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Welcome to Sciene Office report #62, Den Darkhill reporting in for the Big Kahuna who has been experiencing internet problems. While he is having these problems his email response time has been cut down as well. So if you have any real pressing matters that need SCO attention email them my way and I can probably get something done about it.

Science Office News:

1. Its been brought to my attention that the Dungeon Ship patch for XWA has been giving people problems. It is in the list of things to do but I have just been trying to wrap some things up with Imperial Alliance.
2. Speaking of Imperial Alliance, I've made some decent headway this week. You can now give craft jump out locations and they will fly to them before jumping out. I know not a big deal since even the original X-wing game had this feature but this is something that Freespace 2 has been sorely missing. You can also give the player craft a jump location and the player won't be able to jump out unless they are near it as like in X-wing Alliance. If designers wish they don't have to use this feature and craft will jump out anywhere as the game used to. I've also added some targetting brackets on the radar displays to make it easier to track. And I've finally given the cloaking device a visual effect so a craft doesn't just disappear.

Science Office Status:

Site: The Science Office site can be found at http://sco.emperorshammer.net - which includes the Fleet Manual at http://sco.emperorshammer.net/fleet-manual. The Imperial Alliance site is located at http://ia.emperorshammer.net - which includes the ImpED site/course at http://ia.emperorshammer.net/imped.

Command Staff Objectives:

Continued patch development and platform resource: Focussed on Imperial Alliance.

Get a release candidate version of Imperial Alliance released: Beta phase running, upgrading resolutions, checking Multi Player.

Upgrade and add to the Fleet Manual: No changes.

Science Office Projects:

Imperial Alliance: With the release of the freely available source code of FS2, we have started on making a Star Wars game out of it. We can freely distribute a finished game as long as we have all our own data files (graphics, sounds, models etc).

Finishing up:

If you want to keep up to date on new IA things either check out the message board or the offical IA webpage.