Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: KARMA on May 01, 2003, 08:12:02 am
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personally i don't need this, but i think it could be somehow cool
what about an economic system like tachyon?
i mean the possibility to store money in the player file like the points; to receive money in a mission if you succesfully complete objectives, and maybe even from kills; and the possibility to do things with moneys, like call in repair ships (that will cost depending from your damages and ammo status) during mission, buy primary and secondary weapons and ammo during loadout, buy or rent ships during ship selection.
it will give nothing to standard campaigns, but new campaigns could be studied to benefit from this thing, producing more involvment, maybe a story more centered to the individual pilot rather that epic battles, etc etc, it could be cool i think
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Yeah, why not... It could enable a different kind of gameplay, like... some kind of bounty hunter, mercenary or pirate environment. The main campaign is set in military world so it isn't needed in there, but it would make sense in those environments. Successes bring in more money to buy more supplies and so forth...
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Yeh, this and the ship thing I wanna see, too. For it to work, though, requires a continuity setup, which I think they've got on the list as one of the big changes. Right now, with the exception of red alert missions, values don't carry over from one mission to another, and you're essentially playing a series of wholly independent missions rather than one unified campaign.
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Basically all you'd need would be two changes.
1) Persistant variables (like Stryke said)
2) The ability to pass that varible and have it displayed on the screen somewhere. Now personally I wouldn't have that hard coded as money. Make it so that a particular variable can be passed to a certain area of the screen. Then leave it up to the campaign designer to make the HUD graphic with the $ or £ sign on it.
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Why not use the Points code? Right now the number of points you get is hidden, and is only evident when you get promoted. All we need is a way to make the points visible and have some way to 'spend' them.
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Originally posted by GalacticEmperor
Why not use the Points code? Right now the number of points you get is hidden, and is only evident when you get promoted. All we need is a way to make the points visible and have some way to 'spend' them.
i think it would be better to make a couple of file handler SEXP's, as suggested before, since those can be used for more things then just this.
just a few sexps which write variables into a txt file, and some to read/edit them. easy as pie.
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Nah. If you're going to use money it has to be cold hard cash :)
That said if you do what I was suggesting there is no reason you couldn't make the points accessible for players who wanted it. Might be kind of fun to play a mission and watch your point counter skyrocket when you see a sath you hit only once get blown apart by beams :D
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i would beg of you to not turn this into a privateer/freelancer thing... this game is about the fighter pilot and the epic battles and campaigns, and therefore has a certain feel... change that and much will be lost...if you ask me (well, who did anyway!?!) :)
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I'm in favour for it, if the engine can be expanded with this functionality without compromising backwards compatibility, i'd say, go for it :)
Cheers,
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It COULD be developed as a seperate dev tree or option or game for those that would want this...to keep the original feel of a pure space combat game intact for those that do not favor this...
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Originally posted by Steel
It COULD be developed as a seperate dev tree or option or game for those that would want this...to keep the original feel of a pure space combat game intact for those that do not favor this...
Why do that? If they can implement it in FS2Open, and the person doing the expansion that uses it, he'll probably have to enable it through SEXP's, so if you were to use this (unexisting) version of FS2OPEN with eg the original FS2 campaign you wouldn't notice it at all.
The only downside to this might be the increase in memorycompsumption (really should drop in more ram ;))
Cheers,
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Or just people who don't want it don't use it, just like anything else. No table function in the source is really mandatory, you could play the game on as simple or as complex a level as you want. You can play the original campaign on the SCP like it's the same as always (with a few more dials and ****, eventually at least), if you like. And if you don't even like that much change, you just plain play old FreeSpace. If you make money irrelevant in your campaign, fine, then there's no money. If you want a nice, massively modifiable fighter sim to turn into your own Privateer, then go right ahead- there's no point in restricting the option for it simply because some people don't want these things to be a consideration for their campaign.
Considering how, even with the poly limit upgrades and better texes, FreeSpace isn't exactly a memory hog compared to, say, any game made in the past two years, so what? Memory's still cheap anyway.;)
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My point exactly Stryke :)
Cheers,
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Of course, come to think of it, last time I put more memory in my computer, it freaked out, and actually ran slower and was unstable. Hmm.
NO! CAN'T CHANGE ANYTHING! KEEP IT LOW MEMORY!!!!
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Ahh... Was that in the times of Windows98? ;)
You know, memory can't slow down a computer, but the OS might freak out :)
Cheers
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It's 2000, but I don't think that's the issue. It's got some freaky hardware problem, just won't let any more memory in. It's still pretty damn fast, but it doesn't have much memory right now. Two CPUs, fancy graphics card, and about 512K of memory. Pff.
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Originally posted by Stryke 9
... Two CPUs, fancy graphics card, and about 512K of memory. Pff.
512k?:eek2:
You can't even use an MS-DOS 6 bootdisk with that! :ha:
Hehe :)
Cheers,
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Eh, megabytes. Typo. Very funny.:ick
And I practically can't. Winamp ****s all when I run it.
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ok, back on topic, what would be easier, putting this stuff in the pilot file, the campaing progress file, or making seperate file handler SEXPS, which can make/write/read txt files?
edit:
just thought, i'm in favour of the txt files, because it would be easier to make other programs read txt files, then make them read the pilot or campaign progress files.
