Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: Assassin714 on June 14, 2023, 01:12:12 am
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I just had one. In the dream, I was replaying the main FS2 campaign, except it was the newest, upgraded version released by the community, and one of the changes they had made was to include brand new cutscenes before and after every mission.
I was watching one where the GTVA was evacuating and running from the Shivans, there were some ships (I recall an Orion and Mentu, and some kind of large Vasudan transport) being destroyed by Shivan beams. The odd things were that the beams mostly came from offscreen, and we didn't really get to see much of the Shivan ships (I think that I saw a Sathanas briefly, though). The beams were a very dark/dull red instead of bright red, but in the dream, I didn't find this weird.
The cutscene then shifted to focus on a specific Terran ship (I forget what kind but it was fairly large), there were fighters dogfighting around it, and Shivans were drifting through space and grabbing onto the hull, trying to tear their way in. In response, there were Terrans in spacesuits on the hull of the ship (some of them looking oddly like 40K space marines) fighting them off with guns that shot green lasers.
One Shivan fired its beam weapon (which looked more like a few thin white bolts than the large beam in the original cutscene) and hit one of the Terran soldiers, knocking him off a ledge onto a lower part of the ship (makes no sense in zero-G, but it was a dream...) then he was attacked by a Shivan wearing a Terran spacesuit (these looked more like traditional NASA suits). You couldn't see the Shivan inside but somehow I knew there were supposed to be Shivans inside those suits.
Just as it looked like the suited Shivan was about to kill the guy, it was hit by a white energy blast from behind, accompanied by the distinctive whine of a Banshee cannon. The suited Shivan didn't seem to be physically damaged, but it collapsed and fell off the Terran, apparently dead. Pan to see what was identified as an Angel Scout Fighter (in this cutscene it was so small it was about the same size as the suited Terran). It was shown that these fighters were armed only with a single Banshee laser, and were helping defend the ship against the Shivans.
The armored Terran thanks the Angel pilot, but then suddenly they are surrounded by about 50 more Shivans in those NASA spacesuits, and someone says that the Shivans are overrunning them. At this point, the armored Terran seems to just surrender, walking forward and letting the Shivans tear him apart. The Angel pilot does the same thing, landing on the larger ship's hull so the suited Shivans can climb onto the fighter and destroy it.
Then the dream changed to a situation where I was critiquing the cutscene. I don't recall if I was on the forums or what, but I was speaking to the people here who created the new cutscenes. I said that it was very impressively rendered, but I was confused because I didn't recall any humanoid Shivans (referring to the ones in the spacesuits) in the original games.
The creator of the cutscene replied with "Who says they're humanoid?" and then argued that the Shivans' 5 limbs were in the arms, legs, and head of the spacesuits and the rest of their bodies were contorted to fit inside somehow. I objected to this, saying that Shivans would be too big to fit in Terran spacesuits like that (I specifically remember comparing the size of a Shivan to an elephant).
The cutscene author replied with a long, overly complex analysis of the FS1 Hallfight cutscene, arguing that a rank insignia seen on one of the Terrans' uniforms was always a standard size and could be used to measure the size of the Shivan, thus mathematically proving that it could fit into a NASA spacesuit.
Before I could ask any followup questions, like how the Shivans got those spacesuits in the first place, or why they would even be wearing them (there were even unsuited Shivans in the same cutscene), I woke up.
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The fact that your dream devolved into an argument about lore accuracy in upgraded cutscenes is just perfect. :lol:
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I was deployed from a ship that had found itself lost in a nebula. This guy who'd gone missing recently shows up in a fighter saying to follow him, nobody really knows what's going on. Me and my wingmates are following him and we see this ship in the distance, not a spaceship, the outline of old timey pirate ship just sat there in the middle of a nebula. Then a massive subspace portal opens up behind it and at that point I got woken up.
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Wasn't that a mission in Derelict?
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Wasn't that a mission in Derelict?
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At least you didn't run into a Loki class that led you to a bunch of cargo containers and a Shivan Comm Node that all give out disjointed messages when scanned. :rolleyes:
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The fact that your dream devolved into an argument about lore accuracy in upgraded cutscenes is just perfect. :lol:
THE CABLES, MASON, THEY'RE TOO THICK
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I had another one.
I was flying a modified Elysium transport that handled like a fighter. It could fire Kaysers forward, and had 3 missile bays, one of which fired Helios torpedoes. It had an afterburner with a max speed of only 90, though.
I was supposed to destroy these two groups of stations/ships (I forget what they were exactly but I remember at least one Faustus at each one), I was doing hit-and-run attacks, and I fired a pair of Helios warheads then turned away and used my afterburner to escape the blast radius.
