Freespace RTS Mod

[Nuke]

me and aardwolf were discussing the feasibility o making an rts mod with the freespace engine. he came up with the idea and was curious if scripting would be capable of doing the job. i think it is very possible that it could be done.

very little in the way of graphics is required for this mod. with the media vps that pretty much takes care of eye candy. most of what is required is script and missions, and to work out the details of gameplay. the last part requires feedback and much discussion.

first off the missions would be 2d for the most part, the view would be much like starcraft. a camera would over a distance over the level pointing down. you would have control of position, zoom and maybe rotation of the camera. a gui would be made to allow ships to be selected and given orders.

there would probibly be some resource mining, possibly from asteroid fields by using freighters. theese would be taken to a base such as an arcadia to be processed. gas miners would jump out of system, and bring back a load of gas to fuel caps. stations would build fighters and couls place orders for larger ships from out of system ship yards. this requires players to hold nodes to get to out of system resources.

fighters and bombers, when completed, fly from the base and dock with your capships' figher bays, thus increasing their fighter complement. they may possible be also sent to a rallying point or right into battle. larger ships warp in from out of system.

intrasystem jumps may be possible. the drives need to be charged up between use. a minimum charge required plus a charge cost per km would probibly also be a good idea. the accuracy of the jump would also diminish with distance of deployment. ships jumping together would still come out in formation, but the position of that formation would vary. also there would be a limit for how close you can jump to a given object. it would be cheap to jump bombers in 300 meters from their targets.

capship battles remain the same, but you can control the waypoints caps may follow, or explicitly give them a position to hold. beam weapons and engines would require fuel. fuel is tracked and when gets low needs to be replentished with a gas miner docking with it. the ship is essentially disabled and unable to use large weapons untill refuling occures. they also need materials to be shipped in from the base or from a supply depot, to supplement things like field repairs, weapon manufacture, and figher repairs.

there are many other details but i dont recall them all.

[Aardwolf]

Congratulations on your 6,000th post, Nuke.

That sounds pretty accurate. I can't think of anything right now that you missed, but since I logged the chat, I can dig the log up and find out anything else.

In the meantime, comments, ideas, and suggestions from HLP'ers would be appreciated.

[Nuke]

especially fredders. i dont think either of us know mission design.

[Aardwolf]

One thing left out was the question of multiplayer. If it turns out to be doable, mutliplayer could be done in more than one way; different players might be controlling different ships on the same team, or there might be a faction per player, etc. This depends on exactly how easy/hard these turn out to be when the time comes for that.

[Reprobator]

from gas to fuel shouldn't it required some work in a sort of refinery ?
So the  gas miners gather gas->dock to refinery station or ship->freighter load fuel and undock from the refinery and dock with your cap ships to refuel him


No?

[Nuke]

i figure a ship that size would be its own refinery. why else would you need to escort them to the big c for refueling.

[Reprobator]

ok i didn't figure out that cap ships could have it s own refinery system , that's logical 

[Nuke]

what else are you gonna do with all that space, swimming pools and a sauna perhaps? (like the russian typhoon class )

[Turnsky]

<delurk> 

so how are you gonna do it?.. isometric (ala C&C) or semi 3d (like homeworld)?

</delurk>

[Hellstryker]

The answer is quite simple really. NUKES!

[Aardwolf]

The plan so far is for a top-down view (assuming Nuke and I are communicating on the same frequency).




As an interesting side note, the idea for this mod came from me mistakenly thinking rtt (render to texture) meant "realtime tactics"; I thought it was something Nuke was already working on, and then saying something to the effect of "let's do what i thought you meant"

[Herra Tohtori]

Heh, make a FreeSpace: Total War.

Make an RTS map/engine for managing units and resources, then when the mission time comes, the game script FREDs you a mission, fires up FS2_Open engine, lets you fly the mission, records the outcome and continues on the RTS map mode accordingly...

 

[Titan]

I have a lot of expierience making maps for RTS games:

star wars galactic battlefront
star wars empire at war
civilization III conquest


granted, they never really graduated to something i would release.

[Admiral_Stones]

<delurk> 

so how are you gonna do it?.. isometric (ala C&C) or semi 3d (like homeworld)?

</delurk>

Eh? IIRC Homeworld 1&2 are fully 3-Dimensional.
Homeworld 1 was AFAIK the first game ever to feature true 3-dimensionality.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Perhaps it would be a nice idea to use eras, like the Age of Empire games. There should at least be an FS1 and an FS2 era, and those who feel inspired could make the previous and/or the following eras, based on mods, for example.

[MP-Ryan]

Hold it... make an RTS with the FS2 engine?  Why would you try to modify a first-person-shooter engine drastically enough to turn it into a RTS game?  Use an existing RTS engine.

[Admiral_Stones]

Or even make your own. Whilst it's helluva work, it will perfectly suit your needs.
If you know nothing to almost nothing (like me), get a night off, get some coffee and spend a night with Unity and it's tutorials (like me).

[Aardwolf]

Well, modding an existing game, or even creating a new game with an FS2 theme, would not be an 'exact' enough FreeSpace game.

Also, it's sort of just a "do it for the sake of doing it" thing.

And yes, I am aware that there was once a Homeworld > FreeSpace mod, meant to make the TV war seem cool or something, but iirc that died.

[Janos]

Convert FS to Europa Universalis/Victoria/Hearts of Iron engine

easy and straightforward

[Nuke]

Hold it... make an RTS with the FS2 engine?  Why would you try to modify a first-person-shooter engine drastically enough to turn it into a RTS game?  Use an existing RTS engine.

thats not really something i want to do. ive never modded an rts, i did look into the possibility of modding starcraft at one point but i did not like the limitations it imposed. also i dont own a modern rts game whith which too mod. and my budget doesnt really include much excess for games.

also i have been modding this game since fs1. and i got a good handle on the lua scripting system. it was because of this that i not only figured the mod would be possible, but it would also be a really good idea.

i remember there was an rts mode for quake 2 but it wasnt all that good. the reason being is they didnt put much thought into it. hence the purpose of this discussion. starcraft was good because every unit had a function, an advantage, and another species had an ability to counter that advantage. how do we apply this concept to the fs universe without butchering it?