Author Topic: RELEASE: Trimurti  (Read 58810 times)

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Eschaton: Actually i was not sure, if i had to press ALT+J or to fly back to the Hangar of the Lucy to end this mission... i tried to land and it did not work.
False Hope: The Aten has a visible name.
The End: I can see and target the ROFL and LOL wings... even i do not understand their purpose in general (or are they a trigger for something?)
Thank you, all were unintended and should be fixed now.
False Hope: It is intended, that i am able to destroy the Karnak Core from the outside? Or is this one of the mentioned bugs for Nightlies? I have to repeat this mission a couple of times, because my AI shivans had the same idea.
This isn't that aforementioned bug, you'd get a hard crash if it were. This is an unfortunate side-effect of the Apoplexies massive AoE, and the weakness of the reactor core, I should probably bump its health up to withstand accidental damage. Ideally of course I would have area damage not damage things if there are intervening objects, but that would require ray-tracing and a complete rewrite of how shockwave damage is dealt and that's rather unreasonable to ask.

Spoiler:
And it is nice, that you are able to change the history for the Shivans. Even the last mission was a little strange in my opinion, because it miss sound effects and have a very long fade out, where i have to fight blind for nearly half a minute, before the mission ends in a cutscene that also seem to imply some sort of sequel...

Or is this a different ending, because i was able to find all Spoons? Even i miss a hint even in this thread, that there is this archivement system and i miss some hints in-game, too.
Spoiler:
I'm quite surprised and impressed you managed to get all of them on presumably your first playthrough! I had originally planned for them to do something special, but as is they do nothing other than bragging rights. You experienced the ending as intended.

 
This is a fascinating campaign. Not many people can tell stories just by moving icons around on the briefing screen. Even better, it's funny how often I misinterpret them, and end up doing something completely different in the mission.

I like the difficulty of the missions. It requires a bit of attention to detail, acclimation to a completely new weapon set, and good use of tactics like targeting engine & weapon subsystems on capital ships. Given the FS1 era of technology, hitting the weapon subsystem on a ship absolutely cripples their ability to return fire. A few of those Shivan weapons do fantastic damage to subsystems.

The regeneration mechanic is unique too, it's nice being able to press 1 during downtime and re-armor myself.

One thing confuses me though: The unintelligible Shivan code. Why? It seems like it should be exactly the other way around, with Shivan stuff being easily readable, but human transmissions being completely alien gibberish. I have not finished the campaign, so...

Spoiler:
...is the player supposed to be a human who defected to the Shivans, and doesn't understand their language?
"Obviously the meson bomb is a form of cat-toast-device, with the buttered toast inverted, so that the cat and toast both fly in the direction of gravity much faster than expected. By introducing artificial gravity, a pair of cat-toast perpetual motion accelerator units can be made to collide with one another, and they produce an unimaginably devastating explosion. Both cats are named 'Meson'."

 - Wikileaks 2383

 
One thing confuses me though: The unintelligible Shivan code. Why? It seems like it should be exactly the other way around, with Shivan stuff being easily readable, but human transmissions being completely alien gibberish. I have not finished the campaign, so...

Spoiler:
...is the player supposed to be a human who defected to the Shivans, and doesn't understand their language?
Spoiler:
So there are several ways of going about this problem. The approach you assume is the meta-level one. It seems that the player is a Shivan because none of the other Shivans treat you specially or consider you abnormal. But since the 'reality' of the situation is that 'Shivan speech' is unintelligible to humans like you or me it creates a gap between player-knowledge (the person at the controls who doesn't know Shivan) and character-knowledge (the Shivan in the cockpit who does. So you can simply translate the Shivan into English (and English into gibberish) at the meta-level; we know 'that's not how it really is' but that I'm doing it purely for the sake of player understanding.