Once the two groups were destroyed, a huge Shivan fleet jumped in, with literally thousands of Sathanas juggernauts and many other types of ships.
I got a signal from command saying that they were going to activate an experimental new type of engine on my ship, which was faster than a normal drive but slower than a jump drive. Then I saw my ship flying backwards at crazy speeds, causing the entire battlefield to zoom out quickly (I could see the thousands of Shivan ships, many of them were battling GTVA ships, including at least one Colossus, although the GTVA was severely outnumbered). I'd estimate that my ship was traveling at least many thousands of m/s.
At this point, I was somehow made aware that, in the story of the mission/campaign I was playing, this massive Shivan fleet was just a bluff, and most of the ships were illusions of some sort. But in-game, they were actual ships. So I decided to activate the cheat codes and try to kill all of them with the kill code. In reality this would have been pretty much futile, as it takes 10 kill codes to destroy one Sathanas, and doing that to thousands of them would take hours, even if I held down the button and auto-acquired new targets. But in the dream it worked, and soon the entire fleet was exploding (there were also some other ships exploding that were even bigger than the Sathanas class, but they didn't look Shivan or GTVA).
I then received an order to dock with and enter this huge space station (it looked to have been carved out of an asteroid, with dimensions of maybe 30 x 50 km. There were actually several of these stations scattered around, but I was supposed to dock with one specific one). I realized that if I had played the mission normally, this would be easy as the station would stay still, but since I used cheats to destroy the entire Shivan fleet, the explosions were pushing the station and causing it to rotate a bit, so lining up with and getting inside the docking bay was kind of difficult, but I did it.
The inside of the station was fully navigable, with many complex rooms and chambers, other ships docked inside, etc. The station was still drifting from the force of the explosions so I had to be careful not to bump into the walls. I received an order to go to the 'upper level' of the station to dock my ship and end the mission, but the place was so large and complex that I couldn't find where I was supposed to go (even with a Descent - style 3D map to help).
I accidentally went down a corridor that led to a door I passed through, that wound up at a dead end. The door was one way, so I couldn't go back. But in the dead end room there was a computer that I could use to access the internet (yes, in the game... it was a weird dream after all) and I looked up the cheat code that could make you noclip (because I had forgotten it). In the dream, the cheat was the word "sweater". I used it and went back through the one-way door, and eventually found where I was supposed to go.
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I dreamed of a glorious civilization, of cities with spires that reached the sun, of a blue planet with vast seas, of people with myths of humanity everlasting, of children who saw in the embers of dying stars the destiny of their race, and they hurled themselves into the void of space with no fear.
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I once dreamed that I and several other people from my Amazon warehouse found an abandoned space station in a nebula. A Sathanas attacked and I had to blow it up by myself
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I like how the ****post dreams are more believable than the novellas I'm reading here.
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I like how the ****post dreams are more believable than the novellas I'm reading here.
Are dreams supposed to be believable?
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I like how the ****post dreams are more believable than the novellas I'm reading here.
Are dreams supposed to be believable?
What I find hard to believe are these long narratives that you can somehow remember every detail of. :P
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I like how the ****post dreams are more believable than the novellas I'm reading here.
Are dreams supposed to be believable?
What I find hard to believe are these long narratives that you can somehow remember every detail of. :P
There were actually a lot of details I forgot.
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pushing the station and causing it to rotate a bit, so lining up with and getting inside the docking bay was kind of difficult, but I did it.
Command : Alpha1, what are you doing?
Alpha1 : Docking
Command : That's imPOSSible!
Alpha1 : No, it's necessary
Command : You're out of line, pilot!
Alpha1 : Docking procedure complete.
Alpha1 : Negative Command, I am perfectly aligned.
Command : Insubordination is grounds for a court marshal pilot. Return to base immediately!
Alpha1 : You can discuss this at your debriefing.
Command : *Headset smashing and static sounds
(muffled) Deploy a support ship now! I want it to dock with them; do not undock until a recovery transport arrives!
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I had another one. In this dream, I was playing some weird version of TIE Fighter, and I was flying a TIE Defender, but the enemies were Shivans. They also had weird looking fighters unlike the ones in the game (but they were still called Scorpion class). The Shivans and the Rebel Alliance were both attacking us at once but were also hostile to each other. At one point the Rebels were using a GTC Fenris cruiser, that I guess they got from the GTVA, although for some reason it was labeled as a Cain class ingame. I remember that our objective was to defend a few transports from both the Rebels and Shivans, and it seemed overwhelming, but in the end we succeeded.
