Modding, Mission Design, and Coding > The Modding Workshop
Open world?
Goober5000:
--- Quote from: Nyctaeus on January 19, 2022, 01:24:08 pm ---Axem made something like that. Basically a set of empty missions with some random ships, but you can use jump nodes to travel between the areas. Nothing but a basic prototype, but working.
--- End quote ---
If you're talking about FreeSpaceLancer, that was me...
http://staff.hard-light.net/goober5000/downloads/freespacelancer.zip
But Axem took that concept, ran with it, and came up with the mission hub in JAD 2.2x.
Nyctaeus:
--- Quote from: Goober5000 on January 19, 2022, 09:44:32 pm ---
--- Quote from: Nyctaeus on January 19, 2022, 01:24:08 pm ---Axem made something like that. Basically a set of empty missions with some random ships, but you can use jump nodes to travel between the areas. Nothing but a basic prototype, but working.
--- End quote ---
If you're talking about FreeSpaceLancer, that was me...
http://staff.hard-light.net/goober5000/downloads/freespacelancer.zip
But Axem took that concept, ran with it, and came up with the mission hub in JAD 2.2x.
--- End quote ---
Nah, I remember Axem released something different. Can't find it atm but I played it. It was more of a proof-of-concept that such thing may work, but it was pretty barebones.
EatThePath:
--- Quote from: Strygon on January 19, 2022, 05:13:07 pm ---Procedural Generation is more or less not an option either. Many have tried but none have so far actually brought any results to the table AFAIK.
--- End quote ---
Honestly, Blighted makes a semi-decent counterpoint I think.
Traditionally fredded sexp-scripted missions are going to be hard to adapt to this, but I think if one embraces lua scripting there's not much actually stopping 'open world' gameplay with distinct 'instances' you jump between, similar to EVE online, or indeed Blighted. You would essentially have to build a new larger scale gameplay loop, more in the design sense than just the programming sense, and track it's state via lua. Either do the mission logic purely in lua or have standard level files that act as a templates for different types of missions that you flesh out with lua data to generate different areas. If memory serves the campaign system is manipulable enough with lua to allow that, but I've never actually dissected any of the mods that push those boundries to see exactly how it's done.
It's also worth mentioning that if you have a specific vision and can identify the individual features, and are patient, you can often get holes in the engine support for your idea filled. If you try to make something like I just described but find that a couple of scripting functions or sexps you can't live without don't exist or a quirk of the engine is roadblocking, don't treat that as the death of the idea. If you tell the developers it might turn out that what you want is doable, or someone might have a clever alternative for you.
Zarax:
One feature that could be explored more (IMHO, I didn't play every mod) is the ability to store data between missions in one campaign.
With a relatively small settings you could keep track of individual ship health at the end of one mission and depending on scripts you could associate battle damage and secondary objectives with ship/weapon availability.
Not exactly open world, but with enough effort it's pretty dynamic.
wookieejedi:
Tracking ship stats between missions like that could likely even be done with the sexp container features being added in. Ultimately though, yeah lua will let you do almost anything, including writing/overriding mission files, tracking as many variables as you want, and even doing things like selecting options such as planets from a galaxy map, typing in call sign names for ships, and more.
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