Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - FS2 Required => Blue Planet => Topic started by: General Battuta on February 04, 2013, 12:47:05 pm
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Anyone poking through the Tenebra mission files will find a fair bit of disabled content, mysterious SEXPs, and unused dialogue - a Federation pilot begging for his life, a whole set of dialogue for the Icarus opening, a cluster of events with triggers set to false. These are the leftovers of iterative development, the process of figuring out the best way to hit a story beat or make a mission engaging. And there are other relics that aren't as apparent: mission concepts that went unused or cut, gameplay systems that never quite flew, none of which left fossils in the final release.
In this thread I'd like to talk about some of those. There's a lot to be said about Icarus, the opening cutscene, which once featured a few lines of dialogue and stayed focused on the battle between Calder and Steele during the events of Delenda Est. But Axem would probably be a better fit to discuss that mission.
In the mean time I'm going to skip ahead to M18, Nothing is True.
The Gas Miners
One of the core mechanics in this mission is the ability to infect the Vasudan gas miners, converting them into flying bombs. The mechanic is important for a few reasons - it introduces the idea of scanning ships as a mode of engagement, which is reused in M19 and M21; it spares players the chore of individually hunting down and destroying each ship in the fairly large convoy; and it points to the act's key metanarrative element of decisive action on one point, rather than attritive action on many points, as a means to secure victory.
As the mission stands, the convoy will begin to break away from the gas miners once the first one detonates. This incentivizes players to infect all four, then attempt to detonate them simultaneously. Originally, though, the mechanic worked quite differently - the convoy never split up into groups, and the gas miner crews would detect the virus as soon as it was uploaded and begin a purge process. The 'correct' method of attack, then, was to target each miner one at a time and detonate it individually, then move on to the next.
We decided that it made the Vasudans look pretty stupid to maintain formation around a group of potential flying bombs, particularly when their defensive net was down and there was little reason to stay in tight formation. Furthermore, splitting the gameplay tasks into two clean cycles - scan, then kill - rather than four scan/kill cycles reduced the amount of mode switching the player had to conduct, giving a little more process purity to the gameplay and tying into the idea of 'prepare the ground, then act decisively' that permeates Fedayeen operations.
Making the miner explosions player-friendly was a challenge, particularly because we didn't want wingmen flying into the detonations and exploding. (Observant players will note that the first Fedayeen wingman to be knocked out of action in this mission will withdraw, leaving the other two to help Laporte. There's a distinct variation of the final conversation for each permutation of two wingmen, as well as a variant if all three are still present). Large explosions in 3D space are nearly impossible to monitor well in FreeSpace, since the visuals don't signpost them nicely, so we ended up giving the player some (hopefully effective) shockwave resistance and providing the wingmen with AI commands to avoid exploding miners. I'm not actually sure these commands worked - this is something we'll need to follow up on as it ties into our constant quest to improve AI behavior.
The Ainsarii received a significant buff between R1 and R2, largely due to combat experience in this mission. It's a big ship and needs to be at least modestly tough to avoid frustration.
The Ejected Pilot
This mission is notable for its brutality, both physically - the primary action involves the eradication of a huge number of mostly defenseless ships - and morally. For some time it was even worse: one of the Federation pilots who arrived on the scene would eject from his ship after being shot down, and the Fedayeen would need to sanitize him.
The ejected pilot would appear after both the convoy and the UEF fighters had been dealt with. The player had a few choices in their approach to the situation. They could kill the ejected pilot immediately, or hold a lengthy conversation with him, assuring him that he was a hero, that he'd accidentally helped contribute to an important operation, and that he'd be okay and with his wingmen soon. The player would then either kill the wingman herself, or refuse, in which case the Fedayeen wingmen would step in and execute the task.
There's a lot of dialogue from this sequence still in the mission file, and it can get pretty gutwrenching. We felt it was too on-the-nose: it simply repeated the same moral challenge present in the 'shoot down UEF fighters' gameplay loop, but made even more personal and difficult. It began to stretch belief that the Fedayeen couldn't snatch this pilot with a transport and whisk him away to sit out the war. Additionally, it provided another long, talky sequence in a mission already loaded with dialogue and a very talky coda.
We'd already played the 'life of an ejected pilot' card in Act 1 and didn't want to retread the same ground. Ultimately, while it might have been an interesting narrative beat, I think the mission is stronger for its absence.
The Fedayeen 'virtual AI'
Much of the personality of the Fedayeen wingmen is conveyed through their actions and responses to player orders, rather than chunks of dialogue. The Fedayeen wingmen are each essentially perfect pilots, statistically, and we wanted to build on that by making them smart and giving them some initiative.
Thanks to FRED trickery, the wingmen are able to interpret orders and translate them into more effective AI goals. An attack order on one small transport in a group will queue up attack orders on the whole group, for instance. While convenient, though, this wasn't very readable for players. The AI is most notable when it's not doing its job, rather than when it is. How would we signal the intelligence and context-sensitivity of the Fedayeen wingmen?
We ended up with a pretty extensive 'virtual persona' system, in which the Fedayeen provided context-sensitive dialogue for specific orders. Telling Falconer to attack a Serapis will lead her to make a viciously sarcastic remark about the similarity between the Serapis and Anubis; Kovacs will react with skepticism if you tell him to attack a gas miner that isn't infected with the virus; Vidaura will express sorrow when ordered to kill one of the interloping UEF pilots. This same system appears extensively in M21, where the wingmen know when they're being told to attack the Carthage vs. a fleeing gas miner vs. a heavily defended installation.
I'd like to say a bit more about this mission's narrative and our drive to tell the story by presenting rather than narrating, but work calls.
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That amount of thought in a (every?) single mission is truly impressive :yes:
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spoler tags much <hides eyes from act 3 content>
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This is the BP forum. It's going to have BP spoilers.
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spoler tags much <hides eyes from act 3 content>
If you want to avoid spoilers, why are you clicking on a link that advertises cut content, hidden features and dev stories?
