant's guide to writing missions starts from a ship, a nav point and an objective.
