Author Topic: RELEASE - Fall of Epsilon Pegasi  (Read 7844 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

RELEASE - Fall of Epsilon Pegasi
lolz.

I've had Firefox for months now, my browser isn't the problem. What *is* the problem, however, is my 56k. And that is what the problem was.

Anyways, I got the files, and am enjoying myself. BR, as usual, amazing work man.
tianjun1298 > Your this only the fine insect which escapes from the condom

 

Offline Mongoose

  • Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
  • Global Moderator
  • 212
  • This brain for rent.
    • Minecraft
    • Steam
    • Something
RELEASE - Fall of Epsilon Pegasi
As soon as I can get the most recent builds to stop CTD-ing, the first thing I'm doing is playing through this campaign.  I managed to get through the first mission, and I found that it lived up to your usual excellent work. :)

P.S.  It's funny; I was just looking at your website, and I noticed the voiceacting files of Shrouding the Light.  I did one of the voices (albeit not the most high-quality :p)  for that, but I didn't know that it had ever been released.  I then go to check out my FS2 directory, and it turns out I had downloaded it while completely forgetting that I had done the voiceacting. :p
« Last Edit: April 22, 2005, 11:55:46 pm by 1965 »

 

Offline Blaise Russel

  • Campaign King
  • 29
    • http://mysite.freeserve.com/sbre/index.html
RELEASE - Fall of Epsilon Pegasi
Your voice was just fine. The important thing was that Commodore Cooper finally got that larynx he'd always wanted.

He was an angry, angry young man.

(If you can do a convincing older Cooper, I may have need of you sometime in the future... :mystery: )

 

Offline Mongoose

  • Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
  • Global Moderator
  • 212
  • This brain for rent.
    • Minecraft
    • Steam
    • Something
RELEASE - Fall of Epsilon Pegasi
If that statement's implying a certain future campaign, then I'm in. :D

  

Offline Sutehp

  • 23
Re: RELEASE - Fall of Epsilon Pegasi
Yeah, I'm necro'ing this thread, but that's because I've got an error that I can't debug even after uninstalling and reinstalling this campaign.

So here's the error:

Quote
Error: game_settings.tbl(line 2):
Error: Missing required token: [#END]. Found [$Target version:] instead.

File: parselo.cpp
Line: 290

And pressing "Debug" didn't fix it either.

Any suggestions?

Are the modders who made this still around since the last update to FEP was September 2018?

 
Re: RELEASE - Fall of Epsilon Pegasi
You need to run it on a recent build, you can change that in the Knossos launcher somewhere.

 

Offline Goober5000

  • HLP Loremaster
  • 214
    • Goober5000 Productions
Re: RELEASE - Fall of Epsilon Pegasi
Yeah, go into Settings and choose 19-RC2, and it should work.

 

Offline Sutehp

  • 23
Re: RELEASE - Fall of Epsilon Pegasi
Yeah, go into Settings and choose 19-RC2, and it should work.

I can't tell if I switched all my mods to 19-RC2 or just FoEP because all my mods still read as if they're still on FSO 3.8.0-3, but at least FoEP is working now. Thank you for the advice, guys.

Aside from an admiral named Wolf has (what I think is) a Russian accent (wouldn't "Admiral Volk" or even "Admiral волк" worked better in that case? :confused: ) and a voice synthesizer that says "Epsilon Peg-a-SEE" instead of "Epsilon PEG-a-sigh," the voiced mission briefings (or at least the first one so far) are...passable. But beggars can't be choosers, I guess. :nervous:

 

Offline Rhymes

  • Galactic Mediator
  • 29
  • Fatum Iustum Stultorum
Re: RELEASE - Fall of Epsilon Pegasi
You select which build you want to use for any given mod in that particular mod's "FSO Settings" under the Options tab in the mod-specific Details window--the mod settings window resembles the settings window in the old FSO launcher. You get FSO to download the release candidate builds by going to the Settings menu (gear icon in the upper right hand corner) going to the Knossos tab in that window, and setting "preferred engine stability? to "RCs." Then hit the save button.
If you don't have Knossos, you need it.

“There was a button," Holden said. "I pushed it."
"Jesus Christ. That really is how you go through life, isn't it?”

 

Offline Vidmaster

  • 211
  • Inventor of FS2 bullettime ;-)
Re: RELEASE - Fall of Epsilon Pegasi
I finally played this. Overall, its pretty good (because of fun missions), but not great in my opinion.

The campaign exists in this weird middle ground between being vanilla-like in gameplay and story but then also taking cues from more character-driven mods. It felt pretty weird to me, with the two named 6th-Fleet-defending and 6th-Fleet-bashing pilot having a sort of plot arc in the middle of a very vanilla-like overall campaign. Similar feelings about the writing of all the other dialog, a weird hybrid between the pseudo-military vanilla-like style and a more outlandish AceCombat-like nonesensical writing. And people doing lots of ooohs and look at thats and other nonsensical lines...

Speaking of which, while the FREDing is good for the most part, the writing is what drags it down for me: Much of a dialog is simply utterly unprofessional in nature, a sharp departure from all the dialog of FS2, which I find it immersion-breaking: People in this campaign are constantly pre-occupied with other things (like making sarcastic comments) during life-or-death situations. Their focus should be on something else, like their job or staying alive. No respectable organization would tolerate this kind of communication style in critical situations. Dialog from commanding officers or capital vessels is similar in quality, and most of the time, not very situation-appropriate (no matter what said situation is, the tone is usually all wrong). All of this reminds me a lot about the missions I wrote in my teens half-a-lifetime ago, when I was creating campaigns for TBP  :lol: This campaign is old too, so who knows, maybe this is actually a very similar situation?

