[Retsof]

Suggestion:
You should be able to get all your resources from the systems you own.  You could mine Hydrogen from gas giants,  get other raw materials from asteroids and planets, (perhaps get some extra water from comets).  Also, you should be able to manufacture all ships in a given system.  You would have to upgrade your station with shipyard facilities, (I know there is a ship construction facility in TPI.)  This would also act like your Tech Levels, you have to upgrade your station to get better ships.

[Nuke]

well i got the camera working. it can scroll, rotate and zoom. rates scale to how zoomed you are. i guess now we need a gui. all this is just the foundation for the mod.

things like resources and how to implement havent been fully thought up. so far weve come up with asteroids for metals, and gas miners for fuel. it might not be possible to use 3d planets, so i was thinking using a node as the resource location, to jump to a nebula or a gas giant. the other idea was to jump the miners off to a gas giant in system (but not shown in the mission) with an intra system jump. but this eliminates a control point from the game.

comets are a good idea for water, small enough to be allowed in mission, but water really doesnt play much of a roll in the fs universe. i really dont want to make it resource hell. perhaps convoys can be deployed through your node to load your ships up with provisions for the crew. so the number of ships you have is dependent on the number of freighters you own. loosing freighters reduces your unit strength and you can no longer order new units until you either order new freighters or more can be deployed by command. i could probibly also deminish the ships ai class to simulate poor crew conditions as well in the event of expenditure > income (or increase if vice versa).

so

fuel = operational status of warships, part of build cost
metals = main portion of build cost
provisions = consumed by crew over time, required to support new crew (and therefore ships). shortages mean reduced ai capability

[Retsof]

I have no Idea if this is Possible, but you could get 3D planets from Empire at War.
Perhaps in extreme shortages you would have to drydock a ship or two and send the crew home (unless you want them to starve to death).  Also, this would free up resources for your remaining ships.  To reactivate the ship would take X amount of time (increasing for bigger ships) to get it crewed again, but no extra materials (except the supplies for the crew, of course).

[Nuke]

planets arent exactly hard to make, hi-poly (or a normal-mapped low poly) sphere + planet shader is all you need. then bake the texture off of that.

ship status will go to disabled when the fuel runs dry. so doing the same thing for provisions would be redundant. but still if youre crew is on 1/10th rations their ai capacity for their ship will diminish to ensign, making it cannon fodder.

an excess of provisions may increase the crew proficiency, increasing its ai class. a ship may also gain prestige will a number of kills and a high proficiency. overall prestige allows you access to newer technology, kaysers instead of proms ect. making it the equivalent of an upgrade system.

[Aardwolf]

We now have a camera, using mouse to scroll, zoom, and rotate. The specifics of how it does all three of those actions will be revealed in due time.

Additional work on the camera, the map bounds, etc. is getting done by Nuke as I type this.

There was a minor bug involving cutscenes, but I imagine it's either something we can fix or something related to the special build we are using.

[Polpolion]

Just how 2D is this?  Are the fighters and stuff on the same axis, or do they have something like no greater than X, no less than Y, for dogfighting?

[Aardwolf]

Here is the first screenshot!

Just how 2D is this?  Are the fighters and stuff on the same axis, or do they have something like no greater than X, no less than Y, for dogfighting?

Well, originally it was going to be entirely on the xz plane (horizontal), but now we are planning on allowing a few kilometers of movement on the y axis. We are considering using something like Shadows of Lylat's rail mission system to make ships stay within the game area, which will be about 100 km on a side and an as of yet undecided number of kilometers in depth.



Edit: Nvm, no edit.

[MP-Ryan]

Regarding balance:

Why not build an RTS without resource micromanagement, but based on a risk-style concept... the more territory you hold, the greater the resources you can command (in the form of timed reinforcement requests from jump nodes).  You could use jump nodes as bases and divide a system into sectors of interest which allow for additional unit reinforcements.

FS is not really a game that lends itself to resource management, but you could quite easily build territory control and reinforcements into the existing canonical parts of the game.

[Aardwolf]

I would say (and I haven't discussed this with Nuke yet) that if you were to do something like Risk, you would need a TON of ships in order to occupy all of the map, or all of the resource centers, or what-have-you.

We can't have more ships than the engine will display at a reasonable framerate.

