[Parias]

This is something I started putting together a little while ago. I don't know if anyone else has really attempted something this crazy yet (hopefully I'm not stepping on anyone's toes), but my own development of this basically fell off due to other priorities and my own typical inability to stay focused on single large projects for long periods of time. I'm starting to get annoyed however because I actually put a ton of development time into getting what content I have so far together - content which is now just basically sitting around unreleased and under-developed - so I feel compelled to share at least what I have. Hopefully someone won't mind indulging my selfish urges:

Command Briefing 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM0RVhF78sE

Command Briefing 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awQ8q97FaLE

Command Briefing 3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suryN2w75uc

You're probably asking - why in the name of Bosch did I feel something like this was even necessary? It's simple; I've always wanted to try to milk a little bit more out of the Freespace 2 campaign co-op experience. I have friends who have never played FS2, but would be open to trying it out (read: peer pressure) in the middle of a LAN party. The problem is that the existing co-op conversion of FS2's main campaign have never really struck me as something that would "grab" players in a multiplayer setting, for two reasons:

1) Command briefings don't work in multiplayer (not sure if this has been addressed yet - last time I inquired via Mantis though I don't think this was an easy fix).

2) Even if they did, having that much text to wade through might not work well in a multiplayer setting (even with the cbanims). It's great for singleplayer when you can relax and it's just you getting immersed in the game's story, but if there are other players around who aren't as die-hard fans of the series, something a bit more... visual and direct is needed to keep their attention. The existing workaround of just putting all of the command briefing text into the actual mission briefing stage for each level "functionally" works, but results in my player base just sort of awkwardly sitting there listening to the dialogue and waiting for it to finish before we can get on with the gaming, since there's nothing to correlate the text with visually on the screen.

So, I decided to dust off my super-old FRED skills and set to work basically doing a "re-imagining" of the Freespace 2 campaign to make it more co-op friendly. However, the standard mission balancing changes and general scripting adjustments would not be enough - I wanted to also re-create the command briefings in a way that would make the game's backstory a bit more engaging to newcomers, as I feel with the existing co-op campaign conversions that a lot of the "magic" can be lost if players don't have a way to rapidly assimilate how the game's backstory develops in a co-op setting.

My goal to this end was to basically to redo all of the command briefings as in-engine cutscenes. This obviously would be a rather large project since the entire basis for how the command briefings are presented would be totally different, and require major creative leaps and judgement calls which the player base at large would either enjoy, or hate outright and bathe in controversy. Hell with it, I was willing to take the risk

Fortunately I decided to start on this right around the time work was going on to fix up the cutscene SEXPs to work in multiplayer (my adoring thanks for the effort put into this by the SCP developers), as otherwise my plan to make this work in a co-op setting would've been impossible.

I'm unhappy with how a few of the scenes turned out as it's difficult coming up with engine-rendered scenes that adequately match the described dialogue (you might notice where it goes a bit awkward in places), but I was also really satisfied with how some of the action-oriented scenes turned out, especially when the AI can be so bloody unpredictable sometimes.  You'll either like or hate what I have, but I welcome any feedback in case I do decide to pick this up again at some point. Just treat it all with a grain of salt and consider this based on pre-release content.




Some general comments:

What's with the weird camera focus on the Aten at the end of the first briefing?

One of my major vices has always been capital ship combat. I started development on this around the same time the BP2 multiplayer open beta testing was picking up steam, and when I saw how cool the multiplayer rendition of The Blade Itself was (despite the bugs), I immediately decided I wanted to incorporate some kind of player-capital-ship component into my co-op campaign - the pretext being that one of the players would get access to increasingly-powerful experimental cruisers, with the missions balanced out with additional bombers to contend with, and fighter-players having to work tightly with cruiser-players to complete their objective. The first of such ships would be an Aten cruiser refit.

I also wholeheartedly acknowledge this makes little plausible sense in terms of a "realistic" Freespace 2 campaign adaptation. Hell with that, I wanted to have some fun with my friends.

