Went to see the Pirates tonight. I live just outside of Pittsburgh. The game itself was lousy it was 6 to 0, and we had 0. However the game was star wars themed. It was neat seeing people dressed up in costumes. Lots of storm troopers and TIE pilots. Awesome to hear star wars music play when they could. All and all fun event to go to. I kept wishing to myself what would top it off if the beta test download came out tonight to finish off my joyful evening. Lol, just wanted to share that. Keep up the good work.

Currently programming a graphics settings window so that you can customize how many bells and how big whistles you want the game to play with.
I was planning to do this at a later point, but I thought it would make more sense to have it for the test so that people with different hardware power could experiment with it until they find some set of settings that make the game playable for them.

TrackIR:
The TrackIR panel is already there and ready for testing.

VR:
There is not yet VR support, and it will need to wait for a later phase of testing.

Multidisplay:
I will make it possible to select an arbitrary resolution to make it possible to play the game in computers with more than one monitor by expanding the game to cover all of them.
However we are aware this isn't the ideal solution for this. Ideally, we want the user to be able to define different camera positions and settings (resolution, FOV, etc) per display. But this is way more complex so I don't I want to delay the beginning of testing until this feature is coded in.

Other stuff:
We are in the process to change the exterior model of the Y-wing, a ship featured in the set of missions we wanted to test. So I am willing to wait a bit longer until that model is ready to begin testing.
The ISD is not yet completed either, and it is featured in two of the 6 test missions. However it's not a main piece on any of those missions, so I guess we could still go with it at its current state.

Out of curiosity, which models will have been custom-made for XWVM during this phase of testing?

Y-wing, TIE Fighter, TIE Interceptor, shuttle, container, star destroyer, half of the freighter, and perhaps the tug.
I work during the week and have short evening to work on the game, so for me it is higher chance that I can put the time needed to finish these details and upload the test file during the weekend.

By the way, it's a bit big already. Probably above 1 GB, so I hope nobody is going to have problems downloading it.
High resolution textures are the main reason of the huge size. It's funny to think that the whole original could fit 20 times in the size of the "mod". :)

Oddly I find a fancy 21st-Century tug very exciting. :D

Well, it's going to be mostly like the old one but higher resolution and finer details. I don't know what you have in mind. :D

I know there's a lot of work involved in this. I'm looking forward to seeing the new y wing and isd. Going to be fun playing this again.

Someone in the XWVM dev team proposed (I guess almost in jest) that every player pilot would own at least a Tug that would serve as personal ship, as the Otana did in XWA.
The joke went on and after a while we were proposing an alternative game mode where a player can "tune" and bring their tug and pilot it in coop mission, making use of its twin tractor beams to assist friendly fighters in dogfights. :D

I don't see that happening any time soon, but it could have been fun having those personal ships, tug or not. :)

Sounds like things are moving along pretty good. I always wondered what it'd be like to pilot a tug. Be scary, possibly no shields and no guns and slow, lol.

God I still remember that mission in Tie Fighter in which I had to wait for a thug to get a move on for TEN minutes at 4x time compression, it was probably a bug but still.
Hell, at real time speed you couldn't even tell it was moving.

Just curious. will you announce here to let us know when the beta test will be released? I assumed you were, but just wanted to double check. And correct me if I'm wrong for the download, does it matter which version to play x wing in? I know they added some new commands such as match speed with target in later version. Was just curious to know which version would be best to load it in.

The version you use shouldn't matter: the game logic is being re-implemented; it's the mission files, voice files, and so on that are being taken from X-Wing.

(If one uses the DOS version, can one use the original General MIDI music directly, by the way?)

Any edition save for the floppy version will do. Or at least that is one of the things we are going to test. :)
The music will be the synthesized digital one regardless of the edition. We don't have a MIDI emitter implemented at the moment. We are going for now for something that should work everywhere.

I won't agonize over soundfont choice (yet), then. Anyway, the renderings of laserschwert are excellent!