[Selectah]

Hail, o' masters of porting (I guess mainly Goober5K and GalEmp),

As I've dusted off most of me old FS1/2 stuff, I've come across a.., well, .. "BackPort" thingamadoodle that I wuz working on quite some time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Whazzat, I hear you explain? Basically, it's a FS2 "port" for FS1. Y'know, the one that can't be done.

Thing I had in mind,  though: I clearly remember some screenies and gossip about a FS1 version with planets (gasp!) as background. Moreover, these were displayed along suns. In other words not a replacement, but the real deal. Are those recollections mere pipe dreams, or whatnot? Is there any way to get those hacked into FS1? Is it an EXE hack, a Beta leak, pre-production screenies, or what? Does anybody know? Am I wasting my time?

And why would I want such a thing? Well, the backgrounds in FS1 are a bit -- how to say it -- lackluster compared to full out FS2 nebula's, I trust you agree. Basically, I want to flesh out the backgrounds a bit.

Anyone?

[Galemp]

I have no idea. I never modded FS1. Goober, Hippo, and perhaps Taylor might be able to help you out, though.

[Goober5000]

I have actually put many things from FS2 into FS1.  So has Hippo.  Hippo has more experience with the weapons though.

I can't tell you much about my backporting efforts, though, because they're classified.

[Hippo]

Most of what is in FS2 can be converted directly with no hastle, but what cant can be replicated in FS1 relatively easily. Beams can be done with some really shiny railguns (take a look at the commented out weapons in the ST weapon table), and some exelent use of turret-lock and turret-fire. Models can be converted very simply by meerly opening it in Modelview, saving it as a FS1 pof, and rebuilding the table entery for it.

Sound and effects are fairly straitforward, in that you simply move them from one place to another, and make sure they're the right format/pallete

The only big problems are in the game mechanics themselves. For instance, invisible boxes in FS2 are no-collide. Thats how the targetting box goes around the entire Ganymede. Without removing them, you'll bounce off random things. The other big one is game limits. FS2 cannot handle nearly as many polygons at once as compared to retail FS2 - let alone the SCP's counts. The last big one is bombs. As told in the dev blogs on freespace2.com (though, i witnessed this myself before i read it), bombs with high damages (even like that of the cyclops) will cause ships (even disabled orions for some reason) to sporadically start turning frantically to get out of the way (for good reason!). This problem occured in FS2 as well, but was fixed while still in development.


And of course, nebulae would be a bit of a problem... And EM...

[Selectah]

some exelent use of turret-lock and turret-fire

'Turret-lock' and 'turret-fire' in FRED1? How? Splainit!

[taylor]

FS2 is just an improved FS1 engine basically.  I know that early development of FS2 still had those same FS1 style nebula backgrounds (as can be seen in screenshots) but I don't know at what timeframe those various new features were implemented.  I suspect that many things from FS2 will work in FS1 with little modification but I don't think that I ever actually tried the new style background nebula.  I know for sure that FS2 still supports FS1 style nebula but I don't think FS1 supported FS2 style bitmaps, at least not in the parser.  I think the rendering engine should be able to handle it as long as you could figure out how to make it see them.

I worked on the icculus.org version of FS1.  It was basically taking FS2 and backporting it to FS1 through code.  At this point it's a hybrid of the two (since that was a good idea to me) where it gets the engine improvements of FS2 but with the look and feel of the original FS1.  Development took place in late 2002 to about mid-2003.  Final cleanup only took place recently though.  I plan on releasing this version of FS1 for Windows in the not too distant future (it's only for Linux and OSX right now) since it has a bunch of bug fixes and works better on newer computers because of that.  This version is capable of using the new bitmaps as well as the old.

[Selectah]

Hey Hippo, fuggedabout the turret-lock thingy. I solved the prob in FRED1/FS1. I simply reserve a certain SSL turret for 'beams', turning it on with the set-subsystem-strength SEXP and turning it off again with a chained ditto. Works like a dream, no probs. But cheers anyhow.

Pre-production screenies? Where? Showme!

[taylor]

Originally posted by Selectah
Pre-production screenies? Where? Showme!

The screenshots page on www.freespace2.com has pre-release (development & pre-demo) shots in the second page.

[Selectah]

Cheers Taylor,

I cannot for the life of me fathom how I've managed to miss those..

Hey Goob5K, exactly how classifed are those FSM missions of yours...?