Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Fate of the Galaxy => Topic started by: chief1983 on January 18, 2007, 03:52:37 am
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You can interpret this question however you feel like answering. You can be as technical or general as you wish. Things such as goals, type of play, all the way down to specific campaign details (assuming you want campaigns) are welcome. Surprise me. We need to make this our project though. Without goals, we're just wandering, and while I have nothing against wandering in general, it has no place here anymore.
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Why thanks for asking Chief, I'd be glad to tell you what I want. I'm hoping for a game that blends the Star Wars universe with the amazing FreeSpace engine. I don't want a clone of the Lucasarts games, since after all, this is our own project, and we can treat it however we want. I'd like to see the current FreeSpace engine have the chance to show what it's capable of, but with a general Star Wars feelings. Creating something reminiscent to the Lucasarts games would be nice, but I don't want it to lose the FreeSpace feel altogether. I want amazing graphics and an attention to detail. I'm not worrying so much about good low-end performance, because if you want to play a Star Wars game on a low end computer, there's already tons of options for that. I want to be able to say that this is our work, and that the Star Wars Conversion is _the_ Star Wars project for the FreeSpace engine.
I'd like to see some amazing campaigns from the community, original, and possibly some recreations of canon material. I'm more concerned with material from the original trilogy, but I don't want to rule out the possibility of ever having new trilogy and EU material included as well.
I don't want the game itself to ever be slanted towards the light or dark side. If anything I would leave that decision up to additional campaigns.
Any other thoughts?
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How about finished :lol:
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First of all congrats for the promotion :yes:
Maybe something set in the 3 years gap between Episodes 4 and 5? The player could be a Rebel pilot based on a small fleet always on the move to avoid detection by Imperial forces. He could find some Imperial secret weapon and be ordered to destroy it (or something along that line).
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Personally what I'd like to see most is a feel totally stepping away from the lucasarts games. After the original X-Wing they established a baseline and have built their successors around the feel and (worst of all) pace of the original game. While it was amazing for its time, I think that we could do better. Freespace has some impressive graphical and engine capacities, and I'd love to be able to sit back and watch this game, and feel like I'm watching the Star Wars Movies (Original trilogy...) or better yet, be playing the game and imagine I'm actually out there. It's immersion that these games lack, a lack of scale, a lack of speed.
All in all, make it fast paced, make it cinematic, and make it dangerous.
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Personally what I'd like to see most is a feel totally stepping away from the lucasarts games. After the original X-Wing they established a baseline and have built their successors around the feel and (worst of all) pace of the original game. While it was amazing for its time, I think that we could do better. Freespace has some impressive graphical and engine capacities, and I'd love to be able to sit back and watch this game, and feel like I'm watching the Star Wars Movies (Original trilogy...) or better yet, be playing the game and imagine I'm actually out there. It's immersion that these games lack, a lack of scale, a lack of speed.
All in all, make it fast paced, make it cinematic, and make it dangerous.
All right! Now that's the kind of ambition I want to see too. And that's exactly what could separate us from, and possible put us above, the Imperial Alliance project. Whereas they go for almost a direct port of the Lucasarts series into their game, we have the ability to make something different, and I think that's what one of our main goals should be. It's also a very good reason to warrant having another mod besides theirs. I like it.
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I kinda want both. I want that, but I also want to play the TIE Fighter campaigns in the FSO engine. I'm not sure that that's what IA is doing; I thought they were developing their own campaign too.
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From what I've read they're putting a lot of effort into recreating the exact feel of the old games' engines. Maybe not the campaigns necessarily, but the way it feels to fly. The 1/3 2/3 full throttle thing, the HUD, all sorts of things. Of course, their forums have been dead since November, so I'm wondering what's holding them up. Either way, I would like to play the old campaigns in the FSO engine too, but I want to have someone more educated than me vouch for the legality of that. Seems to me like script copying could be a bit of a copyright issue as much as model copying.
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The thing would want most is the high firing rate and short bursts seen in the films (although the reason would have to be different due to the lack of a primary waeopn lock in freespace). But if the weapons have a high fire rate and a high energy use so that they do a lot of damage and then run out of energy in a few seconds, this would make not only a game dynamic that is more like what is seen in the films, but also is very different from Freespace.
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The missions we will make cannot be same as the old X-wing or TIE Fighter ones. Simply because we allign our missions to the models we have, not the other way around. We only make those models we are able to finish, the TIE Fighter campaign has a lot of ships in it, ranging from all kinds of neutral fighters to passenger liners and cargo ferries. We simply can't do that much.
I already wrote some minicampaign plotlines and that's the direction I want SWC to be heading: not strictly following my mission ideas mind you, but have several minicampaigns instead of one big one. The more campaigns we have the more possibility the player has. One campaign can be about an exiled Rebel pilot escaping Imperial authorities and the other can be about a high-ranking TIE pilot who wants to gain the Emperor's trust. We might as well connect one with another or have two completely unrelated to each others. The possibilities we have only depends on the amount we work on it. Perhaps it sounds too ambitious.
As far as balancing is concerned, I want something new in that because, after all, this is the heart of the game. We can modify weapon stats as much as we prefer and we can make use of FreeSpace's gameplay features, for example the energy distribution system. I would like SWC weapons to be somehow different from those of the X-Wing series: we could make standard concussion missiles fast, low-damage warheads while its avdanced version could be a slower, more powerful one. Having it this way doesn't make anyone automatically choose the advanced version when available. We could also make a new type of swarm missile or tactical weapons. I think we already have a leech missile.
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It would be nice to balance the advanced missile with the standard, but maybe something else besides making it slower, like having a dumbfire vs aspect seeking, or maybe the advanced takes more loadout space than the standard.
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Certainly, I just mentioned this speed-power thing to make you see my point, of course there are a lot of numbers to modify for a weapon.
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I want the project to have a quality Death Star that is full size.
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post-movies and pre-Vong would be nice.
mostly because i absolutely hate the NJO series.
maybe if youre feeling really creative and adventurous, you could be a NewRep unit sent out to reinforce the Empire of the Hand out in the Unknown regions.
you could have rebel, imperial, chiss, and any other type of alien ship you could want, all in that one area of space. it has the most possibilities, and thats where I feel the star wars books should have gone next, instead of randomly being invaded by uber space monsters
edit: actually, that doesnt seem like too bad of an idea.
after the peace treaty between the New Reps and the Empire, there isnt a whole lot of tension (not on the surface anyways) between those two groups, but maybe they'll both send fighter squads and maybe a support ship each to go and help Fel and the Empire of the Hand combat the threats of the unknown region (which, while threatening, would not be vong related). alot of the story elements could be based off the Hand of Thrawn and Survivors Quest books. You could also get a lot of great character interaction with the Imps and NewReps, as well as some uncharted territory with the groups from the Empire of the Hand. there'd be all kinds of chances to deal with familiar threats as well as with exotic enemies, plenty of missions for both.
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I want something released :P
No seriously, it always seemed as if the SWC project wanted to accomplish too much at once.
My advise would be : Create a simple basic mod pack (X-Wing, Y-Wing, Mon Cal cruiser, TIE-Fighter/Interceptor/Bomber, ISD), slap some single missions or a mini-campaign on it and release it. Then build up from there, more ships, more weapons, more missions, more eye-candy.
That way you gain some attention, some feedback and probabaly more people who woul help. I know this sounds a lot like the history of TBP, but it seems to be a working concept. And don't get me wrong, I'm not critisising anybody here, I'm just thinking out loud what I think to be a reasonable approach to the work.
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Making a simple first release has always been a plan, thing was that some really fundamental ships (Star Destroyer, Mon Cal Cruiser) were never fully completed. We could make missions with the ships we already had - and we did make some - but what would a Star Wars space sim mod be without a Star Destroyer? It would be like a witch without a black cat or a sweeper.
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I'm new to FS2, so forgive me if I say something that has already been done...( or stupid :eek2: )
Well, first I think we need to ensure that the Star Wars feel is preserved... by this I mean the jump to lightspeed and coming out of lightspeed should be as close to Star Wars as possible... I also like the way the ships jump out in the TV show "Battlestar Galactica" when we see them flash and disappear. I think this is the same as Star Wars from that perspective... but the starfield effect of coming out of lightspeed should be like Star Wars.
I think the dumbfire rockets should be replaced by something else... (since I don't recall dumbfire rockets in SW) you might consider replacing them with the sonic charges like Jango Fett used against Obi-Wan... which were "dumbfire" in a sense and used more like proximity weapons and would have awesome effects in an asteroid field-- try to capture the movie explosion effects on the sonic concussion waves. Also, a similar facsimile of the Star Wars torpedoes should be made... (if not done already).
The player interface/HUD should definitely have a Star Wars look & feel... but I'm not so sure I like the duplication of the X-Wing Alliance HUD by IA-- don't get me wrong, they've done an excellent job with it, but I think we could come up with something better-- cockpits are always going thru avionic upgrades anyways right? But I think a great HUD is key since that's what we'll be looking thru all the time and so it should help facilitate the illusion of immersion... if some aspect of it isn't right then our brains will subconciously reject it.
Has the code been worked out to make it possible to play as a turret-gunner like on a Corvette or Capital Ship? Where you can tab thru the turret positions and fire at passing ships? If not this should be accomplished...
Also, cloaking should be kept to canonical Star Wars ships that actually had that capability... so as not to cross universe paradigms. Perhaps the Capital ships could have a Cap.Ship-to-Cap.Ship missile (simply make a beefier dumbfire missile for this...). Perhaps add-in Cap.Ship-to-Cap.Ship cannon turrets that would fire high-explosive dumb projectiles-- and make these playable as well as the laser-turrets.
Fighters should have a faster sense of speed... and all models should have exceptional detail. Especially when you're up close to capital ships...
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What would I LIKE to see in this?
In essence, nothing short of everything. IDK if it's do-able or not, but I'd very much like to be able to relive all the major battles throughout the storyline, I.E. Anakin's space battle in Ep1, through to Endor, through all the battles in the X-wing series of books, to Admiral Thrawn's last battle, etc etc etc.
An idea I just got on how to make this coherent in terms of story, is follow one character who's present in most of those battles, and when he dies/is for some reason absent, end that campaign there and make a new one that follows another char through another dozen battles or whatever.
Or you can just have it all as one and have the pilot's name change. Just some ideas.
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It's nice to hear that the project is being resurrected - I wish you all the best :yes: May the Force be with you ;)!!!
The main problem is that even after 3-4 years of your hard work nothing was released to public/
was left incomplete :shaking:...
My advice is simple:
work in small parts,
1. Basic "Base" release
finish the basic craft (X-W,Y-W, Z-95,T-F, T-B, a few freighters/utility craft 1-3, a space station, CRV. Nebulon-B, Dreadnought and it's ok for a beginning - a period between episode 3 and 4; as it is generic and the craft can form a strong basis for the future releases - and can represent both Rebels and Empire - these capships were used by both sides of Galactic Civil War) and balance the basic weapons (lasers, ions, turbolasers, concussion missles and proton torpedoes)...
Throw it away to public without more complicated ships (even such a SW icon as ISD!!!),without any missions
but make it stable, nice looking and include FRED so that people can start making some missions :)
It will consolidate your team, bring public attention and start a completely new chapter...
2. Ship/weapons packs for base and separate missions/campaigns
Think in TBP terms - base and missions
To speed things up don't alter the which thigs/features which were balanced by betatesting and were included in previous base releases, but make sure that the new ones are balanced and properly working
Add whatever ships you like as long you keep the SW feeling right and a logical gameplay :)
And don't try to do everything at once as you will spread your effort too much and needlessly waste time...
Hope these simple methods will help you a bit...
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As a general Star Wars fan, my one honest wish is to get behind the controls of an X-wing and fly the Death Star trench run in the FS_Open engine. If you guys can get to that level, I'll be absolutely ecstatic. :)
On a lighter note, my second wish is for you guys to produce a finished product that gives "BoE Syndrome" a positive connotation. :p
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On a lighter note, my second wish is for you guys to produce a finished product that gives "BoE Syndrome" a positive connotation. :p
I've secretly been hoping for that too :)
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I'd be very interested in helping out with the immersion aspect. While I'm not skilled at modeling or texturing, I can certainly table edit, and as far as FREDing is concerned... I'm thinking I'm going to do a campaign based on Michael Stackpole's X-Wing series (1-4, screw everything in the series after that)
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I would like to see something that runs in the FS engine, but that plays like something totally different. Something that feels not exactly like the lucas arts games, but also something that doesn't feel like flying a GTF Perseus in the shape of an X Wing.
Weaker fighters will have a lot to do with this, as will more emphasis on jinking and less on Countermeasures (actually, the absence of CMs will mean major modifications to the aspect seeking nature of the missiles, or it will simply be too hard). And, of course, without beams it willbe hard to confuse the game with FS2. But still, the way things are done should be different - cockpits, for example, are a must, as are fiddling with the flight dynamics majorly between ships. A replacement for the afterburner will also have to be given (presumably by shunting up the max overclock speed dramatically).
As for the campaign itself, well, that'll depend on the ships we get made, of course. But I'd like to see more than just open space battles. Atmospheric missions, if they can be done, would be nice, but not essential. Making very, very rare nebula missions but fairly common asteroid field missions would be a good way to go I think.
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I'd like to see a modpack. And maybe a campaign.
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brandx0, I could almost definitely use some table editing help right now. Stop by the chat room sometime for a while. I'm always in there but not always at my computer.
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I can do tabling.
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Do you remember I volounteered for tabling, too? :)
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Yes, after I mentioned that I went through my list of what people had offered to do what, but he just happened to be the last person to mention tabling since I started looking for tabling. So if anyone ever feels like giving me some tabling help, feel free to drop by IRC for a while sometime. I especially need someone good with starmaps at the moment.
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Upon seeing the new life that has penetrated into this project, my eyes have immediately attained a strong focus.
Seeing this topic has also made something twitch in my mind. Does this topic imply that this might not be a 'simple' X-wing clone?
You see, as much as I love the X-wing series (which I have enjoyed many times a year, since I was introduced way back in 1994) I think that it is somewhat stale.
X-wing Alliance, the most recent of the X-wing games was strikingly and comfortingly the same game as the original, albeit with many new features. While this was never a bad thing, It certainly made the game very alienating to people who had not played the previous games.
The problem with X-wing alliance was that it was meant to simulate Star Wars combat to a 1993 model that (because of limitations at the time) could never have been a genuine 'Star Wars experience'.
If one were to watch a replay of an X-wing Alliance flight, it would never quite look like any of the battles from the movie. It was though a very nicely polished rendition of X-wing.
I'm sure many of you would know that for the combat in Star Wars, Lucas was primarily inspired by the air battles of World War 2.
Lucas and his team studied film footage from World War 2 battles and the end result made this very apparent.
In this project I would love to see a shift away from the mechanics of the 1993 game into something more faithful to the movies.
As fantastic as they were, the X-wing series could never quite capture the urgency, comradeship, and romance (A glamorous interpretation of course!) that the World War 2 battles carried.
For this project to be successful, I would suggest that we need to steer away from what we X-wing veterans are comfortable with, and look closer at the reasons why the battle scenes in the movies were so engaging.
I certainly could not sit back and watch a replay of X-wing alliance and experience anything like what I feel watching Star Wars.
If I were to imagine flying an X-wing in a battle, I would want to be fighting not only a swarm of enemy fighters, but the limitations of my own craft. Getting to know my fighter as more than something that is 20 Mglt faster than a Tie Bomber and a certain percentage more maneuverable is what I want. Slight variations in the power and characteristics of weapons from craft to craft, certain 'tricks' that only someone skilled in the fighter of their choice can perform!
It could only hurt this project if it is to be another sim where the craft differ in small statistics only!
This project does not need a vision, as Lucas has already given it to us. We need to follow the vision that made us want to get into the cockpit of an X-wing in the first place.
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i agree with the post above...
for example it is known the lasers of an Xwing pack more punch than the ones on an Awing
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Yeah. I really think we need more movie-inspired dynamics to give even the best XWA pilots something new.
While it's probably a much larger ambition to do such things with the FS2 engine, it would certainly be good to make the experience fresh again...
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Thanks for the input broadbean, I completely agree that this should not be a clone of the Lucasarts games. And to see how much this engine can do, just check out the Wing Commander and Battlestar TCs. They've done some amazing things with the engine recently, and we're hoping to be right up there alongside them some day. If we can get some more help that is.
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Broadbean, I've been saying the same exact things as you in the IRC room ( #scp-swc on espernet ) for some time now, glad to see that us staffy types aren't the only ones interested in making this more than an XWA clone with better graphics. I myself have pushed at movie-style action since I joined this project.
Great to have your input, would love to see you around here more!
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If one were to watch a replay of an X-wing Alliance flight, it would never quite look like any of the battles from the movie. It was though a very nicely polished rendition of X-wing.
[...]In this project I would love to see a shift away from the mechanics of the 1993 game into something more faithful to the movies.
[...]For this project to be successful, I would suggest that we need to steer away from what we X-wing veterans are comfortable with, and look closer at the reasons why the battle scenes in the movies were so engaging.
I agree completely.
I would like to see more fluid and loose flight controls with extra drift when making hard turns.
In all the Star Wars films, fighters seem to "drift" or "float" around as they fly. Take for example the Jedi fighters in the beginning of ep.3 and the fighters attacking the second Death Star. This effect could probably be done just by giving pitch and yaw a little extra momentum and making them a little less sensitive. I know that the FS2 engine already implements drift (as seen when two fighters collide and bounce off each other) so just bump that up a bit.
For inspiration and clarification I cite the games Star Wars: Starfighter (http://pc.ign.com/objects/016/016508.html), Star Lancer (http://pc.ign.com/objects/010/010584.html), and of course BtRL (maybe not that extreme though).
The problem I noticed is in the the trench run video (http://swc.fs2downloads.com/movies/trench.wmv) created for this project; while the ships look fantastic, I noticed that the standard Freespace 2 maneuvers seem exceptionally precise, stiff, and un-cinematic.
Enemy wise, if you're excluding anything from NJO and later, you have the Ssi-ruuk and the Yevetha as possiblilites.
I'm thinking I'm going to do a campaign based on Michael Stackpole's X-Wing series (1-4, screw everything in the series after that)
P.S. Aaron Allston’s books are excellent, jerk.
P.P.S. Sorry, I'm sure you're not actually a jerk.
P.P.P.S. Does anybody know where to download all or most of the SCP mods?
That's all, I swear.
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See jr2's signature for the two sources I would recommend, either Turey's installer, if you want a online solution that lets you pick and choose what you want, or hip63's DVD, which has pretty much everything, and can be downloaded via torrent, saving Turey's hosts the bandwidth if you plan on getting everything there is to offer.
Now, the good stuff:
:welcome:
Thanks for your input on the mod, we appreciate it. I'm glad people would take the time to register here just to leave their input on this mod, it lets me know that maybe we're moving in the right direction.
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Hey thanks.
But I was thinking more of a mod-by-mod list that wouldn't be 3+ gigs.
