total converstion with Star wolf 3 engine

2. Actual engine doesn't support bump maps, displacement maps, normal maps etc so model look rather flat. Screens showed for SW3:AoV look like new engine will posses these options.

Argh, more effort wasted on eye-candy changes. Can't they see there are more important things to do, like making the engine more efficient so that it doesn't lag like hell when large battles happen, un-hardcoding the XML schema, allowing missiles & skills to be used on mothership (hell, I can think of a balance fix if they implement that: add a "mothership" flag to indicate whether a particular skill should be available while piloting the mothership or not, etc), etc.

I mean, pretty visuals make even less sense than in other games: plenty of times you're zoomed out far enough that ships are tiny specs a few pixels across. I'm not saying the improvements are useless but, christ, there's a whole lot more other stuff they could improve to make the game better. Hireable pilots, for one. That didn't even take much effort to mod in, compared to rewriting the engine to handle bump maps for example.

4. Models are easier part. You will have to find someone who can write a code in LUA for all quests.

Learning the mess that is LUA is what's preventing me from doing more interesting things like fixing the random quests, adding more paths to the storylines, etc. FILETYPE MODDING will only address dialog right? A quest editing tutorial would be useful.