Also,

resource micromanagement

is not something I think either me or Nuke is planning on having. There will be resources of some sort, yes, but to make it fun and FreeSpace-y, the focus of the game will be more on how you use them than how you acquire and protect them. I'm not sure quite how it could be done, but I think it would be best to reduce the effectiveness of the sort of "worker raids" that require so much attention in other strategy games.

[Aardwolf]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CofhrUDBCbI

The first gameplay video. I will upload a high-res version to my game-warden account soon.

I have uploaded a high-res version to my game-warden account.

It can be found here: http://www.game-warden.com/masterpokey/FS2OpenRTS/FS2OpenRTS001.avi

[Singh]

This has...potential. Although I really dont see why you want to stick with just a top-down view - shouldn't it be possible to just keep it ala HW? It would be possible, since the commands to let it stay focused on certain units and rotate free around them already exist - it would be just a matter of modifying those to let you roam freely around the world. You could of course, impose limits on the ceiling and area the camera could move around, but just limiting it to top-down seems kinda...pointless, I think. 

If you ever get it up and working though, especially for the editor hit me a PM and maybe I can help do you guys up a good story.

[Nuke]

i think the top-down view gives you the biggest picture you can have, and also simplifies the math involved in making selections, ect. i am planning 1 or 2 auxiliary displays though, an idea i had is to have cinematic cameras follow the ships around, from like a cockpit view or following the group out from behind it abit or from a random turret, ect, to get a battlefield level view, theese would be rendered to a texture and placed in the command overlay. this sorta fills the role of the character animation you had in stacraft. but the action is real time.

i may include a free look command, that lets you, temporarily, tilt the inclination of the camera, but its sort of a low priority. in general keeping the play area flat makes the units easier to find/manage/control. the huge scale differences would make it too easy to loose small ships when zoomed out to the juggernaut scale.

anyway as for controls, the border represents the control zone. its like my moysejoy function but with a really big deadzone. with no buttons pressed, you can translate the camera by movint into the coresponding region, an the closer to the edge you go, the faster the scroll. right mouse toggles zoom and rotate functions for the same regions. im gonna go ahead and make it possible to do these functions with the standard flight controls, through either the joystick or the keyboard, so that yaw and pitch act as translate, bank acts as rotate and the throttle is your zoom.

the player ship will be just a dummy model which is invisible and non-solid. it will sit up behind the camera somewhere, and will be stealth and invisible to the other ships for the most part. this allows me to use its targeting commands, and hijack its flight controls as a means to accsess the joystick to control other things. dummy weapons may be used, the presence of which in mission can initiate other functions. we dont have full keyboard access but we can differ a few functions.

[Nuke]

i didnt get the selections working yet, but i revamped the interface. now the keypad controls the translation amd rotation of the view, as does the joystick. throttle keys control the zoom, but in a relative sort of way. i might tweak it so that the throttle sets the zoom in absolute terms, meaning pushing the throttle all the way zooms in to max, pulling out zooms out to max. this also lets you use what would normally be your throttle presets to go to preset zoom levels. il think about it. if you accidently hit m however, you might get some intresting side effects. you can still use the mouse, the script just uses whatever input is greater.

targeting works. i placed the player ship (which is essentially removed from play, im only using it to facilitate a variety of interface functions) a few hundred units above the maximum altitude that ships will be allowed to go, directly behind the camera. this allows you to use the target reticle to target whatever is in the center of the screen. you can still cycle targets and their subsystems and turrets as well. im still gonna have point and click targeting and multi targeting somehow, both of which will work in sorta the same way as ship selection. its starting to look like im snowed in for the duration of the weekend, so other than doing my taxes il work on that.

[Aardwolf]

I wish I wasn't on a laptop and therefore didn't have to hold the fn key to use the 'numpad'...

[shiv]

This... is... awesome!!

[Retsof]

Perhaps for development purposes you could just put in one resource for everything which always comes in.  Then you could test stuff without needing to figure out several resources.  Also, is the command interface done? If so, I would like to download this, as long as it doesn't exceed 2 MB. (pathetic internet)

[Aardwolf]

The command interface is not done yet. We are still working on selection.

When this gets uploaded, note that it requires a special build to run.

[Retsof]

Special build... okay... urhm... yeah. 

[Nuke]

not really, it just needs a head build.

all the scripting features i need are in head, so i could always build head if need be. not sure about bob's rtt stuff, but i dont think we need it any time soon.

[Warp Shadow]

 
This is AMAZING!!!