Author Topic: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release  (Read 9016 times)

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Offline Freespace Freak

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FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
Hey, guys!  If you remember from this thread that I'd said I'd do a mod.  Well, I'm ready to release the beta version.  I haven't finished the Silent Threat campaign portion of the mod, so if you want to play Silent Threat, I suggest you remove the mod files before doing so.

If you remember, I wanted some continuity between the FS1 and FS2 tech, so now all the Shivan capital ships have beam weapons.  You can read more about it in the readme.  After I finish Silent Threat (which might be awhile seeing as I'm swamped with school, my job, and other responsibilities at the moment), Snail are working on a campaign together which will smooth over even more tech continuity, among other things.

So, without further ado, here's the download link.  Please let me know what problems and all that you may encounter.  I hope you enjoy!    :)

 

Offline Snail

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
Oooh, first release. :D

Wonder how it is...

 

Offline Snail

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
Three missions have been finished on the new campaign, just so that you know. :)

 

Offline Freespace Freak

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
Three missions have been finished on the new campaign, just so that you know. :)

Cool!  Mind if I see them?

 

Offline Snail

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
You have one of them, the other is finished, but one is as buggy as hell. I'll send the other one over when I get back to my compy.

Oh, and the Orion defense mission died a few weeks ago, so the mission's completely different.
« Last Edit: September 16, 2006, 11:21:39 am by Snail »

 

Offline Freespace Freak

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
Hmm... I'm not getting as good of a reception as I had thought from the post where I originally spoke about the concept.  Perhaps I should have announced this in another forum?

 

Offline Prophet

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
What exactly did you do? Put beam cannons in FS1? To me that sounds like replacing Shermans with Abrams... Sorry not my cup of tea. I hate tea.
:v: did well. Not even the port team can make FS1 better. But that's just me talking. :)
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Offline Mefustae

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
Couldn't agree more. There's just something a bit 'off' about making drastic changes to FS1. All well and good for an experiment, but hardly what i'd call an 'overhaul'.

 

Offline Freespace Freak

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
********Caution: Long-Winded Explanation**********************

It's more than just that, it's actually the first part in a project designed to create technological continuity between FS1 and FS2.  Perhaps I shouldn't have released it until the entire project is finished.  Anyway, we all know that :v: has technological inonsistancies between FS1 and FS2.  First of all, they claim that the GTVA got beam cannons from the Shivans, but there were no beam cannons in the Great War, only the "Flux Cannon" of the Lucifer.  If we streach our imagination a bit, and perhaps we can say that the flux cannon was a beam weapon, not just a silly flux cannon, and that is what the GTVA got their idea for the beam cannons from.  Okay, sounds plausible, right?

No.  The Shivans only had this "beam cannon" on the Lucifer, not on any of their other ships.  Additionally, where did the GTVA get the idea for anti-fighter beams from?  And what about flak guns?   These ideas couldn't have come from the Shivans, but in FS2 it clearly stated that it did, at least for the beam weapons. 

Okay, so what if the GTVA got beam weapons from Shivans, and invented anti-fighter beams and flak turrets out of their own volition (no pun intended).  That sounds good, but why did the Shivans appear in Gamma Draconis with the exact same technology.  If the Shivans knew that the GTVA was equipping their ships with these weapons, then its possible that they would do the same.  So when the Shivans showed up in Gamma Draconis, they had already equipped their sub-Lucifer sized ships with beam weapons and anti-fighter beams and flak guns.  The problem with this is, the Shivans and the GTVA were out of contact (officially) since the Great War, so there's no way the Shivans could have known how the GTVA had equipped their ships, and equipped theirs likewise.

Of course we all know the reason both the GTVA and the Shivans had similarly equipped ships.  Graphics processing technology had improved during the creation of FS2 and :v: felt it would be cool if all the vessels just had them.  No explanation was given as to why everybody all of a sudden has this new technology, it's just that it "looks cool."

