[DarthWang]

Nice, but I thought there were no Hercules fighters back then

[Antares]

Took another run at this today (it's an oldie, but a goodie) since it was up on Knossos to try. A couple of notes:

- The Cain that jumps in behind the planet in order to trigger the "battle" music doesn't actually trigger it anymore; the soundtrack doesn't change until the main Shivan force jumps in. This is presumably due to a change in FSO.

- That Hercules is from the future. 

- Although it pains me to say it, it may be time to retire Dark's planet. It hasn't aged well and will only look worse as the FSO engine and media assets continue to improve, and there's already a giant planet in the mission background anyway. As it stands, it's just a Playstation-esque brown blob that's taking up system resources. 

- This is sort of a balance issue and sort of obvious, but there's really no way to survive the Shivan attack without totally avoiding it. You mix it up with Manticores and Scorpions in an unshielded Apollo armed with ML-16s, and you die, simple as that. The only way to make it to the debriefing is to get several clicks away from the battle zone and watch the Shivans kill everyone. Now, FS fans will obviously know that a storm is coming as soon as the mission starts, but new players (and hopefully we'll get a few, coming off FS2's recent giveaway on GOG) won't have that advantage. Granted, the whole mission is just one giant Easter Egg anyway, but even so.

[Goober5000]

Took another run at this today (it's an oldie, but a goodie) since it was up on Knossos to try.

Glad to hear.

- The Cain that jumps in behind the planet in order to trigger the "battle" music doesn't actually trigger it anymore; the soundtrack doesn't change until the main Shivan force jumps in. This is presumably due to a change in FSO.

I just took in the code and didn't see any apparent changes.  The only thing that might affect this is if a support ship arrived less than 60 seconds before the Cain did.

- That Hercules is from the future. 

Ah, but if you look at the cutscene, the officer's ship display has Hercules ship icons.

- Although it pains me to say it, it may be time to retire Dark's planet. It hasn't aged well and will only look worse as the FSO engine and media assets continue to improve, and there's already a giant planet in the mission background anyway. As it stands, it's just a Playstation-esque brown blob that's taking up system resources. 

Take a look at the screenshot comparison included in the mod folder; there are actually two planets in the background, in addition to the large one.  I could replace all of them with a skybox, but I would need someone to create it for me.

- This is sort of a balance issue and sort of obvious, but there's really no way to survive the Shivan attack without totally avoiding it. You mix it up with Manticores and Scorpions in an unshielded Apollo armed with ML-16s, and you die, simple as that. The only way to make it to the debriefing is to get several clicks away from the battle zone and watch the Shivans kill everyone. Now, FS fans will obviously know that a storm is coming as soon as the mission starts, but new players (and hopefully we'll get a few, coming off FS2's recent giveaway on GOG) won't have that advantage. Granted, the whole mission is just one giant Easter Egg anyway, but even so.

I don't think there's really any way around this.

[Nightmare]

Well I think the idea behind the attack on R128 was that pretty much everyone gets killed so it should be OK. Of course one could guardian the player and have the mission end upon the players demise and dump them into a generic DB, but it doesn't seem necessary as literally everyone who has watched the FSPort intro will know roughly what happens in that mission.