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I'm still amazed at how well crafted the VI for the pilots in HFH is. The intelligence in the defend Serenity command is great.
I've never been able to order wings of fighters to defend a target and have them reliably cover all angles of defense: bomb busting and proactive enemy engagement and all the other things they could do meant that I could freely do everything that I felt was best suited to a player, while not losing out on other objectives because my wingmates were actually good enough to do it themselves!
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Tenebra was really the first campaign that got me thinking of wingmen as more than floating turrets that spam dialogue at you.
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I'm still amazed at how well crafted the VI for the pilots in HFH is. The intelligence in the defend Serenity command is great.
I've never been able to order wings of fighters to defend a target and have them reliably cover all angles of defense: bomb busting and proactive enemy engagement and all the other things they could do meant that I could freely do everything that I felt was best suited to a player, while not losing out on other objectives because my wingmates were actually good enough to do it themselves!
Well, it helps that they can't die.
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So is this thread supposed to be an incremental version of the Act 1 WiH commentary videos the team did way back when R1 was released?
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I'm still amazed at how well crafted the VI for the pilots in HFH is. The intelligence in the defend Serenity command is great.
I've never been able to order wings of fighters to defend a target and have them reliably cover all angles of defense: bomb busting and proactive enemy engagement and all the other things they could do meant that I could freely do everything that I felt was best suited to a player, while not losing out on other objectives because my wingmates were actually good enough to do it themselves!
Well, it helps that they can't die.
They are actually more able to 'die' than most plot-invulnerable wingmen, especially in m21.
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A nice read! :yes: This really goes to show the level of detail you guys operate at.
That being said, in my opinion the Ejected pilot part of the mission Nothing is True would have really been morally challenging (The player could have been given the option to take the pilot prisoner only after a certain amount of dialogue, while the option to sanitize him/her would be open right from the start) and it shouldn't have been cut. But then again, its just my personal opinion.
And another thing, this regarding the sophisticated AI wingmen and their handling of player orders, how do you guys track which order the player has given his wingmen? SEXP's or scripts?
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I was really impressed with your wingman in the mission to destroy the carthage. While yes they were invincible, they were still incredibly effective and carrying out objectives, especially protecting the frigate in the beginning.
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Icarus
What better way is there to start an action packed act release than with an action packed intro cutscene? One that jumps across from Jupiter to Saturn to Neptune and back again until we (in a more than usual literal sense) graze the Sun. But hold on there, Icarus wasn't always jumping across planets and certainly wasn't completely envisioned this way.
The cutscene (at this time untitled) was originally thought of as a pure battle between Steele and Calder. There was, of course, mention that Calder would be running interference on Steele during Delenda Est, so this would expand on that. Calder hears the Wargods have failed, so he needs to retreat. Sounds simple enough, its one big Battle of Endor, right? Well, the first attempt was... really boring. Everything was set up a little too traditionally at the start. Both sides were fighting in a formation and it might have been neat for an actual mission, but there was very little WOW factor. This needed to change.
A Musical Roadmap
Icarus changed it. The music was perfect, meant as a trailer piece for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and like trailer music should be, it crams a lot of action into every note. So there was now a roadmap to build an action packed intro cutscene. Just listening to it you could begin to make out how to divide up the cutscene. It starts off slow, with some establishing and building action. A sudden hit and the music gets faster and louder. Another hit and we're knee-deep in an electronic symphony. As the music goes on, there's some smaller hits. Vocals come in, everything in the background becomes a little bit quieter, but slowly builds up again. Then near the end we have some more sarrowful music before we begin to hit the ending. The trick was to use all of these interesting points, the hits, and the changes in tone or instruments to find good scene transition points and to make sure they are evenly spaced out.
There's a lot that could be said about all the scenes, but I'm just going to talk about a few of them.
So in the first 45 seconds, we've got some nice rising action going on. Things start quiet and get louder. This gets translated visually by starting off in deep space and slowly revealling our battle scape to the viewer. At this point the battle was solely Calder vs Steele, so the combatants were the UEFr Vikrant and UEFr Toreador (both Narayanas) duking it on to the GTCv Juarez (Deimos) and the Seneca (Diomedes). Because its a cutscene and the viewer can't see things like health, we are free to give the ships very high AI levels to maximize fire rates and to make them invulnerable so we can have a nice fire show and have no one get hurt (There might have been some off screen, of course). So the first camera angle was pointed straight 'down' and the camera would pan over the Toreador, filling the entire shot and continue to pan showing its combat with the GTVA corvettes.
Scale in space is hard because there's no ground and no giant shadows. What works best to show scale is to try to fill the frame with a ship, or at least to have part of the ship cut off by the frame's edge. And what also helps is having other smaller ships so you can see just how big these spaceships are! So a little Kent racing across the Toreador's side gives a good sense of just how large these spaceships are (fun fact, a Kent can fit in a Nara's large railgun barrels).
Another problem is having a sense of movement in space. This can be really hard because a static scene is a boring one. Nothing grabs the eye's attention or guides it anywhere. In the 5 or so seconds at the very start, the camera is moving towards the Toreador, but the ship isn't visible yet (unless you've got motion debris on, but I don't, so you don't matter). So its a plain scene then suddenly BAM, Narayana. An easy trick was to give the camera some very slow rotational motion. Not so much to put everything out of shot, just enough to make the stars move and give the sense of movement.
From Jupiter to Neptune
The cutscene was moving along well enough. It was, at the time, "finished". You can view this version here. (http://youtu.be/hX9ivh6fQrQ) You can see there's some dialog from Calder that was cut because while it did help set the stage so the player knows when this is supposed to take place, it also seemed to detract from the visuals that could speak for themselves. But then we found an "extended" version of the Icarus trailer music. This would later be the track that went on the official Human Revolution soundtrack. It was about a minute longer, and the cutscene was basically done but... What could we do with the extra time? Maybe... maybe show everything. The battle at Saturn, Calder's scuffle with Steele, the Eris feinting at Neptune... The dialogue could be cut, because we can see exactly when everything is taking place. Why, that's crazy. But crazy is our mantra. To make everything flow better, we would need to intercut scenes from other battles into the one already made. But that let us cut out weaker scenes from Jupiter and replace them with more exciting stuff from Saturn or Neptune. Alas we didn't end up using the extended edition anyway, there were enough scenes just to fill in the original trailer's length.