And as a matter of fact, you inadvertantly led me to something similar: http://members.lycos.nl/afdportal/
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Well, you said download them, and Turey's installer has the vast majority of the mods and campaigns listed as options. Sounded like it was what you were looking for.
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I'd be very interested in helping out with the immersion aspect. While I'm not skilled at modeling or texturing, I can certainly table edit, and as far as FREDing is concerned... I'm thinking I'm going to do a campaign based on Michael Stackpole's X-Wing series (1-4, screw everything in the series after that)
I agree with Scourge of Ages that Aaron Alliston's books are good too, and I think as far as campaigns go, you might wanna just make one about Wedge rather than part of a series
And I'm new here so I don't really know, but if you don't have it you should (at some point in time) make concentrated barrages take out sections of shields and cause hull damage (Like in the X-wing series how they always do torpedo barrages to get past shields)
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Woohoo, two in one day:
:welcome:
Nice to have you aboard ioken!
Thanks for the input. I'd love to see the barrage thing be possible in game, but there maybe be too many limitations in the engine for something like that to work. I admit it's worth looking into though.
Sorry we missed you in IRC too. I've been recovering from a LAN party I was at all weekend, and brandx0 is probably at work.
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Heh no biggie, I just had some general questions, and I don't know much about code outside some relatively basic vb, but off the top of my head IF you are going to do the barrages, you may want to try splitting capitol ship shielding into segments, I believe in one topic arround here you were talking about shunting shield energy to and fro.... I think it was in the thing about domes on a ISD... anyways, if you are thinking of doing the shunting, then that might have the added benefit of barrage's being effective, although if you aren't already doing the shunting, it would probably be a bit of work to do...
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Oy, as little as I need new projects, this seems like it'd be a lot of fun. :)
I don't honestly know how much I'd be able to contribute (far too much on my plate already), but I've been slowly getting more and more tired of the old X-Wing game feel over time, hoping for something new. Being a flight sim fan, my dream is to someday convince Lucasarts to come up with a true X-Wing sim, complete with plotting hyperspace routes, more canon tactics, and (oh my) actually manually landing your craft. Short of that though, I've kind of been keeping a list of dislikes of the X-Wing games for a while.
First off, and I know this is a big canon argument- if you really want people to fear star destroyers like in the books, ditch the shield dome idea. A random vulnerable exhaust port I can kind of believe. Putting the shield projectors for the entire ship in the most vulnerable place possible is asking for problems. The only canon example (meaning seen in the movies) of this type of thing is when the SSD in ROTJ went down from one bridge dome being taken out, and there is a much more reasonable explanation for this that I've heard many times... the idea is that those were sensor domes, located just outside the shield for better readings. Their destruction, and the resulting explosion, caused a backwash under the bridge shield, disabling it. They never said anything about any other shields.
This kind of goes back to the stuff about having different shield regions. If that can be set up, then individual shield generators could protect individual important systems, like the bridge, propulsion, individual weapons banks, etc. Those huge ships are meant to be very complex, with numerous weapons systems, backups, etc... taking out an entire subset of systems (like all the shields, or all the weapons) at once makes things far too simple.
The most common tactic in the X-Wing book series for fighting bigger ships was very concentrated fire in very specific regions, so that groups of smaller ships could do decent damage. If you knock out everything in one blow, like all shields, or all weapons, you can sit around at your leisure, and peck the target to death (a la X-Wing Alliance). In contrast, if you only knock out one area, you have to plan your attack carefully to make use of that weakness without exposing yourself needlessly, and that adds a nice element of strategy to what otherwise turns into a simple "pour your weapons into it until it dies" situation.
One specific thing that I think would be interesting is to try and implement the type of missile/torpedo tracking system shown in the early X-Wing books. I think you could let the warheads home in on a specific target, but they also had the ability to make them follow the crosshairs, similar to a laser guided bomb. I don't even want to think about the math involved in programming a feature like that, but it might be interesting to see if it's possible.
Personally, I just recently fell in love with the BSG conversion, mainly because of the intensity of it, and how fast paced it is. On the harder difficulty settings, you can work up a sweat just trying to survive in a heated dogfight. I used to mod X-Wing Alliance quite a bit, and the pace never seemed right at all. It took quite a bit of tweaking to get the pace up to something that would get you involved. Just for kicks, I once doubled every stat for some of the fighters, and had a melee. It was quite a rush compared with the normal settings. So that extra speed really plays a part.
For campaigns, I would love to see the X-Wing series done.. maybe an Isard campaign, and a Zsinj one.. the only large problem I see with those is that a lot of those books' major battles took place over planets. Now, I'm not very familiar with this game yet, so I don't have a decent idea of what's possible.. but the ground missions in those books were often very important to the story.
What I think I'd love to see most of all is a respectable scale to the missions, especially the big battles. Again, I don't know how crazy people want to be in modeling, but I would love to see a fully modeled Death Star mission, without the standard "transition" between space and the surface, and with a decently detailed surface with lots of turrets (it looks like that's already in progress from the pics I've seen).. kind of like the Rogue Squadron games for the Gamecube (although, those are hideously detailed.. but something very good might be possible with careful LOD management I think). One thing though.. try to minimize the obstacles in the trench. Yes, they make the run more interesting, but I'd rather see more intense surface fire, and lots more turrets to dodge/destroy.
Same overall idea for the DSII if possible, with the whole ginormous interior modeled, if only for the reason that it hasn't been done decently in anything but Rogue Squadron. I think that game has the best rendition of Endor ever made, even without the perfect transition. I would really love to see an even larger scale version of that, with as many ships as you can pull off without killing the computer. The version in XWA just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Btw... just a personal pet peeve about big missions like that... if at all possible, don't add extra "fluff" objectives to move the mission along, like "protect capship x, destroy flight group y"... many games make those types of things mission critical objectives, and you wind up failing a mission because you couldn't protect some random little ship (like Rogue Squadron.. you had to protect the Falcon for some reason. I was under the impression that it could do that itself :P) I'd much rather see something where the mission keeps going instead of failing, but you have to make up for the losses somehow. For instance, say you need to protect a Mon Cal cruiser early on from a wing of Tie Bombers, and you fail. It goes boom, but the mission keeps going. However, later on, you won't have it's help, and it will be harder to survive when you move toward the huge fleet of ISDs. Same type of thing for the trench run.. don't make the cover wingmen a given.. make them dependent on your performance against the fighters/turrets. Still possible to survive, but the mission gets much harder if you're all alone. :drevil:
Really the goal at Endor was the destruction of the DSII at any cost, and most of the engagement was stalling for time, and trying to survive until the shield went down. I think what really needs to be done to have a good Endor is give it the "gauntlet" treatment... make the first half of the mission just a grueling, intense dogfight around loads of capships, where the AI drops like flies on both sides... but you have no way of knowing when the shield will go down (if you can, randomize it in the mission about +/- 3 minutes or more, so players don't know when to expect it :)) so they can get to the really hard part. That sort of anxious anticipation is really what made that battle good. You can script certain things to happen, but keep it unpredictable, and fast paced.
Anyway, I hope I can find the time to help out in the future (I do lots of detailed modeling, and some texturing/mapping), but right now I'm buried in a pile of theoretical aerodynamics class work. :P Btw, sorry this is so long... I tend to get very detailed pictures of things in my head, and love to do everything I can to see them happen.. I just wish I had the time right now. :sigh:
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Thanks for the ideas. I definitely like some of those ideas, and other ones we already had planned, so fear not. And thanks for dropping by here to say hi!
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Ah, you forgot...
:welcome:
Exits are to your left and right, as well as to your rear. Unfortunately, the airlocks are rather unreliable, and the teleporter only works inbound.
In case a fight breaks out, there are flamethrowers under every seat, however, due to budget cuts, they are only filled with water. You could try some of the projectile weapons in the weapons closet, but most of them are broken and are more effective as bludgeons. The Plasma Rifles are in their own closet, and only :v:olition , an admin, God, or the hyper-intelligent shade of the color blue can open them.
In case of a water landing, you can and probably will be used as a floatation device. If you happen to be exploring the ventilation shafts for some reason (most likely because you are looking for a campaign you haven't played yet), and you come across a five-legged creature with multiple glowing red eyes, you've found Carl, our sometime resident Shivan. Give him your lunch and back away slowly. If he's not hungry, you might be alright. If he is hungry, and he's in a good mood, then at least your death will be quick and relatively painless. The SCP is all that is good.
Karajorma's FreeSpace FAQ and the FSWiki are your friends. Mention efF esS thr33 at your own peril. And, however good it might seem, don't listen to takashi*, and don't efff with Goober.
*takashi seems to be an alright guy, just take his advise with a huge serving of sodium chloride.
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Haven't forgot, just don't have a version of my own yet.
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The main source of problem is the fact that the SCP engine can't handle more than 400 ships at once in a mission. Well, it is the case for the BSG: Beyond the Red Line. But, if you include to all ships subsystems like Freespace 2 ships, I will be impossible to ensure this exciting battle. Other things about the liberty, I found out that the player can't no longer go anywhere as he likes. After travelling more than a certain distance, the player ship will automaticly self-destroy. So, putting a Death Star with his real size and make some funs on it trunch would be painfull, but I remember there was a little teaser with the first Death Star from Omniscaper before he went to BSG and Star Trek mods. I don't know the radius of the DS, but i was likely be playable.
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Overall, I'd like to see the entire starwars universe playable under this game, with tons of different campaigns from the first Republic to the Yuuzhan Vong invasion and beyond as part of a unified release. However, I realize this is completely unfeasible right now-there are easily more than a hundred ships in the Star Wars universe, some of which are 75 miles wide, and I don't think we have, and may never have the resources to do this.
I think, for the time being, we should work towards a small release, maybe one fighter, one bomber, one capship for each side (Empire, Rebel), and a few levels to go along with it. This should generate enough attention to start work on covering Episodes IV to VI, which have always seemed to be the steak and potatoes of Star Wars. After that, lets get Episodes I-III. And from there, who knows?
Also, I'd like to see some customization brought to the campaigns-perhaps as you progress through a campaign, you earn credits for each kill/capship-damage, which you can use to buy new ships, buy new weapons and equipment, call in favors, and buy new paint jobs.
At a recent lanparty, some of us played BtRL for hours just doing multiplayer. So here's a question: do we want/need singleplayer? There's a lot of history there, but if we released a multiplayer-only game with loads of ships and multiplayer missions, I think it would get a lot of play.
To sum it up:
Make it customizable, make it personal.
Releases:
Tech Demo: TIE Fighter, Bomber, Xwing, Ywing, ISD, MonCal-couple of multiplayer maps, and a single player level or two
Stage One: Episodes 4,5,6-All of the ships from this time, A few Campaigns, But also the originals, if we're allowed to do so
Stage Two: Episodes 1,2,3-All of the ships from this time, New Campaigns, Some from other games, if allowed to do so.
Stage Three: New ships and campaigns as doable
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we won't be doing vong as a part of the SWC project.
i personally think that the proper Star Wars continuity ended after the Specter of the Past/Vision of the Future set of books, and I'm willing to forgive them for ****ing up the universe with the Vong by saying that it's a comic book style alternate universe.
basically, we'll have post clone wars all the way to hand of thrawn in terms of ships. (i dont really consider the prequels canon either)
however, working from this core, i'm sure others will add prequel and later books content, but we're going to focus on the important stuff first.
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How about getting a campaign based on SW:ANH up & running first as a demo? (You know, basically I figure if it works for the movies, it should work here.) That will attract support for you. (I hope; just gotta make it well done enough for that to attract ppl who can create content.)
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that's why i'm working on the corellian corvette
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"we won't be doing vong as a part of the SWC project."
Good.
I was reading over wookiepedia, and I was interested in their ships, being made of living tissue, but I looked at the timeline. Apparently sometime between episodes 1 and 6, a giant war with a species unmentioned in the six films destroyed 1/3 of the galaxy's population. And they didn't mention a thing in the films. Gob****e.
I still like the ships, except that the only renditions now are cartoonesque, but having them in just destroys the plotline.
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He's alive! Nice to see you RSA. We're actually trying to hammer out what exactly we'd like to focus on for an initial release on internal, whatever it is, it will be something fairly simple with a low ship count so we can get it out soon and not have to finish an entire era's shipset first.
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Just wondering, how many ships are in SW: ANH, TESB, and ROTJ, individually? How about cumulatively? If no one knows, that's OK, but I was wondering.
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ANH:
- Corellian Corvette
- ISD Mark I
- Millenium Falcon
- Death Star
- X-Wing
- Y-Wing
- TIE Fighter
- Vader's TIE
- Total: 8
- Total Mass Produced: 5
ESB:- Nebulon B Frigate
- ISD Mark II
- Millenium Falcon
- Executor
- X-Wing
- Galofree Transport
- Slave I
- TIE-Fighter
- TIE-Bomber
- Total: 9
- Total Mass Produced: 6
ROTJ:- Nebulon B Frigate
- Corellian Corvette
- ISD Mark II
- ISD Mark I
- Millenium Falcon
- Executor
- X-Wing
- Y-Wing
- A-Wing
- B-Wing
- Galofree Transport
- Death Star II
- TIE-Fighter
- TIE-Bomber
- TIE-Interceptor
- Lambda Class Shuttle
- Total: 16
- Total Mass Produced: 13
Total from All Movies: 19
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So, to be able to play all three movies, you'd really only have to have 19 craft? :eek2:
@brandx0: thx much
EDIT: Where's the sand/snow speeder (used against the AT-ATs)?
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EDIT: Where's the sand/snow speeder (used against the AT-ATs)?
I think that's for atmospheric-only missions.
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I know, but FS:SCP has that capability. (Although, I'm not sure how the Rebel defense & AT-ATs would be handled.)
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I left out the snowspeeder because including that means including AT-ATs and AT-STs as well as ground troops, defences, and a whole wack of things which we really shouldn't get in to...
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:(
Oh, well, maybe after everything else is done & there's nothing else left to do... (ha!)
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And tow cables... wrapping up the AT-ATs legs too... Oh yeah, and stormtroopers, and getting shot down and climbing up an AT-AT with a lightsabre and slashing the bottom, and a rear gunner, and DARTH VADER! Who can deflect lasers WITH HIS MIND, MAN!
Oh sorry, got carried away...
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With his mind? I thought he had a little assist from his mechanical hand. (I don't recall seeing him deflect them except once he appeared to grab a laser bolt from Solo with his hand, hold it, and then let it go, IIRC.)
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Getting rather off topic here...
Either way, the shipset is not huge by any means. As it stands we could have a very playable mod with 13 models (The mass produced ones, we don't need a falcon or vader's tie or slave 1 yet...)
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Of course, that doesn't take into account some other things that would be needed that weren't in movies, but that add a lot of diversity to the game, such as stations and containers and such. But we wouldn't need many of those to get something started.
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Of course, but at the core of things we could have a pretty cool tech demo release (a la BTRL) with very few ships.
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Ah, we need planets... Coruscant, Tatooine, Alderaan...
http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/images/screenshots/fic_starwars/Coruscant__guilpan.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coruscant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tatooine.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Alderaan.jpg
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Those are in progress. Turambar was having fun making those once in a while.
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Would love to see some stuff from the Rogue/Wraith series, NJO single handedly destroyed my enjoyment of SW books. But most of all i would sacrifice Ewoks in your name for a fully armed ISD and MC80. 1.6 Klicks of pure destruction. No 10 turrets like ye ole XWing/Tie Fighter Games or as Trekies like to do in their fanboy "what if" videos have them fire a turbolaser once every 5 minutes. I want to see 60 turbos and 60 ion cannons vaping snubbies and melting enemy capital ship's hulls before the gooey globs of transparisteel and durasteel flash freeze in the void.
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I think you could let the warheads home in on a specific target, but they also had the ability to make them follow the crosshairs, similar to a laser guided bomb. I don't even want to think about the math involved in programming a feature like that, but it might be interesting to see if it's possible.
I have absolutely no idea if it's possible with the SCP, but I know a similar system exists in other games: Battlefield 2 and 2142.
For campaigns, I would love to see the X-Wing series done.. maybe an Isard campaign, and a Zsinj one.. the only large problem I see with those is that a lot of those books' major battles took place over planets. Now, I'm not very familiar with this game yet, so I don't have a decent idea of what's possible.. but the ground missions in those books were often very important to the story.
Ground missions, cityscapes, and land in general is being worked on to very great effect on the Shadows of Lylat (http://www.game-warden.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=16) project over at Game Warden.
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Of course, that doesn't take into account some other things that would be needed that weren't in movies, ...
Corellian gunship, escort carrier, all kinds of cargo containers and freighters, the stormtrooper transport, just to mention a few.
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Well for now, we only need a couple of types of some of those to get started, the rest can be added in later.
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Speaking of the dx9, is anyone working on it, and if not, does anyone have some good pictures/schematics of it?
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Hello Everybody!
I'm new on this site, however it is with great joy that I read about what you people were already up to here.
It is amazing! On the other hand I'd hate to appear like a smart-ass who comes over with "I'd like to have... " and contributes nothing. But here are my ideas:
1) In no previous Games or MODs have I seen the possibility to do an atmospheric descent or to start into space from a Planets's surface. It is always very conveniently omitted by an "autopilot"- sequence. And we know that the X-Wing can land on a planetary surface, just as the shuttels and transporters and even the big cruisers can go "down" on a planet. I just thought that this would open a whole new scope of possibilities in the mission design as well as contribute to the mod's character.
2) Who can help me learn how to do 3D models?
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1) In no previous Games or MODs have I seen the possibility to do an atmospheric descent or to start into space from a Planets's surface. It is always very conveniently omitted by an "autopilot"- sequence. And we know that the X-Wing can land on a planetary surface, just as the shuttels and transporters and even the big cruisers can go "down" on a planet. I just thought that this would open a whole new scope of possibilities in the mission design as well as contribute to the mod's character.
That's something to bring up with the FSOpen source people. At the current time I don't believe such a thing is possible using the FSOpen engine
2) Who can help me learn how to do 3D models?
That you'll have to find on your own, grab some tutorials off the Net. If you need some help here and there I'm always in the Star Wars Conversion IRC channel on EsperNet #scp-swc
And welcome to the community, it's always good to have another person interested in the mod!
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He's right, a cruiser going down on a planet does make for some interesting mission design.
Thanks for dropping by Acin!
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I was going to mention that, too... I'd love it... *gets dreamy look as he contemplates buzzing civilians in an X-Wing*
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There definitely are plans for ground missions, but that's a ways away.
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First of all thank you all for that heartily welcome.
I'll bring that topic mentioned above in the FSOpen Source. I'm sure there are some dear geeks that would hammer it out. But let my just loose some sentences on that.
