Hosted Projects - FS2 Required > Series Resurrecta

RELEASE: Gehenna's Gate

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Mobius:

This thread is meant to discuss Gehenna's Gate, part of the Series Resurrecta - Shadows of the Great War collection. If you want to discuss The Spirit of Ptah, there's a dedicated thread for it. Both campaigns share the same modpack; however, due to their plots and nature, they're probably better off discussed in their respective threads.

Series Resurrecta Official Profile | ModDB
Gehenna's Gate [GehG]
The Great War is formally over, but battles are still taking place. The Lucifer's been destroyed and contact with Sol has been severed. However, remnants of the Shivan armada are still present in Terran and Vasudan systems, and even though both species faced tough challenges as their respective homeworlds have been either annihilated or cut off, they must regroup and finally secure all systems from the Shivan threat. At first, the Shivans seem disoriented and lacking the coordination they had when the Lucifer was around, leading their advance, but can we be certain that no alternate source of command for the Shivans exists?
A "Resurrected Series"
Series Resurrecta is a form of Latin to say "Resurrected Series". No other title would be as appropriate, considering that SerRes campaigns have been in a limbo state for way more than a decade, passing from computer to computer, from pendrive to pendrive, and ultimately making it to a point where progress could be resumed. What you're about to play are missions whose earliest development phase dates back to March 13th, 2007; today's October 16th, 2020, so nearly 5,000 days have passed between the first FREDding attempts and release. At first, these minicampaigns were meant to be unofficial expansions to Inferno: Alliance Standalone, but have since become their own, independent package, using the FreeSpace Port as a root. Very special thanks go to Woomeister who strongly supported these unofficial INF campaigns back in the day, even though none of them were meant to be INF canon.

The Resurrection process
It's no secret that I've been away for a long while from this community. I used to spend less and less time in front of my computer, which gradually became obsolete and prevented me from running any of the graphics consuming FreeSpace mods. At some point in May, mostly due to changes to working habits (some may say that SR may be a consequence of Covid-19), I had to upgrade my equipment and bought a new laptop, which made my jobs easier. I also got the chance to play FreeSpace again, and stumbled upon plenty of missions from defunct projects.

I decided that these campaigns deserved to be "resurrected", so I asked for help on the FSCRP private board, considering how similar the process of getting these campaigns done is to the standard procedure of campaign revamping and upgrading. Admiral Nelson, Nyctaeus and Nightmare helped me cleaning the modpack and extracting it from its INFA dependency, thus turning it into a full FSPort mod. At the sime time, I worked on the mission, and quite fast I may add, considering that most of the FREDding job was pretty much done in about three weeks. Feedback during this revamping process was positive, and the results were quite encouraging too - June's screencap contest winner was, in fact, a screenshot taken from a SerRes campaign. We have spent the last couple of months squashing several bugs and making needed changes to the modpack and campaigns, including proofreading (special thanks to go Iain 'Nomad' Baker and lordhood117 for this).

Is this a new continuity?
Yes and no, with the proper answer leaning no. The campaigns were meant to be independent even with respect to each other, so there's no FS1 Era continuity emerging from Series Resurrecta. As you play through these stories, consider them as something on their own, even though they don't necessarily contradict each other and come under a unified brand. Just treat SerRes as it's meant to be treated - a series of campaigns set in the FS1 Era, which with its own plot and settings.

Will this be expanded?
As you may have guessed, GehG and TSoP aren't the only campaigns which I managed to recover from the void of oblivion. There's... more stuff, and we are evaluating future releases including more campaigns and expansions to this modpack, some of which are considerable. I can't promise anything right now but we do have advanced plans to release at least one campaign in the near future.

Missions and Balance
Due to time constraints, the missions currently lack checkpoints which would be extremely beneficial at least in some 2-3 missions over the package. They will definitely be implemented in future releases, as we expect the modpack to be revised and improved over time (more info on that will follow). We do recommend to set up Very Easy or Easy as difficulty levels during your playthroughs. Easy is still quite challenging and will let you enjoy both the plot and some intense action. Testers have reported a spike in difficulty from Medium upwards, so if I were you I would not play at that difficulty level before the full implementation of checkpoints. Even though these are minicampaigns, some of the missions are long.

Gallery

Antares:
Where is the table with the HUD settings saved in this campaign? I want to play, but I'm running into problems similar to what was going on over here: gauges are huge and dialogue boxes overflow with text. Even at 1920 x 1080 (the highest resolution my monitor will support), wingman chatter is still being cut off.

I can probably override by saving a blank HUD table to the campaign folder and forcing the game to default to retail settings, but I need to know how the MVPs directory is laid out, first. Saving new tables with the same folders and filenames as those used in the FSPort and FS2Upgrade MVPs doesn't change anything, so I assume that Series Resurrecta handles things a little differently.

Nyctaeus:
Fix is on the way. We forgot to implement it.

Admiral Nelson:
A screenshot would be helpful - I don't see overflowing text at 1080p in my testing. There is the issue another user reported with Axem's HUD at resolutions below 1080 which I will need to implement as this uses that hud as its base.

Antares:
1280 x 720:



1920 x 1080:



Things are decidedly less cramped at 1080, but as you can see, dialogue is still being cut off. (1080 also makes my integrated graphics chug and is essentially unplayable on my end.)

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