So, this mod is step one in a three-step mod to correct the historical tech discrepency between FS1 and FS2.  Step two will be Silent Threat, and step 3 will be a new campaign whereby the explanation on how the flak gun (invented in a joing Terran-Vasudan project) interested the Shivans immensely (Shivans were not known heretofore to "adapt" non-Shivan technology) and resulted in Shivan acquisition of the weapon before the "end" of the Great War.

This mod is unique in that everyone knows that there's a tech discrepency between FS1 and FS2, but the modding community for the most part ignores it.  As for me, I'm a bit of a perfectionist ans when I see a discrepency I want it correct it.  That's just me.  *shrugs*

So, perhaps I released this too early.  I think I should have released it only after the entire thing is completed.  :\

 

Offline Mars

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
The tech discrepency is hardly the biggest logical error in FS, and it can be quickly and with only a small leap of faith be explained away. Honestly, I don't see the point. Sorry  :blah:

 

Offline Snail

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
Not really an overhaul, yeah. But something that is fun. I mean, having beam cannons on Shivan ships while the Terran and Vasudan ships didn't would be pretty cool, no? It really gives you that "OMG WE'RE SCREWED!!" feeling, doesn't it?

 

Offline Freespace Freak

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
Well, maybe I should call it "FS1 Retro Mod"

So, Mars, in your opinion, what is the biggest logical error and FS.  And explain away to me the "small" leap of faith that would be needed to explain away the tech discrepency. 

 

Offline Snail

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
FSFreak, did you get my mission I sent you?

 

Offline Freespace Freak

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
Checking...Ok, got it.


 

Offline Mars

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
So, Mars, in your opinion, what is the biggest logical error and FS.  And explain away to me the "small" leap of faith that would be needed to explain away the tech discrepency. 

The physics, by far, is the biggest problem with the FS universe, followed by jump node inconsistancies

The small leap of faith? We can assume there's a good tactical reason why beam cannons aren't in most Shivan ships in FS1. What that reason is could be several things: maybe it inhibits their mobility (time between jumps?) and the Lucifer fleet is an advance fleet, maybe it takes away their ability to use unstable node, it can be explained by many different things

 

Offline neoterran

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
doesn't this horribly unbalance FS1 ?

Anyway i'm going to try it out. I surely appreciate your hard work and efforts to give us the option to play this way Freespace Freak... but i think that considering all the purists (of which I am not one) you shouldn't have called this mod "FS1 Overhaul" but something like "Alternate FS1" or "Beam Continuity mod for FS1".

« Last Edit: September 18, 2006, 10:43:22 am by neoterran »
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Offline Snail

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
He editted some of the missions so that it was more balanced.

 

Offline Freespace Freak

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
you shouldn't have called this mod "FS1 Overhaul" but something like "Alternate FS1" or "Beam Continuity mod for FS1".


This I will do, and no it doesn't horribly unbalance FS1.  It makes some of the missions harder, yes, but not unbalance.  You gotta be more careful, prioritize beam turrets, either beam cannons if an important allied ship is in danger, or anti-fighter beams if it's you that's in danger.

Actually, there wasn't a whole lot of balancing that needed to be done.  When I first tried to "balance" the ships one-to-one, it made them more difficult for fighter assaults, so I "unbalanced them."  In missions, if you simply take out the beam turrets of any enemy, then you don't have to worry about a thing.  The Lucy won't have anti-fighter beams, by the way, simply because I felt a ship that is supposed to be impervious to "normal" weapons doesn't need a defense from small fry.  I figured all of its weapons should be made for capital ship assault.

 

Offline Freespace Freak

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
So, Mars, in your opinion, what is the biggest logical error and FS.  And explain away to me the "small" leap of faith that would be needed to explain away the tech discrepency. 

The physics, by far, is the biggest problem with the FS universe, followed by jump node inconsistancies

The small leap of faith? We can assume there's a good tactical reason why beam cannons aren't in most Shivan ships in FS1. What that reason is could be several things: maybe it inhibits their mobility (time between jumps?) and the Lucifer fleet is an advance fleet, maybe it takes away their ability to use unstable node, it can be explained by many different things

I understand your physics argument, but FS is not at all unlike many other space shooters, so in that regards I don't consider it a big problem.  I think FS would have been better if ship and weapons base velocities would have been a whole lot higher though, but I'm not that upset by the lack of Newtonian physics.   The jump node inconsistancies bother the hell out of me though, especially for campaign writing.

