FreeSpace Releases > Mission & Campaign Releases
Warmachine Release 2: ZIPSANDZAPSANDMISSLERACKS
roadnottaken:
Playing through Warmachine has been an utter joy so far. I really like what you've done with the difficulty and game balance.
I want to focus in on Forced Entry in particular. I fondly remember playing through AoA in the early days, when AoA was only partially complete and FE was this massive setpiece battle to serve as a capstone. The battle was a massive challenge, and I had to replay it many times, slowly building up the skill and tactics to make it through this nailbiter of a fleet battle and emerge victorious.
On later replays, the mission lost much of its luster. The strategies were known. The player's task devolved to racing from the front of the battle line to the back, defanging enemy warships. There simply wasn't time to help out in dogfights, or even maintain situational awareness of the overall battle beyond ordering wingmen to defend each new ship as it arrives. Blue Planet is still some of the best content to come out of the FreeSpace community. Updates to War in Heaven and the rebalance of the retail FS2 campaign have kept things fresh and interesting. But the passage of time has not been kind to Age of Aquarius.
Warmachine brings back the challenge and discovery of the early days, while very clearly forging its own path and showcasing all the massive leaps forward the FSO engine has made over the years. Battles are fast-paced and dynamic. Ordering a kill and watching my squadmates annihilate an enemy formation or cruiser in a matter of seconds is a sheer delight. There is real choice in which engagements to wade into and which to leave to squadmates. The new weapons add immense variety and require much greater strategy than the classic trebuchet spam. And the new HUD icons massively improve battlefield awareness. And best of all, the massive power boost of the WM arsenal doesn't feel the least bit cheap because the shivans have become just as lethal. The gameplay of the reimagined Forced Entry mission was dynamic, engaging, and unforgiving without ever feeling unfair. I had to relearn how to effectively use the weapons at my disposal, push my squadron to their limits while being careful not to overextend them, and die and/or watch the Temeraire go up in flames several times in the process. And I enjoyed every minute of it.
Thank you, truly, for breathing new life into one of the community's most venerable campaigns, and for bringing to it a style and flair that is so clearly your own. I've spent many an hour enjoying FreeSpace content stretching back even to the retail FS1 days, and it's an absolute joy to find continued innovation in the community twenty-plus years later.
EatThePath:
Thank you very much for that post, it was a delight to read. I am glad you stuck through getting it to run, and that you're getting what we hoped out of the reworks!
EatThePath:
2.6.0 uploaded just now targets FSO 23.0 and potentially fixes a few mission bugs.
Warmade Build x.11 just went up to. It is no longer needed for the mod but is currently trialing some new bloom changes
Colonol Dekker:
Just wanted to say, really big fan.
But I can only read this threads title in a Bill Cosby voice.
roadnottaken:
I'm getting a crash to desktop on Universal Truth, shortly after the initial cutscene ends and shivan fighters start arriving en masse. Interestingly enough, I was able to play through the entirety of Maximum Truth without experiencing a CtD. This is with WM 2.6.0 and FSO 23.0.0-RC1, although it also happened when I tweaked WM 2.5.1 to run with a recent nightly build.
Running Fast Debug popped up several modal dialogs on game startup with warnings. Shortly into the mission, I started getting spammed with dialogs referencing the Lua error at the bottom of the linked logfile. I don't know for certain if this was at the same point as the original crash, because
* I'd sped gameplay up a bunch to avoid waiting through the cutscene again, and couldn't tell exactly where in the opening sequence this triggered
* After seeing the same error message pop up several times over, I got tired of clicking through the dialogs and hit "exit"https://fsnebula.org/log/63a149753c97ea8ae9ccee8d
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version