[Goober5000]

I was inspired by a thread in the FSPort forum to dig up one of my old missions and post it here.  One of the first missions I ever made after playing FS1 was a recreation of the Shivan attack on Ross 128.  I've been kicking it around for the past two years, gradually improving on it, and actually planning to release it along with Fortunes of War, but I thought - why not release it now?  So here it is.

Keep in mind that this is a FS1 mission, so it won't run on FS2 without some modification.  I may release a ported version eventually, but that should probably wait until I'm less busy.

The mission is fully voice-acted and features one of Dark's planets.  I've tried to make it as similar to the FS1 intro cutscene as possible, so let me know what you think.

[Goober5000]

(Wow, I had no idea it was a year since I posted this... )

Okay, I'm officially rereleasing this mission. When I originally posted this thread, I was deluged with people reporting various sexp-related bugs - bugs that I had never encountered myself.  But now, thanks to the source code, I have discovered the root cause of the problem.

Sexp nodes are shared between campaigns and missions. If you have a large campaign in memory, it takes up a significant number of sexp nodes (the main FS2 campaign uses about 30% of the total nodes available).  This leaves fewer sexp nodes available for the mission.  If you try to load a complex mission, you may exceed the sexp limit.

So I rereleased the mission in campaign form: a simple campaign consisting of just the one mission.  Now everyone will start from the same footing and have the same number of sexp nodes available.

The reason it took me so long to figure this out was that the source code has a bug in the sexp error reporting.  Instead of printing "You have run out of sexp nodes!" and quitting, it would silently overwrite sexp nodes at random.  This led to some pretty strange errors.  I only started making progress when some of my FS2 retail missions started generating the same bugs.  With the help of the source code, I was able to trace through and nail down the problem.

So, without further ado, here is the updated download.  Let me know what you think.

[Goober5000]

yet again.

Admiral Nelson and I have converted this to work using the Port version 3.0.  Hopefully this time I'll finally get some non-bug-related comments.
http://www.sectorgame.com/goober/ross128.html

[Cobra]

Hey, can you make a cutscene version of this?

[Turey]

 

[Admiral Nelson]

A special thank you to FreeSpaceGundam and to Darkblade for lending their voices!

[Goober5000]

Indeed.

(Are they featured prominently enough in the readme, or should I give them their own section?)

[Mustang19]

Nice! It was really observant of you to add the GTSC Einstein and Mcarthy bits. 

[perihelion]

Very cool.   

[Mobius]

You preceeded me!!!

Has someone ever planned to make a FS2 intro based cutscene mission?

[Goober5000]

Yep, several people.  I'm planning on doing one as well.

[Cobra]

Yep, several people.  I'm planning on doing one as well.

unfortunately, on low to medium-end machines with mediavp's that mission/cutscene will be an FPS nightmare.

[KappaWing]

That cuscene had some extreme BOE issues.

[Antares]

Necrobump! 

Hey Goober. Wanted to let you know that I finally got to play this thing through to the end. I reinstalled FS1 today purely on a whim, and playing your updated version of this mission was the first thing I did. Dark's planet wasn't showing up again (for reasons which escape me  ), but the important thing is that I was able to actually play the mission from start to finish.

Great job! 

[Goober5000]

Cool!  Glad you liked it.

[Renegade Paladin]

So I put this in it's own folder and should be able to run it as a mod from the launcher?  Because that's not working; I only see the retail campaigns in the campaign room.   

[Jeff Vader]

It's a mission. Not a campaign. Go to the Mission Simulator and it should show up.

[Renegade Paladin]

Under what name?  Running the FSPort mod makes a whole bunch of missions that I don't recognize pop up in the mission simulator, and none of them are entitled anything close to Ross-128. 

[Cobra]

Uh, did you make sure you downloaded the one marked "FS2 version"?

[Goober5000]

So I put this in it's own folder and should be able to run it as a mod from the launcher?  Because that's not working; I only see the retail campaigns in the campaign room.   

It doesn't include a mod.ini, so you need to do this manually.  Go into the launcher and put something like -mod ross128, fsport for the custom command line.