Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: S-110 on March 19, 2003, 01:05:16 pm
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How difficult would it be to set up dynamic salvage with the FS2 engine?
I'm thinking of something similar to Mechwarrior2 Mercs where when you downed an enemy machine you could salvage the vehicle. The player would keep this list of vehicles and be able to use or sell them in game. Just wondering if something similar could be effected without too much difficulty?
Food for thought - I'm not a programmer, and am totally in the dark as to what can be accomplished. I have to say what I have seen so far is great! :nod:
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ok, i don't program, but here's an idea:
what about making a sexp wich alows missions to write in a txt file in a certain directory, with a bunch of file handler sexp's. also one to read that info, off course. this would not only solve this problem, but many other status carry-over like things, so it can be widely used.
another wild idea by yours truly, just ignore it, unless you can use it.
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I think that's kindof how its done in OFP: Resistance.
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This sounds a little like what they have in Freelancer actually. However, in these other games you are kind of an independent guy doing things for money, while in FS2 you are a military officer; salvaging the remains of enemy ships sounds fine, but it would not be the player that gets to keep them, so there would be little point in doing so except when you have specific objectives to do that.
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How about a campaign when you're not only a pilot but a commanding officer as well - so you've got to manage the troops under your command. Something like in Mechwarrior 3 -you're not the one deciding about tha campaign, but an immediate officer between the pilots and the command staff.
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This'd be cool, problem is that FS campaigns do not work as a single unit. They're a lot of missions strung together and played in sequence, with no correlation between them but that which can be synthesized in FRED (and, yeah, Red Alert missions). All these other games, you keep ship and environment information from mission to mission, and the campaign acts as a unit. That means if you have X number of rockets in the hangar at the end of the previous mission, you can carry them over to next time, and if you disable and capture a ship, you can take it into the next mission with you.
That doesn't mean a lot, until you realize that that means that virtually everything not the engine would have to be replaced. Continuity would be awesome, but I don't see it happening quite so soon as, say, Newtonian physics, voxel support, and a 40000 poly-per-ship limit. In other words, don't hold your breath.
Besides which, there are other problems with it, such as the inevitability that people will try to do this with ships not meant to be human-piloted. You can fake it in FRED for now, but that's as far as you're likely to get for a while.
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I was thinking along the lines of more control over resource management. There are other possible spins on the story line than just the central theme of the campaign - mercenary, ops behind enemy lines, militia, privateer/pirate...
As far as ships not meant for humans...wouldn't that be part of the fun? Doesn't modding tend to push limits anyway?
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With the advent of FS2 SCP I think most of the issues are not that much of a trouble
- The gunship class is already in the workshop of mod gurus
- Open Fred means a lot of things can be incorporated into the game
- With things like DivX support, OpenGl or DX8 support I doubt a new interface would be that much of a difficulty
- Mission Dersign:
-random generated mission has to be thought out in theory - if you come up with good algorythms, I think the boys - and girls - will fix it within a couple of months
-certain variables could be gained form an outside file, so it's not that much of a hack to carry over the data
-FRED already supports using variables, with good SEXP-ing a mission can be made quite dynamic to suit the data
[/list]
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A little opening up of the variables could solve this problem. All we really need to make this work are two changes.
1) The ability to have variables carry over from one mission to another. This already exists partly in the Red Alert code so hopefully it wouldn`t be too hard to do.
Not to mention that FS2 already must store all kinds of data from the campaign so that the Is-Previous-Event SEXP's work. This would just be more of the same hopefully.
2) The ability to make the number of ships or weapons available in the Team Loadout equal to one of these persistant variables.
After that all that is needed is some fancy FREDding.
BTW even if you aren`t interested in this particular idea having persistant variables is a damn good idea for all kinds of other reasons.
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Originally posted by Flaser
- The gunship class is already in the workshop of mod gurus
- Open Fred means a lot of things can be incorporated into the game
- With things like DivX support, OpenGl or DX8 support I doubt a new interface would be that much of a difficulty
- Mission Dersign:
-random generated mission has to be thought out in theory - if you come up with good algorythms, I think the boys - and girls - will fix it within a couple of months
-certain variables could be gained form an outside file, so it's not that much of a hack to carry over the data
-FRED already supports using variables, with good SEXP-ing a mission can be made quite dynamic to suit the data
[/list] [/B]
Wow. If I were Zylon I'd have a field day with this. :rolleyes:
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To mention, think of how 'Independence War 2' (and a few of it's major third party addons) do it. If cargo traders are attacked, they tend to dump their cargo to try and encourage you to leave them alone. Destroying fighters and larger ships can also yield a few salvagable parts. This was combined with a very large economy, as well as spare parts and manufacturing systems. If you ever needed a system, but didn't have a whole one, but did have blueprints, then all you needed were the necessary parts/scrap metal for making it.
Flaser mentioned an idea of how it'd be nice to have support for a campaign where you're not just another grunt pilot, but have management over some resources as well, such as perhaps what you salvage (thus saving your government a lot of money), your wingmen, etc. The idea just reminded me a lot of Colonial Blair in the Wing Commander novels. Neaty. :lol:
Eg: You don't have real strategic control, but you have some logistical control, and occasionally (as in the case of decently high ranking officers), you have decisions to make as far your role in the campaign goes. Such as do you go after an attack craft in a daring assault, or do you take the more modest duty of defending an important convoy, if it's in the same system and the decision is delegated to you. Do you chase after fleeing enemy ships far enough that it leaves the ship you're defending so far behind that it's vulnerable to attack because it's defense isn't at full strength? Perhaps it's beyond the scope of the mainstream additions to Freespace 2, but it'd be an interesting thought for branching perhaps?
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New member, fire up the welcome beam!
(my own custom made one :p kinda big sry)
(http://hardlight.zapto.org/misc/welcomebeam.jpg)
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BEST ONE YET. I love the pic.
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I think the idea of file accessing SEXP's is a good one.
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Perhaps you could do something similar as in Homeworld with, IIRC, the salvage corvettes. You don't necessarily have to try to salvage a derelict ship, but possibly have some sort of troop transport class to assault ships and capture them. Hm.. now that I think about it, you can already do that in FRED2. Well, nevermind then. :)
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so far i had only one response on my file editing sexp idea. i don't know if everyone has read it, but IMHO, it could save an awfull lot of work, and it wuld be multifunctional, since FREDders could also use it for other campaign information.