Basically the only problem in this is equation is the gravity. One would have to add old Mr. Newton into the whole game and make mass an additional property of all objects, so that their behaviour could be changed according to F=G*((m1*m2)/r^2) with G=6.67*10^-11m3kg-1s-2. Now if you mess with the Gravitational constant G and "CHANGE" you would suddenly have an entirely different range of options. OK I know its weird but it's nothing else but 9th grad physics. The consequences of this were enormous. Uncarefull navigation might suck you into a black hole or into a Neutron star (remember Han Solo mentioning that in Episode 4), if you are in a less than geostationary Orbit your plane would start "falling down" (and possibly burn in the atmosphere) if without any other thrusters ( :rolleyes: SAR missions?? "Anti-Grav generators are down!! Pull us out!! Mayday!), and it gives room for Gravitational Weapons as mines that might crush a fleet . Not to mention is the ability to hoover above a surface (and actually LAND a craft) with anti-gravity reactors on line. I wonder what happends if you manage to shoot down these or damage them in a skirmish ???
I guess such addition might not only make Anakin Skywalker's Rescue of the Chancellor Palpatine in Episode 3 playable, but would also be a welcome innovation to other MODs such a WingCommanderSaga. Last but not least, the introduction of mass into the physics of flight would also result in a different dogfight behaviour. A fighter that is fully loaded has a much greater turn radius and is of course less agile - Velocity and Mass make up the Inertia. Therefore the less missiles and armour you have the more agile you become. That would be definitely a big plus for the TIEs and A-Wings, a big drag for gunships and, say, B-wings and a whole lot of difference if you are with your X-wing on the way to your target or returning back and hit a swarm of TIEs :-)
OK, I have dreamt enough. Don't bash me for that! :) Thanks!
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No bashing involved. For us, gravity isn't much of a problem, considering most combat near planets is handled on repulsorlifts or somesuch, which being a technology with no scientific analog but functions as an anti-gravity device probably won't be affected by any kind of gravity.
As for the weight, as nothing of this effect is really seen ever in star wars it probably won't be a feature implimented (for our mod at least) but I'm sure there are other mods which could definitely use these features, and I know at least the gravity one has been discussed.
Thanks a lot for the input though!
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There is already a system in place to simulate inertia in FSO. When making a sharp turn at high speed, you don't change course perfectly like in the old X-Wing game, you "drift" a little in the direction you were previously travelling. You can really see this when you crash into another fighter: you and him will bounce off each other before the engines start moving you forward again.
And of course larger ships like bombers and transports will have slower acceleration and worse turning radius than an interceptor or light fighter.
This is probably enough for our purposes, because implementing true gravity physics might require re-writing the entire game engine.
As to the space-to-ground and ground-to-space transitions, I am reminded of a game called "Breed." (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/breed/review.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=gssummary&tag=summary;review) It's not a very good game, but it had really cool vehicles. Especially the air/space fighters. There were a few missions where you start in space and need to fly to the surface or vice versa. All you need to do is fly close enough to the planet (or sky) to a certain point, the screen would white out, and BAM you'd be in the atmosphere (or space).
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There's also the RealFlight modification in the Modding (or scripting, I forget) section. It tries to expand on inertia and make it a much more realistic feel. I'm tempted to see if it could make the game feel more Star Wars-ish, or if the main FSO code already does it good enough.
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On a different note...
Who is responsible for the mission design? Is there already a concept in place on how a mission briefing is supposed to look like? Because besides a stunning graphic design, the players need a mission briefing. And if we do a campaign -even a short one-, we ought to come up with a storyline. Are there any plans to branch a story depending on the mission's outcome? Or do you rather prefere to have number of missions that you have to fly consecutively and all over again?
Are any standard replies for wingmen (and hopefully women) in plan ("Confirm. Break and attack! ", "Attacking [Corvette/TIE.../StarDestroyer]," , "Roger, Red one. Falling back into Formation.") ?
Sorry that I ask so many questions, but I had a feeling that this mod has now evolved to a mere modeling workshop.
Cheers, Acin
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We haven't done a lot of decision making on story, and briefing design yet. We do know we intend for any campaign to currently be set in pre- new trilogy stuff, so either original trilogy or EU novel stuff. We definitely intend to be more than a modeling shop, but whatever campaign gets done should be fresh, creative and impressive. So a smaller release will probably come before a full campaign.
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I'm all for episodic releases, like Valve does with Episode 1 and 2... it is quite nice and better for TCs
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I took a look at what the guys at the Wing Commander Saga did until now, and (without wanting to copy them) I think they took the right approach to modding, by firstly publishing a "preludium" to the big game testing all the bugs and so, and at the same time getting a real big feedback from the public. I mean it's impossible to satisfy everybody's taste, but even 40 positive feedbacks with ideas would be helpfull to make up one's own mind on how to carry on with the game. I personally imagine a plot around the x-wing development, i.e, a story on how it was first implemented into the Rebell's forces. At first there might be an X-wing still in dark/black paint (wouldn't that be a texturing challenge ?) as an Imperial Prototype which gets stolen or highjacked by the player and has to be brought to the Rebellion. The Player would be of course flying this mission, while covering/protecting the designers that flee with him. The pre-release might then deal with just two or three missions out of the Imperium's AREA 51. It would fit in the time that was desired (pre Episode4) and such story has a lot of mission potential... I'm open to your suggestions.
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On a different note...
Who is responsible for the mission design? Is there already a concept in place on how a mission briefing is supposed to look like? Because besides a stunning graphic design, the players need a mission briefing. And if we do a campaign -even a short one-, we ought to come up with a storyline. Are there any plans to branch a story depending on the mission's outcome? Or do you rather prefere to have number of missions that you have to fly consecutively and all over again?
Are any standard replies for wingmen (and hopefully women) in plan ("Confirm. Break and attack! ", "Attacking [Corvette/TIE.../StarDestroyer]," , "Roger, Red one. Falling back into Formation.") ?
Sorry that I ask so many questions, but I had a feeling that this mod has now evolved to a mere modeling workshop.
Cheers, Acin
Don't worry. There are still a few people around from the old mod (me, Topace) and a few new people who have an idea about how to make things more that a model collection. I have a small campaign all plotted out that I'll be building once the shipset gets to where it needs to be, and I thik there'll be a main campaign being developed before long. A solid shipset is important though, before you can start FREDding.
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I would like seemless hyperspace transitions like XWA did if possible, and if that is possible, it would be cool to have multi-part missions in different regions (XWA had so much potential with that and never seemed to really capitilize on it).
Story-wise, I think it should remain the Galactic Civil War pre-Yavin, or at least pre-Hoth. Too many of the X-wing games deal with between Hoth and Endor (TIE Fighter and XWA), whereas I think X-wing is really more dated in how missions were done, so maybe certain missions could be referenced or possibly redone to be more interesting (for the love of Pete, put in-flight radio chatter in those if it's decided to recreate a mission like say "Capture the Frigate Priam").
In fact a good idea might be to do something based on the formation of the various Rebel factions that unite to form the Alliance to Restore the Republic.
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I've always thought system hopping would be a good thing to have implemented, but currently there's no obvious mechanic for it in the engine. We'd either have to jerryrig something to seem like you're system hopping or have something added to the codebase, and it'd be a significant workload either way.
Voice chatter is always a must for long pauses between action, we should have plenty of it.
Direct mission conversions are probably something we're going to avoid first, instead focusing on bringing an original, involving campaign, but rest assured that the shipset itself should be capable of conversion down the line.
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Do you mean system hopping as in "at will" or something more like the red alert screen, just without the alert?
Would it really be that hard to switch out a skybox and every single ship (less one) in an instant?
IDK, but it sounds like something FRED could do. (Not sarcastic)
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IIRC, Allegiance has this, too.
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Well, FRED could maybe do it, but it still sounds pretty painful. You'd have to be tracking which other ships have left the area if they're heading to where you're going, and which ones stayed behind, and when they should make the jump in too. To do it XWA style, where each ship has to reach the navpoint, you'd have to actually be tracking two areas at one time. I'm not sure fred could do that, but I could be wrong. The other way is to actually try to fit multiple areas into one mission field, and just change the skybox. You'd 'warp' via a method similar to what WCS is doing maybe from one area to another. But I think the mission area would need to be increased a tad. We're already gonna have a hard time fitting some models inside of it from what I've heard.
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You know there was one other thing I was wondering about and that's if you guys are planning on making cockpits visible so we can see the pilots moving around, kind of like XWA and also The FSU are doing with the updated fighters.
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Yes, later on. It'll probably be something like a massive fighter upgrade once we get this project going a little better. In fact, we'll be detail boxing the cockpits for use with the Virtual Cockpit mode as well. And if we get the render to texture or whatever option to dynamically generate a texture, well, you can imagine where we can go with that...
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Render to Texture? Are you talking about trying some way to implement a normal map? (I'm sure that there are ways to fake normal mapping in games that don't support it). Sorry my knowledge of the FS2 engine and implementing new models is a bit non-existant. The only games I worked with were UnrealED2k3 and 2k4, and X-wing Alliance 3rd party editors like OPTech and Ace_DXF.
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For the multiple areas FRED idea, could you have "rooms" so to speak, and have the game only render the contents of the room you're in, but still have the ships in each room able to do everything like normal? I mean, sort of like what happens to stuff that you're not facing; it doesn't get rendered. And, you wouldn't have to play any sounds. Ships would be able to jump back and forth from these rooms, but you can't just fly off the edge of one room into the other, there would be "warp points" in each room that connect them to each other at different locations. Prolly impossible, but...
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Another thing I was wondering.... would it be possible to incorporate seemless transitions between entering and exiting a planetary atmosphere? I'm sure that there are ways to fake this, though it may be more SCP editing related.
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It might be possible but the time involved in leaving an atmosphere could very well not be worth doing.
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This "leaving the atmosphere" thing, was something I have already put forward, but I also agree it is better to introduce such things later on.
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I suppose the cutscene / autopilot feature of WCS would come in handy there... have you seen their demo?
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First of all, Let me say that the force is strong in this one.
Very well done. The daily progress in this mod is nothing short of amazing If you don't mind some fun to help you along here is what I found on the net...
Jabba the Cat is very anxious that this mod is done, so that he can take revenge for his long lost cousin... Damned SOLO!
(http://) (http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/01/14/jabba/)
(http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o276/keravnos/Jabbathecat.jpg)
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:wakka:
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Lollercats and roflcopters! Great!
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I remember a Star Wars based sci-fi for PS2 in which the player could use the force.
You could slow down everything for a while(in order to represent fast reflexes), for example.
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Ah yes, The Force == Bullettime.
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lol
read I, Jedi.
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You are the one, luke. Wait, that doesn't work, you can't rearrange Luke into one like you can with Neo...
You are the Klue, Luke.
Ah whatever, just run around in slow motion yelling "I know saber-fu"
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Ok, we're totally gonna have to have a pirate in the game now saying something like "I know Cloakshape-Fu" or something.
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what i'd like to have ingame is a sense of realism and authenticity in the missions...
in all space combat simulators the player is often the 'one man army' that destroys whole fleets is the only one surviving.. the most obvious example is the "alpha one" from the freespace games.
What i'd like to see is that the AI is as capable as the player, where both share the same abilities. For example, I don't want to have the "glide" ability like that in the BSG TC simply because the AI isn't able to use it.
The X-Wing series did a good job in that aspect, weapons did a constat damage independent from the difficulty setting, unlike the freespace games.
The AI should be able to elude the player's lasers and missiles and the player should have a hard time killing veteran ai pilots. This holds true especially considering the unshielded TIE crafts...where sometimes only one hit is enough to destroy a TIE, I want them to evade the player's gunfire as well as possible, thus having a more difficult time to rack up kills and rejoice for every kill I get.
So I think that is a good start to balance things out
Tweaking the ai_profiles.tbl and ai.tbl I achieved to modify the "insane difficulty" for my tastes...for example the AI having the same weapon and shield regen ratio as the player and weapons doing the same damage, and making the AI more intelligent in terms of evading and firing.
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We're definitely aiming for a bit more realism, and one of the areas it's going to show is in player vs capship. For us, that's really going to translate to dead player vs capship, since it's going to be virtually impossible to 1v1 most of the capital ships in the game. But yes, we're doing what we can as far as fighter AI goes.
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Did we ever see the Rebels take down a capship in the movies? I mean, besides the two Death Stars and taking out the bridge of the SSD. I don't think so. In the newer SW movies, you see them going down, but that's as result of both capship vs capship weaps + maybe a little tipping the balance with fighters.
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In the original trilogy the Rebels blow up one imperial star destroyer on screen, during the battle of endor, that's it.
(http://theforce.net/swtc/Pix/dvd/ep6/rotj109.jpg)
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Well a littel note on realism... It might be a good idea to actually include the consequences of damage on a spacecraft, i.e. if you bang your Xwing with backboard against a capship or an object, one should then have trouble firing the 2 lasers on this side. Or if one of the 4 engines is down then your speed should be reduced somewhat and the steering should become a bit more difficult (force feedback??? ). I imagine if one vectors the engine thrust and arranges it in such a way that the sum vector = the flight direction * -1, then you should automatically get a drag if you get an engine knocked out. Lucky for you if you could turn off the diagonally opposite engine then and make the craft flyable again. Do you think it is programable?
However I would not go so far with realism. The loss of cabin pressure should not suck you into the pc-monitor and thus into the emptiness of space :lol:
In case of capships, especially in transport ships, that might be also an interesting option. I imagine you could reek havoc in a convoy if you manage to bust 1 or 2 engines of the lead ship and see it spin out of controll slowly and possibly crash into following transporters or at least buy time in this way because they'd have to evade and loosen the formation.
So, functions like these (just like when taking out the shields of the ISD by firing on the generators, or on it's turrets to "silence the fire",) would certainly add to the flavour of the game. Consequently it would be cool to have the possibility to destroy the bridges or engines of other ships (but you would need torpedoes for that not just mere lasers) and thus bringing them to a halt or derailing them form their previous course (no bridge) :) The FREDers would have then much more options for their mission design and teamwork would play a much bigger role.
What do you think? would it be possible?
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that is sadly not possible...but weapons doing general damage to subsystem should be implemented...the AI is able to damage and destroy you subsystems and vice versa...
i remember when player TBP i destroyed the engines of an enemy fighter several times with normal laser weapons, rendering him unable to flee ^^
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Also I noticed when playing FS2, if your engine subsystem is damaged, your top speed is decreased proportionately. And if your weapon subsystem is damaged, your guns stutter and charge slower.
Yeah, you've all probably noticed too, but it's a pretty simple system and already in place.
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Not to mention Goober's shield subsytem adds a similar effect to your shields... ;7
In the original trilogy the Rebels blow up one imperial star destroyer on screen, during the battle of endor, that's it.
(http://theforce.net/swtc/Pix/dvd/ep6/rotj109.jpg)
Did we ever see the Rebels take down a capship in the movies? I mean, besides the two Death Stars and taking out the bridge of the SSD. I don't think so. In the newer SW movies, you see them going down, but that's as result of both capship vs capship weaps + maybe a little tipping the balance with fighters.
(http://img120.imageshack.us/my.php?/image=winamp2007081307033389rt1.jpg)
(http://img138.imageshack.us/my.php?image=winamp2007081307033546qa8.jpg)
(http://img263.imageshack.us/my.php?image=winamp2007081307033684jy0.jpg)
(http://img150.imageshack.us/my.php?image=winamp2007081307033920ou9.jpg)
(http://img299.imageshack.us/my.php?image=winamp2007081307034043ad9.jpg)
(http://img175.imageshack.us/my.php?image=winamp2007081307034290ww8.jpg)
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What I'd like from this project:
Immersion. Immersion. Immersion. This is one of the primary reasons that I believe FS2 is/was the best space sim ever made (don't get me wrong I loved Tie Fighter but FS2 upped the ante ;)). It's immersive. Part of this has to do with the beautiful scenery (the nebula missions were some of my favorites), and the awesome, and well developed story line. The briefings were also very well done. Part of it was also just from the incredibly awesome ship designs and HUGE capital ships. And of course the fast paced, frantic gameplay. And keep in mind this is all from a "universe" not nearly as developed as that of Star Wars (obviously).
I really don't want to see a re-hash of the LucasArts games (though I wouldn't mind seeing a port of Tie Fighter's campaign somewhere down the road), but rather something new and different, something that gives this project the chance to be creative.
The Star Wars universe really is incredibly broad in scope which means if the dev team behind this project wants to, they can come up with something completely new and amazing (story/setting wise), which will help contribute to amazing gameplay. Off the top of my head, I'd like to see combat in some unusual environments, like I said before, nebulas are all around awesome. Perhaps battles around, even INSIDE asteroids? Black holes? Maybe something somehow involving what scientists call "dark matter" (some enormous majority of our universe is made up of matter than can't even be detected or measured, but we know it's there because of the way "normal matter" reacts to its presence)... read: alternate universes? The sky really is the limit here and I encourage you guys to be as creative as possible.
That said, I still would like it to have that Star Wars "feel" but have it coupled with FS2's general all around brilliance in all aspects. The classic ships are of course a must (Tie fighter, x-wing, y-wing, a-wing, tie bomber, star destroyer etc...), and while I'm on that I'd really like to see the ships act completely differently. Tie fighters of course don't have shields, but they should be VASTLY more maneuvarable and faster than the rebellion ships.
I do want it to be in either the episodes 4-6 era or the EU universe though (but like I said the campaign doesn't need to, and even shouldn't copy the main story of the movies/lucasarts games)
Oh and if there's to be only one campaign (initially), make us play as the Imps! Playing as the bad guys always lends games that extra edge ;)
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Your post almost exactly echoes precisely what we've discussed about this project and our goals, especially in the realm of immersion. When reading your post I almost thought I was reading my own words.
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Careful on going too creative, though. You do want it to be recognizable as a Star Wars game. I don't remember anything about black holes, dark matter, or nebulae in Star Wars. Are you sure you aren't mixing it up with Star Trek? (I'd love to see that come through, too, but this is Star Wars.)
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Yeah, I kinda skipped by that part of the post =)
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Black holes? The Kessel Run did have some black holes, did it not?
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Black holes? The Kessel Run did have some black holes, did it not?
If my memory serves me correctly that's what made it so dangerous. I know for sure it was right next to some "large body", but I'm guessing a black hole because obviously you couldn't get close to a star period.
And no I'm not confusing Star Wars and Star Trek. I've only actually seen a couple of the ST shows and maybe two of the movies so I don't much about it.
But the EU universe books are testament to the fact that you can greatly expand what is Star Wars, but still have it be Star Wars, complete with Stormtroopers, jedi, and everything else.
I'd love to see some really complex plot deep within the bowels of the Imperial war machine... (I think it'd be awesome to be an imperial pilot under some special "intelligence" branch of the navy)
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Hmm, yeah, IIRC it was between two black holes or somesuch.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Kessel_run
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_Maw
I'd love to see some really complex plot deep within the bowels of the Imperial war machine... (I think it'd be awesome to be an imperial pilot under some special "intelligence" branch of the navy)
Who would you be fighting? Rebel operatives deep inside Imperial territory?
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In the course of a war, there will be many battles. Some will be won, some will be lost, but both sides keep coming back.
In the course of a game, there will be many battles. Some will be won, some will be lost because it's supposed to happen, some will be repeated ad infinitum until they are won.