This is a common approach when it comes to Shivans (in what few mods actually face this problem), but actually one of the main reasons I created this mod in the first place is that I don't really like this approach! If you do translate it, what exactly does it sound like? Just regular English?! I don't know about you, but I find the idea of Shivans speaking normal English rather comical and immersion breaking. Every approach to Shivans differ, and everyone is entitled to their idea of how they function. The way I like to depict them functioning is very very different from our own. In virtually every way I can get away with. Whatever form of communication they use I believe would be massively downgraded and simplified when put into English, quite possibly unavoidably so for any target language we could understand. Shivan's cognitive capacities and format are probably extremely different, if not outright incompatible. And I still feel this way even about their current communication in the mod! That it is a huge oversimplification and an artistic interpretation of whatever form of communication they use.

Having them speak in normal English removes some of the barriers of understanding and mystery between us and them, and one of my major goals was to keep as much as possible still alien to us, and only allow small rays of understanding to peak through, just enough to keep them interesting and provocative. That's why Shivans are interesting in the first place.

Keeping Shivan speech 'as it truly is' (although as I've mentioned as I think their current implementation errs too much on the side of understandable by us) not only maintained that sense of strangeness, but also providing the interesting challenge of making everything still understandable enough for a player to play the missions without being utterly lost. Both the directives and recommendations are painful but regrettably necessary concessions I had to make, I knew I couldn't count on everyone being willing or able to follow such obtuse instruction. I'm slightly disappointed that some briefings weren't clear enough for you, and I'd be curious which ones they were and what were mistaken impressions you got from them.

 

Offline Novachen

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Actually i liked this approach. Because, if the shivans would talk in clear english (or any other human language you could translate)... you had to mention their motivation for all of this in the first place... which would actually demystify them completely. And would cause discussions about it, for sure.

So you still do not know why you are doing this, what keeps the Shivans as there is, a species with higher goals we do not understand (maybe we cant even with ETAK).

And i liked the fact, that the briefings are visual only and i was surprised how understandable they were only with the moving icons.

I actually would not feel as a shivan, if there were human speaking shivans. Maybe Vasudan speaking Vasudans are missing here, but that is the only thing, i can think of ^^
Female FreeSpace 2 pilot since 1999.
Former Global moderator in the German FreeSpace Galaxy Forum.
Developer of NTP - A Multi-Language Translation Library Interface, which allows to play FreeSpace in YOUR Language.

Is one of my releases broken or not working? Please send a PM here, on Discord at @novachen or on Twitter @NovachenFS2, a public tweet or write a reply in my own release threads here on HLP, because these are the only threads i am still participating in.

 
Spoiler:
And it is nice, that you are able to change the history for the Shivans. Even the last mission was a little strange in my opinion, because it misses sound effects and have a very long fade out, where i have to fight blind for nearly half a minute, before the mission ends in a cutscene that also seems to imply some sort of sequel...

Or is this a different ending, because i was able to find all Spoons? Even i miss a hint in this thread, that there is this achievement system and i miss some hints in-game, too.
[/quote]

Spoiler:
I'm of the opinion the end ties into BP:AOA because the Terran pilot said the Bastion failed to stop the Lucy. The Vasudans became extinct (another BP:AOA story point). Also, we saw the Sanctuary leave Sol in the cutscene just as Lucy was glassing Earth
[/quote]
« Last Edit: July 23, 2018, 02:19:14 am by CapellaGoBoom »

 

Offline Novachen

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Spoiler:
I'm of the opinion the end ties into BP:AOA because the Terran pilot said the Bastion failed to stop the Lucy. The Vasudans became extinct (another BP:AOA story point). Also, we saw the Sanctuary leave Sol in the cutscene just as Lucy was glassing Earth

Spoiler:
Ah okay, i actually never played BP and i thought BP take place in FS2's timeline. Have to admit that the situation of this ending remembered me more of the first campaign of the dump of Project: Outreach by Droid303 six years ago. Because it was dumped it also looked like, that this campaign maybe picked up some of its scenario again, only in a shivan pov.
« Last Edit: June 14, 2018, 06:25:55 pm by Novachen »
Female FreeSpace 2 pilot since 1999.
Former Global moderator in the German FreeSpace Galaxy Forum.
Developer of NTP - A Multi-Language Translation Library Interface, which allows to play FreeSpace in YOUR Language.