However, I don't agree with you small leap of faith.  There's no evidence that says that the Shivans in FS2 couldn't have used unstable nodes.  In fact, they probably did.  It is widely accepted, and is near canon, that what we saw at the end of FS2 was that when the Sathani made Capella go nova, it created a "supernode" that allowed them to travel to great distances, possibly to another galaxy, universe, or even another dimension.  This "supernode jumping" technology is probably very similar unstable node jumping, and the same technology is probably what allowed Lucifer fleet to get to T-V space in the first place.  Also, if having beam weapons hinders their ability to use unstable jump-nodes, why did the Lucifer have beam weapons?  The Lucifer used such unstable jump nodes, did it not?  So that theory is shot before it could even begin.

But that's only talking about the beam weapons.  The inconsistancy problem is thus:  In FS2, all Shivan and GTVA ships had three seperate weapons systems: beam cannons, anti-fighter beams, and flak guns.  In FS1, no ships had them except the Lucifer, and it only had what we might imiginatively call beam weapons.  So the problem is, how did ALL of them have essentially the same exact technology when they re-encountered eachother.

I'll give you some explanations and show you how they're illogical.  The first one I just talked about, the node thing.  Second one, the Shivans want to be "good sports" and not have technology that would be "unfair" so battles are more "balanced."  Not logical, because, what's the deal with the umpteen million Sathani?  Obviously that's overkill compared to the GTVA's one Collossus.  And if the Shivans wanted to be good sports, what's the deal with the Lucifer itself?  If they really wanted to be good sports, the Lucy wouldn't have shields or flux cannons in the first place, nor would they be so upset about the GTA learning how to track ships through subspace, so we can kill it.  So, I see no evidence that the Shivans were trying to be "good sports."

Thirdly, what if the GTVA simply developed these weapons out of their own volition, and decided to equip them on all their ships.  The Shivans, who have all kinds of weapons laying around, since by now they should have invented just about anything, decided to equip themselves with the same weapons.  This is similar to the "Shivans were being good sports" theory.  Firstly, this is bogus, because in reality, technology that is not used is forgotten. 

Example: Did you know that humans invented the steam engine before the birth of Christ?  It was invented in Alexandria, Egypt by some famous philosopher or another.  Anyway, it wasn't used because it was thought to be unnecessary because of all the cheap slave labor that existed at the time.  It took almost 2000 years when slavery was being abolished, for the steam engine to be reinvented again.  So, if the humans did invent these weapons on their own, the Shivans are unlikely to have them lying around themselves.  Also, if this theory is true, then the Shivans should have countless other weapons lying around that we haven't even thought of.  How did the Shivans guess to use anti-fighter beams and flak guns specifically, to match the GTVA, when they could have used anything else?  Remember, the Shivans and the GTVA are supposed to be completely isolated from eachother during the interim.

So, no small leap of faith that I have yet seen can be used to explain away the tech discrepency.  So, some other method should be used.  However, you do have a point, Mars, and that is changing FS1 may be a bit too drasctic of a fanfic method to try to explain the tech discepency.  So, I'm afraid I'm going to have to scrap this mod.

Sad, my first mod was a complete failure.  :blah: :sigh:  However I do want to resolve this tech discrepency, and I think I have an idea of how to do it by, instead of changing FS1, simply creating an add-on campaign that takes place during the Great War, but after the events of FS1 and Silent Threat.  I'll post my idea later, so I can give you guys a chance to digest what I just said, but I'd like you to chime in on my idea to create a campaign as a fanfic way to explain away the tech discrepency.    :)

 

Offline brandx0

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Re: FS1 Overhaul Beta Release
I'm actually quite intrigued to try this one out, I'm highly in support of it, and I'm a big fan  of the idea.  I'll be downloading it in the next few days and giving it a shot as I have time (what little of it I have)

Keep up the good work!
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