Author Topic: Surface Combat  (Read 1882 times)

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Offline BigJerk

  • 22
Out of curiosity's sake, I can't help but ask the question where there's not more surface combat in freespace mods.  Now I don't know jack about modding or the fs2 open engine; I'm just perfectly happy to mooch off of others' skills and creativity ;)  Nonetheless, I've only seen one campaign that even features a planet/moon surface, and that's Blue Planet.  I've played all of the original fs1 and 2 campaigns, Silent Threat, Templar, Blue Planet, Diaspora and part of Vassago's Dirge and Inferno (I think it was Inferno, might have been a different campaign), and am starting The Babylon Project and Wing Commander Saga, and out of all of those, only one mission (two if you count the Gef homeworld mission) had an actual planetary/moon surface, and that mission featured no combat.  Is it because surface combat is hard to do, or surfaces are hard to create?  I would love to see some more of that kind of play.  I understand it's a space sim, but I think a mission here and there with some terrain would be kind of interesting.  I haven't played WCS or TBP yet, so I don't know if those feature any surface combat (don't spoil it for me!), but I'm attempting to start those.  Between poor Kuwaiti internet (currently deployed) and graphical issues with TBP, it's been a challenge, but I'll get it figured out.  Anyway, now that I'm done rambling, have a great day, and be sure to fire in short, controlled bursts.

 
Can't say for certain, but I'm pretty sure it's mainly due to the AI being really bad at collision avoidance :/

 

Offline 0rph3u5

  • 211
  • Oceans rise. Empires fall.
In TBP there is one in Raider Wars and the Fortune Hunters-campaigns (also TBP) have at least one too

The problems with that kind of mission are not few ...
for starters, the "ground" has to be a model of huge dimensions, which has to be made and detailed; on top of that it is a normal object in the mission as far as FRED is concerned (which leads into the mentioned AI issues, the AI simply doesn't mind running into it)

The "terrain" being fixed dimension also has the downside that you can't scale along all dimensions because at some point you are going to see the edges or the model is in the way ...both cut down the space you have to make your missions

Then there are objects "on the ground" like vehicles which need a good deal editing (or scripts) to work as the engine is not per se designed for such restricted objects...

Other minor stuff like gravitiy simulation is at least as an option there but I n3ver worked with it
« Last Edit: November 29, 2016, 07:56:51 pm by 0rph3u5 »
"As you sought to steal a kingdom for yourself, so must you do again, a thousand times over. For a theft, a true theft, must be practiced to be earned." - The terms of Nyrissa's curse, Pathfinder: Kingmaker

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"I am Curiosity, and I've always wondered what would become of you, here at the end of the world." - The Guide/The Curious Other, Othercide

"When you work with water, you have to know and respect it. When you labour to subdue it, you have to understand that one day it may rise up and turn all your labours into nothing. For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing?" - Graham Swift, Waterland

"...because they are not Dragons."

 

Offline AdmiralRalwood

  • 211
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There's at least one ground-assault mission in the upcoming 4th act of Blue Planet: War in Heaven (Darius posted a video of it a while ago, although I can't find it anymore), and UndyingNephalim's Star Fox mod has shown several videos of surface missions (here is a link to the most recent post containing one that I could find).
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Codethulhu GitHub wgah'nagl fhtagn.

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.

When you gaze long into BMPMAN, BMPMAN also gazes into you.

"I am one of the best FREDders on Earth" -General Battuta

<Aesaar> literary criticism is vladimir putin

<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 niffiwan

  • 211
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I think it's this one

Creating a fs2_open.log | Red Alert Bug = Hex Edit | MediaVPs 2014: Bigger HUD gauges | 32bit libs for 64bit Ubuntu
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Debian Packages (testing/unstable): Freespace2 | wxLauncher
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m|m: I think I'm suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Bmpman is starting to make sense and it's actually written reasonably well...

 

Offline Black Wolf

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A big part of it is the work:reward ratio. Making a good looking ground model takes a lot of work - It's up there with building a destroyer if you really want it to look good. Then you have to make the skybox, and all the scripting, and all the FREDding - it's definitely non trivial. You constantly run into restrictions related to polys and optimization, and texture quality (this is a model you can expect a player to be up close to frequently, so pixel density becomes a major issue. So does UV alignment and making sure the seams in your textures aren't too noticeable. There are so many things you have to take account of, it's literally months of work to do well.

And then you use it for a mission or two, and ultimately the player can choose to fly to an altitude of a few kilometers and it all looks obviously fake and crappy all of a sudden.

People are doing it, and have done it. But it tends to be restricted in some way, and it often takes a long time. I don't think it will ever be common.
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Offline General Battuta

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The AI has no idea what the **** to do so these missions have to be pretty tightly scripted.

 

Offline BigJerk

  • 22
Didn't realize the AI was so bad with collisions.  I knew it was bad here and there, but I didn't realize it would just slam into the ground for the golly gee willickers of it.  I imagined graphics was a problem, which was why I was wondering if simple invisible boundaries (like in BP WIH lunar mission) would suffice.  Didn't really think about how painful building the ground would be.  It's too bad, because I think it would be pretty cool, but I understand the massive pain it would be now.

 

Offline BigJerk

  • 22
I think it's this one


Just watched this.  If it actually turns out as good as this looks (I understand it's still in progress, but for where it is, it looks pretty good), I'll be super happy.  Man guys, you're all a bunch of jerks, you got me super excited for BP and then I reminded myself that it probably won't come out till 2020.  Time to start troubleshooting TBP, I gotta get it working :banghead:

 

Offline Kie99

  • 211
It's something that's been discussed a bit over the years and there have been a couple of attempts at it but it's so hard to do because the game engine just isn't designed for it.  It's like playing a heavily modded First Person Shooter and asking why nobody's ever done a mission where you're in a 100M athletics competition.  It's probably doable and well done to anyone who manages it but it's never going to be common.
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Zookeeper at one point created a proof of concept Death Star mission using FotG assets.  While cool in concept, it's really difficult to get the artistic parts of it working well enough to be worth it.  Plus the previously mentioned AI issues.