In the game you could replay the campaign missions in the historical combat room, and the re was a "topace" pilot that allowed to play all missions.
I guess it will be the same in the remake when it's finished, of course for testing mission behaviour having to unlock them would be too much of a hassle.

No need to shut up. :) It's nice to have some activity here.

As Det_Bullock says, it wil be the same as in the original game.
We need to implement the Pilot file first before we can have it so, because without that, there is no record of which missing has been completed or not.
Once we have the Register Room done, we can have the pilot file, and the progression.
But since we are testing the engine and implementation of the AI and all of that, it is just more convenient for the moment that everyone can play all missions at will.

Count me in on this! I've been playing these games since the Mac Collector's CD too. Would love to play this on an updated engine (a la the Freespace 2 community)!

How do I send a private message with my email address?

Background Death Star model for later missions taking place in the vicinity of the space station.

WOW. Beautiful. Brings a tear to my eye. :)

I like it for Alderaan reasons.

Now that's Tarkin.

I"m an X-Wing fan-boy from way back! I would love, *love* to get on the list for the next Alpha. I was involved with the TIE Fighter Re-Orchestrated project modding the exe to play the missing music throughout the concourse. I refuse to let these games die :)

I can't PM (probably due to post count) - hence can't do what you asked to get on the list. So if you can PM me, I'll be happy to pass on my email etc.,..

I also have a friend at work who is a pretty decent graphic artist with loads of game development background. I'll see if he's interested in getting involved - maybe doing some cockpits or whatever is required.

We are currently in the second phase of pre-alpha testing.
We are getting lots and lots of nice bug reports and lots of improved specifications to better replicate the original game's mechanics, more closely that we had been doing before, and that is making us rethink some systems.
So, for the moment we have lots and lots of work to do.
If anyone is curious, we have an issue tracker here https://bitbucket.org/xwvmteam/xwvm-lfs/issues?status=new&status=open and, as you can see, we have lots of issues still open that need to be fixed or worked on.
All of that has come from these two phases of testing.

So even it might be that we aren't saying much, it's not because we are not doing much, really :D
There are commits and updates done to the code every day or every other day.

Once we have solved the biggest issues that we have already well documented and are ready to be resolved, we will open the application form to get more testers. For the moment, we have plenty on our plates already. :D

In the close future, we will need more testers for joysticks, VR headsets, graphic card performance, etc. Also, people that are good at comparing the the current version of XWVM with the original to find out some glaring differences in how missions play out.

I have a joystick and a HTC Vive, and I'd be happy to test. I've sent you a friend invitation so I can messge you my email address

System is

i7-4790k (OC to 4.4Ghz all cores)
GTX 1080ti
16GB Ram
Windows 10 Pro
SDD+HDDs

Cyborg Evo joystick (although Prob getting a Thrustmaster T.16000m soon as the Evo is getting on a bit)
Sound either 5.1 setup from Logitech, or the Vive's headphones (Deluxe Audio Strap)

Any thoughts about opensourcing the work/development? Code made available for everyone has so much more potential than just building another closed source project.

Have a look at Freespace2, Doom, Quake3, Open Morrowind, ScummVM and such - these codebases are available to a broad community which keeps these projects alive and improves them (ever thought about playing on a printer display? Well, you can do this with Doom because the sources are available).
Someone could work on a XWVM Linux executable right now and push the changes back to the mainstream codebase (but maybe Unity just spits out a compatible binary for every supported system, I don't know) or several people could divide the work to enable all game missions ASAP if there is documentation how to do it.

Most mods I know are kept closed source like the original game they use and in 10 years they share the same fate as the original game: no or decreased development, changed technologies, development- and reverse engineering knowledge gets lost and someone has to do it all over again from zero.

I reverse engineered TIE Fighter savegames and that cost so much time while all trainers and editors mentioned in the web were lost (just download XY from Geocities and ... oh wait, nevermind, it was shut down several years ago).

Currently your development team does all the work. I led a small team to develop a roleplaying game in our spare time and most developers always had other things to do (learning for university, girl friend, work, partying and whatnot). We developed closed source and we died after 2-3 years.

Hi.
No need to convince me about open sourcing. I was convinced since the beginning.
The only problem is that we are making use of some libraries that don't allow for open sourcing, in particular, the input library, some backdrop assets, and the whole collection of model placeholders from XWAUP.
Until we find replacement for those, and it can take a while, we can only make public the code that concerns to the game logic and AI, but not the rest.
Since that would make the project not really easy to contribute to, it's better to leave the project private until later.
If there came the day that we cannot dedicate more time to this project, and in case we have not yet open sourced it, or got rid of the incompatible assets and libraries, we would just "rip them off" and make the rest public.

Regarding Linux, Unity just generates a Linux and Mac build with the toggle of a button, but we have some libraries that are, for now, Windows-only. In particular, the TrackIR integration library, because there doesn't seem to be one for Linux yet.

ah, so you bundle it alltogether.

Out of curiosity: which libraries do you mean? Maybe it is possible to find or write a replacement in the meantime.

After reading the legal disclaimer from XWAUP it seems one only has to ask for permission to add or link to their files.

Is it possible to be in on the next batch of testing? I missed both enrollment periods and would love to take part in this if possible. I am unable to PM you but if you PM me I'll gladly give you my email address.

Is not that simple. You just don't rewrite ReWired (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/rewired-21676), an input library that the creator has put thousands of hours into to make it compatible with lots of joysticks and input methods. That goes against the very idea of using a library.
Perhaps we can get away with bundling a compiled version of the library, somehow. But that is not documented in the library and it's not worth spending time now on figuring that out when there is so many other things yet to do.

Planets (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/sci-fi/planets-26903) is a series of shaders, textures and art assets that, by its own nature, is licensed to be used on the project that paid for acquiring the license. We cannot just opensource that because then everyone could just download and copy those art assets for free.

The XWAUP models indeed require having permission for redistribution, but that permission needs to be granted per individual model. Some models we have got permission for (those made by Darksaber, and a couple other creators), but most creators have not yet granted us permission after 2 years of asking for it. It's not going to happen. And anyway, they are quite low poly for today's standards and we need to rebuild them to match our other models.

Opensourcing is easy when all pieces of the project are open source.
That isn't possible unless you build up everything yourself, or restrict yourself to the few things that have been released as open source over the years.
It was never a goal for the project to be open source, but to get it done. If after it is done we can rework some stuff to release it as open source, that is fine.
But I am not willing to delay the project for a few years just because of that. It's not top priority.

To contribute to the project, someone will need to join the team and have access to the private repo for the moment.