Is one of my releases broken or not working? Please send a PM here, on Discord at @novachen or on Twitter @NovachenFS2, a public tweet or write a reply in my own release threads here on HLP, because these are the only threads i am still participating in.

 
Spoiler:
Ah okay, i actually never played BP and i thought BP take place in FS2's timeline. Have to admit that the situation of this ending remembered me more of the first campaign of the dump of Project: Outreach by Droid303 six years ago. Because it was dumped it also looked like, that this campaign maybe picked up some of its scenario again, only in a shivan pov.
Spoiler:
BP does take place in FS2's timeline, specifically 20 some years after the fact. BP: AoA has the player accidentally travel to an alternate timeline where the Great War had been lost those 50 years prior, and then later return to the normal timeline.

 

Offline Novachen

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Spoiler:
Ah okay, i actually never played BP and i thought BP take place in FS2's timeline. Have to admit that the situation of this ending remembered me more of the first campaign of the dump of Project: Outreach by Droid303 six years ago. Because it was dumped it also looked like, that this campaign maybe picked up some of its scenario again, only in a shivan pov.
Spoiler:
BP does take place in FS2's timeline, specifically 20 some years after the fact. BP: AoA has the player accidentally travel to an alternate timeline where the Great War had been lost those 50 years prior, and then later return to the normal timeline.

Spoiler:
Never know that. Even this fact actually reduced my interested in BP.

But well, another question appeared as i introduced this campaign in another forum. As someone suggest (only in a joke of course), that i should translate the complete campaign into german, including the shivan messages of course.
Because that would a very nice twist... are the Shivan messages english ones, that were decoded into a ternary system or are the numbers totally random?  :D
« Last Edit: June 14, 2018, 11:18:00 pm by Novachen »
Female FreeSpace 2 pilot since 1999.
Former Global moderator in the German FreeSpace Galaxy Forum.
Developer of NTP - A Multi-Language Translation Library Interface, which allows to play FreeSpace in YOUR Language.

Is one of my releases broken or not working? Please send a PM here, on Discord at @novachen or on Twitter @NovachenFS2, a public tweet or write a reply in my own release threads here on HLP, because these are the only threads i am still participating in.

 
But well, another question appeared as i introduced this campaign in another forum. As someone suggest (only in a joke of course), that i should translate the complete campaign into german, including the shivan messages of course.
Because that would a very nice twist... are the Shivan messages english ones, that were decoded into a ternary system or are the numbers totally random?  :D
I'd prefer not to spoil too much of how it works, but suffice it to say that a legitimate english to german translation would change the content of the messages (to something equally opaque).

 

Offline General Battuta

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AHM A SHIVAN, PARDNER

I'm up to Eschaton, about halfway-ish through!

This **** is dope. There's so many ways this concept could've gone wrong, from overexplaining (We are Shivans from Shiva, we exist to shiv) to underselling (stock FS2 interface, no dialogue, directives only, etc) to furry highly emotional Shivans (yeah that did get made at one point). But right from that superb main menu you're plucking my artistic heartstrings. I ****ing love FRACTALS

This campaign might have the best briefings ever done and that's really embarrassing to admit coming from a guy who slathers on the :words:. It's essentially ridiculous how effective they are at communicating what to do. I wonder if they'd be as effective to a new player — they tap knowledge of stock FS2 mission archetypes — but for me they work wonders. There have been a few times where I misunderstood my objective, but I'll get to that later.

The missions are hard so far because I'm playing on Hard, but I've never felt like I don't have the tools or options I need (thank you for not forcing the player into a lot of dogfights in Basilisks, that'd be true hell). Regeneration is a great touch and only enhanced by the fact that you can ****in give yourself orders while regenerating which while probably not intentional is hilarious. Your weapons stay locked but you'll fly around after targets and stuff.

