Librelancer has hit a milestone that matters for anyone who cares about long-term preservation: Mission 01A of Freelancer's campaign is now fully playable in the open-source engine.
That sounds incremental. It isn't.
Mission 01A is the first scripted mission of the campaign — the sequence that begins Freelancer's story with the attack on Freeport 7 and sets Edison Trent's situation in motion. Getting a scripted mission working in Librelancer requires the engine to handle mission script execution, NPC behavior driven by mission triggers, voice-acted dialogue playback, cutscene-adjacent sequences, objective tracking, and the transition between them — all of the systems that make a scripted mission different from free-roaming a system.
Free-roam mode has worked in Librelancer for a while. The engine can load Freelancer's systems, let you fly in them, and render the assets correctly. That demonstrated the rendering and navigation architecture was sound. What it didn't test was the mission script layer. Mission 01A tests that layer — and it passes.
The practical implication: if one scripted mission works, the architecture for handling all of them is in place. The remaining missions require the same systems that 01A uses; the work from here is implementation rather than architecture. Complete campaign playback in Librelancer is no longer theoretical.
As of this update, Librelancer is not yet a complete replacement for running vanilla Freelancer through the campaign. You still need the original installation for a full playthrough. But the trajectory is clear: complete support is the goal and the foundation is now proven.
For the modding community, this matters beyond preservation. An open-source engine that can run scripted missions is an engine that modders can use to create new scripted content — new campaigns, new story arcs — without being limited to the closed binary.
Progress updates at The Starport and on the Librelancer GitHub.