Your <camera work/backgrounds/event management> is bad and you should feel bad!
Yup. I pick up steam quick once I get started FREDding (until something shiny distracts me), but making ships behave the way you want them to when the camera is rolling is a task that can easily consume an entire day just for a few seconds of good footage. Obviously more extensive work would've gone into improving things prior to actually releasing this to the community at large.

Will you ever finish developing this?
One day, maybe. The massive flood of FS2-related modding traffic over the last year has given me cause to get excited about being part of the FS2 community again. I'd love to develop this further (if only so that I finally have an excuse to get my local LAN buddies into the game's campaign properly), but need to find the time and drive to do so. Classic sob story.

[The E]

This is actually very good work. There are some issues here, but those are not your fault (IMHO, the briefing dialogue has some overly long and awkward pauses in it, caused by the necessary separation into stages).

One thing I would like to add though is a suggestion to use the "adjust-audio-volume" sexp to selectively mute the in-game sound effects; there are points where warp sounds or weapons fire drown out the speech, something I consider to be bad.

[Parias]

One thing I would like to add though is a suggestion to use the "adjust-audio-volume" sexp to selectively mute the in-game sound effects; there are points where warp sounds or weapons fire drown out the speech, something I consider to be bad.

Aye, I agree wholeheartedly on this. The big challenge with dusting off my FRED skills was suddenly realizing I had all these new and wonderful SEXPs to play with that did useful things like this - now that these are available (and more importantly, actually work in multiplayer as I understand it) this would be something pretty high on my list to implement.

[mjn.mixael]

Huh, not bad! Another suggestion is to work on trying to smooth out your camera moves. Roll to a stop instead of just stopping, etc. It helps it feel more complete and professional.

[Kopachris]

Huh, not bad! Another suggestion is to work on trying to smooth out your camera moves. Roll to a stop instead of just stopping, etc. It helps it feel more complete and professional.

Agreed.  The cutscenes are otherwise well-directed, though.  Very cinematic.

The only other thing I noticed that could use improvement (besides the smoothing and the audio) was on the first one, at 0:43, where it cuts to "The 53rd Hammerheads were formed in the Great War..."--cutting like that, it takes a little bit before the viewer figures out we've switched perspective to the past.  Fading between those two scenes would probably be better.

[General Battuta]

Adjust-audio-volume is a little ****ed right now.

[Lorric]

Maybe it's 3.6.14, I wouldn't know as I couldn't get it to work due to audio problems, but I've never had effects anywhere near that loud in my games anyway. Did you use custom explosions or something, or is it just 3.6.14? If it is 3.6.14 I'm quite turned off by it. Those loud effects would surely blot out normal in-mission voice transmissions. Meaty explosions are nice, but that's a bit much. And I've never had the warping be that loud.

That's some slick stuff though. The third one has me intrigued, I could certainly use whatever you did to get that herc to fire when and what you wanted it to for one of my missions. I was satisfied with just exploding the target on cue, but having the ship that does the destroying fire a single laser shot would be much better.

One thing though, you showed Bosch's asteroid base in the 2nd briefing right? Command doesn't know that's there. You discover it in the mission. I don't like pouring cold water on your work like that, but it's a pretty significant detail, unless I'm mistaken.

Did you make any more than these three? I'd like to see them.

[Parias]

Thanks, everyone!

Huh, not bad! Another suggestion is to work on trying to smooth out your camera moves. Roll to a stop instead of just stopping, etc. It helps it feel more complete and professional.

Yes, this bugs the hell out of me as well - we're definitely on the same page on this point. Smooth camera translation is something I had the toughest part with, probably because I was using a half-assed, time-consuming way to figure out what coordinates I wanted to roll to / from and just sort of throwing numbers around for the speeds until something nice came out.

I watch a ton of Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, etc (and put a bit of inspiration from them into 1:22 on the second briefing) - being able to even half-way match the camera work done in those shows in the FS2 engine is a bit of a pipe dream of mine.