I'm not completely sold on the weapon names. I think if I took more than a second to think about the meaning of the names I'd figure out how they relate to the function, but as is I'd sort of prefer a little more affordance in the names – maybe tap the euphemisms you use in directives to name them 'rapid abort', 'heavy abort', 'paralyzer'? Or do storm names — 'bolt', 'slow bolt', 'rain', 'shock'? I dunno. Since you kept the Terran names for the fighters it seems like it wouldn't hurt the mood to make the weapon names more transparent. (I just use the weapon's energy usage to figure out what it probably does.)

A few directives could be a little clearer. Telling me to 'end threat' when in fact I need to wait for it to get closer feels like it's the bad kind of ambiguous. But that leads me to the really cool thematic stuff holy **** I'll dance around spoilers so everybody can read how good this is:

The actual experience of playing is so full of loneliness and — not confusion, exactly, but absence of meaning, poverty of context, in a very good way — that it's genuinely startling to see the human and Vasudan voices break in through the encrypted wails and howls of the Shivans. You really do get a sense of what it means to be Shivan in a way that I don't think any amount of description could evoke, but which gels perfectly with what it's like to fight them. I mean that you get a sense of emptiness. I mean specifically: what if this is what it's really like to be a Shivan? Not the imagined 'Trimurti but I understand all the numbers', but actually what if the experience of playing Trimurti is what it is to be Shivan? You don't experience meaning or internality when your Lucifer howls at you, it's just a set of symbols that evoke a response (because you get a directive). You don't say 'oh no my Cain is getting blown up', you just react to the changing data to make new combat decisions. You're nothing on the inside. You just act and react. No Shivan fighter in FS2 ever really seemed like it was piloted by a person, did it? But they sure do feel like they're piloted by things-that-are-experiencing-the-world-as-we-experience-Trimurti.

And this leads to the best part, which is the occasional confusion over mission objectives, and the ability to get a clear description of what to do only after you fail. (Let me be clear to people who read this as a negative: the missions are not confusing and you will not be like 'wtf wtf I lost why?' You just get a clear English explanation of your objectives in each failure debrief, as a fallback) DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW ****ING GENIUS THIS IS? It is admittedly genius only in a specific fictional context, but: forcing the player to learn through failure and repetition is such a perfect ludonarrative encapsulation of the BP idea that Shivans develop local optimae not through a conventional process of modeling the task but through brute-forcing it. You gain the data you need through inefficiency and mistake until you have enough data to do it right.

I am having a lot of thoughts now about ways you could do even more, avenues of the interface and design you could use to further suck the player into this alien mindset. But I will finish the campaign before I start spewing them.

 
I'll save diving into the really deep stuff until you've finished it, but I'll respond to a few things here
I wonder if they'd be as effective to a new player — they tap knowledge of stock FS2 mission archetypes — but for me they work wonders. There have been a few times where I misunderstood my objective, but I'll get to that later.
I certainly do not think they'd be as effective for new players, not only for the reason you mentioned but also because several missions impart extra meaning or even gameplay advantage due to the player's meta-knowledge of Freespace 1.
Regeneration is a great touch and only enhanced by the fact that you can ****in give yourself orders while regenerating which while probably not intentional is hilarious. Your weapons stay locked but you'll fly around after targets and stuff.
Play-dead has been broken for months now! Go bug a coder about it!

I'm not completely sold on the weapon names. I think if I took more than a second to think about the meaning of the names I'd figure out how they relate to the function, but as is I'd sort of prefer a little more affordance in the names – maybe tap the euphemisms you use in directives to name them 'rapid abort', 'heavy abort', 'paralyzer'? Or do storm names — 'bolt', 'slow bolt', 'rain', 'shock'? I dunno. Since you kept the Terran names for the fighters it seems like it wouldn't hurt the mood to make the weapon names more transparent. (I just use the weapon's energy usage to figure out what it probably does.)
So, if I were to go slightly more transparent with the weapon names, to refer to them more directly to their purpose, even if in that slightly oblique manner such as the directives, it sort of makes it more clear what each weapon's purpose is. Well I suppose that's what transparent means anyway, but it would put the player's 'headspace' in the more utilitarian aspect of the weapons, and doing so raises question about how the Shivans interpret the utilitarian aspects of their weapons. Would a purely utilitarian approach really have so many weapons? Couldn't you boil down the functions you need from your weapons to just 2 or 3? Would a weapon really do this? Why did they make their weapon do that? While their arsenal as is is certainly a defensible one from this approach I've kind of already lost the angle I wanted the player to be coming at it from.