If you compare to two, you can see some scenes just got moved from one battle to another (like the beginning got moved to Saturn, the Marcus Glaive got moved to Neptune) and others just got replaced entirely (nearly all fighter-centric scenes were cut and for good reason. Fighters under their own AI SUCK in cutscenes.) It also gave everything a sense of simultaneous action throughout the Sol theatre that you often hear about, but can't really see. It also gave the mission some real complicated methods to keep everything on track.
Before...
(http://lazymodders.fsmods.net/files/BP/cutscenebefore.jpg)
After...
(http://lazymodders.fsmods.net/files/BP/cutsceneafter.jpg)
(http://lazymodders.fsmods.net/files/BP/cutsceneafter2.jpg)
You can see by these pictures that we needed a LOT of ships. To try to keep things running semi-smoothly, we would only keep in game the ships that are in the cutscene. So those ships in the first scene, depart when we get to the second. And the ships in the second scene are cued to arrive one second before we're moving the camera down there. This loading and the game going "hey this is the first time I've seen this ship, I better pause for a tenth of a second" would still cause problems that would throw the carefully done music syncing out the window. So a lot of these ships are just duplicates, sometimes still occupying close to the same space from the last scene it was in to keep some continuity. But that was pretty much abandoned that near the end, the Eris and Serkr corvettes are in very different positions between their two scenes.
Wargods Delenda Est... Again
So the cutscene had to have parts of Delenda Est recreated. A lot of effort was spent into making sure that everything was exactly from the mission as possible. The Carthage's angle, the position of its escorts (according to their final waypoints), the far distance the Imperieuse arrives from. But some scenes needed a very quick cuts from one point in time to another, and going back to the same point would show the still fresh debris from a ship that was supposed to be destroyed minutes ago. So we just keep moving the scenes around to make sure nothing's in view. (Well, almost, there is a single Saturn scene where you can see the next scene's Imperiuse and doomed Wargods arrive in the distance before the shot is over).
The GTD Impy is now canon, as are its 2 sisters
(http://lazymodders.fsmods.net/files/BP/threeimps.jpg)
But of course that all goes out the window with the Carthage just completely removed from some of the final Imperiuse-kills-Karunas scenes. This was mostly done to keep all the viewer's attention to the beams and stuff.
Also fun fact, only a handful of capital ships are actually moving in the cutscene. The warping GTVA ships is pretty much 90% of distance travelled by capital ships! A Toutatis and a Katana have some waypoint orders, but I suspect I could remove them and nothing would change.
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After seeing those Calder lines it makes me regret they weren't present in the final version, but after watching Icarus again on my computer I don't really mind it because the final product is just that good.
With that said IF Calder is killed at some point I do expect the same or better(is it even possible?) level of epicness.
Overall the intro is one of the best scifi action scenes I've ever seen. It deserves every praise known to man. Great job!
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I'd vote for putting Calder's lines into the "Conversations from Tenebra" thread. They help to give you a bit more perspective on Calder's motivation for "Her finest hour".
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I must admit, while I did of course recognize the "Delenda Est" scenes, it never occured to me that the rest we say was from the delay action. You should some of the dialogue again, especially when you aquire voice actors...
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I was underwhelmed by the intro. Not technically. Technically it is an amazing feast that I only expect from the queue of modders that WiH2 aligned. However, narratively, it is a letdown.
So the first scene we see in WiH2 is .... basically the same thing we saw in Delenda Est plus what we already established was happening in Jupiter and Neptune?
Basically a "Previously in WiH!"?
I do agree that adding badass lines from Calder or Steele might have given something new to the scenes, but as they are they only seem "Wow" pieces that were designed to be "wowish".
All when it could be used to advance the narrative to a new setting. Pose a new question, pose a new frame of mind, something that placed gamers into the next chapter of the story, rather than a "meh seen this, so it's more of the same. k then".
And I was a little underwhelmed by the choice of the soundtrack. It's too ****ing iconic. Instead of me being amazed by what I am seeing that is novel, and feeling the music and so on, all that goes in my head is "What has Deus Ex to do with this?", and I knew right away, it depicts Wargods as Icarus, but it's too ****in literal. It's a wink wink that is not worth the unoriginality of it all.
To understand better my criticism, compare it with the cutscene in WiH1. It doesn't portray the original frigate being slashed to pieces by the 14th battlegroup in a WOWish angle. We had seen it, no need to rehash it. Instead it showed us a completely new battle with new issues, new problems, new themes, new questions. What a waste of time would have been spent in recreating the initial encounter between the GTVA and Sol at the end of AoA. Even worse if the soundtrack was something to the tune of something iconic as "Leaving Earth" by Mansell or anyother.
edit: After seeing the old intro, I have to say I disagree with Axem's take that it was repeting what we were already seeing.... because what it shows is more important than the fireworks. It shows the emotions behind the fireworks, culminating in Calder's frustration. (imagine WiH1 intro without the spoken words... can you?)
/Angry Rant
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Both versions are great. I guess the solution is to let us watch both. :p
The only shot in the final product that rubbed me the wrong way was the one showing the Katana, Altan Orde, Insuperable, and Kyoto closing in on the Imperieuse and Hydra. Between the lack of visible motion and the UEF ships not firing, it looked more like they were patiently standing in line to get beamed than performing a delaying action.
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I'd vote for putting Calder's lines into the "Conversations from Tenebra" thread. They help to give you a bit more perspective on Calder's motivation for "Her finest hour".
Seconded.