I would like to be able to continue after a failed mission, and face the consequenses of not blowing up X or saving Y. I'd like to be rewarded for keeping wingmates alive. I'd like to see a mission succeed even if I should eject in the middle of it. As has been said before, immersion is the name of the game (aka SWC), and not having the universe revolve around Rogue/Aplha 1 (also previously mentioned) is my definition of immersion.
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Agreed on all counts. It's something we've discussed and are trying to work around implimenting that
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In IRC, I have brought up the idea (or maybe it was someone else) that with a branching path implemented, the player would have a certain amount of replays or tries to complete the mission. If the player uses all of the replays, the mission moves on as a failure.
The ejection idea may be possible, the game could calculate the chances of each side winning and factor that in as a win or lose for the player.
The wingman idea is also important in my opinion because:
1. The more wingman you have on a mission, the better
2. You form a connection with them thus more immersion
3.
As for universe not revolving around "Alpha/Rogue 1", I totally agree with you. We have ensured that the other characters are going to have major and useful parts with the player and will do so for both Rebel and Imperial campaigns. There will be connections formed and characters fleshed out, contrary to Freespace 2 and possibly the TG games.
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4. Profit
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How about, after you eject, the mission plays to the end in 64x time compression? (But not with the view on.) Then, the results are shown. An hour-long battle after you eject would take just under a minute to finish. (60 mins / 64x time compression, so 60/64=0.9375 mins)
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We could also try to implement a wingmate experience factor, such that wingmates that you keep alive get higher AI, to simulate experience. But, the biggest problem I see with branching based on a real failure is that almost no one wants to play that path. We're currently working on ways of disguising the branches a little more carefully though, such as in FF7, when you work your way up to a date with either Aeris, Tifa, or Barret. (I've never managed to get Barret.)
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I have.
It was wonderful.
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Something I was thinking was to have the squadron you're assigned to be outfitted for a specific mission role. For example, Green Squadron is specifically geared for recon/long range scouting, and thus uses Longprobe Y-wings to accomplish this. Down the line, they may received R-22 Spearheads, and then A-wings. Blue Squadron might excel in bombing and anti-capship defense and thus starts off with Y-wings, and then gets B-wings later on.
TIE Fighter sort of had the right idea in that the more campaigns you did, the better ships became available for your use.
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OH! For some reason that reminded me of something else.
You know how in FS2, when you're picking a loadout and you have a certain number of ships and bombs to assign to your squadrons? I noticed that it never really mattered. Sure, sometimes you have to take a weapon of slightly less mass destruction on two of your bombers, but there were always enough Erinyes (or whatever) to go around.
How about implementing ship and ammo shortages?
The rebellion did have a shortage of equipment; they can't always give you half a dozen X-Wings to replace the ones you lost in the boneheaded charge against an SSD. Then there's the torpedo shortage that happened in X-Wing: Starfighters of Adumar.
I want to see some strategy with the assigning of equipment, and more incentive to keep your wingmates alive. I want to try to take out a Frigate with concussion missles and a mixed squad of Y-Wings and Z-95s.
Of course logically this wouldn't often apply to the Empire.
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What just sprang to my mind is that we should have different kinds of warheads with different specifications...for example the torpedos the TIE bomber deploys should be bigger and stronger than the torpedos of an x-wing, cause the tie bomber has a giant pod for warheads!
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Well, as far as what ordnance is used, it's going to be up to whatever canon info we can find to determine that. And yes, the T/B has a pod, but that doesn't necessarily mean it uses bigger warheads, although it can probably carry more of them if not.
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IIRC, you had basically for the most part Proton Torpedoes in various flavors (Adv., etc). And, IIRC, the Millennium Falcon had "concussion missiles", which Solo (or Lando) had modified the firing system of to fire at a ridiculous rate if necessary. This all came from a SW nut friend of mine who had the SW books & games etc. (Nick L. , you out there? :p ) He introduced me to FS when I lived in South Korea.
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In Star Wars, saying "proton torpedo" is like saying "Missile" today. It'd be a sad sim if every fighter was armed with "Missiles" and "Guns" rather than "AIM-120 AAMRAAM" and "M61A1 gatling gun" as their weapon loadout. We're doing our best to dig up as much info as possible on individual models and incorporate them. The Advanced, heavy rocket etc used in the games is merely a game mechanic. Anything that was just a game mechanic should not make its way into a sim, which is really what we're attempting to do.
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:wtf: I said they came in different flavors, and I did mention concussion missiles. :p I'll dig up some info for you. :p
EDIT:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Proton_torpedo
has info on the MGA-1 and the MG7-A torpedoes, the MG7-A was used by the X-Wing vs. the DSI. Apparently, the MGA-1 is a capship weapon (heavy frigate); there are picures in the article link above.
EDIT2:
Ok, these were enlightening:
http://www.answers.com/topic/weapons-of-star-wars?cat=entertainment
but, especially, this link that I got from the link above:
http://www.answers.com/topic/list-of-star-wars-ship-mounted-weapons
More info here, but mostly same stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Wars_ship-mounted_weapons#Proton_torpedoes
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Here's something that I'm curious about. Storywise, will you have your own unique storyline that intersects with major events that happen during that timeframe, and will you have new major villains to use (Empire At War: Forces of Corruption gave us Tyber Zann, TIE Fighter gave us Grand Admiral Zaarin and Admiral Harkov, X-wing gave us Overlord Ghorin, Shadows of the Empire gave us Prince Xizor, etc.)?
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We will certainly have unique missions, as well as some remakes of old X-wing-style missions. This is inevitable if we consider SW canon while creating our own storyline.
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1. I'd like the original collision damage from FS2 changed ( I've always though about ramming another fighter and receive a 1% hull damage being ridiculous :p )
2. I'd like to see multiplayer controlled ships ( IE: A pilot and a gunner, or more gunners! XD ). Mostly this feature, it would be really inmersive to have several computers on LAN , dim the lights and fight your way out of trouble with your friends onboard, rather than ( although I love squadron fights! ) having them in other fighters. ;)
Phantel
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:welcomeblue:
Eh, try hitting your afterburners, or going to max speed, before smacking into that other fighter.. ;)
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:welcomeblue:
Eh, try hitting your afterburners, or going to max speed, before smacking into that other fighter.. ;)
Thanks for the welcome :D
Already tried that, it's frustrating the times you must smack a capship to die ^^U
What about multiplayer ships, then? :D
Phantel
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I've been wanting multiplayer capships for a while. I think someone was working on something along those lines, but it's still a ways off. Only time will tell
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I've been wanting multiplayer capships for a while. I think someone was working on something along those lines, but it's still a ways off. Only time will tell
And something smaller? Like the YT-2000 in XWA, with a Pilot station and Gunner station, I mean.
And in other order of things, are you going to implement the turret control? ( As in XWA, you can order the turret(s) to fire to an specifically selected target, fire in a defensive mode or not fire at all, with just one button press ). FS2 only allows for IA controlled turrets that fire endlessly to the enemies ( not bad except when you are playing a mission with hostile factions controlled by other players, and trying to negociate ;7 The only resource is to be faaaaaaar far away ;7 )
Phantel
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Question.
Will there be Ewoks in SWC?
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Are you serious?
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Maybe we need a TIE Interceptor cockpit with Lieutenant Kettch (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Kettch) in it?
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Bleed and Die! Yub Yub
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Okay I have a slightly more serious question...
Will Luke Skywanker Skywalker and the other main characters (like Chewbacca and Han Solo) be heavily involved, or only mentioned in briefings and debriefings?
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I would prefer them to be secondary, background characters.
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I have a few suggestions but i hope that those are not too uncommon :nervous:.
First: What`s about other organisations and fractions like the Hutt space, the Corporate sector, CorSec,Black Sun, the Mining Guild... and groups like mercenaries, pirates, smugglers, bounty hunters and so on? It would be nice to see more than the main conflict in the Galactic Civil War between the Empire and the Rebellion. My suggestion is to play something different to have more possibilities. It`s one thing to be good (rebellion) and evil (empire) - what is to be between this positions? What's about to play a group of mercs for example and deal with different fractions - with different consequences? Would it be a more living universe????
Second: I don`t know - maybe this will fits better in canon and continuity, but the question was: What do you want this project to be? Now it will be a little bit complicated: I don't want to (re)play only missions from the movies, the books, the older games... Would it be fine to expend the sw-universe by ourselves (I think there will be always much space in the universe ;) ). Isn't it impossible to go a bit away from all the official released stuff? Isn`t it constricting? Have only GL and other authors, comic-strip and game artist the permission to develop the universe? My thought is: Let`s don`t be slavish to ourselves - let`s make our own thing. Let`s be creative!!! That`s include (for me) to be open for new ideas (storylines,ships, stations, characters ....) that although respect the canon of the remaining sw-universe.
I hope my post is not too heretical, so don't kill me :nervous:
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Ahm, I think the main release was going to be based off the original trilogy.... but the wonderful thing about FS2 is that FRED2 makes sure that as long as there's a capable campaign team, you can make whatever story you want. If this mod gets finished with all the necessary ships etc, you will be able to create whatever you want... I'm hoping it'll be like the FreeSpace / FreeSpace2 campaigns are now with the SCP.. the main campaign is included, but you also have the option of installing other campaigns that are almost as good or as good as the main campaigns. :D
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Will there "bosses", like Darth Vader or anything?
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I actually have some campaign ideas that deal with the actual formation of the Alliance to Restore the Republic from various rebel groups that first attempt to do their own thing and realize just how ineffective that is. I'm really in favor of pushing an 'early days of the Rebellion' story because with the exception of X-wing and all its continuity discrepancies, the EU hasn't done much to explore that arena. And I also am a BIG fan of the Corporate Sector Authority. I've actually got to get a script in the works, but I think it'll be pretty good storywise. And I have some ideas on how to implement the possibility of planetary bases like Echo Base and Yavin 4.
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Will there "bosses", like Darth Vader or anything?
I don't want anything that directly contradicts canon. Expanding the universe with storylines such as the formation of the Alliance or the construction of the Death Star II are fine, but killing off a major character who we see die on screen (aboard a space station) is not ok.
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True, but you don't always have to win a boss fight. It could be FREDed that you lose, or he gets away after X damage is dealt.
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That would be unfair to the player to force him to lose in a one v. one fight. Scripting the destruction of a corvette you must protect for your primary objective and exposing him to the risk of dying in a fight he can't win are two different things.
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I'm just saying, there are ways to involve a bad guy in a mission that don't involve you killing him. Or maybe it's a dream/nightmare sequence. Or a clone. Who knows. That's what writers get paid for.
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I had also thought of the clone option... and, since the clone would be rapidly grown (I imagine), it would probably not be as good as the original. I can't imagine Vader allowing himself to be cloned, though... although Sidious/Palpatine may have harvested some tissue when Vader was being put together in the end of Revenge of the Sith.
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Good idea, jr about Palpatine being given the chance to clone Vader while he was put together after Mustafar.
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That would be unfair to the player to force him to lose in a one v. one fight. Scripting the destruction of a corvette you must protect for your primary objective and exposing him to the risk of dying in a fight he can't win are two different things.
BtRL did it with Scar. You can't kill him, but he can sure kill you.
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Question.
Will there be Ewoks in SWC?
Howabout Gungans?? :nervous: :lol:
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Gungans can be the contents of an Imperial Slave ship bound for the spice mines of Kessel, awaiting to be smashed into who knows what.
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I'd prefer to forget about gungans entirely. Being as we're looking mostly at the Galactic Civil War timeline, well, the Empire rounded up most alien races and put them into slavery, and maybe the Gungans just "accidentally" got shipped off to the Maw and "accidentally" fell into a black hole and "accidentally" had a real painful death.
Meesa thinks a dis gonna be real bombad time for da gungans
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Meesa thinks a dis gonna be real bombad time for da gungans
Oh man, reading that while getting over a cold is almost lethal. Damn near coughed up a lung from laughing so hard.
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and what about later in the star wars timeline?
Wouldn't it be good to try to recreate for instance the 2nd rise of the emperor, with the world devastators and the eclipse super star destroyer? This would be great!
And later still, why not depict the yusaan wong war? etc...
Full of ideas there.
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There are no plans to do the Vong War, let alone create ships from the NJO era. Not currently sure about the Dark Empire saga, though it may be a possibility.
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I don't know if the following questions have been asked before, but...
Are you going to create a soft demo(that requires FS2 to run, of course) with only a few models, textures and tables?
Are you going to complete all models of all eras before releasing the Conversion or you will divide it in episodes, chapters or something like that?
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I hope to have a small demo released, and depending on how much file replacement we get done it may or may not require an FS2 install.
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What about the other question? Will you complete of models of all eras first? Are you going to divide the mod in parts?
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As soon as we have enough stuff done for an initial release, we'll have it out, so it will likely only have ships done that are needed for that release. If we do a fighter combat release, we will likely only have fighters done first. If we get some of the campaign done, we will have what's needed for the campaign as well. Other ships from other eras are currently a lower priority than the stuff from the time our campaign is going to focus on.
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Something like the Demo of BtRL: a handful of models...that's what I had in mind.
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Well, hopefully we have a few more. I'd like for there to be enough to really allow the community to have something to play with. Ideally, I'd like to have two to three times the ship count they had, even if it means not getting it to the point of being a standalone release.
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Are you going to create multiplayer missions for it? :)
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Multiplayer is one of the things I'm most concerned with. If nothing else I plan on creating a simple melee pack myself :)
I have an even larger interest in this now, because my old squadron over at The Rebel Alliance was recently shut down, and integrated into other squads. So, if we do this right I hope to get it added as a supported game with TRA, and hopefully revive interest in them, enough so to warrant reopening my squadron. It was sad news when I heard about it being closed, so now I have even more drive to help get this out the door.
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Something like the Demo of BtRL: a handful of models...that's what I had in mind.
Umm... AFAIK, BtRL had quite a few models, but only 3 or 4 were used in the campaign. ...Right?
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Uhm, not that they've released in the demo yet I don't think. It was pretty much just the ships they used in the campaign. 2 vipers, a drone, a raider (w/ 2 skins I think) and the miner.
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Hmm... seems you're right. :doubt: What was I thinking of? Maybe the WCS Prologue? IDK
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I serverly doubt if this possible, but can one make planet surface battles? i quite enjoyed the x-wing books, and fly arond coursant would be fun.
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It's something we still hope to entertain at one point, probably once we get someone with planet modeling experience. SoL has been working on it for quite some time, and I don't want to delay the whole project for that long just for that feature, considering it's not the main focus.
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I know that I want to include planetary bases and such, though I'm not sure what kind of coding would be involved to animate Walkers, let alone make sure they stay on the surface and have their movements restricted.
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The FPS coding that Goober is doing in 3.7.0 coupled with razorjack's coding that he is attempting (if he ever gets any help; :ha: ) should make that possible.
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I know that I want to include planetary bases and such, though I'm not sure what kind of coding would be involved to animate Walkers, let alone make sure they stay on the surface and have their movements restricted.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Descent 3 was both a space and planet-side game, where you controlled vehicles on the ground. The Descent 3 code is all released... perhaps if the SCP coders took a look at that they would gain insight into adding your wish.
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D3 did have walkers and other ground based vehicles... rather primitive IMHO, but still there.
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Actually I thought it was more underground and planetside, were there really open space battles with no ground anywhere nearby?
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Not that I'm aware of, but I think it had the capability... there is Descent code in FreeSpace, and perhaps visa-versa. Not sure. There is a mission you can get, Asteroids, where there is just space and asteroids. It's in my D3 Mod pack. Most of Descent is in mines, though, and planetside. Prettier there. ;)
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I'm a newbie and i can't be bothered reading 10 pages of posts, but did read the 1st (well, most of it)
A Freespace vs Starwars is more the thing i'd like, or a GTVA/Starwars vs Shivans.
example,
The Shivans have attacked again with amazing new ships and OMG Humoungousaurusburger beams. Meanwhile in a deserted part of the Galaxy a porthole to another Galaxy is revealed, strange electronic signals and radiation is in this galaxy (the Force), and the Clone wars are in full force (just after episode 2 but way before episode 3). Once news reaches the GTD Somethingarather that shivans have once again invaded the Terrans try to make an alliance with the Republic and give them the technology of the great beam cannons. etc.
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Well, I doubt that's something your going to see from any of the current staff. We're gutting out all the FS stuff from the engine and making it completely Star Wars. We also tend to have a preference to the original trilogy, and kind of hate the new trilogy, so anything in that era with those ships isn't likely anytime soon. And trust me, that's putting it nicer than some of the staff would have.
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That's just what i thought it would be like when is saw this, thanx for putting it nice for me.
What timing is this then?
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hmm, death star vs. colossus, imperial star destroyer vs. hecate?.... nahhh
I've enjoyed all the various star wars "space shooter" games, but the FS2 engine would make for far better gameplay than any of those games offered. If anything, I would personally like to see something that has never been done before in any of the actual star wars games, so, in terms of time frame, it would have to take place outside the movie time frames, either pre-ep1 or post-ep6 to interest me. Otherwise, it'd just be too similar to games I (we) already played. If it were to take place during movie timeline, I'd have to vote for right smack in the middle of the clone wars, lots of cool ships there, and a huge array of ships to choose from. IIRC a game called "star wars starfighter" takes place right prior to the clone wars but thats as close as lucasarts got to that timeframe.
- Shawn
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It's definitely going to be different from the Star Wars games that have been made, but not necessarily just due to timeline. The gameplay will be significantly different, due to a lot of changes we'll be making from what Totally Games did. Large variety of weapons, different ship handling, etc. It'll also probably not be set in the Clone Wars.
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A Freespace vs Starwars is more the thing i'd like, or a GTVA/Starwars vs Shivans.
example,
The Shivans have attacked again with amazing new ships and OMG Humoungousaurusburger beams. Meanwhile in a deserted part of the Galaxy a porthole to another Galaxy is revealed, strange electronic signals and radiation is in this galaxy (the Force), and the Clone wars are in full force (just after episode 2 but way before episode 3). Once news reaches the GTD Somethingarather that shivans have once again invaded the Terrans try to make an alliance with the Republic and give them the technology of the great beam cannons. etc.
If we release a shipset, you can combine FS with SW as much as you like.
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This definately sound very spacebattlelike! :P
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A Freespace vs Starwars is more the thing i'd like, or a GTVA/Starwars vs Shivans.
example,
The Shivans have attacked again with amazing new ships and OMG Humoungousaurusburger beams. Meanwhile in a deserted part of the Galaxy a porthole to another Galaxy is revealed, strange electronic signals and radiation is in this galaxy (the Force), and the Clone wars are in full force (just after episode 2 but way before episode 3). Once news reaches the GTD Somethingarather that shivans have once again invaded the Terrans try to make an alliance with the Republic and give them the technology of the great beam cannons. etc.
If we release a shipset, you can combine FS with SW as much as you like.