The names as they are are meaningless to the player (and as a side-effect are nicely evocative emotionally), which puts them in the position of trying to figure out what the **** they even do, and as they play they learn what they do, and feel as though they've 'translated' this aspect of the Shivans. While in after-the-fact reflection they can still question what the utilitarian motives of the Shivans were with the these weapons, in the moment I keep them engaged instead with the task of finding out what they do, instead of understanding what they do, and possibly questioning how they do it. But I'm definitely open to more debate on this.

You also mentioned keeping the Terran names for the fighters, so I should point out that they were also meant to be changed originally. But it'll be easier to get into why didn't that work out once you've finished it.

 

Offline AdmiralRalwood

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Regeneration is a great touch and only enhanced by the fact that you can ****in give yourself orders while regenerating which while probably not intentional is hilarious. Your weapons stay locked but you'll fly around after targets and stuff.
Play-dead has been broken for months now! Go bug a coder about it!
Thanks for the reminder, but I just checked and there's absolutely nothing in the code that should be stopping play-dead from having a priority up to 200, like any other goal. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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schrödinbug (noun) - a bug that manifests itself in running software after a programmer notices that the code should never have worked in the first place.

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<MageKing17> "There's probably a reason the code is the way it is" is a very dangerous line of thought. :P
<MageKing17> Because the "reason" often turns out to be "nobody noticed it was wrong".
(the very next day)
<MageKing17> this ****ing code did it to me again
<MageKing17> "That doesn't really make sense to me, but I'll assume it was being done for a reason."
<MageKing17> **** ME
<MageKing17> THE REASON IS PEOPLE ARE STUPID
<MageKing17> ESPECIALLY ME

<MageKing17> God damn, I do not understand how this is breaking.
<MageKing17> Everything points to "this should work fine", and yet it's clearly not working.
<MjnMixael> 2 hours later... "God damn, how did this ever work at all?!"
(...)
<MageKing17> so
<MageKing17> more than two hours
<MageKing17> but once again we have reached the inevitable conclusion
<MageKing17> How did this code ever work in the first place!?

<@The_E> Welcome to OpenGL, where standards compliance is optional, and error reporting inconsistent

<MageKing17> It was all working perfectly until I actually tried it on an actual mission.

<IronWorks> I am useful for FSO stuff again. This is a red-letter day!
* z64555 erases "Thursday" and rewrites it in red ink

<MageKing17> TIL the entire homing code is held up by shoestrings and duct tape, basically.

 

Offline General Battuta

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What a good campaign. I finished and really loved it. It's incredible how a few good artistic choices — no translated speech, custom sound effects, and an excellent interface — can make such a powerful statement.

One of the things I loved most was that the campaign evoked in me, and earned my participation in, the Shivans' monumental indifference. I didn't get angry when I failed a tough mission, or feel any resentment of the jerks shooting me down. I always had this sense that I was still in control and that I would inevitably win in the end, even if my individual fighters were frail. When we got to hear the Washington's heroic speech in the last mission I remember thinking not 'a lot of species must've made this speech' or 'you guys are really ****ed' but something more like...clinical remove? Just this sense that the outcome was inevitable and all the human yelling was a symptom, a byproduct of the process, as meaningless in content as the Shivan transmissions.

(Now if I'd been trying it on insane, I might've gotten mad!)

