Author Topic: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!  (Read 2438 times)

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Offline General Battuta

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HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
IN THE HOUSE OF THE DYING SUN

(it's out now) (you can buy it here)

House of the Dying Sun is a mission-based space sim in which you play as the ghostly commander of the Empire's Elite Guard, on a mission of revenge against the traitor lords who killed your Emperor. Lead from the front with Diaspora style flight physics, swapping instantly between atmospheric and Newtonian flight. Command your fleet of destroyers and frigates in Homeworld-style tactical view. Outfit your ships with drones, kamikaze charges, betrayer modules, gap drives, and other selectable gear.

House is primarily the work of ex-Bungie dev Mike Tipul, but it's got a number of HLP alumni on the team! I did lore/story writing and MaX of Beyond the Red Line contributed drums to the superb dynamic OST.

I think it's super cool that talent farmed up on HLP is helping to put new space sims out in the world. There's a thread for the game already but I wanted to draw attention to how dope it is that HLP's got legacy.
« Last Edit: June 08, 2016, 10:44:19 am by General Battuta »

 

Offline Firesteel

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Congrats! I'll definitely check it out! Does it have any procedural music? My team on the project I posted yesterday was trying to get the system used in the new Tomb Raider to work in Unity and couldn't manage it with the time constraints.
Current Projects:

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Offline General Battuta

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
I believe so, yeah! The drums are procedural.

 

Offline Firesteel

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
I'm enjoying it so far. I haven't been able to pay too close attention to the audio, but I'm very happy that a new mission to mission space game has been created! For reference, this was the system my team and I tried to get working:

http://intelligentmusicsystems.com/index.html

I think we're going to try and patch it in once we get in touch with the tool's creator again. Fun fact, he was a PhD student at UCSC where I'm graduating from in a few days.
Current Projects:

- Video Critiques of Freespace
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Offline Darius

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Heck yeah MaX!

I thought he had disappeared from the internet.

  

Offline 0rph3u5

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
(it's out now) (you can buy it here)

I wish there was a more precise term than "out"... it's still in Early Access. The term "out" was become a lot more fluent in recent years because of Early Access and made it very deceptive...
"As you sought to steal a kingdom for yourself, so must you do again, a thousand times over. For a theft, a true theft, must be practiced to be earned." - The terms of Nyrissa's curse, Pathfinder: Kingmaker

==================

"I am Curiosity, and I've always wondered what would become of you, here at the end of the world." - The Guide/The Curious Other, Othercide

"When you work with water, you have to know and respect it. When you labour to subdue it, you have to understand that one day it may rise up and turn all your labours into nothing. For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing?" - Graham Swift, Waterland

"...because they are not Dragons."

 
Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
It's supposed to be feature complete but not fully tested. If you want to pay to be a beta tester you can buy it now. If you think beta testing isn't something you should be paying for you can just wait a few weeks until it's officially released.
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Yeah, it's basically in open beta. Though I don't know if I'd say feature complete! Hopefully Tipul has a couple more tricks up his sleeve (including the already announced wave clear mode).
« Last Edit: June 09, 2016, 03:14:29 pm by General Battuta »

 
Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
purifier bombs are so good

PURGE CLEANSE KILL IN THE NAME OF THE DEAD EMPEROR

 

Offline procdrone

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
wait a sec.

You say HLP made it, so you were involved in developing of this cool game ?
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Offline The E

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
House is primarily the work of ex-Bungie dev Mike Tipul, but it's got a number of HLP alumni on the team! I did lore/story writing and MaX of Beyond the Red Line contributed drums to the superb dynamic OST.
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Offline __MaX__

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Hey nope Darius ! Pretty busy with my projects... i still have some leads for Diaspora to finalize also :]

@Firesteel All the soundtrack is procedural. I prefer how General Battuta put it : it is a dynamic score.
Every single action in the game changes dynamically the music. I wrote all the score ( Ambiant, suspens and battle ) and i did the whole integration on FMOD. Mike just had to send events back to FMOD api to drive the soundtrack.

Someday i'll release a post-mortem explaining how everything works. It is kinda dense when you see the sequencer, but it is not so hard to understand : https://twitter.com/033MaX/status/740991465464160257. Looking back on the way i did the FMOD implementation, i would definitely make some things differently and improve even more the possibilities.

Hope you enjoy the game :)

 

Offline Firesteel

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
I'd agree that I think dynamic score is a better way to describe it. I was curious to know if you'd done something similar to what we tried integrating into the project I posted a few days ago. It sounds like you wound up with something similar.

Congrats again to you guys! I've been enjoying it quite a lot now that I have a bit more time on my hands.
Current Projects:

- Video Critiques of Freespace
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Offline Ace

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
_Max_ you should replace those bells in the intro with some nice taikos and synths like your trailer music :)

Really enjoying it, and I've been following this for a while. I do hope that he does some mission packs and maybe a few other fighter types. :)
Ace
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Offline NGTM-1R

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
So is anybody actually going to, uh, describe how the game plays?
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Online Colonol Dekker

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
The game thread is linked in the first post.