You absolutely can, of course, this team won't. We're not big on crossovers. Once we have a release feel free to use those ships however you'd like (as long as you give the proper credit)
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One thing that came up in my mind was that sometimes the Empire used bounty hunters for special missions (not to mension the bounty hunters seen in ESB and RotJ). Have you thought of including any of such mercenaries of the Bounty Hunters Guild fighting against the rebels in the mod?
I like the bounty hunters. ;7
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Hah, I'll blast them all in a fell swoop ;7
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Idea for campaigns:
1. (Demo) Rise of the Rebellion, cultimates in the DS1 battle
2. Era immediatly after EP4, As the rebs flee Yavin
3. Right after that
4.
5. (i don't know exactly how much happens here, so this is blank)
6. Begins with several Red Alert missions of the Rebs escaping Yavin, then goes through to the DS2 battle
7. EU, post-endor stuff
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Actually, the formation of the Alliance to Restore the Republic is an idea I had been tinkering around with for some time. Not sure at what point the campaign would end since it takes roughly two years before the Battle of Yavin and most conflicts are rather minor in comparison to the major battles that happen later on.
I'm not sure how as to what ships would be needed as again, I haven't figured out when the story would end. So on that note, there may be X-wings and there may not be. Really, you'd have Y-wings and Z-95s plus other out-of-date, out-of-service Clone Wars era fighters (possibly the ARC-170 and V-19 Torrents, but that's really a stab in the dark and if they are there it's going to be in a significantly reduced number that's no where near the production of Y-wings that the Rebels will have in their arsenal).
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Is there any detailed info on the birth of the rebellion? It could be a great idea, with tons of possibilities, (for example we could make the first sorties against small empire outposts from independent groups, that go escalating until they join to form the alliance) :nod:
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Yes, that was the initial idea behind a five-mission demo I had been thinking of where you indeed are one of the local rebel groups in a far flung world like Tatooine. Though since the Empire proper is low in presence, you'd be fighting local governments that act in place of the Empire, until the presence of several rebel groups begins to prove too much to the point of incurring a visit from the regional Imperial flotilla. It should also be implied that not all rebel groups get along as they have different goals (some just want secession from the Empire while others want to restore the Republic, and others are just anarchists).
If anything, the beginning missions should drive home the point that the rebel groups need to pool their resources into an Alliance, since by themselves they don't stand a chance.
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Is the Y-Wing going to be a pure bomber, or a heavy fighter? I hate how a lot of games make it into a bomber that can't do a single thing at all.
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I think very heavy fighter, the B-Wing is much more bombing oriented I would imagine and would probably serve that role.
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ok. Y-wings always were my favorite SW fighter.
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Yeah the only problem is the limited pool of other bombers to choose from. Although that may not be a big issue, the Empire has the TB, and the Rebs have the B-Wing, at least later on. Early on though, they'll need something capable of launching significantly sized warheads.
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I think it works out just fine, actually, considering that the rebels are supposed to be woefully out-gunned, it's their tactics that allow them to survive (note survive, not succeed)
Remember that the first Death Star was their first major victory. Before that they only made minor gains here and there.
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Well, another thing to consider is that the early Alliance fleet was made up of various types of ships, not all of them designated as true warships, from all the different rebel sects. The only proper warships that are in the Alliance fleet that you tend to see a lot of are the Nebulon-B Frigates and Corellian Corvettes (which is debatable since they weren't exclusively fitted for combat only roles). The Mon Calamari vessels are still technically passenger liners that were modified and even then, didn't see any major use until after The Battle of Hoth (honestly though, there are so many conflicts as to when Calamari Cruisers began to be employed by the Alliance Fleet. I'd like to think that the Rebels had a few of these in their arsenal from captains and crews that had been able to escape the enslavement of their homeworld, not to mention Ackbar was rescued before The Battle of Yavin and had earned the rank of Commander shortly after his rescue).
Of course, one thing that needs to be understood, that if a pre-Yavin campaign were to be made, we'd have to go and add ships that were being used at the time, mainly a new slew of TIE-craft (namely, the TIE-gt, TIE-fc, TIE-rc, TIE Vanguard, and TIE Scout) as TIE Bombers were just entering service as a replacement for the TIE-gt and TIE Interceptors weren't around).
Also, craft should be prioritized as a need basis as for what the story calls for. Since we're kind of doing the opposite right now, we're limited in terms of what craft we've decided to focus on.
With regards to the Y-wing, I think heavy fighter/light bomber is an appropriate role for that craft. It should be able to take down small heavily armored targets such as transports and freighters, and at least some of the older corvette-class vessels (well cause damage anyways).
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i personally would like a section on the time arround 4000bby...
its my favorite section of star wars...
4 those who dont speek starwars, its the time of revan and the old republic, and the exile and the time after the jedi civil war.
play star wars kotor (knights of the old republic) and kotor 2 if u still have no idea...
i have a feeling that this time wont be made into a mod, so i will probably do it myself once i learn how to make mods...
i am getting close to it though... so ill do some more reasearch on it, and once i work it out i will probably get my cous to help me make it.
once i do... ill make a thred on this board and get some beta testers and some programmers to help and whatever...
i recon if the time arround 4000bby was made into a mod, you could easily make it into a series of 4 mods... 2 under the sith and 2 under the republic, 1 of each during the time of revan and 1 of each during the time of the exile...
you could even add onto that, have bounty hunter work on nar-shardar, or have a campain that follows revan after he left to battle the sith in the unknown reagons...
the starwars universe is a big one so theres a lot you can do... i have the feeling this project will go on for a while!
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Blablabla on a Kotor mod on SCP.
Well, it would be interesting but we lack enough information about this Era. And we don't have any detailed technical info about other ships used in this universe. And personally I prefer a Star Wars conversion/mod/stand alone where I could see X Wings, Tie Fighter, Tie Defender, Super Star Destroyer Eclipse, and so on.
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Finish the azzameen story: I was so pissed off with the end of XWA: karmin is still not dead, and antan azzameen leaves you to the imperials like the treator he is, and it ends HERE!!! :mad:
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As far as I know, one of LucasArts' little pet peeves is using their characters in your game/story/whatever. As such, and the fact that we're already tip-toeing around a number of legal issues, we won't be using any of their established characters.
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We aren't tiptoeing any legal issues. We are free to reference any SW character/planet/anything as long as we do it for a noncommercial purpose.
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I thought as much: Technically nothing prevents you from doing an XWA user campaign (I think the game had an editor), so I think this MOD could finish the story if they wanted.
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Question: What are the basics of trademark law that could affect FanFic?
Answer: Any word, name, symbol or device which is used (or intended to be used), to identify specific goods and to distinguish those goods from items sold by others and which indicates the source of the goods is eligible for trademark protection. A fan fiction author who writes a new action novel involving Star Wars characters with "Star Wars" in the title could be liable for trademark violation since "Star Wars" is a mark owned and registered by LucasFilm Ltd.
Now, if Lucasarts just happened to be developing a new star wars space sim, well we could wind up with a C&D letter on our doorstep already because we're using their intellectual property without their permission in a way which could affect their own revenue (by providing a competing product using a license we don't hold)
In addition, Lucasfilm and lucasarts have taken legal action before against mod makers and fan artists. Recently, the first trailer for the Force Unleashed used a model of a Star Destroyer made by a fan without his permission to promote their own game. The artist was not compensated for his hours of work, nor even given a credit. Previously to that, a Map Maker for Unreal Tournament was given a cease and desist order, and LucasArts demanded that he take all of his Star Wars related material off his site, even though he was making no profit from it.
As the holder of the legal trademarks, LucasFilm can do whatever they want, they can tell you not to use their stuff, their characters, etc, whenever they want. They very existance of this mod without LucasFilm or LucasArts' permission IS tiptoeing around a legality.
We discussed this a couple times on IRC, and I believe the consensus that the project heads had was that using SW characters and music was not a good idea. Besides, it's more fun and creative to make our own story, that way we're not constrained by writing for someone else's characters.
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Yup. But, after the Total Conversion is out (not just a mod, it will be 100% standalone), there's nothing stopping the community from doing what they want with it, you'd just have to find your own hosting, because it's whoever's providing the files that usually ends up getting shut down. We won't be condoning anything that could cause unnecessary trouble for us.
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Yes, LucasArts tends to not enjoy it when the fans begin taking matters into their own hands instead of just mindlessly purchasing whatever crap that they're marketing to the LCD.
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...We discussed this a couple times on IRC, and I believe the consensus that the project heads had was that using SW characters and music was not a good idea. Besides, it's more fun and creative to make our own story, that way we're not constrained by writing for someone else's characters.
So, basically you suggest that using XWA characters is illegal, but using ships from XWA and XvT - like we've been doing since the beginning - is legal? That makes no sense. It is as much as saying that we should abandon the project as a whole without begging for permission from Lucasfilm to use any SW material. The motion that we cannot reference characters but we are free to make SW-themed models is simply false. If you infiltrated LA's HQ and copied their models for their yet-to-be-released games, that would be theft, not using a name for a game they had released a decade ago.
And by the way, why do you think LA would care about a SW-themed mod for a nearly defunct space sim? And who would they sue if they did? "Some guy named 'chief1983' and some other guys named 'x,' 'y,' and 'z' whose place of living we have no idea about"? That's just not feasible.
LF has never been particularly successful at even stopping the circulation of prerelease RotS copies, or very recently they did not seem to care very much about early copies for Legacy of the Force: Revelations. Given these issues, what do you think just how many LF employees would give a four-letter about the existence of a noncommercial project like this for a space simulator game they have probably never even heard of? Let me stress something out again: we are not in this for profit or defamation.
And based on your legal issue theory, how would you explain the existence of all the SW fan films? Do you actually think that the authors asked for permission every time they decided to include something in their movies that are already in SW canon (Jedi, lightsabers and lightsaber effects, TIEs, Star Destroyers, space stations, Death Star, names for planets/places/characters)?
Check Wookieepedia and you'll see that we are free to use any SW material as long as we use them for a noncommercial purpose.
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Actually, I thought as much!
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Check Wookieepedia and you'll see that we are free to use any SW material as long as we use them for a noncommercial purpose.
We know that they've shut down mods in the past, that weren't charging anything for their material. So that statement can't be entirely true, they have taken action in the past. Maybe they can't sue us, but they can shut down HLP and anyone else hosting the project, and we don't want that to happen do we? If character usage is something they've been shown to be particularly annoyed at, I see no reason to do it. Although I would like to know where that particular belief comes from, I wasn't aware of Galactic Conquest being shut down for its use of characters, and it may have been due to the fact that it was a mod for a product that still costs money, whereas ours is not.
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They can't just shut down HLP as a whole for using a string of letters like A-c-e[spacebar]A-z-z-a-m-e-e-n.
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The Azzameen story won't be done by us as an official campaign.
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No, they can't, but they might in the case of a fanfic (which is essentially what that campaign would be) centered around Azzameen. We'd be hosting it. So, as cool as I think it would be to continue that plot, I don't think we can currently afford to do so in any official capacity.
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Pity! Geeze, at least they could have ended the plot correctly :mad: I don't know: A small string of family missions just after the endor battle, you know, like a CODA in a song.
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If we're going to do a pre-BoY storyline, why not put the player in the Tierfon Yellow Aces (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tierfon_Yellow_Aces)? It was supposedly a training squadron, which would let us do a training mission as well as a few lead-in easy missions. Then we can build up the difficulty until we get to the BoY, which (if we have a DS1 trench), we can have the player participate in.
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Won't we have the same danger as the azzameen matter, then?
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Won't we have the same danger as the azzameen matter, then?
Perhaps. It was just a thought.
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I've seen some talk in this thread the people want the conversion to emulate the movies rather than the game, but I'd go a step further and to say don't emulate the movies either . . . at least not in terms of the ships. The ship combat in star wars is pathetic really, huge kilometre long ships that fire a few pop guns here and there. Star Wars is quite honestly dreadful for ship to ship combat.
Yet the ISD has four HUGE turrets on either side of the super structure, we never even see these fire.
So what I'd like is for the ships to have some meat on their bones, so they can smash the hell out of the other ships. Not just firing a bunch of pissy little anti-fighter turbolasers at eachother. I wouldn't necessarily say be restricted to canon either. The canon stats seem a bit all over the place really . . . and they're more fluff than stats for the most part. One good source might be something like the old Rebellion, game which seperates anti fighter and anti-ship stats for each ship. Just a thought anyway.
I should also point out that in Revenge of the Sith, one ship does fire a blue beam weapon. So there is a precedents for beams, even if it's from a really laughable source. (you can also model little guys loading cartridges into an 88' flak can- er . . . I mean turbolasers :rolleyes: )
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You're stepping a bit outside the design idea of this mod there Angel. The game was concieved of as a simulator based very closely on the action as portrayed in the movies and in fiction. Will it be exactly like the movies? No, Star destroyers will have all the guns they had in the published material, but we're not going out with the idea of creating our own universe here. This is meant as a sim, and we're doing all we can to keep as close to the films as possible
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Yes, we're aiming to have all ships default configured as close as possible to what they're 'supposed' to be. We've covered the list of where we want to grab this info from many times in the past, as you've stated you've seen. The fact is, Lucas envisioned the combat as WWII in space. So, the fighters fly like fighter planes roughly, fairly low agility, but moving relatively fast. The capital ships are mostly designed to either launch fighters, attack other capital ships, or both. Fighters will play a role against them, but will have a very hard time singlehandedly eliminating any but the smallest capital ships. This is fairly close to how fighters were used in WWII, swarms of them could inflict serious damage, but only when used appropriately, and it would help much more to have some capital ships of your own aiding in dishing out some damage. We hope to avoid using mechanics and such that were only seen in the games, because we're not trying to recreate the old games. We want to make something new, that feels different wherever necessary to achieve a slightly more realistic, but still fun, feeling.
And as far as complaints that having all that firepower on the capital ships will be hard to balance, just because ships can carry X amount of guns doesn't mean they'll always be configured that way. The mission designer can rearrange or disable the turrets however he wishes within the bounds of the table, which won't be very restricting. I just see no reason not to allow the maximum level of firepower possible, for when it _is_ wanted.
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You're stepping a bit outside the design idea of this mod there Angel. The game was concieved of as a simulator based very closely on the action as portrayed in the movies and in fiction. Will it be exactly like the movies? No, Star destroyers will have all the guns they had in the published material, but we're not going out with the idea of creating our own universe here. This is meant as a sim, and we're doing all we can to keep as close to the films as possible
Oh I'm not saying make your own universe . . that just that every piece of information needs to be taken with a grain of salt. And weighed against other informatioon, and what would be fun and so forth. I'd say the first source of information would be the models themselves, that's why I reference the large turrets on the side of the ISD.
I mean people always mention the 60 turbo, 60 ion cannons. But the thing is, you never see the ISDs firing that volume of fire . . . at the same time, you never see them firing as much as they should be. We see the Medical Frigate at point blank with the broadside of an ISD, and they exchange about 2 or 3 very very minor blasts from some random place on their hull. The whole 60/60 thing is I believe from some Star Wars RPG anyway, hardly a great source for information. If it were from say a tactical boardgame, then I might give it a little more weight.
There's more to emulate in a movie than the laser blasts. When Ackbar says "we won't last long against those Star Destroyers" he's concerned about their firepower, but in terms of visuals we later never see an Alliance ship fall to the ISDs. One ISD explodes in the background and the Executor does it's all too familiar plunge into the Death Star with the sense-of-scale breaking rush of flame. The only Rebels dying around the ISDs are a bunch of random fighter pilots, some black guy exclaiming "she's gonna blow!" and of course Mr. Awing and his SSD-shattering scream.
So what I'd like from the project is an emulation of the feel of the combat, rather than a direct translation of the combat itself. Not necessarily an easy task to be sure.
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I personnally always felt fustrated by the LOOONNNNGGGG delay taken for firing lasers in x wing games (especially x wing because in addition to that, precision firing was extremely difficult in the game: ARGH, how I HATED the b wing... :hopping:), luckily, the timing was slightly accelerated in x vs t and in alliance (by a factor of 1.5 I think) and precision was greatly improved in tie fighter alone: that 3d CMD tasted heaven :)
However, when you see how they fire in the movie, it's maddening.
Also, regarding the ISD, I'll gie you this info taken out from the secret plans book i have at home: they (at least the class 1, have 8 heavy turrets on the sides of the bridge pillar: to each side: 3 heavy turbos (they are said to penetrate shields and to pierce vessels like butter) and 1 heavy ion cannon.
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One thing also: Please let us dogfight missile boats ;7
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If someone models the missile boat, you will be able to dogfight with it. But I don't think anyone's claimed that one yet, or the Gunboat either. They're not currently very high on the priority list, could change if we need them for a campaign though.
The firing rate will hopefully be significantly faster, but come with some other penalties for having it that way (quick energy drain most likely, causing burst fire).
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I'm very excited about the SWC Project, being both a big fan of the X-Wing series and FS2 :)
I think it's great you're not going to re-create the X-Wing series style exactly, I think it would be really interesting to see how Star Wars star-fighter combat could be re-envisaged. Some earlier comments suggest adopting a pace more similar to BtRL. I like the BtRL mod, but I think the ships turn a bit too fast in it. Combat tends to de-generate into ultra high-speed spins of death, with neither party really being able to hit the other (due to the very limited firing opportunity). You can break out of this in BtRL by using the slide feature, but I doubt you'd be having such a slide in SWC. No doubt you'll come up with a combat mechanics that plays well though :)
The comparison with WWII fighters is interesting, although my understanding of WWII was that whilst a single fighter couldn't take out a capital ship, it didn't take that many. Most capital ships couldn't survive more than a few direct torpedo hits. Even if they survived they were typically severely crippled. Indeed WWII was the point at which the fighter became the dominate force in naval combat, and the battleship became largely irrelevant. In some ways I see the Star Wars universe as being fighter dominated too, capital ships seemed to be carriers more than anything else. Certainly this interpretation makes for a more fun "star-fighter simulator" :)
The Assault Gunboat, as I understand, only appears in the games. However, it is also the only imperial ship that is armed with ion-cannons and which can be controlled by the player. So I guess it might turn out to be a necessity. Ion-cannons allow for much more varied missions since you can have the whole, "identify -> disable -> protect capturing operation" missions :)
All in all, good stuff, I'm looking forward to the first release :)
Tom
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Well, there is still the tie defender... ;7
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Lawl TIE Defender haha lol lulz...*sigh*
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Heh, me and the rest of the senior team have quite a bit to say about the TIE Defender... hehe
Anyways, one important thing to remember is that Ion Cannons won't be quite as neccesary as in the X-Wing games, due to the FS engine's ability to disable a craft with normal weapons by targeting specific subsystems. I'm sure the Gun Boat will be seen at some point in this mod, but at the moment the team is really focusing a lot on ships and fighters which will show the true differences between the two sides of the conflict. Rebels with their smaller and more lightly armed capital ships vs. the big imperial cap ships bristling with guns, and strong, powerful rebel fighters versus light, fast but fragile imperial TIEs. I always found that the Gunboat, Missile boat, Tie Advanced and Tie Defender really kind of destroyed this great duality that exists in the universe, after all, remember the empire's stance on fodder... err, I mean, fighters and their pilots: "We can always build more..."