I read back in the thread and saw the discussion about player-understanding vs. character-understanding; I get that the Shivan character probably understands the transmissions, but I still like the idea that the player's incomprehension is evoking something fundamental about the Shivan psyche, a process by which information is received and acted upon without interiority or qualia.

It's a tribute to the campaign that I left with my brain fizzing with ideas. Here is a vomit of some of them:

—I'd love, love a pseudo-sequel set during the events of FS2, which I think could be far weirder and delve even deeper into the psychological ab-space of 'existing as a Shivan.' I say pseudo-sequel because of the spoilery stuff around the ending. I just want to see such more! I want to be inside the Shivan response as it evolves and develops structure.

—The measure of great video game lore is how it alters moment to moment gameplay decisions, and there were definitely times when I stubbornly persisted in attack runs, or threw myself at certain targets with unusual aggression, because I thought 'I'm a Shivan and my life doesn't matter' or 'this is what I always see the Shivan AI do.' Similarly, lurking around regenerating, waiting for prey to show up, was A+ ludonarrative.

—Talking about weirder stuff: this edges into pushing my artistic interpretation of the Shivans onto yours, but I would love to see more symbolic/semiotic weirdness. A downtime mission about what Shivans do while they're not killing everything, by which I do not mean domestic theater, but 'a mission where you do things you don't understand for reasons that aren't apparent, but which are clearly having some effect'. Moments of failed contact, meaning-corrosion, miscommunication: things reaching out, but in vain. It may be that your Shivans are highly functional and do not experience this. But I dream of what you could do with a notional Trimurti 2 — interaction between Shivans that isn't as cleanly hierarchical and uniformly efficient, eruptions of consciousness or interiority which are starved or destroyed, mentality arising and vanishing in the crevices of the cold Shivan structure. Images appearing to you as you act. Imagine receiving conflicting objectives from outside, neither understanding those purposes nor having any criteria to choose between them — and observing the results of your choice for some hint as to what you've actually done. Such depths of incomprehension and enigma to evoke! You could explore whether Shivans are a tightly integrated unit, or as alien to themselves as they are to us. You could show us individual Shivan vessels or minds developing idiosyncrasies, madnesses, strange malformed psyches gestating in a mindless space and awakening surrounded by incomprehension and mindless hostility only to vanish again into the turmoil. Oh, the possibilities! Thank you for making me think about all this.

 
I want to stress that I really like BP's take on Shivans, and I pretty much took it as canon in those few ways where it was relevant. But trying to fit in all that stuff about the non-functional side of Shivans seems almost impossible given the format! Remember we're making a Freespace campaign here, at the end of the day it needs to come down to flying a fighter shooting at other fighters. Non-combat missions have certainly done before, but a Shivan one seems intractable. The player still needs to be doing something they understand, at least at some level. So it seems you'd either have to explain too much, or have a string of tasks that the player is utterly baffled by and feels as though his time has been wasted. Accurate, perhaps, but not very fun to play!

Something 'far weirder and delves even deeper into the psychological ab-space of 'existing as a Shivan.'' sounds really cool, but probably not suited to a Freespace campaign, maybe a short story? As I've said before, you can't go too far on the side of incomprehensible, both in terms of how Shivans work, but also in gameplay terms. Without anything to latch on to, the player may as well be reading a book in a different language.

Quite ironically, its entirely because FS2 makes the Shivans more compelling and less straightforward that a Trimurti during FS2 would be much harder. That straightforwardness could be relied upon as an anchor for player to not get completely lost. The avenues for FS2 actually showing new viewpoints/re-contextualizing the actions of the Shivans or otherwise changing or enhancing what we already know about the events of FS2 (because otherwise there's no real point in making such a campaign) are much less clear to me than FS1, at least in way that keeps the player relatively grounded in 'normal' Freespace gameplay.