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I'd vote for putting Calder's lines into the "Conversations from Tenebra" thread. They help to give you a bit more perspective on Calder's motivation for "Her finest hour".
Third'ed
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And I was a little underwhelmed by the choice of the soundtrack. It's too ****ing iconic. Instead of me being amazed by what I am seeing that is novel, and feeling the music and so on, all that goes in my head is "What has Deus Ex to do with this?", and I knew right away, it depicts Wargods as Icarus, but it's too ****in literal. It's a wink wink that is not worth the unoriginality of it all.
I'll be sure to change the music to "We are the Champions" for the next release.
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derp
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Well for what its worth, I thought the choice of music was really good....I had goosebumps. It was epic! :nod:
Oh, and:
And I was a little underwhelmed by the choice of the soundtrack. It's too ****ing iconic. Instead of me being amazed by what I am seeing that is novel, and feeling the music and so on, all that goes in my head is "What has Deus Ex to do with this?", and I knew right away, it depicts Wargods as Icarus, but it's too ****in literal. It's a wink wink that is not worth the unoriginality of it all.
Respectfully, even though I have played Deus Ex multiple times (and watched the trailer countless times) I never felt Icarus "underwhelming" during Icarus (no pun intended).
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To understand better my criticism, compare it with the cutscene in WiH1. It doesn't portray the original frigate being slashed to pieces by the 14th battlegroup in a WOWish angle. We had seen it, no need to rehash it. Instead it showed us a completely new battle with new issues, new problems, new themes, new questions. What a waste of time would have been spent in recreating the initial encounter between the GTVA and Sol at the end of AoA. Even worse if the soundtrack was something to the tune of something iconic as "Leaving Earth" by Mansell or anyother.
edit: After seeing the old intro, I have to say I disagree with Axem's take that it was repeting what we were already seeing.... because what it shows is more important than the fireworks. It shows the emotions behind the fireworks, culminating in Calder's frustration. (imagine WiH1 intro without the spoken words... can you?)
/Angry Rant
The intro as it stands is so necessary. It has to recapitulate the emotional arc from Delenda Est (without just replaying Delenda Est) so that it can deposit Laporte on the Masyaf, and the player into the narrative, at exactly the right point - both temporally and affectively. The danger we had to avoid was bringing in anything new - just amping up the magnitude on the events of DE so the whole magnitude of the effort behind that failure could be seen.
It was so much weaker with dialogue, too. One of the risks with these threads is people latch onto cut stuff and think it 'should be in', but it was all cut for a reason, and we don't crowdsource our designs. ;)
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To be clear, I'm not suggesting you should crowdsource anything, or even take anyone's advice. I'm a complete believer on "do what you believe nevermind the others". However, once the product is shipped it is utterly exposed to every criticism others are able to regurgitate from their keyboards/mouths...
Regarding the effort, it's a choice. I am moved by Calder's words, and how they strike an emotional punch of frustration. The intro as it stands merely show three large commitments and a final sad twist, placing us again near Sol waiting to be rescued. There is no emotional connection to Calder. Don't read my "suggestion" as a "real" suggestion. It is not. I am not aware of the problems you faced (and I truly understand the nature of them) nor your hacks around things you wanted to do, etc. What the cut speech provides us with is a notion on what the intro cutscene is lacking. IMHO.
Don't read into my words too much harshness though. I love this campaign. I'm still collecting emotions and feedbacks while I am still to finish it (it's too hard and I haven't touched it for weeks now, no time for it). I'll be much more even-handed when I am finally able to make an exegetic analysis (ah!) of it all.
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Yeah, I gotcha.
I don't feel like the dialogue adds any emotion to the cutscene. It does paint it with some - I'm not sure what to call them. Fake feelings? The kind of thing you get when you're watching a trailer and the music's all dooo dooooooo DAHHHHH and the trailer cuts together a bunch of disconnected lines of men yelling about how much they've sacrificed and how it's a very dark night but they're going to hold until the dawn doo doooaooahhhhhhhh wahhhhhh. (It was far from final dialogue when it was cut.) Calder can't say anything really substantive beyond 'we're waiting for the Wargods, uh oh, the Wargods are screwed!' Which, narratively, makes it all feel rather peripheral: the real story happened somewhere else, in those missions we just played last act. What's the point of a beautiful cutscene that describes a peripheral commentary on something we already saw?
The genuine problem, though, is that dialogue there centers the narrative on Calder and his feelings, his antagonism with Steele, whereas the scene needs to draw the viewer back to the Wargods and Laporte in order to deposit both the character and the player at the right place to begin Act 3. That's why I think the wordless final version works so much better - we see all the enormous weight balanced on the Wargods, all the battles depending on you, and then the moment of failure and retreat. It focuses down from the huge sweep of the war to the end of Sunglare and the beginning of the Act 3 narrative.
Those message beeps also totally kill the mood.
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If this was voice acted then I could understand the desire for dialog to add emotion to the scene, however I think that the music already sets the mood and reading Calder's transmissions just distracts from the fireworks going on around. I dont think that the opening cutscene would have had the same wow factor with that distraction.
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Really interesting read on some inside dev thought and development process!
Not that it needed confirming, but it really cements that Axem is truely the king of FREDing cutscenes and that Battuta has great insight in game development.
/Angry Rant
After typing all of this you really should have thought to yourself "should I really put this for all to see on the internet?" Before hitting that post button.
Too bad you didn't. Now you just look like a...
(No really. You are getting angry over how this amazing cutscene doesn't fit your definition of amazing. I don't wanna call you autistic but... thats pretty damn assburgerish, brah.)
Edit: I've seen the version with dialogue in it. The version without it is definitely better.
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I like Luis Dias rants, I feel they are often thoughtful and contain interesting and nuanced criticism!
