Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Fate of the Galaxy => Topic started by: Dain on January 20, 2017, 09:47:50 pm
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Ok, I've been thinking about this for a while (this could almost be a general freespace comment).
In the films, wingmen are generally pretty important. Pilots stick together, help each other out and generally cover each other. Luke asks for help, Wedge arriving in the nick of time is an important moment in that battle.
However in Freespace, we're generally somewhat lone-wolfish. If you want wingmen to be characters, campaign makers usually have them be invincible. This is because when a wingman asks for help or yells about how they're in trouble, unless they are very lucky, that is probably the end of them. Even if you wanted to try and help them, finding them in the heat of the battle is hard, and then finding their attacker is also very hard.
Once again, the stuff I'm saying could be true of general FS stuff, and other mods.
There is a "target the last ship to send a message" button and a "target my targets attacker" button. I was wondering, for thematic purposes, how difficult it would be to have a script that basically chains those together. So a wingman requests assistance, you hit the button and are immediately targetting one of the attacking ships which gives you a much better chance of helping them out.
Just a thought, might feel quite star warsy.
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Possible, I think.
However, maybe there's a simpler alternative: simply add a new set of scripted markers and off-screen indicators which highlight all enemies that are attacking your wingmen (and/or the wingmen), similar to the escort reticle script. Of course there's a lot of details to work out, but that sounds like a convenient strategy for addressing that issue, since it doesn't require the player to learn/remember any new controls, and the targets can't get lost or mixed up by several successive messages.
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Yeah, highlighting a Wingman that's in trouble is easier to actually play with than having to memorize a bunch of key combos that are never going to be used elsewhere in the game.
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What about redesigning the way message.tbl works? I mean, there could be custom messages, just like in the X-Wing computer game series.
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Yeah, highlighting a Wingman that's in trouble is easier to actually play with than having to memorize a bunch of key combos that are never going to be used elsewhere in the game.
I think it'd work best as a codified mechanic in the game if you trained the player to do the "wingmate calls for help, pres butan to target their attacker, shoot attacker to save them" pattern and then built on it, but you'd need to build it into the game pretty early in the design process.
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Sounds like a more elegant solution than my idea.
Yeah, highlighting a Wingman that's in trouble is easier to actually play with than having to memorize a bunch of key combos that are never going to be used elsewhere in the game.
I think it'd work best as a codified mechanic in the game if you trained the player to do the "wingmate calls for help, pres butan to target their attacker, shoot attacker to save them" pattern and then built on it, but you'd need to build it into the game pretty early in the design process.
I guess as you say, a button to target a friendlies attacker after you get a message is a bit of an overly gamey system.
I suppose whatever solution you go with, you'd probably also want to reward the player for keeping friendly fighters alive somehow because otherwise they'll just ignore them because they can easily kill everything all by themselves.
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Also the player often has very little agency over whether AI wingmates get killed, and there's nothing worse than losing a mission due to factors beyond your control. This is why Blue Planet slaps you on the wrist if friendlies get shot up and why you'd need a very clean, clear map from player action/inaction to wingmate survival for it to be fun.