[IPAndrews]

Someting I've been thinking about. Inspired by one of I_E_Maverick's suggestions actually. Would it be possible to turn The Babylon Project into a space trading game in the style of the classic game "Elite". Using persistent campaign variables to keep track of such things as how much money you have and your current cargo. Is this a good diea? Is this possible? Does anyone have any opinions one way or the other?

[I_E_Maverick]

well, i have no idea if it is possible, but i would like such a game as i played x and privateer 2, both great games. if you could do that it would be great. especially in the bab5 universe it could be very interesting, you could flie through all known sectors, narn, centauri, you could smuggle or be a legal traider, all this kind of stuff

[DaBrain]

I love the idea!

I always wanted to get some new gameplay elements into the FS2 engine. (--->Shadows of Lylat ^^)

[Fury]

The problem is that FS2 has not been designed to be a game like this. It would be a serious pain in the butt for mission designers to make a full campaign like that. Not to mention that mission designers are already struggling with "regular" campaigns as is.

The idea is intriguing, but it will most likely remain just that, an idea.

[karajorma]

It could be done. It wouldn't be easy though.

ShadowWolf's Mercs campaign is an example of something similar. IIRC in that case he's restricting things to small mini campaigns which will later be stiched into a full campaign.

[Black Wolf]

What you want to do is get a whole bunch of people producing small, standalone TBP missions with specific, identifyable goals.

Then you get a decent FREDder with a lot of free time to stitch together the relevant PVs and freespacelanceresque jumping between sequences. The real challenge isn't the technicality of it, just getting the basic mission fodder and finding someone willing to do what would probably be fairly repetetive semi monkey work.

[IPAndrews]

For the trading aspect of the game you need a set of missions which define locations. The missions can then randomly position ships and cargos. The player needs to be able to fly around the mission and there needs to be a mechanism for allowing the player to trade with other ships in space. Possibly targetting a ship with a cargo and pressing some key to buy it's cargo. Or targetting a ship without a cargo when you have a cargo and pressing some key to sell it your cargo.

Once buying and selling is in place you need some way of allowing the player to choose which destination they wish to jump too next using the jump gate. Perhaps pressing a particular key or maybe once again targetting an object (nav beacon?) and maybe pressing a key.

Finally in the campaign file you need to send the player to the appropriate mission for the destination. Only thing is the campaign needs to be able put into an infinite loop.

I'm experimenting a little with this but so far I've not figured out how to put the campaign into a loop, or how to show how much money the player has (numeric campaign variable) on the screen. So I'm not doing great.

[Sigma957]

Its a pity that freespace engine doesn't allow system jumping while inside a mission.

[Singh]

I believe Goob's Freespacelancer is something similar to what you're looking for.

It is entirely possible to accomplish - its just that you'll need a FREDder with a LOT of free time and willing to commit quite a bit to do this.

[Col. Fishguts]

Originally posted by IPAndrews
I'm experimenting a little with this but so far I've not figured out how to put the campaign into a loop, ....

Yup, Goob demonstrated that campaigns can bee infinitely looped with the powers of notepad.

Not sure about the status of persistent variables, though. But I like the idea.

[IPAndrews]

Hey guys. I'm tied up working on tables and model conversions and other such boring rubbish. So I thought I'd ask the wider TBP community. Do we have a community? Well anyway. Are there any talented FRED users out there who fancy having a go at this?

[karajorma]

I would love to but I'm over commited as it is.

I've been wanting to do something like this since I saw Goober's Freespacelancer demo.

[Skullar]

So.... how far have you guys come ?

[IPAndrews]

Blimey. Necrophilia or what.

Well I managed to get a code in place whereby you could fly around in hyperspace and jump to normal space and it would always generate a system (ships and background) that were the same every time. The same code could have been used for generating product prices that were broadly the same every time.

The killer problem was the user interface for trading. It was very difficult to make work using SEXPs, and the scripting system didn't help either because there was no way to make the scripting system talk to the SEXPs.

So I got most of the way to making this work, but couldn't quite get there 100%.

[Vidmaster]

I have done something like this for Ares (an AmbroisaSoftware Mac Game) and thought about if it would be possible in FS2.
There was no trade or similar stuff, but you could freely jump between the (branching) missions. (It was a custom universe with 3 factions, 4 ships per faction and 9 star systems). It contained about 30 missions, each system had multiple variants depending on the player's progression.

My conclusion: IT IS POSSIBLE WITH FS2 and I guess it would be fun.

BUT: Actually, this doesn't fit in any of the universes Freespace and all of it's mods are set in.

- you can only fly fighters
- freelance trading is (aside from WC) never really a major subject
- it would be monstrous

I say stick with Freelancer, Terminus and especially Escape Velocity Nova !!!

[Admiral_Stones]

Oh yeah, EVN rocked. Especially with my fed Carrier. Ah, good memories.

[karajorma]

I've not done any FREDding but I have been improving my loadout code recently. Most of the basic idea is already in HEAD but I've been refactoring the code to make it better and adding new features as they came to me. Once I'm done you'll be able to buy and sell ships and weapons if you make a "shop" mission.

With some clever FREDding you could have a home base(s) with selection of ships you'd bought and choose which one you flew on any mission. You could then use that for whatever you wanted to (e.g. Narn ships have problems in Centauri space but no one starts a fight with a Nial since they're worried about starting another war with the Minbari). You could even do an Elite and have a First One fighter on some distant planet no one will ever visit.
 More clever SEXping you could allow you to only repair ships on their own species' bases or places like B5. 

I'm going to have to look into whether it's possible to make the loadout code work on a per ship basis as that would allow al kinds of other fancy tricks (hiring wingmen for instance).



So as far as I'm concerned the idea isn't dead. I'm just doing behind the scenes stuff on it.   Whether I'll ever get round to FREDding anything is another matter. To be honest though I'm not worried about trading that much. I'd be working on something like Freelancer without the trade. You fly from system to system doing missions to raise cash instead.

[emi_100]

i LOVE the idea!!!
GOOD one!

can i help?? 

[karajorma]

Learn to FRED if you haven't already. Get very good with string variables and the argument SEXPs. That's pretty much all that's required.

[IPAndrews]

Creating things such as option menus for the trading system is the problem. The only mechanism we have for displaying at the moment is the subtitle system and that's inadequate for creating a persistent menu of options. You have continually recall the subtitle sexp to redisplay menu items with short lifespans to keep them alive on-screen. It's just woefully inadequate. The scripting system is more promising but without being able to use sexps to set variables to tell menus when to appear, when not to appear. etc...