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I actually thought the real intro was pretty engaging storywise, mainly because I wasn't sure how those "distraction" enagements were going to end. Yes, the end credits of WiH R1 showed the destroyers parked in various places, but I wasn't convinced that I should consider that canon. So I was watching the intro for the first time wondering if a Solaris was going to bite the dust - or, less likely I suppose, a GTVA destroyer. After all, Wih R1 ended on such a down note for the Wargods that I could imagine the BP team really taking a hammer to the UEF and knocking out a Solaris to impress upon us the scale of the strategic defeat. All three chapters have impressed upon us how integral the Solaris destroyers are to the UEF's defense efforts, so I think there's definitely some emotional engagement whenever one might come in harms way.
At the same time, it was very gratifying to see the alternate (and inferior) intro for a number of reasons. I found the real intro to be hard to follow, and I immediately rewatched it twice to glean everything I could from it. It's so fast-paced, and it took some amount of seconds for me to be sure that I was indeed watching battles going on during Delenda Est. You're not really given any clear indications as to whether Calder's and Netreba's battles were wins, losses, or stalemates, nor what sort of losses the different fleets incurred. This information might not be necessary for the narrative, and that's fine. But learning a bit more about what was actually happening in those battles in this cut intro was definitely interesting, and so I really enjoyed watching it.
I do agree, however, that the cut intro is inferior to the final product. It just falls a bit flat, cinematically. By comparison, actively contrasting all three major engagements as the real intro did was a powerful storytelling device.
One final thing: that very first shot in the real intro, with the fighter first coming into view... and that music... is a little awe inspiring.
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I like Luis Dias rants, I feel they are often thoughtful and contain interesting and nuanced criticism!
Welp, its your party.
I mean, I'm all for critcism, but I feel the way this rant was delivered left something to be desired.
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Thank's for the inside scoop! Always cool to see these things. :)
I like both versions of the intro scene. I can both see why some people prefer the old and why some, including yourselves, prefer the new. They're different, emphasising different aspects. I agree with the others that it is nice to see Calder's being depicted in the original scene, but revisiting the horror of Delenda Est, wordless, is a great emotional starting point for the story. So in the end, I prefer the version you guys settled on.
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However, a similar cut scene with Calder and Laporte fighting Steele to begin Act 4 could be a great way to start that Act :P
BTW for the ending cutscene for Act 3, why was it chosen to have the Toutatis receive Laporte at Mars, wouldn't it have been at Neptune?
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No. Toutatis was at Mars getting a refit (You did notice the two humongous mass drivers mounted to her prow, yes?).
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It would also have been easier to let Laportes new identity pop into existance on Mars rather, without raising suspicoun, than in a just recently re-conquered terretory.
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No. Toutatis was at Mars getting a refit (You did notice the two humongous mass drivers mounted to her prow, yes?).
I did not notice that ... but I like it. :)
EDIT: Went back and looked, now I see them.
It would also have been easier to let Laportes new identity pop into existance on Mars rather, without raising suspicoun, than in a just recently re-conquered terretory.
That's going to be tough regardless ... though despite what I said in an another thread about the UEF's lack of cross communication between the fleets and the council being a problem, that would actually help Laporte's anonymity.
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Will the Toutatis get any more additions to her armament? Do these upgrades also apply to the other Solarises?
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(No really. You are getting angry over how this amazing cutscene doesn't fit your definition of amazing. I don't wanna call you autistic but... thats pretty damn assburgerish, brah.)
"Angry" was a misnomer, yes.
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As a coder, I found in the inclusion of adjustaudiovolumebug.fs2, a single mission to reproduce consistently a bug report, very pleasing.
Given the assistance these have towards fixing bug reports, I'm going to make an effort to resolve it for the BP team :) Why "JOSHUA" though?
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Will the Toutatis get any more additions to her armament? Do these upgrades also apply to the other Solarises?
The Eris has all kinds of integrated AWACS magic, the Solaris simply hasn't been shot half to pieces.
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Why "JOSHUA" though?
I'm guessing because its the single most awesome soundtrack in FS history? :warp:
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Well that made me sound me a n00b. :)
I guess I should stick to the code.
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Will the Toutatis get any more additions to her armament? Do these upgrades also apply to the other Solarises?
Hopefully the ability to do SSM strikes. Right now they could really use the ability to have a warship attack a target without the warship being anywhere close to the battlefield.
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Err... SSM strikes are a GTVA shtick?
I must admit that I'm a little surprised at the speed with which the UEF can refit their capital ships, I thought lesser conversions during WW2 (like upgraded AA batteries/radar) took significantly longer than a "few weeks" (is that how long the Big T took to get her upgrade?)
edit: actually, I now recall someone, somewhere, saying that the mounts for the mass drivers were in the original Solaris design, however the weapons weren't mounted. In which case, the stuff above is irrelevant...
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Err... SSM strikes are a GTVA shtick?
Certainly, but something that works is worth being replicated. Besides, torpedo attacks are more of an UEF shtick than a GTVA one. They just need a platform that doesn't fold like wet paper in front of shock jumps.
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The problem with replicating SSM strikes is that they require some modifications to the missile busses, the Launchers, the targeting and navigation software, and several other things besides. The UEF certainly has the capacity to do all these things, but what they do not have is the time required.
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They also seem to have fewer AWACS than the GTVA.
And jamming beams is far more important than vectoring in artillary, exactly because there is no ship build by Terrans of either side that doesn't fold like tissue paper in the face of a full strength shockjump.
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why do launchers need to be modified?
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I would assume the launchers would need to be upgraded/redesigned to accommodate the modified missiles--the addition of a subspace drive probably changes the physical profile.
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BTW, where the cat_love.ani file (found if the interface folder of the bp-visuals2.vp) is used? Is this some kind of easter egg?
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It's in one of the command briefings for WiH Act 1, I think.
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BTW, where the cat_love.ani file (found if the interface folder of the bp-visuals2.vp) is used? Is this some kind of easter egg?
It is used for the command briefing after Darkest Hour iirc.
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"Detecting strong agitation in the viewer. Would you like to see a kitten image to calm down (yes/no)?"
Or something close to that anyway...
