warning is given or stay and die defending the remaining ships, which affects the ending slightly. In the ending cutscene the player's commanding officer, Admiral Petrarch, delivers a speech about everything the Alliance has lost, speculating on the nature of the Shivans and why they destroyed the Capella star, and if the player decides to stay, a small tribute is paid to the player's heroic actions as Petrarch informs his wingmen of his sacrifice. The Admiral concludes by saying that the Alliance now has the means to recreate the Ancient subspace gate, implying that there's a chance the node to Earth can be restored and that this conflict didn't bring only sorrow, before signing off. Development The news of FreeSpace 2 being in development was confirmed in a chat on November 6, 1998. FreeSpace 2 was developed in less than one year. The Volition team revealed they had written up a story and will be targeting high-end hardware with dogfights for a greater number of ships and even larger and more deadly capital ships. The team set themselves the goals of setting new standards for both single-player and multiplayer space combat simulations, and started to modify the FreeSpace game engine for FreeSpace 2. This team was the same team which had worked on Descent: FreeSpace, plus several new members. In order to flesh out the story, Volition hired Jason Scott as a full-time writer before work even started. The linear mission structure was adopted as it was decided it would help the immersion factor of the story greatly. As the relations between the Terrans and Vasudans dominated the first game, it was decided to scale the focus down to a personal level with Admiral Bosch and his decisions to rebel. Scott's close work with the designers, and co-ordination of the voice recording process helped to tightly integrate the story into the missions, giving a more sophisticated feel to the story. Due to time constraints, a lot of the initial ideas were dropped from the final version of the game, such as atmospheric battles, and new weapons types like a "subspace missile artillery strike". The team made major improvements to the same FreeSpace engine from the first game. By revamping the core of the graphical engine, and adding 32-bit support, they sped up the interface screens and graphic processing. Hardware acceleration for the graphics was also decided to be a requirement