[Hellstryker]

Alright, i'm surprised nobody has said this before: BHs music does not fit well with this campaign, and I honestly think it could've used some metal here and there.

This aside, what really bugs me is the storyline. It's like PI except with Shivans. 

[Droid803]

Firstly, I picked BH's music because 1) I liked them, and 2) I had them on hand.I don't know of any places where to look for music tracks, so I had to make do with what I had (originally, I just had no special event music at all which kinda felt 'meh').

Also, I haven't played PI past the third mission (and when I completed the missions, the only custom campaign I had played was BluePlanet), so I don't know.

[Hellstryker]

Well... next time you make a campaign, you should play through everything popular first.. PI was easily my favorite campaign, and this just feels like a cheap watered down rip of it.

...However, since you never played it, you're forgiven.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

I love the Duress track, and I think it fits very well with the climax of the campaign. And I don't like metal

[eliex]

Aye. BH's music is well used and suitable for the mission. It's all a matter of perspective. 

[Molybdenum]

Sorry for my temporary thickness but BH = ???.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

blackhole

[eliex]

 . . . a.k.a Erik McClure 

[Flaming_Sword]

I just played through this and... some elements may end up in my mod...

DISCLAIMER

I am extremely biased (guess why ), so feel free to ignore parts of this post.

GAMEPLAY

The setting and plot might be a bit iffy (see disclaimer), but the missions were action packed and a lot of fun. I found missions much easier when I gave all my wingmen giga lasers (the Scarlash), though some did seem a bit BOEish (fitted the context, so I don't really have a problem with that ).

LOOK/FEEL

I liked the music. The retextures of the nightmare ships also looked very good. However, with shivan vs shivan battles, my whole screen was filled with flashing red and black (probably not something you can do much about).

TECHNICAL

The shiny capship problem other people have mentioned can be solved by mucking around with the alpha on the texture shinemap (you tested with environment mapping on, right?).

I remember spotting a couple of errors in text (few and minor, and not too big a deal, can't even remember where I found them).

I'm currently trying to figure out a good way to make animated glowmaps for the SF Gorgon in line with the mediavps (hopefully in an automatic and generic way so other shivan ships can be done too), so you might be interested in my results when I'm done.

Ditto for normal maps.

Have you considered using autoaim for the seraphims? This can be highly unbalancing, though. That and it requires a fairly recent build.

Have you also considered going all the way with the interface screens?

SUMMARY

It's fun. Go play it.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

The game crashed in Piercing Gaze, when I was scanning the Saraknyal.

It also crashes at the title screen on debug. Take a look at the attached fs2_open.log.

Here's an IRC dialogue that might be useful:

[21:24]   <Wanderer>   make sure you dont have the warnings #
[21:24]   <Wanderer>   WARNING: "Weapon explosion 'RailgunImpact' does not have an LOD0 anim!" at weapons.cpp:1241
[21:24]   <Wanderer>   #
[21:24]   <Wanderer>   WARNING: "Outer blast radius of weapon Shivan EM Cannon is zero - EMP will not work. Add $Outer Radius to weapon table entry." at weapons.cpp:2616
[21:25]   <Wanderer>   #
[21:25]   <Wanderer>   WARNING: Weapon 'Plasma Flak' has both LASER and POF render types! Will only use POF type!
[21:25]   <Wanderer>   #
[21:25]   <Wanderer>   WARNING: Laser glow specified on non-LASER type weapon (Plasma Flak)!
[21:25]   <Androgeos>   Huh?
[21:25]   <Wanderer>   each and every one of those _needs_ to be fixed
[21:25]   <Wanderer>   from the log you posted
[21:25]   <Androgeos>   Oh, okay.
[21:25]   <ShadowGorrath>   Try it with a new build now
[21:26]   <Androgeos>   Wait wait wait. Downloading r5040...
[21:26]   <Wanderer>   the warnings are there not to annoy you but to prevent the game from crashing... should modder ignore them then it is highly likely that the game will ctd or worse sooner or later
[21:27]   <Nuke>   hahahahaha
[21:27]   <Androgeos>   Switched to debug r5040.
[21:27]   <ShadowGorrath>   The plasma flak errors are from not having the flak flag?
[21:29]   <Androgeos>   Crashed at the same spot.
[21:29]   <Wanderer>   of course it does
[21:30]   <Wanderer>   it is supposed to crash due the bad data
[21:30]   <Wanderer>   so...
[21:30]   <ShadowGorrath>   Why didn't it crash to anyone else then?
[21:31]   * Androgeos   has updated http://pastebin.com/d31f0cd1b
[21:31]   <Wanderer>   plasma flak seems to (looking from code) have a pof file defined for it (ie. pof renderer) while having also laser renderer enabled. weapon should use model OR laser renderer, not both
[21:32]   <ShadowGorrath>   Doesn't flak use both?
[21:32]   <Wanderer>   or then it lacks laser bitmap field
[21:32]   <Wanderer>   flak uses neither