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Running Conversations and Hot Tubs
So Everything is Permitted's central facet is the fact that you're hunting for the mole that betrayed the Federation, the Wargods and Laporte. To add some story hints to the mission, we would have the mole have a conversation with Steele. The conversation would activate a signal monitor on the player's ship to draw the player to their target. To make things a little tricky for the player we added a "decoy" transport. A transport that just has boring normal traffic so the player has to look for the right conversation while they are hunting.
The whole messaging system was pretty complex, hitting an 4096 character limit on events early on in development (this was lifted, allowing the insanity to continue). We had to check to make sure the player had hacked the comms subsystem on Artemis, make sure that its our turn to talk, make sure that one side hasn't talked too much, make sure the player's ship has power, make sure that the player hasn't revealed themselves, make sure that the mole wasn't dead (there was a point where killing the mole without raising any alarm would have Steele talking to a vaporized transport) and etc.
Anyway, writing foreshadowing and intriguing dialog is not my forte. That was Battuta's. But I had to write something for the running conversations so that I could make sure everything was working. When I need to make sure good dialog gets written, I just write very bad dialog so someone will just rewrite it.
Here are the original test conversations... Hot tubs and bananaphones!
Running conversation between Mole (MM) and Atreus (AM)
$Name: MM1
Yo, Steele, my main man. Waaaazzzzuuuup?
$Name: AM1
Not much my homie. Just sitting back, having a few brewskis. How waz your flight man?
$Name: MM2
This is one podunk ride you sent to pick me up bro. No hot tubs or anything!
$Name: AM2
Hey lady, we need to keep is real ya'know. Those u-fies go for my pimpin' hot tub corvettes
$Name: MM3
But G, you said I'd be jiving with the best. This ain't anything but the best!
$Name: AM3
Just chill yo. You get your hot tubs when you give me this project thing to me.
$Name: MM4
No no man. I get my hot tub first, then we talk.
$Name: AM4
C'mon sister. You know how much those hot tubs cost. I can't just throw them away to any ol' mean mother hubbard!
$Name: MM5
What'd you call me?!
$Name: AM5
Aw man, I'm sorry. I just wasn't thinking. Ya know what I'm saying?
$Name: MM6
Don't give me that bro. This ain't no sucka party now is it?
$Name: AM6
Look, let's just get this all down. I got hot tubs on here. Just gimme something here. I've got the big boss on hold, I need to give em anythin'!
$Name: MM7
Alright G, fine. You wanna know?
$Name: AM7
Yeah! Tell me sister!
$Name: MM8
It's called... Jambalaya..
$Name: AM8
What.
$Name: MM9
You heard me. It's the most badass jambalaya recipe this side of Ross 128!
$Name: AM9
Tell me more!
$Name: MM10
Well you see the secret is...
$Name: AM10
Just a sec, I really gotta take this call.
Running Conversation between aRtemis station (RM) and Transport (TM)
$Name: TM1
RING RING RING RING
$Name: RM1
BANANAPHONE
$Name: TM2
I've got this feeling, so appealing,
$Name: RM2
for us to get together and sing. Sing!
$Name: TM3
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring
$Name: RM3
banana phone!
$Name: TM4
Ding dong ding dong ding dong
$Name: RM4
donana phone!
$Name: TM5
It grows in bunches
$Name: RM5
I've got my hunches,
$Name: TM6
It's the best!
$Name: RM6
Beats the rest!
$Name: TM7
Cellular, modular, interactivodular!
$Name: RM7
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring
$Name: TM8
banana phone
$Name: RM8
Boop-boo-ba-doo-ba-doop!
$Name: TM9
Ping pong ping pong ping pong ping
$Name: RM9
panana phone
$Name: TM10
It's no baloney, it ain't a phony
$Name: RM10
My cellular bananular phone!
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dear god. I woke my roommate up, was laughing so much.
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My god...
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To make things a little tricky for the player we added a "decoy" transport. A transport that just has boring normal traffic so the player has to look for the right conversation while they are hunting.
Hey cool, I guess I just got lucky in both my attempts at the mission :)
When I need to make sure good dialog gets written, I just write very bad dialog so someone will just rewrite it.
(etc)
And this is just gold :lol:
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That's not gold, that's how **** gets done!
Oh man, can't wait for the Qart-ḥadašt commentary.
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No. Toutatis was at Mars getting a refit (You did notice the two humongous mass drivers mounted to her prow, yes?).
I not only didn't notice, but wondered why the VP had a separate model for the Toutatis.
Betrayin' da eldaz
This is amazing. Someone needs to draw Steele in a pimp hat.
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To make things a little tricky for the player we added a "decoy" transport. A transport that just has boring normal traffic so the player has to look for the right conversation while they are hunting.
Hey cool, I guess I just got lucky in both my attempts at the mission :)
I don't think that decoy transport still exist. I think it was cut before I joined in September.
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Sure there's a transport with normal dialogue, it's just really easy to notice it's not the right one, Laporte even says so.
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ahahahh omg
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Now you don't get to use those lines on JAD Axem!... not a smart move.
But it was funny nevertheless :P
Oh wait, I've gotta take this call...
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One Future
The first two acts of War in Heaven saw the player fight as a spear-carrier in some of the most important battles of the war. Laporte's personal journey took place against the backdrop of massive political and military events - but she was only a soldier, a cog in the machine. More vocal than usual, certainly, but not an agent, not empowered to change what was happening. She fulfilled her role, won the mission, and gave the story permission to continue.
Act 3 sees Laporte vengeful, ferocious, and empowered. She has one of the finest covert/intelligence apparatuses in Terran space behind her. And we wanted to give the player a chance to hold the war in their hands.
Every mission in Act 3 pays off an arc from Acts 1 and 2 in incendiary fashion, then sets it up for further conflict - first the Terran/Vasudan covert ops arc, then the Elder politics/first fleet arc, and now, the Gef arc. We saw the Gefs develop from scrub-tier secondary antagonists with an odd fixation on Gaia into pawns of the major players. Now, with his back against the wall, Reverend MacDuff rebels against the chessmasters.