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And another one, this actually had two different parts. The first one was more like a mission briefing than an actual mission, the story was that a GTVA expedition was exploring a newly discovered system, but long-range sensors had detected a Sathanas in the system. The expedition only had an Orion, an Aeolus, and an Arcadia installation for some reason (in terms of large ships/stations), so they had sent some ships to the jump node to evacuate, while the Orion and Aeolus were waiting around the installation for scattered parts of the expedition to meet up with them and then proceed with the evacuation. The Arcadia had been abandoned and rigged with explosives and a remote self-destruct trigger, in hopes that if the Sathanas got too close to it, they could blow it up and cause some damage. The dream also had a part where I was trying to make the mission in FRED and trying to decide at what distance and angle the Sathanas would appear, etc.
The second part was a completely unrelated mission, that I was actually playing this time. I don't remember what kind of ship I was flying, but I know it was some kind of mod as, like my earlier dream, it also involved Star Wars ships and weapons, as well as some other assets that weren't from the Freespace or Star Wars universes (I couldn't tell you what they were, though). My ship had Star Wars style lasers as a primary weapon and two types of missiles, both heat seeking: First were these small green missiles that would fire in pairs and I had a lot of them, next was a type of swarm missile that fired in a group of 4 or more, but took a while to reload. I remember that I was fighting enemies identified as "Super Zeus" class fighters, but they looked like Apollos and were supposedly Shivan. I was also fighting the Millennium Falcon at one point, and it had some weird abilities: First, a missile turret that also fired a swarm missile, but more powerful than the one I had, and secondly, it seemed to have the ability to regenerate its health in bursts (I would get it down to 1% and then it would suddenly jump to around 17%, etc.) but this was a limited ability and I eventually destroyed it. Then after the Super Zeus fighters were taken care of, there were some Shivan bombers at long range (these actually looked Shivan but weren't a canon design, they were supposed to be from another mod or something) and while I was fighting those, there was a supernova warning, but I kept fighting because there were over 300 seconds before it hit. Then suddenly it seemed that I lost track of time and there were only 25 seconds or so left, so I jumped out and made it (I remember seeing the third-person perspective of my ship jumping out, but I still don't remember what it looked like).
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I just had one where I was flying in a nebula (I forget what kind of ship I was flying) but then I flew out of the nebula into normal space (there was a boundary that marked the edge of the nebula - can this be a real feature please?) and there were a bunch of Shivan cruisers, fighters, and bombers that my wingmen and I took down, but some of the Shivan bombers were weird - looking (they looked sort of like Medusas, and were grey instead of red and black). I remember that I was doing a lot of interception of Shivan bombs. Then a giant Vasudan fleet jumped in, and there was some sort of map showing hundreds of ships in a large area, divided into four factions: Terrans, Shivans, Vasudans, and Civilians/Pirates? I think. The area was so crowded that ships were bumping into each other all the time, and there were some cargo containers that we were supposed to scan, but they got destroyed before I could.
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I had another one, this time I was making a mission. I was trying to create a mission set during the FS2 campaign that used the spacehunk (https://wiki.hard-light.net/index.php/SpaceHunk) object, in a way I thought it would originally have been used.
It took place after the destruction of the first Sathanas, where your objective was to scan its wreckage to gain more info about it. The chunk was put in the middle of a small Shivan debris field to represent the rest of the debris, and it was obviously scannable. But I didn't know all of the details of the mission in the dream, so I was then testing it.
I flew over to the wreckage and scanned it, but then a transport with escort fighters jumped in, and there was some dialogue, with command saying they weren't supposed to be in the area, but they said they represented a planet in the Capella system and they wanted to claim the wreckage of the Sathanas for themselves as a status symbol or something. So the transport tried to dock with the piece of wreckage to tow it away (that was why it had a dockpoint), and I was ordered to fire warning shots to warn them off. However, the transport (an Argo, I think) had shields for some reason, and when I fired on it, its escorts started shooting me.
Then I was building the mission again, and the transport was programmed to dock with the debris chunk and jump out if you didn't stop it.
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You can be both creator, and character, and still not know WTF is going on. :lol:
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I just had several more (or maybe it was one dream with multiple parts? I'm not sure).
Anyway, for the first part, there was a setting in the menu that was (according to the dream logic) well-known and had been there since the retail version, which was an 'autopilot' setting. It let the computer control your ship, although you could override it at any time by using the controls yourself. This was generally considered useless by the community, as the autopilot couldn't fly well at all, and it wasn't programmed to try to achieve any specific mission objectives (it would just dogfight whatever enemies were in the area even if you were supposed to be doing something else).
So I decided, just for fun, to try to play through each mission in a campaign using only the autopilot setting and see if any of them were actually beatable that way. The campaign that I chose was Blue Planet Age of Aquarius (although in the dream the missions were nothing like the real BP:AOA). The first mission actually had more in common with the first mission of the main FS2 Campaign, as you were fighting NTF forces, although this mission was significantly harder than the real 1st FS2 mission.
