[Titan]

just want to toss around an idea. instead of having stories place you in squadrons all the time (still can, yours just gets renamed for those) you can actually start your own squadron, have logos, choose pilots, and that stuff. and the pilots gain experience, regardless of mission/campaign/mod and you can use these to give them attributes. they can also get like personality points, so that you can make them unique. and you would be able to place certain squadmates in wings however you like and that stuff... i know it probably can't be done or is very difficult/ time consuming, but it would be very cool if we could.

[TrashMan]

It is difficult and time-consuming..

Especially the "personality points" thing.

[Dark RevenantX]

Assume that any thing that would require a new element of UI is difficult and time consuming.

[karajorma]

If you want to be able to upgrade them yourself then you're looking at a lot of time doing lua scripting in order to make and work the interface.

If you want to let the game handle it then it's definitely doable. The only real problem is that the current AI classes don't make a huge difference to the fighter's behaviour. You could fake this in other ways though (Giving ships a guardian period equal to their ranking for instance to indicate strong defensive skills, swapping weapons to slightly more damaging ones to indicate good attacking ones.

It's all doable though.

[BlackDove]

Yes, and if we gave the player a better UI instead of choosing the "Loop" or "Get out", with campaigns centric to replying with different lines of text, we could probably induce an RPG experience as well.

I don't think the community is big enough for any of this. Too much of a project for the ratio of people that would care.

[Swifty]

If we're on the subject of persistence in FS2, for ****s and giggles I just want to share.

You know what I've been throwing around in my head for a bit? Creating a dynamic campaign system like the dynamic campaigns from Falcon 4.0 or Enemy Engaged.

Instead of a scripted campaign, you're flying missions in a living, breathing battlespace. Each side has a certain number of bases, destroyers, corvettes, cruisers, and fighters, all distributed throughout the subspace network. Basically, the CPU dukes it out with itself, mobilizing fleets, dispatching fighters, creating Air Tasking Orders, and simulating the skirmishes and firefights in super accelerated time until it comes the the point where the game finally auto-FREDs a mission based on your location and numerous other variables affecting your situation. Your performance in the game will affect how the campaign goes.

So that's the idea and I haven't the faintest idea how to implement it nor even sure if this is even feasible. For starters, FREDing is hard as it is and expecting to algorithmically generate fun missions is easier said than done. Plus you have issues of scale, AI in both the strategic and real-time portions of the campaign, and if the campaign is even winnable by the player; can one lone Alpha One really make a difference?

So yeah. This isn't something I'm serious about but it's nice to dream.

[karajorma]

*points at BHX*

Not only is this all possible it's already been mostly done already in IP Andrew's campaign.

That said, one idea had when I was working on Team Loadout was to expand the system and allow it to keep track of a fleet loadout too. That way you could control which forces the player had as well as the dispensation of the enemy forces without the kind of in depth mission scripting BHX required. You'd simply set up the variables, tick a box on each ship to tell the game to determine the class of that ship dynamically and the game would swap it to something for which that side had ships remaining.

To be honest I doubt it would even be hard to get FSO to parse the required data as I made the Team Loadout stuff as general as possible with this in mind. All the alt_classes stuff would work as well with fleet loadout as it does with teams. I'd simply create a similar set of fleet functions to the loadout ones and run everything through swap_parse_object().   

 The time consuming bit would be making the new Fleet Editor for FRED so that it could understand it. 

[Swifty]

*points at BHX*

Not only is this all possible it's already been mostly done already in IP Andrew's campaign.

Oh that's nice, Kara. Just say it's already been done and just leave it at that... Can you give me a link of the project or point out what modules in the source code that show how it works?

[karajorma]

It's not out yet though and based on my understanding is currently shelved. My point was that it's not as pie in the sky as you were saying. It can all be done through clever use of the existing SEXPs.

That said the number of FREDders in the community who could do something like that is in the single digits which is why I was thinking about the Fleet Loadout stuff as a way of making it more accessible.

[Bob-san]

The best solution I could figure out is making 2-3 outcomes for major (influential) missions and then carrying the storyline from there. That's what I'm doing with The Sagitta Project (once I get it moving forward again)--it'll be highly branching so it's a sort of choose-your-own-fate campaign. It splits with the normal campaign right when Act 1 finished up and then mirrors Acts 2 and 3 in that you can fly missions for either the NTF or GTVA and other sub-groups (GTVI, NTI, and so on). Your actions determine YOUR fate and to some extent the war's fate. If you're assigned to protect a convoy, you're expected to do so. If that convoy fails to survive, you may lose a weapon, a ship, reinforcements, or some cruiser-to-destroyer support later. If you don't destroy all the cargo in a depot, you may have an additional wing of hostiles to deal with later. So on and so fourth. Protecting a destroyer? If it gets too damaged, you're losing it for a mission. Again, so on and so fourth.

[Polpolion]

How would you guys do the personality development? It's one thing to have the same, deep, well-developed characters throughout multiple campaigns, but it's another thing to have them be dynamic characters. From what it looks like you'd need to modify the campaign to really do anything major, and that'd be a huge pain.

[Retsof]

I think if you wanted an AI like that you would have to invent something akin to a sentient AI, and if you did that you would probably be too famous to worry about us here at HLP.

[Mura]

mhh.... probably not a "sentient AI" maybe can design aspects of personality the character can access depending on how much it has developed... maybe you can even program what things can do on each level, and such... i know is not as much as it growing naturally since you would need to program what things can do and cant do, but it's an idea (if it made sense at all  )

[Galemp]

Reminds me of this little piece of concept art I cooked up a while back.

[karajorma]

Doing that much wouldn't be particularly hard actually. The problem is that the Accuracy, Evasion etc don't actually do that much. In fact Patience never did anything.

The trick would be to add values that actually do something and make the game use them. Although I wouldn't want to use such an obvious display of it in BtRL I certainly wouldn't mind having a system where certain pilots were obviously better than their counterparts.

[Snail]

Before we do this we should get the AI to actually make a difference.

[Mobius]

The trick would be to add values that actually do something and make the game use them. Although I wouldn't want to use such an obvious display of it in BtRL I certainly wouldn't mind having a system where certain pilots were obviously better than their counterparts.

May I know why? It would be good for BtRL.

Before we do this we should get the AI to actually make a difference.

Game physics have their importance, they should be slightly changed to make the presence of very skilled pilots possible.


You can get something like that with an wise usage of variables and scripting. You can create cutscene missions and use scripting(I recall a few useful mouse related options)to "create" an interface.

[karajorma]

This is absolutely nothing to do with physics. It's purely an AI problem.

As for why not for BtRL, cause while I think Starbuck and Kat should obviously be better pilots if you fly with them having an actual screen flash up with Starbuck's stats for Accuracy and Evasion is the very antithesis of the gritty BtRL feel. It's something that would suit something like Starfox or a mercenary based campaign more I suspect.

[Davros]

If we're on the subject of persistence in FS2, for ****s and giggles I just want to share.

You know what I've been throwing around in my head for a bit? Creating a dynamic campaign system like the dynamic campaigns from Falcon 4.0 or Enemy Engaged.

So that's the idea and I haven't the faintest idea how to implement it

its in the eech source code

[Mobius]

This is absolutely nothing to do with physics. It's purely an AI problem. 

Game physics take their part. It would be much easier to handle experienced pilots with high speeds and momentum.