(http://i.imgur.com/CQFmBD2.jpg)
The Story
Before anything else, we knew we'd set this mission at a Gef cometary habitat. We'd had enough of Scimitars leaping in en masse to disrupt our protagonists' plans. We wanted to show the Gaian Effort on their home turf - a rough, radically abnormal lifestyle in the rigors of zero gravity, getting by in the cold and the distant dark.
We knew that FreeSpace lore makes subspace unreliable on the fringes of solar gravity wells. We'd always envisioned Gef territory as the military equivalent of a navy's littoral terrain - dominated by small, agile ships that could go where others couldn't. And we'd built a trove of lore about the Gef cells, focused more on internecine warfare and outward expansion than on Kostadin's regressive and vengeful agenda. Kostadin Cell, we felt, had to be on its last legs.
With so much of the story spent with the Fedayeen, we wanted to give their counterparts, SOC, a chance to shine. Kostadin has been decimated by a systematic, ruthless SOC attack: a reminder that for all their boldness, the Gefs cannot stand up to the likes of Steele. MacDuff, we were certain, would have only his most fanatical or most ruthlessly oppressed followers remaining - and he would resort to his eschatology, the most desperate and apocalyptic of his plans.
The subspace generator in the asteroid gave us a way to introduce a ticking clock into the mission. We were able to draw on established canon about Gef looting and UEF intelligence's failed efforts to buy the Gefs with military technology to equip Kostadin with a subspace gate and an Oculus-class AWACS (though, we were confident, not packed with the sophisticated electronics of a Jovian model). We were sure that nothing as large as the asteroid had ever been jumped before in FreeSpace canon, so we decided that the habitat would shear apart if it ever made a subspace jump - fitting, for a suicidal plan. Lastly, we thought players would pick on the string of clues in Act 1 about the Gefs pursuing subspace components, though ultimately this thread might not have popped well enough.
Would the apocalyptic scale of MacDuff's plan overshadow the rest of the war, we worried? Ultimately, we felt that it was time to remind the player of the stakes of this conflict - everyone has access to civilization-killing weapons, and most of the players don't need to jump an asteroid into anything: they have enough firepower in one destroyer air wing to make a planet uninhabitable. Furthermore, we felt that a genuine Gef threat would help explain the value of the Fedayeen over the decades.
To show the fanaticism of some of the habitat's remaining defenders, we added suicide spacesuits that will attempt to swarm the player inside the habitat. To tie the Gefs to previous appearances, we brought back Sergei Gwilym, introduced his son Ivan, and gave the player a chance to settle scores with all of them at once. The Gefs could be defeated and diminished in a way that our Tev antagonists can't - they're a more vincible, less well-prepared foe. We wanted to offer that kind of catharsis to help Laporte move through her fury and enter a purified, exalted state for Act 4.
(http://imgur.com/49cl9kv.jpg)
Gameplay: Stealth or Strength?
When we first broke the mission, it was simply an attack on the reactor within a Gaian Effort asteroid habitat. We imagined giving the player a choice: fly a Custos-class patrol combatant, or lead Falcata wing's stealth fighters. The mission and its dialogue would adapt correspondingly.
We added the capture option once it became clear that destroying the reactor was simply too straightforward.
We ultimately decided that the player would, as in many Act 3 missions, face a choice between a more difficult but more ethical path, and a more efficient, ruthless alternative.
The Custos was inspired by John Sheridan's White Star from Babylon 5 - a high-powered, maneuverable command ship bristling with weapons and technology. More than most BP missions, One Future depends on the trait of custom asteroids - the Scarroid from BtRL, the MacDuff's reactor casing, and Cadius' model for the Custos-X. The mission simply wouldn't work without them.
As we developed the Custos gameplay, fleshing out her abilities - we knew we wanted to prevent swarm missiles from being annoying, give the player an 'oh ****' button to survive tough positions and a 'c'mon' button to cross large distances, and provide a quick boost of health for convenience - we started building up the duel between the player and Reverend MacDuff. We loved it: rather than the many-against-one gameplay of traditional anti-warship attacks, we got to build a David and Goliath boxing match between a darting little Sugar Ray Robinson and an erratic, crazed Hulk Hogan carrying the mummified corpse of his own dead wife. Ultimately, I think, it was this more than anything else that killed the stealth fighter branch: we felt that the Custos branch was strong enough to carry the whole mission, and we didn't want to build what would essentially be an entire separate mission to service the fighters.
We loved flying the Vindicator. The abilities, the ship's variable-loadout torpedoes, and the magnified effects of ETS on capships (scripted by FRED) gave the player a lot of tactical options and interesting approaches. Like all Act 3 missions, we wanted to reward replay and build a sandbox rather than a scripted thrill ride. We spent a ton of time taking the Vindicator up against the MacDuff to make sure the duel would be tense but fair.
We went through several models for the Morena MacDuff. The first was based on Shivan Hunter's TF Ion (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/TF_Ion), scaled up to warship size. It was fun to fight and offered a clean, forward-facing axis of fire which made it very readable - you could get behind it and know you were mostly safe. But it didn't have quite the presence we were looking for. We briefly tried another model BlackWolf had converted, but discovered it had one of the enigmatic all-things-vanish asset bugs that had plagued us with old versions of the Vishnan Sacred Keeper. Finally, we settled on a model by Cadius with UEF-style centrifuges, a crapload of VLS tubes, and loads of turret mounts. After playing with the loadout to prevent it from putting out too much mid-range damage along the flanks and rear, we felt we had a ship that could threaten the player from any direction but still allow players to escape and repair. Her final loadout gave her a brace of forward-firing mass drivers, torpedoes for all-aspect attack, turreted mass drivers for other aspects, and point defense turrets all over the place for short-range anti-subsystem punch. We felt she'd been gradually up-armed from the gleanings of Kostadin salvage, leaving her overgunned and ungainly.
