[Unknown Target]

I know, I know, I should probably put this in FS modding, but I just wanted a winder opinion of it. Some (I won't even venture to say "quite a few") know of the Hard Light movie (in my sig) and it's sequel (stickied at the top of the main forum - sorry guys, a visit to Penguinbomb's HLP bashing thread disheartened me from writing tonight ), and I just thought that it would be "nice" to have something to pull the entire community together, in the form of a Freespace 2 campaign, possibly standalone (way too much work, but it'd be good because then everyone could download it, rather than just the 90% of the community that has FS2). I think it'd pull the community together as a whole, and hell, it'd be great fun.

Here's my general idea: you load up the game, and you are presented with a welcoming screen ripped from the Hard Light new user registration page. You sign in (probably as your HLP name here), and are presented with the main hall, ripped from the Hard Light forum index; Hard Light is campaigns, Hard Light Art is the tech database, etc.

So, ok, you hop into your beat up n00b-fighter (too bad we don't have the old designations for post counts still, we could use those), and enter your first mission, whereupon you and your various bits of baggage approach the mighty Hard Light station, glistening in the sunlight. Comm chatter bites back and forth, spiked with a few insults and other noobish questions. As you grow nearer to the station, let's say, oh...Black Wolf notices you. You hear the HLP greeting, and are immediately hit by the HLP welcome beam, sending you reeling - as you steady yourself, you are greeted (everyone can put in their own two cents), and instructed to dock at wherever, thus ending the mission.


---

Being a new user, you have little respect, and your tiny ship is dwarfed by the mighty capital ships of the older members (higher post counts = better ships, with the admins probably flying around in Hecates or Orions or what not).

Now here's where I divulge from standard HLP fair - I'm thinking of adding in an AI copilot, probably with some odd personality quirk (homicidal maniac anyone?) to guide you around and basically talk for you - ask questions, give you objectives, and the like. Any opinions on this?
Here's an interesting twist as well - we could maybe pick three seperate, well-standing forum members to use as templates for the robot, maybe even set this after the HLP movie, and say their brains were encoded onto chips (that's optional). Each one represents a different mindset of the community; the an0n bot represents, well, trying to destroy all of HLP, the Setekh bot represents the nicer side, trying to help the community overall, while, oh...the Tin Can bot is something you scrounge up out of the junk yard, way out in deep space, and represents just general noobishness. Each bot guides you down a seperate path, and gives you different interactions; this might be too big, if it is, just scrap it and go with a cingular storyline.


Anywho, off that tangent; I'm thinking of several forum-destroying crises (some of them including the player and his bot), but I'll hold off on that until I get an opinion of this Sorry if it's hard to read, it's late at night and I'm just a wee bit uncreative, heh.

[Nuclear1]

This sounds interesting. Very interesting. Actually, I'd being interested in FREDing some of it, if we can work out the details.

[Thor]

i like it.  can i be a stealth ship?  it would perfectly suit my lurking ways 

[Singh]

Wayyyy ahead of you UT.

At least, in the sense, I started a mission and collected a list of what fighters/ships people wanted to be.

And then I got lazy and forgot about it.

[Nuclear1]

i like it.  can i be a stealth ship?  it would perfectly suit my lurking ways 

Nope. That is so Ransom's ship.

Edit: A good place to start...

[Unknown Target]

That would be a good idea, although the noob's ships would have to be decidadly, well...noobish . I'm glad the response to this is so positive. I'll see what I can do about storylines

[Unknown Target]

Ok, here we go (I just banged this out in the quick reply box)...you, the player, has just arrived after the new forum upgrade. Things are a bit iffy, not everything works right, and the entire station loses power for almost three hours a few days after the system switch; fortunately, it's brought back online, and all appears business as usual.