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Ah that's interesting, my favourite game in the X-Wing series was TIE Fighter, so I never really saw the TIE fighters as fodder :) To me the TIE fighter seemed about equal to an X-Wing, and a TIE interceptor could literally run rings around an X-Wing. Sure the TIE Fighter was fragile but it had great maneuverability. So against an X-Wing, if you could survive the head on pass then you'd almost always win the turning fight. The small profile was also a big win :)
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I'd still take an A wing rather than a tie (fighter or interceptor).
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Ah that's interesting, my favourite game in the X-Wing series was TIE Fighter, so I never really saw the TIE fighters as fodder :) To me the TIE fighter seemed about equal to an X-Wing, and a TIE interceptor could literally run rings around an X-Wing. Sure the TIE Fighter was fragile but it had great maneuverability. So against an X-Wing, if you could survive the head on pass then you'd almost always win the turning fight. The small profile was also a big win :)
Well, the game X-Wing said that 3 TIE Fighters equals 1 X-wing, and I think that is the way it should be, since TIE pilots don't survive that much and not many veterans are out there to gain experience in battle. But these veterans definitely stand a chance against the rebels if they survive.
And f*** the small profile... in the x-wing games all objects had huge hitboxes, which made it easier to damage any craft. Fortunately the FSO Engine is more accurate in this regard...you can only hit a ship without shields when your weapon directly impacts the hull. So TIEs should have a greater chance of survivability as well as the x-wing to evade shots due to its evasive x- profile.
It's also sad that the X-Wing game or any space simulator game in that matter lack something like energy fighting, firstly successfully used in WWI in the naval battle between ****cats and Zeros. In fact, George Lucas based the properties of the X-Wing and TIE Fighters on the American fighters(Heavier,faster, heavily armored ) and Japanese fighters(nimble, more maneuverable, hardly any armor). The American's only stood a chance when taking the fight to the vertical and using their speed to an advantage. Sadly, space simulator games only have turn fighting. This problem is further emphazised in the BTRL project, where fighters hunted each other in neverending circles.
That's why I love Il1946 atm so much, air fighting is such a beautiful and complex matter.
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Well, the game X-Wing said that 3 TIE Fighters equals 1 X-wing, and I think that is the way it should be, since TIE pilots don't survive that much and not many veterans are out there to gain experience in battle. But these veterans definitely stand a chance against the rebels if they survive.
Pilot skill definitely makes a huge difference, for example in both X-Wing and TIE-Fighter the AI couldn't hit the broadside of a barn. As a result the player could be effective in both the X-Wing and the TIE-Fighter.
And f*** the small profile... in the x-wing games all objects had huge hitboxes, which made it easier to damage any craft.
Ehehe the hitboxes were a little unfair on the TIE's :)
It's also sad that the X-Wing game or any space simulator game in that matter lack something like energy fighting, firstly successfully used in WWI in the naval battle between ****cats and Zeros. In fact, George Lucas based the properties of the X-Wing and TIE Fighters on the American fighters(Heavier,faster, heavily armored ) and Japanese fighters(nimble, more maneuverable, hardly any armor). The American's only stood a chance when taking the fight to the vertical and using their speed to an advantage. Sadly, space simulator games only have turn fighting. This problem is further emphazised in the BTRL project, where fighters hunted each other in neverending circles. That's why I love Il1946 atm so much, air fighting is such a beautiful and complex matter.
Yes actual air combat is much more complex, I guess mostly owing to gravity. Space combat is greatly simplified in that regards. One-on-one encounters tended to start with a head-on pass and then whoever turns the quickest wins. However whilst 1-on-1 was common in air combat it's quite rare in games like X-Wing, and that makes the situation more complex. Also the X-Wing series tended to have lots of objectives that needed constant attention. The bombers are torpedoing your freighter, the enemy frigate is escaping, you need to guard the capture operation whilst trying not to get trashed by the enemy fighters. Air combat never had objectives that were that so complicated or tricky :)
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Anyways, one important thing to remember is that Ion Cannons won't be quite as neccesary as in the X-Wing games, due to the FS engine's ability to disable a craft with normal weapons by targeting specific subsystems.
What if you made an ion cannon, and had it as the equivilant of both the emp missle and the stelletoII?
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Anyways, one important thing to remember is that Ion Cannons won't be quite as neccesary as in the X-Wing games, due to the FS engine's ability to disable a craft with normal weapons by targeting specific subsystems.
What if you made an ion cannon, and had it as the equivilant of both the emp missle and the stelletoII?
I think that (later than sooner) when the priority 1 ships are ready, and an initial campaign is launched, just then will there be a need to finish with the rest of the shiplist (even the ones that are not listed), as more and more fredders will be making new campaigns and will be in need of more diversity. In this community there´s very talented people that can have great ideas on using something that the rest of us might deem as useless in a great and mindblowing way :) .....
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Yeah, I mean, you may have to disable a really weak craft for one, and that's not even too far-fetched. But normally you'd take out an escape pod in a couple of shots. Ions would alleviate that worry.
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Hmm, about SW supposed to be WWII in space:
Torpedo bombers. =P - one of those was responsible for taking down that German mega battleship, what's its name? The Bismark? The torp disabled its rudder, so it was stuck going in circles and was eventually destroyed. If they had managed to get a direct hit, it'd have prolly done it in, depending on where it hit. b/c the seas were choppy, however, it didn't work, and they were lucky to just jam the rudder. See here:
Dogfights: Hunt for the Bismark: John "Jock" Moffat (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYpiz77JwhQ)
heh, the whole series:
Dogfights: "Sink the Bismarck" 1 of 5 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4Xn6Oy52hY)
Dogfights: "Sink the Bismarck" 2 of 5 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ib7jnRXHV4)
Dogfights: "Sink the Bismarck" 3 of 5 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0dTpwTPAPA)
Dogfights: "Sink the Bismarck" 4 of 5 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrVivj9Q5Po)
Dogfights: "Sink the Bismarck" 5 of 5 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeXJBQsxGEU)
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Torpedo bombers....
Now that I think of it, that's almost exactly how it was in Wing Commander 2 (the only one I really played). A bomber with a single, huge, ship-mangling topedo strapped to the bottom (iirc).
However, with the large payload/low yield warheads common to Star Wars games, that's not exactly going to be very easy to do. Especially without being able to hug the ocean for a little bit of cover.
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One of them managed to make the hit, yes, but it took 2 wings of them for that to happen. One plane flying in on its own with all port or starboard guns beared on it probably wouldn't have fared so well.
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I am new to the Forum. First I want to wish you every inch of luck and success there is with your conversion. Ever since hope died that there will be a new SW Space Sim after X-Wing Alliance I have waited for a new chance to fry some TIE Fighters/X-Wings.
What I realy would like to see done in a new SW Space Sim is a more "realistic"/immersive feel to it. Maybe as this is a noncommercial mod you may be capable of pulling it off as its not ultimatly meant to appael to everybody. I was very happy reading that youd like to create a more "simulation" like game than an arcardey version. So Ill put my list of wishes here.
- Realistically strong Capital ships = no one fighter continuously wearing the ship down until it blows up
But how can that be done. Id say there are two approches which can be combined. Change the way shields work like having relativly weak capship shields that recharge at a very high rate. But if they collapse at one side they will stay down for some time so fighters/other Capships can do damage and destroy the generators. Secondly and I guess this can be easily done with the FSS engine - make it dangerous to get too close to a cap ship. In XWA you just could fly around an ISD without ever having to fear to get hit. This would also make ships like the Lancer Frigate or the Corellian Gunship a formidable foe if implemented with the long range anti starfighter weapons they are meant to carry.
- Make it hard to intercept warheads. As capships get less "endangered" by starfighters make it harder to take down enemy missiles (like in the original 1993 X-Wing in which is was nigh impossible to hit them)
- Make Capship - Capship battles worth to watch - the Wing Commander Saga project did a great thing with their capship battles.
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You, my friend, have found the correct mod.
Our aims are simple: Not recreate the X-Wing series, but create something that feels like you're in the movies. To that end our reference sources include only the movies and book series, without delving into stats or capabilities from the games.
It will feel realistic.
Capships will be frakkin scary too.
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Yes, and the capship behavior you described is actually something I've already noticed. In some testing missions I created in which a MC80 and an ISD perform a broadside pass, the shields on that side do indeed drop, and do not replenish from the other sectors, so until they've changed angles, that side starts seeping huge hull damage from the massive batteries of turbolaser fire from the other ship. I'm pretty sure there will be missions that make use of that as well.
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I want this project to be ......
...aiming for an initial release with a small set of ships.
Lets say...
- X-Wing
- Y-Wing
-A-Wing
- Z-95
- T/F
- T/I
- T/B
- T/A
- Corellian Corvette
- Nebulon B
- Calamari
- Star Destroyer
- transport
- Platform
- container
It's a basic set of ships which allows for some sort of Show-Off-Campaign. It's something to start with.
The music you have.... I can make some interface art in case you are missing some ( including a mainhall ) , then just a little fredding and some voiceactors...... et voila !!!
It's something to aim at, TBP also came in small portions, and I have to say it was the right decision.
Greetings !
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X-Wing - In game, needs a normal map :)
Y-Wing - Texturing just finished, needs LODs and export
A-Wing - being reborn
Z-95 - maje had the texture going, but he's been gone for some time
T/F, T/I, T/B - Texturing recently completed, needs LODs and export
T/A - Brand will get to it eventually, not as important as these others though
Vette - Let's give Turambar some 'encouragement' to get this thing done :)
Neb B - Nothing really going with it, Temp started one but the solid modeling app might not prove easy for export for something that complicated
MC80 - We have a UV mapped brand new model, needs texture, turrets, LODs, detail boxing - not needed for a smaller campaign/release though
ISD - WIP
Gallofree - Model near completion, again, maje seems to have disappeared though
Platform Type 2 - We have an older mesh, but it's decent quality - I'd like to see it textured and used, and another station as well eventually
Containers - We can steal FS containers for now, no one will care, right? :)
So, hopefully we can have a good chunk of that in game by the end of the summer. The bigger capships might be absent for a while, but I'd be happy just to have a good chunk of fighters to play with, maybe do some station skirmishes, 2v2 matches, some experimental campaigns, etc.
I want this project to be ......
...aiming for an initial release with a small set of ships.
Lets say...
- X-Wing
- Y-Wing
-A-Wing
- Z-95
- T/F
- T/I
- T/B
- T/A
- Corellian Corvette
- Nebulon B
- Calamari
- Star Destroyer
- transport
- Platform
- container
It's a basic set of ships which allows for some sort of Show-Off-Campaign. It's something to start with.
The music you have.... I can make some interface art in case you are missing some ( including a mainhall ) , then just a little fredding and some voiceactors...... et voila !!!
It's something to aim at, TBP also came in small portions, and I have to say it was the right decision.
Greetings !
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...Containers - We can steal FS containers for now, no one will care, right? :)
Black Wolf did some textured containers, did he not?
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I don't recall ever seeing them on the ftp. He might have kept them to himself, like his new Gunship he started on (that he should be able to finish with the new turret code) :)
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Yes, and the capship behavior you described is actually something I've already noticed. In some testing missions I created in which a MC80 and an ISD perform a broadside pass, the shields on that side do indeed drop, and do not replenish from the other sectors, so until they've changed angles, that side starts seeping huge hull damage from the massive batteries of turbolaser fire from the other ship. I'm pretty sure there will be missions that make use of that as well.
In ROTJ, when the shields on the front of that Executor-class <-correct? SD went down, and that A-Wing that was critically hit did a suicide run on the bridge, didn't the captain tell them to "get those deflector shields up"? Obviously, it's something that can be repaired, and not over great lengths of time, unless the shield generators are damaged... and even if they are, unless they're destroyed, they can be repaired, no? I dunno, but the shields should be able to be fixed if the enemy can be distracted from ravaging the now-bare systems, I think... that was the impression I got from the movies, anyways. What do you think?
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Just because the captain wants the shields up now doesn't mean it's going to happen. We don't know how long it would have taken for them to come up based on that. Granted, bridge shields are probably going to be more important than the rest of the ship, cause the captain wants his ass safe. The way the system works now though, capships with shields balance as rarely as fighters do, perhaps even less often, not sure. Once a sector is down, it's probably down for a while. Without some coding changes to how the ai handles shields it'll probably stay that way.
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Actually, Piett, the captain, said "Intensify forward firepower!"
Then it was "Too late!"
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I waited so long for something like a sequel to Alliance. I remember theese Days...back at 1993. Xwing/Tie Fighter, is by far one of the best Space Simulators ever. I don´t know how many Hours i spend with it, but I don´t regret a single second.
Glad to see someone is porting SW to FS. What I want it to be ? Well, the most what other People want.
- More Simulator then Arcade...put in plenty of Micromanagment
- First finish the Mod, then make Missions...as soon as the Mod is ready, there will be plenty of Fredders, that will build Missions for you...me included... :D
- All Ship, Base, Capship Types from Alliance included. Will that be possible with 130 Ship limit ?
- Based on SW Episode IV-VI and it´s Timeline
- Attack the Death Star
- Battle of Endor (but plz a huge one, not like in Alliance)
- Missions for booth. The Empire and the Alliance
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The reason I wanted a sequel for alliance was to know the end of the azzameen story! What happens with k'harmyn viraxo? and antan?
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The reason I wanted a sequel for alliance was to know the end of the azzameen story! What happens with k'harmyn viraxo? and antan?
Yeah, I don't think that we'll be doing that though, not because we don't want to necessarily, but because we probably need to stick with new characters and a new plot.
As far as ship limits go? Maybe that'll be removed by the time we need that many.
Doubt we'll have a DS attack early on, but everyone wants to see it eventually. The project will need some serious momentum behind it for that to happen though. Should pick up over the summer, I'm going to outline what I think we should have with the team.
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What do I want this project to be?
simple... it needs to be AWESOME..
nothing more, and nothing less
(taking into account all the models that have been released so far, that's not gonna be a problem :) )
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The reason I wanted a sequel for alliance was to know the end of the azzameen story! What happens with k'harmyn viraxo? and antan?
The other problem with this is that we're not lucasarts. We don't know what happens to those characters. To assume we could conclude their story is no different than saying "Want to know what happened after the shivans blew up capella? Play Inferno! It's the truth!"
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Yes, but like our very multiple freespaces 3 :D we can speculate...
Anyway, LA will never finish the story: the azzameen are not important characters you see elsewhere, and it's a shame, really that it's not finished for this reason only.
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The other problem with this is that we're not lucasarts. We don't know what happens to those characters. To assume we could conclude their story is no different than saying "Want to know what happened after the shivans blew up capella? Play Inferno! It's the truth!"
Oh, come on...I thought that kind of comments disappeared from this site time ago...
Keep it close to the movies, it's a choice I support. :yes:
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As long as I can fly a B-wing, Ill be happy ;7
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I want this to be what Rogue Squadron should've been.
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Rogue squadron was an arcade game, if you want a game like that you'll be sorely disappointed by our mod...
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I suppose for me, perfection would be for it to feel like a natural extension of the original Star Wars games, though maybe with a little less of the 70's cheese ;)
I can see this project relying heavily on voice acting, however, since Star Wars in general was very reliant on the character dialogue, and that was maintained in things like X-Wing Alliance.
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Of course, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it hehe.
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I want this to be what Rogue Squadron should've been.
Rogue squadron was an arcade game, if you want a game like that you'll be sorely disappointed by our mod...
I mean as in epic space battles.
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sad... anything from lucasfilms and lucasarts has simply ignored fulfilling their fans by now; everything is simply for profit.
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You guys need a clear direction (lol lol captain obvious), it'll make this go faster.
For example: remake the first four battles (mini-campaigns, basically) in Tie Fighter, focusing solely on creating the ships neccessary to do so. Quick voice acting (lots of english accents for the Imperials lol), release.
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Heh, actually, as a Londoner, it could be quite fun to play an Imperial commander ;)
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Londoner? I hope you don't have a cockney accent, the imperials were always rather posh...
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Yeah I don't remember any of them running around when the DS was being attacked going 'Where's the fork and knife? We're in rubble now!' or anything like that.
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Chief, you fail at cockney rhyming slang =P
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Hey we only spent a couple weeks on it in Etymology. And rubble was from Ocean's 11. Come to think of it, it was supposed to be barney. F***.
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Londoner? I hope you don't have a cockney accent, the imperials were always rather posh...
Very 'BBC English', so yes, a good voice for an Imperial ;)
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Good stuff, BBC english is perfect, Not quite Queens English, but then you sound like a ponce anyways.
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Heh, actually, as a Londoner, it could be quite fun to play an Imperial commander ;)
Londer, huh. That's more "Tie Advanced pilot" than "Imperial commander."
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I keep meaning to do some voice acting samples, but either can never decide what to say, or feel stupid standing in front of a mic in my office shouting at imaginary people to 'launch all fighters' ;) I keep getting visions of sympathetic men in white coats knocking at the door.
Edit: And that's not even considering the looks I'd get from my other half :shaking:
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Why not just pick one character in an existing campaign (or multiple characters if you think you're versatile enough) and do one or two of the missions? With the script output code that someone is working on now it should be easy to generate scripts for any missions.
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Are you guys planning to have different textures for the shared ships? (ie maybe Imperial corvettes are just unpainted metal but Rebs have red stripes on 'em?).
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I doubt it. None of the rebel ships seen in any of the movies are coloured, with the exception of the corvettes.
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I doubt it. None of the rebel ships seen in any of the movies are coloured, with the exception of the corvettes.
Damnit, what about the Errant Venture?
Ok, so not in any movie, but still...
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If it wasn't for XvT's NRSDEV application I'd never have gotten any of these references to a colored star destroyer. Thanks XvT!
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I want this mod to be epic. (who doesn't?)
I want this mod to be awesome. (again, who doesn't?)
I want this mod to be released, final and perfect, by a week from thursday. (okay, now I'm just dreaming...)
I want this mod to include mole miners, Katana-type slave-controlled Dreadnaughts (the bridge is smaller or something. slight difference in structure, and fewer windows cause less crew.), those crazy shield-ship things Lando's mining operation had that one time, and a Red Impstar.
I want this mod to surprise me with a good campaign plot that has twists I don't expect on the first play-through.
I want to know everything about this mod now. (hmmm... slight logical issue there...)
I want it to be good.
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Most of those are mutually exclusive.
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Just the last one, then. The rest are optional. I'd love if it came with the models to FRED a Thrawn Campaign together (since, copyright & all, not gonna happen official-like), but most of all, I want it to be good.
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Just the last one, then. The rest are optional. I'd love if it came with the models to FRED a Thrawn Campaign together (since, copyright & all, not gonna happen official-like), but most of all, I want it to be good.
Everybody wants it to be good, and its in the hands of a good team, so just have faith in the For-- I mean, the team.
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X-wing books and Thrawn books are the main ones I want to do/ see done.
That, and remaking TIE fighter.
