Renegade Resurgence

General info

Released on: 6th July 2004 (v1.0) 9th July 2008 (v1.1), 13th April, 2021 (v1.44)
Post feedback here The official feedback thread for the v1.44 release (also contains download links)
Number of missions: 31 campaign missions, including 2 SOC missions
Mods used:

• GTF Valkyrie
• GTF Rapier (TF Kvasir)
• GTGs Antwerp
• GVC Somtus
• GTI Samson

All included in release
Website and download: http://www.moddb.com/mods/renegade-ressurgence
FreeSpace version required: SCP, optimized for release 21.2.0 Release Candidate 2 (Vanilla FreeSpace will not work for RR v1.1 or later.)
Description:
After the incident at Capella, the GTVA begins a large construction project at the Altair sector to learn more about the Ancient civilization in the hopes those new discoveries may aid them in the war with the Shivans. But the project was not proceeding as planned: pirate activites are halting the constructions. It is time to send armed forces to stop the pirate strikes. Turns out, the GTVA is facing an even larger enemy than they had expected...

Background

This section will concentrate on what happened before the campaign starts. Needless to say, all info underneath is non-canon.

Capella happened. Though the Shivans are sealed off in Capella and the Neo-Terran Front is crushed, optimism soon fades when both Terrans and Vasudans start realizing what they actually lost during the war. It is not enough that they lost billions of innocent civilians, the GTVA Colossus with many hi-ranking officers on board, and the bulk of their fleet, there is no guarantee that the Shivans won't find another route into GTVA space in the future.

High Command and numerous galaxywide civilian corporations are willing to put more effort and money into research and development, both civilian and military, to press the severely weakened Terran-Vasudan alliance into a new age. Countless reconstruction plans had been suggested in three months, the most promising and thorough devised an ambitious and potentionally gainful project: a giant scientific endeavor to learn more about the Ancients' civilization. They all know that, even though the Ancients were defeated by the Shivans millennia ago, it is them who supplied the Terrans and Vasudans with knowledge that allowed these two species to survive the attack of the SD Lucifer's task force. Discovering multiple Knossos subspace portals has convinced all leading figures that Ancient Empire indeed stretched much further than anyone could have imagined.

Civilian corporations saw the ambition and the possibility for profit in the project, and subjected themselves to study the unknown. Though the GTVA, a military alliance, was justifiably low on funds after a devastating conflict of such a scale, it was a matter of time until civilian corporations, who suffered lightly during the war, started supplying the initial preparations with seemingly unlimited funds. Within a year, the Altair system, which is believed to have played a major part in the Ancient Empire's history, was teeming with practitioners of all walks of science, including archeology, xenolinguistics, astronomy, and physics.

However, the rest of the GTVA was more bothersome. The Terrans and Vasudans diverged from each other, minding their own businesses. The Vasudans were concerned with their own traditions and respect to their deities. The Terrans were preoccupied by the welfare of their society and steadiness of their economy. Despite all this, the alliance remained officially intact. The General Assembly assembled, the Security Council communed, and the Vasudan Imperium did not hesitate to assist the other two branches when requested. The two governments withdrew to their respective homeworlds: the Terrans to Vega, where they intend to rebuild Earth in their own way, and the Vasudans to their desolate yet beloved Vasuda Prime.

Very soon, disturbances take place at Altair. Unknown Terran fighters and cruisers keep harassing supply depots and unguarded science vessels. As more military vessels are deployed, the pirate strikes intensify. Their intents are not as clear as those of most pirate organizations. Pirates typically don't destroy science vessels just for the sake of it, but take hostages and demand a ransom. These Terrans are different. Not only different, but more powerful. As the project's existence is gradually jeopardized by the escalating number of thefts, the Security Council hastily orders the deployment of the GTD Phobos and its fighter wings, along with a number of other corvette and cruiser-sized vessels. Because of the intermittent and unpredictable nature of pirate strikes, it is impossible to keep the entire task force in one place. The ships of the scattered task force gradually disappear. None of them ever sent a distress signal. On a dark day, the Phobos also vanishes.

Designer's notes

(Written by TopAce)

I would like to tell people that the author of these missions is not a native speaker of English, so grammar mistakes are expectable. I hired some natives to check the grammar/spelling, but according to feedback, not everything is correct.

Also, don't expect the model meshes to be gorgeous and teeming with polies or high-resolution textures. The main purpose of this campaign was to make top-quality missions. If you see a bug in a mission, you are entitled to complain about it in the feedback thread.

Development

Work started on the campaign in March, 2003 but it was only released a year and three months later. The plot outline was written in four days. Later, only minor changes were applied to the story. Initially, using a Valkyrie was not an idea, but later I realized that using a premade ship that many know would be ideal, especially under the circumstances the Valkyrie is used in this campaign.

The campaign had a forum at a server called Cold Space, but that site went down permanently. Then I found the Mod Database and submitted my campaign there.

In August, when I nearly completed all missions, I hired voice actors. Until December, only one mission was partially voice acted and a few messages of another mission were voice acted. Any calculations I made made it clear that with voice acting, the campaign will never be released. So I abandoned voice acting.

The campaign has since been updated twice. Once by the author (version 1.1) to make it compatible with the contemporary FreeSpace Open engine and MediaVPs, and once more updated by Novachen on Knossos for MediaVPs 4.0x in 2018.

TopAce optimized the campaign for MediaVPs 4.4x and the current FreeSpace Open 21.2.0 Release Candidate 2, and released it on April 13, 2021. Updates include the obvious bugfixes that rendered the current FSO + MediaVP releases incompatible with the campaign, but a lot of other improvements were made, including rewriting some mission dialogs, the prettification of the nebula backdrops, and quality-of-life changes that make the gameplay more enjoyable. Select missions received major updates as well, including the complete rebuilding of the mission "Twilight."

Regarding ressurgence

In proper English spelling, there is no such thing as ressurgence, but resurgence (re (meaing "again") + surge + -ence). This spelling mistake came about of my ignorance, and complete confidence in me knowing proper English spelling. I tried to defend this mistake of mine by saying it was a mascot, but I wasn't very convincing.

I admit making this mistake, and, having ignored the advice of my grammar checkers, I am the only one to blame for this. When it was brought to my attention, I deemed it too late to make this change, the campaign having been announced as "Renegade Ressurgence" everyone on the net.

On 2 July 2008, I started removing as many instances of ressurgence as I came across. Instances of ressurgence, however, cannot ever be completely removed for two main reasons: a) lack of attention, b) lack of ability to edit other's posts and comments who used the original, incorrect, spelling of the campaign's name.

Related links

Up-to-date

• MediaFire – v1.44
• Feedback thread at Hard Light Productions

Older mirrors

(Use in emergency if other mirrors don't work.)

• Mod Database profile
• Freespacemods.net Mirror