 

Offline rubixcube

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One of the things I loved most was that the campaign evoked in me, and earned my participation in, the Shivans' monumental indifference. I didn't get angry when I failed a tough mission, or feel any resentment of the jerks shooting me down. I always had this sense that I was still in control and that I would inevitably win in the end, even if my individual fighters were frail. When we got to hear the Washington's heroic speech in the last mission I remember thinking not 'a lot of species must've made this speech' or 'you guys are really ****ed' but something more like...clinical remove? Just this sense that the outcome was inevitable and all the human yelling was a symptom, a byproduct of the process, as meaningless in content as the Shivan transmissions.

I actually felt really bad during that last mission; like someone culling a den full of invasive baby rats. You know it has to be done, but it still feels so wrong.
Stuff

 

Offline IronBeer

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Just finished. I had a bit of a bumpy start, needing to get my Freespace reflexes back to fighting shape, but I absolutely LOVED the "feel" of the campaign. From the stark fractal loading screens, to the pervasive use of base-3 numbers, the verbal un-intelligibility of your allies, and the cold minimalist briefing music, every element seemed perfectly tailored to put the player in a very different mindset from traditional Freespace.

Brilliantly done!

A handful of specific comments or things that stood out:
Spoiler:
-The humble Scorpion turned out to be my most-used fighter! Just couldn't get the hang of the Manticore or the Dragon somehow.
-I found missions 2 and 3 to be fairly challenging, though for different reasons.
Mission 2 was tough because you needed to keep enough wingmen alive to mix up with the Valkyrie/Athena avenger-party at the end of the mission.
Mission 3 was actually kind of frustrating until I found out about the "wait until 1000m range" trick. Nailed the mission on the first try.
-I can't tell you how good it felt to be pouring Acerbities out of a Basilisk in the Vasuda Prime mission. Payback for all those escort missions is a *****, and I really enjoyed being the "bad guy" for a change
-Called in the bombers too early in The Great Escape, wound up having to abort the cruiser single-handedly. D'oh. Could've and should've waited a bit.
-Good Luck. Goddamn. Just, Good Luck. Starts with one hell of a bang. Died a few times, finally managed to clear it at 4% hull with 2 wingmates keeping the remaining fighters away from me as I took out the bombers. The bank of Desideriums finally paid off- sure as hell couldn't line those up in the opening moshpit!
-Is the final mission supposed to end with an indefinite black screen?
"I have approximate knowledge of many things."

Ridiculous, the Director's Cut

Starlancer Head Animations - Converted

 
Spoiler:
-Is the final mission supposed to end with an indefinite black screen?
Spoiler:
It should not. Was the black screen after it faded out after the Washington was destroyed? Or after the cutscene? And can I confirm you're using Knossos and the mod is version 1.1.0?
-The humble Scorpion turned out to be my most-used fighter! Just couldn't get the hang of the Manticore or the Dragon somehow.
It's quite interesting to me how many people seem to feel this way! For me, of course it seems the Dragon is obviously the best dogfighting option, and I quite imagined many players would be going into the campaign saying "When do I get to fly a Dragon? When do I get to fly a Dragon?!" and that I was cruel for making people wait until mission 7, but it's good to see that it has some competition.

 

Offline HLD_Prophecy

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Sorry that I haven't finished this campaign by now, but I'm having a significant amount of trouble with mission 1.

Spoiler:
Some humans always manage to reach the node. Sometimes I have no idea who managed to get there. Every time I think that I've destroyed everyone headed for the node, I fail the objective.

Any help with this?

 

Offline General Battuta

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Haven't had that issue but try constantly hitting F3 or F4 or whichever key brings up the 'all ships in mission' list, then add everything to a hotkey group and use that hotkey to look for **** near the node.

 
Sorry that I haven't finished this campaign by now, but I'm having a significant amount of trouble with mission 1.

Spoiler:
Some humans always manage to reach the node. Sometimes I have no idea who managed to get there. Every time I think that I've destroyed everyone headed for the node, I fail the objective.

Any help with this?
Spoiler:
The radar should make it fairly obvious who is still alive, the big culprits in terms of stealthyness are the two wings of fightersthat try to go around you, and the escape pods, which don't auto-targeted