Being a newbie, you have to earn respect; trolling through the various threads and looking for interesting topics is getting you a bit, but not enough; if you really want to get to the top of the forum heirarchy, you're going to have to pull your weight. Mining asteroids seems like no fun, and making models is just too much work; so your bot, luckily for you, pulls a few strings and manages to get you into the underworld flame wars going out in the asteroid belt far beyond HLP's orbit (this is where the stories would diverge a bit; depending on your bot, you might get entered on different pretenses, or directed to junior forum moderation; i.e. reporting posts [blasting the people who are annoying others] - that would be the Setekh bot, btw ).
Now here's the deal; fighting in the flame wars may earn you respect, but the higher community members, such as the admins and grognards, immediately take a large dislike to you. If you go with the Setekh bot, it's the other way around.
So, let's just say that you've got enough respect and "posts" (kills, possibly?) to get noticed; you move up a forum rank, and are now flying a better fighter. After some ditzing around, looking for some new jobs (Maeg, this is where that new jump system stuff you did, with the persistant jumping thing comes in), such as asteroid clearing, troll clearing, and demolition (destroying derelict forums floating through space), some trouble starts to brew over the pond at the CIC (not sure if we can do this, it can be changed; but, it'd foster some inter-community cooperation if we got the CIC to send some members over to work on their half). Apparantly, dropping membership has forced the admins into a corner; either let the forum die, or go for a last-ditch effort and attempt to forcibly "persuade" other forumites to convert to CICianity.

It starts innocuously enough; border patrol vessels along the CIC/Hard Light border start to dissappear, randomly, seemingly in accidents; nothing big, just maybe a freighter or two, possibly a military fighter here and there. No one pays attention to the equal surge in CIC membership, until finally, the CIC gets a little bit too close. Kalifreth is on patrol in the area, his destroyer running some regular checks on a radar station in the vicinty of the CIC/HLP border. Unknown contacts, moving fast, appear out of the asteroid belt on an incoming course; they're shaped like large arrowheads, but are much too large to be Hard Light craft; they attack the destroyer and the station, severely damaging Kalfireth's destroyer. Only when he deploys his fighter craft to the enemy dissapate into the asteroid field; further scans reveal no further activity.

Upon further examination of gun cameras and radar signatures, the enemy craft are identified as F-66 Thunderbolt heavy fighters, belonging to the first fighter wing of the CIC defense force. A flurry of activity erupts, as posts are made on both boards, debating the causes and reasons of the attack, and slowly connecting the other dissappearences. The posts slowly devolve into flame wars, the admins trying their best to lock them in time; over at the CIC, the panic is at it's hight, the front page is filled with flame wars, as Freespace denizens stream over to voice their minds (the player is involved with these flamings, by the way ). Eventually, the flames spill out, and a full fledged board war develops, thus starting our saga.


Thoughts/opinions?

[Nuclear1]

Sounds great to me. So, this would be like an RPG-style campaign, where the player is given the choice of bot/sortie to rise in the ranks?

As for the story, I think the story should start with the joining and end with the inter-community flame war. By this point, the player is either infamous or respected enough that he's now a significant HLP member.

[Unknown Target]

Isn't that what I had? You join, do some odd activities to gain some standing (maybe flash forward a year), then some trouble starts brewing with the CIC, resulting in a board war.

[Nuclear1]

May just be me reading it wrong. I thought that the part all the way up to the flame wars was only the beginning, and that there would be more story afterwards. Still, it's all good.

[Unknown Target]

Ah, ok No, that's not the backstory, that's all the game; I generally like to have the players play through the backstories, it's more interesting/exciting.

Anyway, I'll start typing up a storyline I guess, maybe do some rough sketches to just get my mind working (based on what I had in mind when I wrote the movies), but who else would like to participate in this?

[Turnsky]

you mean a mod that's based on those numerous movie scripts and stories you've written, correct?

[TrashMan]

Sounds awensome!

[IceFire]

Sounds a bit like the old Descent Chroncles VS Planet FreeSpace mission we did for FreeSpace 1.

Basically it was a mission layed out with two Leviathan cruisers at either side.  You were asked to join one of the two teams and you'd proceed to shoot down and destroy the other teams ships...all appropriately named by the nicknames of the guys on each side.  It was great fun and absolutely hilarious

[Unknown Target]

you mean a mod that's based on those numerous movie scripts and stories you've written, correct?

Not on the movies, but on the same general idea (HLP being an actualy place).

[Turnsky]

you mean a mod that's based on those numerous movie scripts and stories you've written, correct?

Not on the movies, but on the same general idea (HLP being an actualy place).

nice 

[Ransom]

Sounds very cool. I might be willing to help FRED some of it as well if I get the time.

What about including some of the other communities at some point, like Game Warden and GTD?

[Polpolion]

I think Ill try somthing like that...cya...

[Unknown Target]

Sizzler, why don't you finish one of your many other campaigns first?

[Polpolion]

too late:  http://www.yourfilelink.com/get.php?fid=967

Its nowhere near done.
sorry the file is untitled.
its junkie.
sorry if your not in it.


EDIT: oops. i meant chunkie