A big failure for me is the whole tactical situation. I will still put it spoiler-tags, even if is no spoiler that Epsilon Pegasi falls, as that is in the title :rolleyes:
Spoiler:
So, the GTVA is supposed to be guarding the Node leading to an NTF-held system. Except, that it does not do so. There are just a handful of ships on station and any actual effort from the NTF on the other side could break the blockade. If the system is mostly secure, the majority of the GTVA's guns should be next to that node and for some reason, they are not. There is never a sensible reason given (no our line of defense has been reprioritized). The breakthrough of an enemy corvette (which is totally expected, given the way they are going about this blockading-thing) is a big deal for the plot, which means the system is safe enough prior to said breakthrough that my original argument holds.

The campaign then goes on a hunt for that corvette, which to nobody's surprise turns out to be part of the NTF "plan", so that Koth can invade the system. Through the node that is now "no longer blocked", except that it never was. I think this whole corvette+signal thing is a very badly constructed macguffin to have the shocking twist of the NTF breakthrough. But it just falls flat.


TLDR; This is a functional campaign, with above average mission design and below average writing. Obviously, this says pretty much nothing because nobody in this community can define a sensible average. View this more as an emotional statement. Play it if you are in the mood for some vanilla-style missions and you have already played or replayed all the other classics.

Weirdly enough, I found the first mission to be the most difficult. I did beat anything except that first mission on either the first or second try on medium, but required about ten attempts for the campaign's start. Going about that blockading thing less seriously was the trick, aka exploiting the fact that most fighters pretty much ignore the cruisers. I held back and took less damage, allowing me to complete the mission.

« Last Edit: June 11, 2022, 12:52:06 pm by Vidmaster »
Devoted member of the Official Karajorma Fan Club (Founded and Led by Mobius).

Does crazy Software Engineering for a living, until he finally musters the courage to start building games for real. Might never happen.

 
Re: RELEASE - Fall of Epsilon Pegasi
Yeah, and Burke should have gotten cashiered on the spot for
Spoiler:
calling the admiral, of all people, a moron on open comms during a mission.  Even though it was true.
  :P
"Courage is the complement of fear.  A fearless man cannot be courageous.  He is also a fool." -- Robert Heinlein

 
Re: RELEASE - Fall of Epsilon Pegasi
Yeah, and Burke should have gotten cashiered on the spot for
Spoiler:
calling the admiral, of all people, a moron on open comms during a mission.  Even though it was true.
  :P

In the third mission of the vanilla Freespace 2 campaign, Alpha 2 ranted about Command intentionally setting them up to fail (which he wasn't wrong about) on an open com and no word of anything happening to him. I think that outside of plot reasons, only the one designated Alpha 1 gets punished

 

Offline Vidmaster

  • 211
  • Inventor of FS2 bullettime ;-)
Re: RELEASE - Fall of Epsilon Pegasi
In the third mission of the vanilla Freespace 2 campaign, Alpha 2 ranted about Command intentionally setting them up to fail (which he wasn't wrong about) on an open com and no word of anything happening to him.

That is actually part of the point I was trying to make. FS2's writing used the few instances of defiance of communication protocol to great effect, like this mission 3 scene after Bosh escaped or the foreshadowing that something is in the nebula and we "need to get the fleet out of here". Since you brought it up, let's analyse mission 3 in greater detail.

We begin by shattering the player's expectations. We are supposed to attack the big ship but it not only seems to be a bit too big for our small wing, it also seems too far away.
Then, we learn that the node should have been blocked, but the line of defense had "to be reprioritized". Finally, Bosh sends a message that we "should question the wisdom" of our leaders.
At this point, our wingman basically bursts out in frustration, voicing out what the player is supposed to experience. We do not understand what is happening and our wingman is pissed.
However, it is absolutely important to stress that both the writers and the voice actor sell the scene, because (A) it never crosses into insulting or childish behavior and (b) it happens after the action, during a moment where nothing happens except that dialog. We reflect on the mission's first minute, aka on the events  of the story thus far and also re-iterate the feeling of Freespace.
The key line here is that "I can live with being a pawn if the game makes sense". Implying that the events we have just witnessed do not make sense (yet).
This mission (one of my favorites from FS2 actually) creates a bit of doubt and uneasyness about the GTVA's leadership, something essential to make the rest of the plot work.
FS2's story has so much hybris and overreach in it, as well as an inevitable catastrophe, but I strongly believe it is this mission that saws the first seed to make it work.

Did I ever mention that I adore FS2's writing? I think FS1 is really generic and weak when it comes to writing but the sequel is just tight and brilliant throughout.

Now, when it comes to consequences for the pilot, we never learn of any. But since FS2 has this whole cog-in-a-machine-feeling, that pilot could have been reprimanded and punished without us learning.
The fact that our wingpeople are mostly name-less characters who may die and be reborn without issue actually helps selling this. In contrast, the issue with Burke in this campaign, aside from choice of words and all the other problems mentioned there, is that he is a named character and we know this is the same moronic pilot over and over who just verbally ****s over his colleagues and superiors during live-of-death situations.
Devoted member of the Official Karajorma Fan Club (Founded and Led by Mobius).

Does crazy Software Engineering for a living, until he finally musters the courage to start building games for real. Might never happen.