The battle against MacDuff was a lot simpler in earlier incarnations: he was a big ship that you had to blow up with torpedoes while you snipe turrets with primaries. This duel of capships ended up being very very dull. We tried to spice up the combat, but it never managed to reach the heights required for such a climactic showdown (Axem added random AI orders, and, at one point, gave MacDuff a huge mining beam to tear up the Custos if player got too close to his nose). The idea for the reactor came from the enjoyable arcade boss fights from The Antagonist. Luckily Cadius' model for the Morena MacDuff allowed for this mode of gameplay.
Balancing the slugfest required a lot of trial and error. We felt the MacDuff would become boring once de-turreted, so we gave it a damage control system that allowed it to bring turrets back online. Axem played a key role in creating a FRED AI for the mighty warship, allowing it to swap between behaviors rather than brainlessly chasing the player or following predictable waypoints. (We were comfortable with the MacDuff repeating or choosing suboptimal behaviors, since the command crew is clearly not high-grade material.) This disrupted the player's ability to find one degenerate attack strategy and stick to it. We used the MacDuff's reactor subsystem to create a key weak point, playing to the Fedayeen theme of finding vulnerabilities.
Fighter attacks broke up the fight with the MacDuff, forcing the player to reorient and juggle two threats at once. The first attack, by Aquarius wing, was meant to put the player on the receiving end of a classic FreeSpace scenario - fighters devastating a light warship with swarm missiles - and show off our gorgeous new flare spews. Sergei's arrival brings a few sluggers to the table, but mostly allows the player to finally square off with the squirrelly, capable pilot and shred him in a storm of Gattler fire.
Allowing Gef pilots to escape in Nothing is True puts Ancamna cruisers on station to guard the habitat, which can present a real threat. We wanted to unilaterally punish the morally 'good' decision in the earlier mission in order to drive home the theme that doing good sometimes has costs: it can't always be justified on purely utilitarian grounds. That's why being good is hard, and, sometimes, worthy.
(http://imgur.com/KQMygSO.jpg)
Mercy or Massacre
We established early on that the two paths through the mission would be capture or destroy. Since the BtRL asteroid model had paths leading inside, we figured it'd be really cool to penetrate the asteroid's surface and blow up the reactor. Docking Gef habitats to the surface gave us an alternative target, and let us use the cool Fedayeen commando teams, who would otherwise have been stranded offscreen until 'Eyes in the Storm'.
It was a constant struggle to keep the 'capture' choice harder than 'destroy'. We relied on the fragility of the boarding transport, and its relatively slow approach, to keep the player honest. If the transport was lost the player would be forced to destroy the habitat and the Kostadin civilians aboard, but the mission could continue - though we took pains to reinforce in the debriefing that the soldiers aboard the Andex were spectacularly valuable. Throughout dev, we struggled with bugs in which the transport would dock but the habitat would then warp out, leaving the mission in a weird limbo of failed success.
Tempo was a constant concern throughout the mission. We needed the player to feel under pressure, but give them enough time to explore and learn. We had to space messages carefully so they wouldn't choke the HUD (a huge problem in One Future). We wanted to give just enough time for boarding the habitat to be viable, but not enough for it to be clearly optimal and methodically achieved. The MacDuff had to be tough, but not so gristly that the fight become a dull battle of attrition.
Once we had the balance where we liked it - and once we were confident the mission was possible on insane - we added finishing touches. Most players never see them, but a group of SOC Pegasi will show up to clean up Gef leadership under certain circumstances. Starting the mission before a tactical jump gave us a chance for a quick and dirty tutorial on flying the Vindicator for players who'd skipped The Blade Itself.
Character Beats
I wonder if we missed an opportunity by not putting the other members of Falcata Wing aboard the Vindicator. We tried to do as much of our characterization as we could in-mission during Act 3 as part of our drive to move the story into gameplay, but ultimately I'm not sure this was successful. Operator Navarra is a cipher, pure business, and putting Kovacs, Vidaura and Falconer aboard with nothing to do but yell at Laporte could've given them some more lines.
But it felt dubious that Laporte would be put in command of a full-sized patrol combatant without any experienced human infrastructure. The Vindicator fits her skill set well - as an ace pilot she can maneuver the ship and shoot as well as anyone, given the fighterlike controls, and she has Dreamscape bleed helping her out - but all the other business of commanding a larger vessel probably demands a seasoned crew with experience on the hardware.
All in all, I think this is a mission to be proud of. It's sweeping, full of interesting systems to engage with, and it lets the player get on with it however they choose.
Fun trivia: Due to unintentionally good timing, if the player looks behind them when fleeing the exploding reactor, they can see the GEF Oculus attempting to jump out, getting caught by the explosion mid-jump.
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Wow. I was not aware that not killing the Gefs could bite me in the arse. Good thing I didn't spare them! :drevil:
Also, I did notice the SOC craft when I first played the mission, I though they were a nice touch considering what happens offscreen after NiT.
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face a choice between a more difficult but more ethical path, and a more efficient, ruthless alternative.
I found this interesting after playing One Future. The first time through, I flew right past the MacDuff, into the asteroid and promptly got lost. (maybe I should play some Descent, I'm out of practice) The second, I attacked the MacDuff and captured the station and it seemed much more straightforward to me. I kept thinking "wait, the ethical choice is supposed to be harder than the ruthless and efficient one!"
The first [Morena MacDuff model] was based on Shivan Hunter's TF Ion, scaled up to warship size.
Hahaha, that must have looked pretty silly :P
also after looking at the mission to get a fact straight-
I have declared this operation priority BANE. I will brief you personally. Security - leave us.
hehehhehe TDKR reference
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...Kovacs, Vidaura and Falconer aboard with nothing to do but yell at Laporte...
I had a vision of Falconer sitting at her station, hands folded in her lap, staring straight ahead at her screen, not doing anything but yelling at Laporte when things go wrong. "Stop sucking Laporte. Stop getting us shot Laporte!"