Oy, as little as I need new projects, this seems like it'd be a lot of fun.
I don't honestly know how much I'd be able to contribute (far too much on my plate already), but I've been slowly getting more and more tired of the old X-Wing game feel over time, hoping for something new. Being a flight sim fan, my dream is to someday convince Lucasarts to come up with a true X-Wing sim, complete with plotting hyperspace routes, more canon tactics, and (oh my) actually manually landing your craft. Short of that though, I've kind of been keeping a list of dislikes of the X-Wing games for a while.
First off, and I know this is a big canon argument- if you really want people to fear star destroyers like in the books, ditch the shield dome idea. A random vulnerable exhaust port I can kind of believe. Putting the shield projectors for the entire ship in the most vulnerable place possible is asking for problems. The only canon example (meaning seen in the movies) of this type of thing is when the SSD in ROTJ went down from one bridge dome being taken out, and there is a much more reasonable explanation for this that I've heard many times... the idea is that those were sensor domes, located just outside the shield for better readings. Their destruction, and the resulting explosion, caused a backwash under the
bridge shield, disabling it. They never said anything about any other shields.
This kind of goes back to the stuff about having different shield regions. If that can be set up, then individual shield generators could protect individual important systems, like the bridge, propulsion, individual weapons banks, etc. Those huge ships are meant to be very complex, with numerous weapons systems, backups, etc... taking out an entire subset of systems (like all the shields, or all the weapons) at once makes things far too simple.
The most common tactic in the X-Wing book series for fighting bigger ships was very concentrated fire in very specific regions, so that groups of smaller ships could do decent damage. If you knock out everything in one blow, like all shields, or all weapons, you can sit around at your leisure, and peck the target to death (a la X-Wing Alliance). In contrast, if you only knock out one area, you have to plan your attack carefully to make use of that weakness without exposing yourself needlessly, and that adds a nice element of strategy to what otherwise turns into a simple "pour your weapons into it until it dies" situation.
One specific thing that I think would be interesting is to try and implement the type of missile/torpedo tracking system shown in the early X-Wing books. I think you could let the warheads home in on a specific target, but they also had the ability to make them follow the crosshairs, similar to a laser guided bomb. I don't even want to think about the math involved in programming a feature like that, but it might be interesting to see if it's possible.
Personally, I just recently fell in love with the BSG conversion, mainly because of the intensity of it, and how fast paced it is. On the harder difficulty settings, you can work up a sweat just trying to survive in a heated dogfight. I used to mod X-Wing Alliance quite a bit, and the pace never seemed right at all. It took quite a bit of tweaking to get the pace up to something that would get you involved. Just for kicks, I once doubled every stat for some of the fighters, and had a melee. It was quite a rush compared with the normal settings. So that extra speed really plays a part.
For campaigns, I would love to see the X-Wing series done.. maybe an Isard campaign, and a Zsinj one.. the only large problem I see with those is that a lot of those books' major battles took place over planets. Now, I'm not very familiar with this game yet, so I don't have a decent idea of what's possible.. but the ground missions in those books were often very important to the story.
What I think I'd love to see most of all is a respectable scale to the missions, especially the big battles. Again, I don't know how crazy people want to be in modeling, but I would love to see a fully modeled Death Star mission, without the standard "transition" between space and the surface, and with a decently detailed surface with lots of turrets (it looks like that's already in progress from the pics I've seen).. kind of like the Rogue Squadron games for the Gamecube (although, those are hideously detailed.. but something very good might be possible with careful LOD management I think). One thing though.. try to minimize the obstacles in the trench. Yes, they make the run more interesting, but I'd rather see more intense surface fire, and lots more turrets to dodge/destroy.
Same overall idea for the DSII if possible, with the whole ginormous interior modeled, if only for the reason that it hasn't been done decently in anything but Rogue Squadron. I think that game has the best rendition of Endor ever made, even without the perfect transition. I would really love to see an even larger scale version of that, with as many ships as you can pull off without killing the computer. The version in XWA just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Btw... just a personal pet peeve about big missions like that... if at all possible, don't add extra "fluff" objectives to move the mission along, like "protect capship x, destroy flight group y"... many games make those types of things mission critical objectives, and you wind up failing a mission because you couldn't protect some random little ship (like Rogue Squadron.. you had to protect the Falcon for some reason. I was under the impression that it could do that itself
) I'd much rather see something where the mission keeps going instead of failing, but you have to make up for the losses somehow. For instance, say you need to protect a Mon Cal cruiser early on from a wing of Tie Bombers, and you fail. It goes boom, but the mission keeps going. However, later on, you won't have it's help, and it will be harder to survive when you move toward the huge fleet of ISDs. Same type of thing for the trench run.. don't make the cover wingmen a given.. make them dependent on your performance against the fighters/turrets. Still possible to survive, but the mission gets much harder if you're all alone.
Really the goal at Endor was the destruction of the DSII at any cost, and most of the engagement was stalling for time, and trying to survive until the shield went down. I think what really needs to be done to have a good Endor is give it the "gauntlet" treatment... make the first half of the mission just a grueling, intense dogfight around loads of capships, where the AI drops like flies on both sides... but you have no way of knowing when the shield will go down (if you can, randomize it in the mission about +/- 3 minutes or more, so players don't know when to expect it
) so they can get to the
really hard part. That sort of anxious anticipation is really what made that battle good. You can script certain things to happen, but keep it unpredictable, and fast paced.
Anyway, I hope I can find the time to help out in the future (I do lots of detailed modeling, and some texturing/mapping), but right now I'm buried in a pile of theoretical aerodynamics class work.
Btw, sorry this is so long... I tend to get very detailed pictures of things in my head, and love to do everything I can to see them happen.. I just wish I had the time right now.
