[Felix 039]

Q1) Are there any Mac games out there where you can actually fly a cap ship? Excluding EVE and Vendetta...
Q2) How hard is it to make a Cap ship like Battlestar "pilot-able" by we players in/FS2Diaspora

[Deckard]

Don't tell me you also wanna do the Kamikaze thing through a BaseStar.. don't tell me that

Seriously.. no idea

[General Battuta]

1) Couldn't tell you. I don't know if Nexus, Bridge Commander, or Starfleet Command were ever ported to Mac.

2) Please reference here.

It's doable but it wouldn't be any fun.

[Rodo]

freespace relies on table editing, so any kind of ship will be player-flyable if you modify it's table, though... cap ships are not ment to be piloted by players so it will probably just turn out to be a waste of time to even try it.

[Felix 039]

Don't tell me you also wanna do the Kamikaze thing through a BaseStar.. don't tell me that

Seriously.. no idea

I wana drive a Battlestar right into a basestar, like Lee Adama did... It should be like driving a car... RIGHT INTO A TREE. or something.

Which reminds me... Capital ship collision. Does Diaspora have something like that? Whena capship collide with another, they split into pieces and explode?

[General Battuta]

When capital ships run into each other in Freespace 2, they bounce off each other, UNLESS you script a kamikaze, in which case one party will explode while dealing a large amount of damage to the recipient (possibly enough to make it blow up as well.)

And yes, Freespace supports chunks of capital ship debris hitting other things and dealing a lot of damage.

You could pilot a battlestar via table editing. You could drive it into a basestar. That's doable. It would take a lot of work to get it polished.

[Felix 039]

When capital ships run into each other in Freespace 2, they bounce off each other, UNLESS you script a kamikaze, in which case one party will explode while dealing a large amount of damage to the recipient (possibly enough to make it blow up as well.)

And yes, Freespace supports chunks of capital ship debris hitting other things and dealing a lot of damage.

You could pilot a battlestar via table editing. You could drive it into a basestar. That's doable. It would take a lot of work to get it polished.

But the debris I see in videos are mostly burnt chunks of metal, is it possible to do it like show? Having undamaged bits float off to hit another ship? This could be a cool thing to see in Diaspora campaign

[General Battuta]

A lot of models in Freespace have fairly intact chunks coming off the ships. If the debris model for the Pegasus is built with one of the debris chunks being a flightpod, for instance, then you would have a fairly intact flightpod flying off.

The explosion doesn't just generate generic burnt chunks. The chunks you get are specified in the ship model. You can even have the ships NOT blow up into chunks, and just turn into hulks (though I believe that's only in some branch code right now...?)

I'm not sure there's any way to make the debris chunk fly exactly where you want. I don't know how random the debris paths are.

[Felix 039]

Debris can be given a waypoint right?

When Pegasus is destroyed in the show, the hull expanded and cracked before exploding.

[General Battuta]

I don't believe debris can be given a waypoint, because debris isn't a ship.

[FraktuRe]

It would be possible to spawn a flightpod as a ship when pegasus is destroyed?

[General Battuta]

That could be done, yeah. You'd have to make it fly sideways, but it could be done.

[karajorma]

People have been reporting seeing chunks of the Sathanas break off and smack into the Colossus, doing large amounts of damage, since as long as Freespace 2 is out so it's definitely possible. We'd simply need to make sure we get that effect every time.

[General Battuta]

Right, exactly. That's why I mentioned debris damage earlier. The only problem is making sure that it happens EVERY single time (do ship chunks always fly off in the same direction?) which is why the flight-pod-ship-spawning trick might work...

...except you would have to somehow prevent the regular flight pod debris model from spawning. Hrm. I guess that's problematic.

[FraktuRe]

That's simple to fix.. you simply don't include a flight pod as part of the debris.

[General Battuta]

No, that doesn't make sense, because then the Mercury-class model would never be seen to explode properly except in situations where you used the spawn-flightpod-ship trick.

Remember, the debris chunks are part of the model itself. It's not something that's easy to change on a mission-by-mission basis.

[redsniper]

Just use a different version of the POF.

[Mikes]

freespace relies on table editing, so any kind of ship will be player-flyable if you modify it's table, though... cap ships are not ment to be piloted by players so it will probably just turn out to be a waste of time to even try it.

might end up seeing the insides of the ship and nothing else? hehe