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X-wing books and Thrawn books are the main ones I want to do/ see done.
That, and remaking TIE fighter.
Don't forget remaking X-Wing first! With its limited ship types it would be even easier! :)
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Hubba hubba: trigit, zjingj, the iron fist... True music to my ears! ;7
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If it wouldn't be a horrid amount of trouble, would it be possible to include some "classic" Missions separate from a Campaign? Sort of like a UMS for StarCraft or WC3 (you can't tell what I used to mod for).
A Yavin IV might be fun, an Escape from Hoth escort and definitely an Endor (its been done before I know but the way it was done in Rogue Squadron made me sick.) After all Endor is a Target rich Environment.
First Writing on here, sorry for bad English. It has been a long Time. :nervous:
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I've been hoping to squeeze in a few standalone missions alongside any campaign. Just stuff to play for fun, show off the engine, whatever. I'm sure there'll be a lot of them if we release a big enough ship and effects set. I'm also hoping we can FRED a good diversity in multiplayer missions.
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Standalone missions are easy to make, so there's a conceivable chance of some being released. I plan some anyway.
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If it wouldn't be a horrid amount of trouble, would it be possible to include some "classic" Missions separate from a Campaign? Sort of like a UMS for StarCraft or WC3 (you can't tell what I used to mod for).
A Yavin IV might be fun, an Escape from Hoth escort and definitely an Endor (its been done before I know but the way it was done in Rogue Squadron made me sick.) After all Endor is a Target rich Environment.
First Writing on here, sorry for bad English. It has been a long Time. :nervous:
Target aquired!
Fire all beamz!
:welcomeblue:
the escape from hoth sounds good, i think the only lucasarts version of that is fro Lego Star Wars
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Well, there's not much to tell about the escape from hoth. They took off, the Ion Cannon fired at any near star destroyers, and the fighters and transport jumped. The only transport that even had a fight on its hands was the last one, but that didn't go too well and was over pretty quickly.
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I know this might not be SW related, but i want an X-Wing with a Bosch Beer/Minute Maid OJ skin. :p
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What do you mean no escape from hoth? What was that in SotE?
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yeah, what's the diff between Battle of Hoth and 'Escape from Hoth'?
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yeah, what's the diff between Battle of Hoth and 'Escape from Hoth'?
Some Rosetta Stone lessons and I feel I am ready :).
Battle of Hoth refers to, insofar as SoTE to the flying the Snowspeeders against the AT-ATs, or the ground batle for lack of better words (I think). Escape from Hoth refers to the Rebel exodus through the Imperial Fleet in space with the big ion gun. (Ich denke).
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I just meant the part where you're fleeing in the Outrider. That was pretty much an escape right there.
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I'm sure we could make a storyline that follows the plot of the X-Wing books and maybe into the Thrawn campaign without taking the roles of main characters of those stories. If we did that, we could have a chance to pilot the wide variety of ships in the conversion and do our own story while still maintaining a framework to base the plot off of. Besides, following the X-Wing books lets us use the Rogue Squadron skins in at least one mission.
Multiplayer-wise: Multiplayer Battle of Endor, if possible. That's something I've always wanted to do with my friends.
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I just love it that many that come here use "we".
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Well TopAce, I used "we" because I'm helping work on the conversion with sound effects.
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Yes, this is true.
Speaking of which, someone get this guy a badge
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Space Combat and Epic Battles as they are described in the X-Wing Novels :nod:
No Factor5 arcade junk.
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Hey, the Factor 5 games were good.
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Speaking of those, I need to get copies of RS2 and RS3 for my Gamecube, since LucasArts decided to be bastards and not release them for Computer.
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http://catalog.ebay.com/Star-Wars-Rogue-Squadron-II-Rogue-Leader_023272652586_W0QQ_fifptsZ1QQ_pcatidZ2QQ_pidZ8704QQ_trksidZp3286Q2ec0Q2em271 (http://catalog.ebay.com/Star-Wars-Rogue-Squadron-II-Rogue-Leader_023272652586_W0QQ_fifptsZ1QQ_pcatidZ2QQ_pidZ8704QQ_trksidZp3286Q2ec0Q2em271)
http://catalog.ebay.com/Star-Wars-Rogue-Squadron-III-Rebel-Strike_023272662585_W0QQ_fifptsZ1QQ_pcatidZ2QQ_pidZ10560QQ_trksidZp3286Q2ec0Q2em271?_trksid=p3286.c0.m271 (http://catalog.ebay.com/Star-Wars-Rogue-Squadron-III-Rebel-Strike_023272662585_W0QQ_fifptsZ1QQ_pcatidZ2QQ_pidZ10560QQ_trksidZp3286Q2ec0Q2em271?_trksid=p3286.c0.m271)
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Will those work in the emulator on Wii?
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I'm fairly certain that the Wii can play any and all GameCube titles, if what I've been told is true.
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Yep. :yes:
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now if only i could convine my parents to buy me those and a memory card...
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AFAIK, for GC games, it's not emulation. I believe it runs them natively.
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the wii architecture is extremely close to the GC. Just a little more raw processing power (completely aside of the X360 and ps3 beasts)
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Hey guys, this conversion looks amazing! I know it might be too late for this, but here are some things I'd like to see after spending some time with the old X-Wing Collector's CD last night:
1) Fast acceleration/deceleration for fighters. I'm guessing you're not going to employ the glide function that was so critical in BtRL on account of it not really being very Star Warsy, so I thought that you could maybe keep chases from descending into simple turning matches by making running a viable option, even for slower ships. It would be great to push hard in order to dive behind a friendly cruiser and then slam on the breaks, or to make a desperate breakneck escape through a twisting tunnel. And the faster you go the wider you turn so...maybe disable the match speed function? Will even suggesting that get me banned?
2) Blasters that can recharge and fire faster. After launching awesome streams of destruction from a Viper, it was hard to go back to 2 shots per second and running dry halfway through a dogfight in X-Wing. Shooting is just fun and should be encouraged, though I do like the first shot being more powerful mechanic.
3) An awesome asteroid field chase!
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Ships will definitely fly different than either FS2 or BtRL, I'm not sure about fast acceleration, but glide is a big no.
The fire rate is something that will be quite different than most have ever seen, we're looking at doing a burst fire, in which most guns deplete very quickly, but charge back within moment, causing you to control your fire bursts, but still give you a high ROF when you do fire. You just won't be able to stream aim for too long, and good aim will really pay off.
Asteroids at some point are probably a given, it is Star Wars.
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Something that was really missed from the Star Wars games was the real ability to 'skim' along the surface of a Star Destroyer or something, popping turrets.
At least with Auto-Aim you won't have to be actually flying directly towards the target ship in order to do it :)
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Yup, that's going to help that out a lot I think. Most fighters will have at least some degree of an autoaim FOV cone, to compensate for the incredibly precise hit boxes, unlike the giant blob you had to hit for a fighter in XvT. You'll still have to lock that turret though, although I think I want to code that away too. Have it just aim for the nearest object in the reticle if there's not a targeted item in the cone.
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... Have it just aim for the nearest object in the reticle if there's not a targeted item in the cone.
Probably something you've already thought of, but what are the odds on getting a quasi-preferential autotarget, such that if there's a friendly x-wing in the center of the targeting array, and a hostile tie right behind it, but also in the target cone, we shoot the tie and not the x-wing? I'm thinking here of Wedges awesome moment in ANH where he almost collides with a friendly craft and blows up the craft behind it, for example. Whether having auto-aim disregard allies entirely or non-targeted allies, or something else, but friendly fire avoidance seems ... important to me.
At least accidental friendly fire. And anyways, that was Quake. And he totally deserved it.
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Perhaps also a reticle to show just what the lasers are shooting at rather than just guessing by their flight path. Something to let you know what your guns are pointing at.
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Well, maybe we can have the reticle that's already in the center of the hud move around a bit.
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*snip*
:welcomeblue:
well, someone had to. Now were's that link to all those speeches..... *ruffle ruffle ruffle* hmmm......
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... was that really necessary?
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oh, sorry. :blah:
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hehe, well thanks for the welcome anyway. The burst fire sounds like a good solution both for gameplay enjoyment and keeping starship behavior looking like the movies. Have you established how it will fit into the power distribution system? I'm just curious because the simple balancing act of having to compromise your defense/mobility in order to blast away made the Lucasarts sims feel a lot more perilous to me than most games (where you start out levels with optimal conditions); it would seem less than ideal to be able to maneuver around with shields and engines boosted up and then flip on the quick-charge lasers to shoot with impunity when it becomes convenient. I'm not that that strategy shouldn't be possible or anything, just pointing out that if any one subsystem is given an edge in recharge or onset time, it could result in less diversity in strategic approaches. Perhaps systems could take time to heat up or something? Just silly speculation from a guy who can't program worth a damn...
Anyway, sorry if this isn't the right spot for this type of discussion. Peace
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I have no idea of what you said, but Freespace already has an excellent energy distribution system. I assume they're using a modified form of that.
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Yeah sorry that wasn't very clear. I just meant that if the way weapons worked was modified so that lasers drained away and charged up fast enough to force you to shoot in bursts, there wouldn't be much point in shifting power to them until you were right on top of your enemy. If it took 5 seconds to charge up between bursts, then a guy who has had energy diverted to his guns for a minute wouldn't have any type of advantage in firepower over one who switched them up 5 seconds ago.
If the guns (or shields or engines for that matter) took a bit of time to "warm up" to full function, however, then there would be a reason to think about how aggressive you could afford to be given the enemies present, rather than just beefing up your shields as much as possible and then shifting power to the guns as they come into range. Just something I'm curious about from a design standpoint; it might not be an issue at all.
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oh.... come to think of it, theres this flag for the weapons table, swarm, that is used for weapons like the hornet in retail FS2. It works with primaries, so if it did
$Swarm 4
then it would fire a quick burst of 4 shots from each of it's firing points (i think), then you'd have to wait whatever the firing rate says before you can fire again.
And maybe the FotG team can put in several variations, of say, the X-wings lasers, that have different firing configs (i just read several of the rogue squardon books again, and if you read... uhm, which one was it, uh, Iron Fist, theres a good several pages of Lara Notsil explaining how the X-wings guns can be set.)
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Hey, the Factor 5 games were good.
No.
They were arcade-like. Which can be fun. Which is fun if made properly. But they were not good as a flight Sim.
Come on, multiple lives?
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:wtf:
yet you obviously play freespace, as you're part of this community. And you have problems with other games?
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I love Rogue Leader! A lot of their models are very high quality
Also, I astonish my friends with my Y-Wing precision bombing under the influence of alcohol.
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Don't forget that actual SW arcade games have an almost unblemished record of awesomeness...I think the take on the Battle of Endor in SW Trilogy Arcade is the best version so far, and I've definitely spent more money on the 1983 vector original than any other star wars game. But yeah the Factor 5 games were a bit closer to StarFox than X-wing. Still quite enjoyable, though.
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whats wrong with arcade-y games?
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Well, I don't see a point to create a new topic and I don't know where I could ask it. So, do you have any in-game screenshots ? ^^ There is nowhere to be found both here and moddb. :D
Just to see if the SCP Engine won't degrade the render of yours WIP models (textured) :D
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click the little icon below any team members name, go to screenshots, knock yourself out.
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click the little icon below any team members name, go to screenshots, knock yourself out.
I just see renders. :o In-game screenshots and particularly the actual works are nowhere to be found :p And, no, it's not in my ass.
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That's because most of our models still need converting. There's a little bit in game yet, but most of the in game stuff is ugly placeholder models not worth showing off (nor could we, due to the source of some of them). So, until we start converting the pile of meshes we now have, you'll have to just wait. Shouldn't be too far off though...
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What I also want are the beeps of my trusty R2 unit in the back of my x-wing/y-wing. that was a great immersion faction of the x-wing series and I'd love to hear his input regularily.
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That only needs an R2 "beep" voice file and FRED.
Doable.
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Yeah it'd be sweet to have 'dialogs' with a robot, I agree. Definitely something we could do scripted into a mission, not sure how easily it could be done otherwise.
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Not only as dialogue.
I think of something like:
during the mission R2 chims in, the player gets 1 or 2 options to choose from ( keypress ).
If one of the key is pressed the player lets R2 "scan" something or whatever, to get either a bonus objective or useful hints how to complete primary or secondary or bonus objectives, or detect something unusual.
Something like: Damn in these freighter are 20 hidden TIE's, better blow of the ship before they engage in combat and make the mission a bit harder, or something like that.
If the player ignores R2 or order him to focus on the task, the TIE's undock and the player is in trouble.
Not many events needed, but "enhance" the mission.
Doesn't have to be in every mission, though.
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The problem I can see with this is that you need to time these events very well. A "Press 1 to do this and press 2 to do this"-type message would distract the player's attention from the "real" in-mission messages, so the FREDder must make sure that the player gets into this situation when there isn't any mission-critical dialog going on in the background.
Something else, if multiple of these alternate options are to be used in one mission, they will overlap if the player doesn't press any of the buttons at the first choice. This may break the mission in various ways. There's nothing that can physically prevent the player from not pressing either 1 or 2.
It's technically doable. I think I will start experimenting with this.
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The problem I can see with this is that you need to time these events very well. A "Press 1 to do this and press 2 to do this"-type message would distract the player's attention from the "real" in-mission messages, so the FREDder must make sure that the player gets into this situation when there isn't any mission-critical dialog going on in the background.
Something else, if multiple of these alternate options are to be used in one mission, they will overlap if the player doesn't press any of the buttons at the first choice. This may break the mission in various ways. There's nothing that can physically prevent the player from not pressing either 1 or 2.
It's technically doable. I think I will start experimenting with this.
I have such an event in my mission ( during a quiet moment and it comes from a wingman ), and i already thought that the player might choose to NOT press the key or simply don't care, which might break a part of the mission ( in my case he won't get a additional objective, also the 3rd mission ending wont be available).
I'll try this weekend to make the keypress thing time critical.
I thought of something like, if not keypressed 10 sec after a event comes true, the whole thing resets, so that the player gets a second chance if one other event returns true ( it's a bit complicated ).
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You actually have to think about this?
Make a Tie-Fighteresque campaign in which the player flies increasingly advanced models of Tie Fighters in the service of arrogant and corrupt COs. Killing hippies = fun. No shields = fun. Imperial hardware = fun. Make your shiplist just large enough to accomodate a focused campaign, and go at it.
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I have a new and wonderful idea: Let's make a Clone War-era campaign. One of the Republic pilot persona should say: "Incoming jump signature! Hostile Confederation!":D
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noooooooooooooooooooo
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I want this project to force the local newspaper to rewrite this article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/10/DDE215P283.DTL
As a side note, this made the front page of the entertainment section. Print may be dead, but GL still gets unlimited free advertising in any San Francisco media. The benefits of rebuilding the Presidio.
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What Rogue Squadron should have been, basically.
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The only issue with that is you wouldn't have AT-AT walkers (any walkers tbh, tanks, soldiers, etc). because the animation code is very basic. For things like walkers, you'd need to have IK animation support, enable translate (move), and some other stuff that would ensure certain ground vehicles couldn't get that high off of the surface (basically eliminating the elevation or "z-coordinate".
I don't program games, but I do know that advancing the animation code to the level of characters in FPS games would be considerable.
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Most ground units shouldn't really be able to cause trouble for starfighters anyway, so I don't think they would be missed too much. But in-atmo missions (as seen in SoL screenshots) could still be amazing with just turrets and airspeeders. Imagine ripping up and down between skyscrapers on Coruscant in a Z-95, or chasing down TIEs in a canyon maze. Oh man. Still, plain old space gives you more bang for your buck.
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Personally, I would like a concept based around a neutral faction, maybe mercenaries or just a normal run of the mill family, much like X-wing Alliance, where you are slowly absorbed into the larger conflict around you, forcing you to take sides in the Civil War.
It would be splendid to have, like in Jedi Knight, a choice to go light or dark based on your actions (kill friendlies, not completing certain objectives, bailing out of missions, etc) and from there modify the storyline accordingly. Of course its a hell lot of work and not up for consideration. Still, I would rather fly pirate or rebel. I'm an Imp by heart, but from my point of view its much cooler to look at the Empire from the outside, as an evil, overwhelming military faction, than from the boots of a normal buckethead.
Flying rebel makes you feel more heroic, and I think its a feeling we want to rescue in this project. In TIE Fighter, I felt more of an expendable asset rather than the crucial game piece in X-wing. As I watched my TIE buddys die I said to myself "whatever, the ISD has a lot more squadrons where those came from".
Flying pirate or neutral combines a bit of both.
Flying Imp is cool, but maybe JUST for certain occasions. "Your group just captured several TIE interceptors and need them to infiltrate the perimiter around a Golan Arms platform to inspect bacta containers"... or whatever. You get the point :)
Thanks for reading
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FotG has two campaigns I think. One is rebel one is Imp.
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Damn in these freighter are 20 hidden TIE's, better blow of the ship before they engage in combat and make the mission a bit harder, or something like that.
20 TIEs?
In X-wing Alliance once you had an interceptor on your tail, and specially if you were flying a rusty y-wing, it was impossible, yes, IMPOSSIBLE, to shake the bastard off your tail while he pounded your ass with constant laser fire.
TIES might be weak head on, but the advantage comes when they get behind you.
I suggest, maybe just for hard modes, the possibility to man the turret of your y-wing (or similar slow, bulky craft), to counterbalance the unshakeable-bastard effect TIES have on these kind of ships. And not make it a PERFECT, "one-hit-kaboom" turret, but rusted up and with precision problems.
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It'd be pretty hard to get that working.
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Damn in these freighter are 20 hidden TIE's, better blow of the ship before they engage in combat and make the mission a bit harder, or something like that.
20 TIEs?
In X-wing Alliance once you had an interceptor on your tail, and specially if you were flying a rusty y-wing, it was impossible, yes, IMPOSSIBLE, to shake the bastard off your tail while he pounded your ass with constant laser fire.
TIES might be weak head on, but the advantage comes when they get behind you.
I suggest, maybe just for hard modes, the possibility to man the turret of your y-wing (or similar slow, bulky craft), to counterbalance the unshakeable-bastard effect TIES have on these kind of ships. And not make it a PERFECT, "one-hit-kaboom" turret, but rusted up and with precision problems.
depends on the difficulty setting. i had no problems with tie interceptors on medium and with adjustable throttle you can win almost any fight.
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My favorite tactic in X-Wing (the first game, the DOS based one) was to take a Y-Wing, pump everything into lasers and shields, and just park.
Double cannons make short work of everything, and the extra shields make you nearly impervious to TIE strafing runs.
Probably wouldn't work in any more modern game, or on a harder difficulty. But that's what I thought of when I heard "adjustable throttle."