[attachment stolen by Slimey Goober]

[General Battuta]

Battle of Endor Syndrome. Battles that are so large and chaotic the player can't really affect them. Considered poor mission design.

[Droid803]

BOE = Battle of Endor.
In FS, its generally carries a negative connotation of being a battle which is too big for the player to make any difference in.
I've certainly tested that you do fail your objectives if you do not follow your directives (as in do nothing)...
Yes, the scale is a bit big, but the player has a defined purpose.

As for the warnings:
I'm sorry that I forgot to check debug one final time after rebalancing the modpack. Trust me, there were a whole ****load more than that and it still ran. At any rate, these will be fixed, and I'll put a patch up

[Androgeos Exeunt]

You might want to download Flaming_Sword's Shivans! v0.2 mod and check out the Single Mission "The Face of BoE".

[Commander Zane]

That is the neat thing I noticed with the Freespace SCP. Not only are they improving all the retail ships but many of the fan made ones as well to have htl and normal maps, it seems. Other SCP for other games don't seem to mess with the fan made textures and stuff, but this community does, which makes it interesting.

Also, I like Duress and Temperature sound tracks. I do listen to them out of game. I deemed the tracks that good.

Also, what does BOE mean? I can't find that slang in wikipedia or the urban dictionary that seems to match how it is being used here. The closest I came was Blades of War, a computer game. Maybe that is what it meant, though I never played it nor heard of that game.

Wait a minute, there's more sources that people have been allowed to mess with besides FreeSpace and Descent 2?

[Droid803]

The patch is up:
GET IT HERE: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/126554/FS2/TOD_Patch.rar
(~115 KB)

Its just a *.ani and a few *.tbls which have been fixed.
Should get rid of most if not all of the debug errors (it did when I ran it on my build).
Only download this if you're getting a crash...you shouldn't need it otherwise.

[eliex]

Neat - although since I experienced no crashes I can do without it. 

[Commander Zane]

www.descent2.de

It's called D2X-XL.

You might want to download Flaming_Sword's Shivans! v0.2 mod and check out the Single Mission "The Face of BoE".

For the number of ships that appear in the battlefield the mission is way too short.

[Flaming_Sword]

You might want to download Flaming_Sword's Shivans! v0.2 mod and check out the Single Mission "The Face of BoE".

For the number of ships that appear in the battlefield the mission is way too short.

Any longer and it starts to get boring and repetitive, just like in a real BOE mission.

[Commander Zane]

Other than Trancsend's storyline, it's all pretty much the same anyway each mission.
You have your convoy escort missions, defend installation / disabled Destroyer missions, bomb capital ship missions, raid cargo depot missions, and act as fighter cover for other bomber missions.

And usually the Fast Mod mission takes about 14 minutes, I like trying to rack up as many kills as I can.
A six minute battle of epic proportions would be like "OMG DOOMSDAY, oh...it wasn't that bad."

[Androgeos Exeunt]

Two things that made me dislike Transcend like liver:

- Repetition;
- Inability to choose ship or weapons loadout.

ToD is nothing like that.