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if it is an option to turn on or off, cool...but don't force it. i stated this in the thread in General as well:
a military pilot is issued his equipment and that is it. you do not get to buy/sell/trade stuff... money showing up on screen is not at all realistic for a military pilot, and kills the feel.
if a seperate campaign, ships, etc were created to utilize a feature that is turned on by that campaign, then cool! i might even give it a whirl...
but the game IS a military space combat game...so i say add this ON to it, not INTO it as it changes the feel and gameplay...
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a bit more to add to your ideas though... ;)
to do this properly you need to award points (money, whatever) based upon projects... money would not generally be awarded by getting a kill...rather by accomplishing goals. this can be a mission goal, or the culmination of several missions. sometimes a per kill bonus would be awarded, but that woudl depend upon the contract.
you will also need a way to choose amongst the available missions or sets of missions... i do not know if FS2 has this capability currently?
there will also need to be a viable economy model running to set prices for trade/stolen goods, products available at certain planets/stations, etc. this could be avoided with a simple initial merc type campaign to start with (ala Strike Commander and F-16 Aggressor), but you still have to have ship and weapon upgrades, etc available...
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The economy system would need to be a massive addition, probably for later. Since at the moment you can't just dock up to the local Arcadia and buy a nice new set of Harps or a fuel pod for C7050, the money thing would probably be restricted to scripted encounters for now- points where you, say, talk to another pilot, and a y/n keypress determines the transaction. If you agree, a certain value is deducted from your cash, and you get information/access to a new weapon for the next mission.
In the end, that's probably as far as it will go. FreeSpace isn't particularly amenable to a trading game setup, and while it's technically possible given the current sexps and a budget system, it'd be a lot more work to set up some freeform universe than a simple linear campaign. Think FREDding fifty to two hundred missions, about half of which were in the same places as other ones, just with new friendlies/enemies and mission parameters. And it would STILL not be a fraction as good at it as a game that was made for this sort of thing.
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btw: avoiding using a txt might be a good idea tho. at least make people have to put some effort to cheat...
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You'd most likely want to have it in the pilot code, not only because there's already an accomodation for the point system (and thus it's built for values that can be carried over, though I'm not sure if it ever directly applies to the game), but because it has the most to do directly with the pilot.
Of course, it would be easy to "cheat" there, too, just by making a mission beforehand that awards the pilot a million units of money- it'd carry over into any new campaigns he played. But at that point, you've got a very determined cheater, and having it be a campaign data value won't help you, either, 'cos he could go and modify the values in that.
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Bah. You can cheat for anything you want in FS2 singleplayer. Just open up FRED and set the ship giving you trouble to 1%.
It would take me 1 minute to write a mission that I could play a few times and make admiral.
If someone wants to cheat, let them. Just do whatever is easiest and gives us the best working code. Don't let people cheating sway you in any direction in the slightest.
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probably the best way to maintain compatibility would be to make this optional, decided by designers for every/mission/campaign.
and probably some work on interface will also be needed (in case i may help)
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While we are on the topic of cheats, the ~-shift-k (destroy subsystem) command does not do anything, so it would be nice if that was fixed. Also, how about changing the initial www.freespace2.com to something shorter? bit annoying to type all that every time a mission is being tested for bugs... :p :D
On the original topic, this might be nice idea, but you would need special missions/campaigns designed to use this system; I don't think there are any pirate campaigns out there at the moment.
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well i was thinking about some sw campaigns where you are (like azzameen family) a smuggler or a pirate or a merc or a bountykiller, like han solo or boba fett, maybe with connection to the starwars main story (like xwa), but with many missions where you play not for glory but for your own businnes...this doesn't mean RPG game nor necessary an elite/privateer/freelancer game, simply a story with a different "style", and an economy system (simple or complex) may increase the overall involvment.
and obviously only future specifically studyed campaigns will benefit of this thing
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I'd just like to throw in my two quatloos that pilot files, IMHO, are evil, pointless, and do nothing other than confuse things. Freespace should have gone with a single savegame file like 99% of the other game out there. The whole "persistent pilot" concept should have been on the "Things NOT to steal from Wing Commander" list.
That being said, I think it would be great to be able to tag variables as persistent. Heck, make ALL variables persistent. Even if you used a thousand unique variables in your campaign, the savegame file would still be only a tiny fraction of the size of most FPS savegames.
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Originally posted by ZylonBane
I'd just like to throw in my two quatloos that pilot files, IMHO, are evil, pointless, and do nothing other than confuse things.
Here, I'm going to violently disagree. I currently have two other people at different stages in the main campaign playing my copy of FS2, while I'm doing missions for the Port. If it were not for individual pilots, we'd be hopelessly muddled.
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If pilot info and campaign progress had been encapsulated into a single savegame slot, there would be no muddling at all.
The pilot configuration should have been reserved solely for multiplayer. In single-player your pilot pic and name are irrelevant. It's a lot of mess just to support the meaningless accumulation of rank across unrelated or repeated campaigns
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almost all space sims store pilot info, and many other games too, expecially those with multiple campaigns, like some rts for example (aoe, starcraft..)
for spacesims this is to let you have awards, stats etc, that make the game cooler, and that are present since the old xwing and wingcommander, and probably earlyer, and in fs2 case there is pxo too, and when game configuration is stored in pilot's files too, it make far easyer to have multiple players- each with his own key configuration- on same pc.
i don't see why you should cut it for singleplayer with so many advantages, considering expecially that you will need it for multiplayer...