This thread is highlighting the HLP staff involvement.
Campaigns I've added my distinctiveness to-
- Blue Planet: Battle Captains
-Battle of Neptune
-Between the Ashes 2
-Blue planet: Age of Aquarius
-FOTG?
-Inferno R1
-Ribos: The aftermath / -Retreat from Deneb
-Sol: A History
-TBP EACW teaser
-Earth Brakiri war
-TBP Fortune Hunters (I think?)
-TBP Relic
-Trancsend (Possibly?)
-Uncharted Territory
-Vassagos Dirge
-War Machine
(Others lost to the mists of time and no discernible audit trail)

Your friendly Orestes tactical controller.

Secret bomb God.
That one time I got permabanned and got to read who was being bitxhy about me :p....
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Offline __MaX__

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Thank you ! I'm glad you're enjoying it guys !

@Firesteel Interesting approach for IMS, but i'm pretty sure that it's not going to become a game changer. For several reasons :

- The audio is bundle in the game datas, if you need high quality samples and you are using a lot of instruments, there is no way it's going to be good for low memory systems (aka consoles)... and since most of the market is designed around consoles... well you know where i'm going with this. It could work for percussions, but there isn't many games with "percussion only" score.

- Even with high memory systems it's gonna be hard to replicate some of the percussions i can use on my DAW. For instance, i have some loaded percussions for HotDS over 100mb, and if you combine every single percussion instruments it can go from 500mb to 1gig in memory. If you optimize audio and reduce the number of samples, you are definitely loosing quality and details. I'm not sure musicians and composers are going to like that. (I'm not linking it just thinking about it)

- Since the audio is driven by midi files, you can indeed play with the tempo. That's the strength of this system, but besides that, you don't have much more possibilities. Yeah you can analyze the midi and do some fancy snapshots with audio levels and creating dynamically transitions between them, but you can replicate that with FMOD.

- You are always artistically limited when using this kind of techniques. I mean : fillers between themes, human variations and details in the instruments, really odd rythmic schemes extending from one measure to another... and so on. Music is really difficult to replicate and that's why there isn't a lot of middleware in the industry for that.

- Why trying to replicate something with a procedural system if you can do (almost) the same thing with less memory usage and high quality audio.


Basically what i'm saying is : use FMOD if you have a musician in the team. NOPE i'm not here to sell FMOD, but the tool is insanely flexible and allows you to do whatever you want with your music. Monolith nailed it a long time ago with NOLF2. You can do a really cool dynamic soundtrack with no creative limitation and really good quality. FMOD allows you to do exactly the same thing as in NOLF2 but with better tools and a gorgeous sequencer.

The only problem is : you need the composer in the team... there is a bunch of work to make a dynamic soundtrack work.


@Ace yup i thought about that. Mike deals with everything related to the sound design, i didn't discuss much about the potential changes atm.

 

Offline Firesteel

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Re: HLP made a new, FS2-style space shooter!
Thank you ! I'm glad you're enjoying it guys !

@Firesteel Interesting approach for IMS, but i'm pretty sure that it's not going to become a game changer. For several reasons :

- The audio is bundle in the game datas, if you need high quality samples and you are using a lot of instruments, there is no way it's going to be good for low memory systems (aka consoles)... and since most of the market is designed around consoles... well you know where i'm going with this. It could work for percussions, but there isn't many games with "percussion only" score.

- Even with high memory systems it's gonna be hard to replicate some of the percussions i can use on my DAW. For instance, i have some loaded percussions for HotDS over 100mb, and if you combine every single percussion instruments it can go from 500mb to 1gig in memory. If you optimize audio and reduce the number of samples, you are definitely loosing quality and details. I'm not sure musicians and composers are going to like that. (I'm not linking it just thinking about it)

- Since the audio is driven by midi files, you can indeed play with the tempo. That's the strength of this system, but besides that, you don't have much more possibilities. Yeah you can analyze the midi and do some fancy snapshots with audio levels and creating dynamically transitions between them, but you can replicate that with FMOD.

- You are always artistically limited when using this kind of techniques. I mean : fillers between themes, human variations and details in the instruments, really odd rythmic schemes extending from one measure to another... and so on. Music is really difficult to replicate and that's why there isn't a lot of middleware in the industry for that.

- Why trying to replicate something with a procedural system if you can do (almost) the same thing with less memory usage and high quality audio.


Basically what i'm saying is : use FMOD if you have a musician in the team. NOPE i'm not here to sell FMOD, but the tool is insanely flexible and allows you to do whatever you want with your music. Monolith nailed it a long time ago with NOLF2. You can do a really cool dynamic soundtrack with no creative limitation and really good quality. FMOD allows you to do exactly the same thing as in NOLF2 but with better tools and a gorgeous sequencer.

The only problem is : you need the composer in the team... there is a bunch of work to make a dynamic soundtrack work.


@Ace yup i thought about that. Mike deals with everything related to the sound design, i didn't discuss much about the potential changes atm.

As I wasn't the main audio person on our team, I don't know the ins and outs of the tool IMS built or how much memory it eats, but based on what the tool's creator said, it isn't intended for more than percussion. He also mentioned that it wasn't intended to replace traditional scores, only help blend them between game states more effectively. I think it also requires FMOD to do something, as I remember seeing an FMOD plugin to Unity after we tried to integrate it.
Current Projects:

- Video Critiques of Freespace
- Re-learning FRED