The only other thing I noticed that could use improvement (besides the smoothing and the audio) was on the first one, at 0:43, where it cuts to "The 53rd Hammerheads were formed in the Great War..."--cutting like that, it takes a little bit before the viewer figures out we've switched perspective to the past.  Fading between those two scenes would probably be better.

Noted.

Maybe it's 3.6.14, I wouldn't know as I couldn't get it to work due to audio problems, but I've never had effects anywhere near that loud in my games anyway. Did you use custom explosions or something, or is it just 3.6.14? If it is 3.6.14 I'm quite turned off by it. Those loud effects would surely blot out normal in-mission voice transmissions. Meaty explosions are nice, but that's a bit much. And I've never had the warping be that loud.

That's some slick stuff though. The third one has me intrigued, I could certainly use whatever you did to get that herc to fire when and what you wanted it to for one of my missions. I was satisfied with just exploding the target on cue, but having the ship that does the destroying fire a single laser shot would be much better.

One thing though, you showed Bosch's asteroid base in the 2nd briefing right? Command doesn't know that's there. You discover it in the mission. I don't like pouring cold water on your work like that, but it's a pretty significant detail, unless I'm mistaken.

Did you make any more than these three? I'd like to see them.

* Good question. Weren't some of the sound-effects remastered for mediavps_3612? It might've also been my somewhat messed-up package configuration, launcher flags, and / or bad volume settings; I've had the same FS2 install for far, far too long, so maybe I have something kicking around that's making the explosion sound effects more intense than they should be. I don't think what I have is that far off-base for how the game is "normally" these days though (looking at other footage on Youtube).

Sorry to hear about your audio problems - 3.6.14 is pretty nice.

* Sorcery and trickery was used for this - a combination of "lock-primary-weapon" and "unlock-secondary-weapon" to force it to only fire one type of weapon at a time. Since "unlock-secondary-weapon" doesn't let you specify which secondary weapon however, I additionally started the Herc with no hornet missiles, and used "set-secondary-ammo" to "force" it to switch to the other missile type when I wanted it to.

You might notice the Herc has no engines too - I recall I had terrible problems lining it up right and that was the only way really to get it to behave at the time without it flying outside of the camera angle upon starting it's attack.

* Ack! Good call - I've played through FS2 so many times I completely failed to note that the asteroid base / Iceni are supposed to be a SURPRISE for the player. I agree, this is a scene that should be reworked.

* These are the only three that have any meaningful content in them. I started on a fourth but never got far with it. I recall a sticking point involved beam cannons and the same volume complaints prevalent in this thread; maybe if there are ways to do more granular volume control now (or if I just man up and cut off the sound effects completely) I'll be inclined to get back into developing this.

Edit:

Adjust-audio-volume is a little ****ed right now.

In what way, out of curiosity?

[General Battuta]

It doesn't work at all under certain circumstances. I've got a test mission for Mantis.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Yes, this bugs the hell out of me as well - we're definitely on the same page on this point. Smooth camera translation is something I had the toughest part with, probably because I was using a half-assed, time-consuming way to figure out what coordinates I wanted to roll to / from and just sort of throwing numbers around for the speeds until something nice came out.

You know, all of the move-camera SEXPs have some optional arguments that allow smooth start-roll and end-roll

[iVoid]

The command briefings don't work in the co-op campaigns? That sucks
Anyway, I think this is an excellent idea, I also try to bring some of my friends into freespace and this can definitely help.

One suggestion: why not also show some of the cbanims on a corner of the cutscenes? For example, on the first one, when the myrmidon fighter is presented to the player, the schematic could also be shown.

[karajorma]

The command briefings don't work in the co-op campaigns? That sucks

They don't work in multiplayer period. This is because of the potential issues caused by having one player still watching the CB whilst everyone else is assigning their ships and weapons.

[Cyborg17]

How many command briefings are there?

[PeterX]

Many work is taken in to this project,may be this will be the next standard in briefings.....or not? It looks good:.. super good.
For single game...yes,for multiplayergame has it to be synchronized.
Peter