When it started, the autopilot flew in formation with my wing and there were multiple NTF wings attacking a small group of cruisers, freighters, and transports we were supposed to be defending. Like I mentioned, the autopilot was not very skilled at all, so it just went head-to-head with a wing of NTF Lokis, missing most of its shots (I remember it killed one but I was thinking that if I was flying I could have killed all of them), and once they passed by my wing, we just kept flying forward, allowing the enemy wing to come around behind us for another run. I saw Subachs and Prometheus Rs being shot at my fighter (mostly missing, although some were hitting) but they weren't doing much damage. Finally the autopilot lazily turned around to engage the enemies and we exchanged fire a bit. At this point, I was thinking to myself that maybe the reason we weren't taking that much damage was because we were playing on Very Easy, where the enemy weapons and stuff were nerfed. A bit later, an NTF Leviathan cruiser jumped in, and a scripted message warned us to stay away from its AAA beams, but of course the autopilot ignored this, chasing an NTF fighter right near the Leviathan. Luckily for me, when it fired its AAA beams, it was targeting other allied fighters, and didn't target me.
Eventually, an allied fleet jumped in (there was one Deimos, the GTCV Vengeance, and one Typhon, the GVD Hedetet, I don't remember the other ships) and they destroyed the NTF fleet and the mission ended successfully. I considered this to be a lucky and unusual result as I avoided dying. There was also the idea that the way the mission was normally supposed to go, you were supposed to destroy at least two NTF cruisers and most of the NTF strikecraft, and the fleet would just show up to mop up the survivors, but the autopilot was so incompetent that it only killed 1 Loki and all of the enemy cruisers were still there when the allied fleet arrived.
Then I tried the second mission, which was very weird as it wasn't much like a Freespace mission at all (it took place on the surface of a planet) and as soon as I moved more than a few dozen meters above the surface, this weird robot would start chasing me and it was invulnerable and would kill me with one hit if it rammed my ship. I think it was supposed to be a stealth mission, but of course the autopilot didn't realize that so I just died.
For the second part of the dream, I was running a weird version of Freespace that caused the ships to physically appear in miniature in my house. There was a three-way battle between an NTF raiding group, a GTVA convoy, and a Hammer of Light raiding group that took place a meter or so over my bed. After the mission was over I went downstairs without turning off the game, and then I saw two Orions (they were about the length of a human hand) jump in near the door to my kitchen (it was implied that different rooms in the house served as different systems, and ships could jump between them), and they started heading towards the downstairs bathroom, which was implied to be where the Shivans would appear from. I considered shutting down the game as I was a bit nervous about having all of these miniature ships flying around my house, but I wanted to see what would happen. Then the dream changed to a bunch of weird non-Freespace stuff that's not really relevant.
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Another one. This was supposed to be a mission in the new Blue Planet Chanticleer campaign (which I haven't actually played yet, all I really know about it is that you're flying for the GTVA against the UEF). We were supposed to ambush and raid an enemy fleet and destroy at least 4 capships before the fleet jumped. The fleet was huge, with easily dozens of ships, and they didn't look much like UEF ships either. They had a strange look, a slightly red color and extended shapes with rounded curves, not like any type of ships I was familiar with. They ranged from about the size of an Argo transport to Juggernaut size.
I destroyed one of the smaller ones but then got distracted by something else in the mission and flew far away from the fleet, and a new group of ships jumped in close to me. They registered as hostile but they didn't shoot at me, even when I attacked them. So I figured maybe these could count for my 4 required kills. I began firing on a corvette-sized ship, but when it was down to only 8% hull integrity, some dialogue happened and that entire small group of ships changed IFF to friendly. After that, we were suddenly engaging a bunch of Shivan fighters, including Scorpions, and it took a while to deal with them all.
By this time, the enemy fleet was almost ready to jump and I was still quite far away from it, so I used afterburners to catch up, but I ended up needing to cheat to destroy enough ships in time.
I forget what I was flying for this mission, but I remember that it was some kind of heavy fighter with a turret.
In the debriefing, there was some strange plot information revealed. Some of the ships in the enemy fleet formerly belonged to the NTF, while some didn't, but they were all being commanded by a rogue GTVA admiral who was trying to sell out humanity to a faction of AIs that wanted to stop the GTVA/UEF war, but also enslave the human race (and supposedly make things peaceful and everyone happier).
It was never explained why the enemy ships looked so weird, or why there were Shivans there, though. I think there might have also been some ships from the Wing Commander universe in the mission, but I'm not sure.