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I actually started playing X-wing as of yesterday and it's pretty hard considering the sensitivity of my joystick is really fubar. My Logitech Wingman profile that I tried to create didn't really help either. Oh well, I guess I'll just get good by flying through the Pilot's Proving Ground 29 more times (God that is the definition of Hell, but I want those Flight Badges). ;)
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Oh well, I guess I'll just get good by flying through the Pilot's Proving Ground 29 more times (God that is the definition of Hell, but I want those Flight Badges). ;)
You can get all the badges in around twenty minutes by pulling a fast 180 at the course start, then flying through the last group of 3 and the starting gate (in order), then hypering out and doing the same for the next level. At least I know that that trick works in the collector's CD (cause I just went through in last month).
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cheater :P. still like the original music
while thinking about IL2 and attacking bombers and in analogy the tie fighter attack on the millenium falcon, my question is how would you handle the speed of transports, i.e. millenium falcon?
The Millenium Falcon is on of the fastest ships because of its hyperdrive, but it's sublight speed should be on par with the normal ones, maybe a little faster. The fighters should be at least 3/4 faster than any transport to make strafing runs possible.
Strafing runs, because attacking bombers or transports from behind is suicide, especially in IL2 (ww2) and since SW spacefights are modeled after WW2 aerial warfare, the characteristics should be similar.
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Didn't you just contradict yourself? If they should do strafing runs headon, why would it matter if the fighters are faster than the transports or not?
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obviously the fighters can't do a second strafing run after the first one when the transports are as fast as the fighters
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Yes, the space battles in Star Wars are inspired by the idea of WWII in space.
Star Wars inspired by WWII in space
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WWII Flight Sim
=/=
Star Wars Sim Mechanics = WWII Flight Sim Mechanics.
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Also, the Falcon is not just an ordinary YT-1200 Corellian transport, it's a heavily modified one. It's capabilities don't tell much at all about the original model...
I would be more interested in the fact that at sublight speed the Falcon can't seem to outrun a Star Destroyer (much less TIE Fighters). Are you going to give the capital ships high top speed but limited acceleration/deceleration? Or go for more "traditional" way for cap ships to move about?
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Yes, the space battles in Star Wars are inspired by the idea of WWII in space.
That's exactly what I was told when I was a kid but even back then I wondered if that statement is true. Machineguns aren't as deadly as laser shots...in Star Wars one or two hits are usually enough to take a fighter down, but during WWII the same number of machinegun(and even cannon) hits weren't enough. Useless to say that the mechanics of dogfights change accordingly.
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Machine guns, perhaps not, but many fighters were equipped with cannons that could actually rip a plane to shred in a few well placed shots. Plus, SW weapons have a lower ROF but probably higher damage/hit in comparison. You could make contact with a lot more bullets in the time you can hold a bead on the target than you could lasers. Blasters are probably more similar to the machine guns, but not many companies in the SW universe rely on blasters alone (unlike the US Govt in WWII, with its over-insistence on machine guns vs cannons for dogfighters).
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Unless you aimed at the pilot and/or you used well placed incendiary bullets, it was damn hard to get a kill with a number of shots compared to the ones needed in SW. That's why I have been thinking for years that the classic SW-WWII comparison is not 100% true.
This adds virtually nothing to the topic, it's just my opinion, so people are free to ignore it. :)
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Unless you aimed at the pilot and/or you used well placed incendiary bullets, it was damn hard to get a kill with a number of shots compared to the ones needed in SW. That's why I have been thinking for years that the classic SW-WWII comparison is not 100% true.
This adds virtually nothing to the topic, it's just my opinion, so people are free to ignore it. :)
get your facts right... a cannons are neither machine guns nor incendiary rounds. cannons explode on impact, leaving massive holes in the attacked craft. a single 20mm cannon hit is able to rip a wing off a fighter. thats why ILM calls them laser CANNONS in Star Wars.
it is very hard to bring down a fighter only with machine guns as you said. apart from precise shots into the vulnerable areas you have to put half your ammo into the opponent to birng him down.
In FOTG we have the option to have many laser cannon and blaster variants...let's say we use it! this battlestation is the ultimate power in the universe...ok im zoning out :D
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Didn't you just contradict yourself? If they should do strafing runs headon, why would it matter if the fighters are faster than the transports or not?
We can't ignore the Falcon's escape from the Death Star in Episode 4 - it was clearly moving slowly enough for TIE fighters to swarm around it in multiple strafing runs. So unless they were purposely going slowly at that point...
Most EU references point to the fact that the Falcon has an extraordinarily fast Hyperdrive, not sublight engines, which is where Han's comment about it being the fastest ship in the galaxy comes from.
That said, during the Battle of Endor the Falcon is depicted as being as fast as many of the rebel starfighters, so I think Lucas just doesn't know how to be consistent.
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Of course the comparison isn't 100%, it's supposed to be _like_ WW2 in space, not an exact copy. It's just one source of inspiration. It probably more relates to the movement and the choreography of the fighting than the weapon's effect anyway. But aRaven is still right, you don't seem to give the 20mm ShVAK cannons and the like enough credit.
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cheater :P. still like the original music
Hehe, game design that makes the player fly the same 5 minute obstacle course 24 times gives cheating a good name. As for the music, I completely agree that the dynamic iMUSE system was way ahead of its time and much more engrossing than using CD quality sound clips from the movies. This has been troubling me since I started composing music for this game, so I'm perhaps gonna see if I can bother the SCP folks about getting some red hot music code.
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maybe you can reimagine X-Wing and TIE Fighter's MIDI score? Imagine a full orchestra playing the TIE Fighter music. That would be sooo awesome!
I heard Hans Zimmer doesn't use a orchestra anymore, but a software to simulate an orchestra, when he made the Batman OST. Maybe you can look into that?
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Yeah, using sample-based and hybrid software instruments is the way to go for those not able to afford hiring a professional orchestra. There will definitely be some TG MIDI influence in there, but I'm not sure if the game will support a dynamically adapting score like those games did. Right now I think the engine can only crossfade between tracks, which is not very SW, but we'll see.
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Heh, get a decent public domain soundfont from somewhere and put midi music sequencer to the engine... :p
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Heh, get a decent public domain soundfont from somewhere and put midi music sequencer to the engine... :p
Timidity (http://timidity.sourceforge.net/)
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Hehe, oh man, that would be sweet! There's nothing quite like hearing that last nasally clarinet note that never got its off message playing all the way through the debrief ;7. Ah, good stuff.
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Yes, the space battles in Star Wars are inspired by the idea of WWII in space.
Star Wars inspired by WWII in space
+
WWII Flight Sim
=/=
Star Wars Sim Mechanics = WWII Flight Sim Mechanics.
What's the biggest difference between a SW sim and a WWII sim, besides technology?
"Air."
Ain't no air in space.
"There's an air-in-space museum."
EDIT: (aerospace)
BTW, I'm playing IL-2. Picked it up cheap at Circuit City.
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I don't get it...
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I don't get it...
Just smile and nod...
(actually the biggest difference between them is gravity, not air)
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I don't get it...
Just smile and nod...
(actually the biggest difference between them is gravity, not air)
Yup, gravity creates energy tactics that separate the two basically.
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Kudos to whichever EU dude came up with the "Etheric Rudder", two words which conveniently explain away why ships move like they're in the air while remaining obviously BS enough to halt any further inquiry by the physics megadork element of sci-fi fandom. Plus it sounds cool. Speaking of rudders, has anyone found or cobbled together some pedals that work with Freespace for less than the ridiculous $100 they want for the Saitek or CH sets? Gotta have yaw for that authentic dogfight feeling, but twisting the stick should be used for roll if anything...
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Without gravity there wouldn't be much of an atmosphere around...
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Kudos to whichever EU dude came up with the "Etheric Rudder", two words which conveniently explain away why ships move like they're in the air while remaining obviously BS enough to halt any further inquiry by the physics megadork element of sci-fi fandom. Plus it sounds cool. Speaking of rudders, has anyone found or cobbled together some pedals that work with Freespace for less than the ridiculous $100 they want for the Saitek or CH sets? Gotta have yaw for that authentic dogfight feeling, but twisting the stick should be used for roll if anything...
i like twisting my stick :)
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I was thinking of trying my PS2 steering wheel and pedals for FS2. I wonder if that would work? I wonder HOW that would work? :nervous:
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I was thinking of trying my PS2 steering wheel and pedals for FS2. I wonder if that would work? I wonder HOW that would work? :nervous:
There are all sorts of options (http://www.stepmania.com/wiki/USB_Adapters).
I have the Radioshack adapter, and it works fine.
Without gravity there wouldn't be much of an atmosphere around...
Yes, but in the movies, games, and books the starfighters all behave as if they're in an atmosphere.
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I was thinking of trying my PS2 steering wheel and pedals for FS2. I wonder if that would work? I wonder HOW that would work? :nervous:
There are all sorts of options (http://www.stepmania.com/wiki/USB_Adapters).
I have the Radioshack adapter, and it works fine.
Yeah, I have a PS2 to PC adapter I got from Game. I use a PS2 pad all the time with the PC. When I said "HOW" I meant that I'm wondering how you'd set it up for turning, banking, pitching and rolling!
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I was thinking of trying my PS2 steering wheel and pedals for FS2. I wonder if that would work? I wonder HOW that would work? :nervous:
There are all sorts of options (http://www.stepmania.com/wiki/USB_Adapters).
I have the Radioshack adapter, and it works fine.
Yeah, I have a PS2 to PC adapter I got from Game. I use a PS2 pad all the time with the PC. When I said "HOW" I meant that I'm wondering how you'd set it up for turning, banking, pitching and rolling!
Ah, I think this (http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=139447) is what you're looking for then.
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Guys, there are topics for discussing joysticks and where to get them. Can we keep it out of this one please?
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Can I ask a quick question?
What sort of 'style' for in-game combat will you be following? Will it be similar to FS2 fighter combat, or will it be different and a more unique experience?
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One of the greatest signs that this mod is progressing is the fact that we have a working alpha finally. It's taken us a long time, and it mostly uses placeholders, but it's allowed us to really get into the nitty gritty of how will the game play, and we've been working hard to create a unique experience never before felt in a FreeSpace mod, or any Star Wars game before. With this has come some new custom code features that will greatly enhance the playing experience, and we can't wait to release a beta version so all of you can finally jump in the cockpit of an X-Wing or TIE Fighter.
From the 2008 News Grid wrap up. So yeah, we're going to try to make something distinctly different from most everything else. Maybe not as different as SoL, but hey, at least in our mod you still sit in the cockpit :)
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I guess perhaps to clarify a bit of what I mentioned in that post, the goal we've given ourselves is simply this:
Freespace will render our ships for us, and give us a framework. After that it's all ours. We're hoping to create something that feels like a real star wars space sim, not what we've been given with the X-Wing series, nor Freespace 2. Watch the Battle of Endor again, and imagine sitting in the cockpit of that.
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One thing I'd like to see compared to the TG games is much less emphasis on energy management. I've been playing XWA again recently and one of things I remembering is how much of your time in game is taken up with managing your power systems, it really detracts from the fun in my view. Also the number of occasions that you end up using ridiculous power tricks like doubling your speed by dumping to engines.
That's not to say I think power management should be removed entirely. For example, I think the way that energy management was handled in Freespace 2 was much better. It took more of a sideline role, you could use power to your advantage but also you could largely ignore it if you wanted.
I think the focus on power management in the TG games also added to their "slow" feel. Killing a shielded fighter in those games was a case of gradually wearing it down. Whereas the impression I always got from the films was that a good rapid fire burst was enough to overload a fighter's shields and take them down. Having someone on your tail was dangerous, whether you had shields or not.
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...I think the focus on power management in the TG games also added to their "slow" feel. Killing a shielded fighter in those games was a case of gradually wearing it down. Whereas the impression I always got from the films was that a good rapid fire burst was enough to overload a fighter's shields and take them down. Having someone on your tail was dangerous, whether you had shields or not...
Did you get that impression from the movies? It always seemed to me that no matter what you're flying, you are one hit if you're a TIE, and two or three if you're flying something else, which doesn't make much of a difference because lasers in the movies are rapid-firing ones.
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Pretty much the only difference between X-Wing games and FreeSpace games energy management is that
1. In FreeSpace, energy doesn't drain away from shields and weapons, while in X-Wing games you need to keep the energy on maintenance level at least to just prevent that
2. There are more positions and thus more combinations for energy configurations in FreeSpace.
Otherwise, it's quite the same. Furthermore I don't think there's any reason to select the system that Totally Games chose; I don't think there are any canon mentions of shields and lasers draining if no energy is constantly fed into them. The FreeSpace system is more relaxed in that regard.
What comes to the Death Star trench run, I vaguely recall them directing all shield energy to forward shields (although any pilot worth their salt would have re-directed them to rear quadrant after the turbolaser anti-fighter fire ended and TIE's were spotted) but it might explain why the X-Wings were so vulnerable to the TIE's in A New Hope (or Darth Vader just had the skillz to shoot just the right spot... which is not completely unplausible either for obvious reasons).
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Did you get that impression from the movies? It always seemed to me that no matter what you're flying, you are one hit if you're a TIE, and two or three if you're flying something else, which doesn't make much of a difference because lasers in the movies are rapid-firing ones.
Indeed, in the movies shields seemed like something that helped you shrug off the odd stray hit. However, if you took several solid hits in succession then it was all over. Which is very different from how it was in the TG games.
Pretty much the only difference between X-Wing games and FreeSpace games energy management is that
Well both the X-Wing games and Freespace both have guns, shields and engine power systems. However, I always felt the shields and gun "buffers" in X-Wing were much larger but charged much slower. In the X-Wing games you could take a lot of fire while your shields were strong, but once they were down it took ages to recharge them. However in FreeSpace your shields were much weaker but charged quicker.
The result was that in X-Wing you really had to micromanage your power situation so that your shields and weapons buffers didn't get depleted. Whereas in Freespace you didn't have to think about it nearly as much.
Also in the X-Wing games dumping had a much larger effect. For example you could take a slow Y-Wing (80 MGLT) dump power to engines and suddenly it's as fast as an A-Wing (120 MGLT). Dumping generally had a much smaller effect in Freespace.
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Well, as far as I remember, the only engine effect in freespace would be to increase the afterburn recharge rate, not to boost the general speed values of your fighter. However, since the Xwing series do not come with the afterburn concept (save the SLAM in tie fighter) that's quite logical.
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Well, as far as I remember, the only engine effect in freespace would be to increase the afterburn recharge rate, not to boost the general speed values of your fighter.
no. play and observe again.
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I really liked the tactical management of energy in the FS series. I don't think it'd be too out of place in SW, albeit with much weaker shields. (or stronger weapons)
But I don't think I'd enjoy the way the X-wing series work.
I trust the team to make the most enjoyable SW sim ever. They're the kinda SW fans that won't get things wrong.
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Oh? did I miss something? :doubt:
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Engine energy level has direct effect on the maximum velocity on FS2. Although it is not as pronounced as in X-Wing series, and varies a lot more between different ships, and afterburner recharge rate tends to be the more deciding factor for maximum speeds at lower difficulties.
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Max OClk speed in the tables... if the max oclk speed is the same as max, then yeah, just a faster AB recharge. Oh, and I think that part of the reason fighters died so fast in the movies was that they didn't have time to equalize or change their shield coverage, that seemed to perhaps take time or something... whereas in the Millenium Falcon, they were large enough to take alot of hits. But you remember when they were running from the Star Destroyers, C3P0 saying "If we take on more hit in that 'area'"... So, maybe the lasers burn through the shields, but the shields absorb enough of the laser that it doesn't make a killing blow? So therefore why fighters go down quick is that they get shot in the same (critical) spot several times, taking damage each time because the shields don't stop the laser, they just absorb some of the punishment?
IDK, what do you guys think of all that?
EDIT: alot <---- Darn you, Goob. :lol:
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One thing I personally think would be cool other than having something besides fur balls for multi player (like the combat engagements from XVT), would be to have something like the challenges they use in Call of Duty for the different craft/missions in the game.
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One thing I personally think would be cool other than having something besides fur balls for multi player (like the combat engagements from XVT), would be to have something like the challenges they use in Call of Duty for the different craft/missions in the game.
Mmm, yes that would be a good idea.
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One thing I personally think would be cool other than having something besides fur balls for multi player (like the combat engagements from XVT), would be to have something like the challenges they use in Call of Duty for the different craft/missions in the game.
Bonuses might be able to work like that, they could be mission specific or even accomplishable throughout a campaign via campaign variable storage and the existing pilot file stats.
There will almost certainly be more than your basic furball for multi, but I fully expect the hardcore players to demand a basic 2v2 Furball for tournament style play just like XvT. Unless a new type of tournament mission arises.
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If you put achievements/challenges in that are specific to the "combat engagement" scenarios you would be more likely to get people to want to play them especially if you add things to unlock on any of the achievements. Such as a paint job, type of missile, type of ship. The achievements can be a combination of mission specific (furball and combat), and general such as kill X number of TIE/in with a Y-Wing.
The similar systems in the Call of Duty franchise and in World of Warcraft have people salivating just to get rack up getting them done for very little in game reward by comparison. Call of Duty would be a closer model to FotG though.
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If you set that up with the challenges you would already have a database for that type of tracking. It would not be a far stretch to move it another level and have something that does what www.battlestats.com does for tracking the Week of War and other such events internally with in the game. The hardest part would be having someone to set up the event start and end dates.
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What I want to see hmm.. That you really get the felling to fly a X wing or Tie fighter specially when you get hit, it is reasonable that the X wing sub system get repaired but not for fighters without r2 or r3 units and that the subs system at a critical point stop to function (is it possible?).
This would give it a realistic felling.
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How about team CAP? This might be comparable to Unreal Tournament's "survival mode" where the given team or teams have to survive for either a certain amount of time while fending off consistantly larger and more agressive opponets (such as TIE or Assault Gunboat squads) OR survive long enough to protect a certain asset while it is in transist (such as a cruiser or transport).
Placing an escort mission in an asteroid belt would be good fun as well. If the entry time for each enemy squad varies (so arrival cannot be predicted) while the players have the added challenge of protecting their ship from rocks and debris, the game would prove to be different every time, even when just facing off against the computer. Perhaps there is a hidden TIE hangar(s) in the field. The players (if they can find it) might destroy it, but then they run the risk of letting the ship become heavily damaged due to neglegence/enemy fighters.
Come to think of it, such a mission is very similar to single player missions found in X-wing and/or FreeSpace. I'd have good fun with that for sure...
-Thaeris
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Sounds a bit like the Terran/Vasudan/Shivan gauntlet missions of FS1 + FS2 (focusing on multi in FS2)
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Hi, I just found out about this project. I read the first few pages, and here are my thoughts:
While it's important not to get too locked into what the original X-Wing games brought us and not look to simply clone them. . . it's important to look at what they got right and wrong. This is all my opinion of course.
Right:
- The original X-Wing's cockpit. You get all your system read outs built in. The computer is low tech as well. To me this is one of the most important things to get right.
- In the original versions of the games, the Imuse system does the music wonderfully. It ramps up and down with action, and some of the music was completely original. They took this out in the windows 95 version, which isn't cool at all.
- in the original X-Wing- the responsive R2 unit
- in the original X-Wing, the squadron assignment screen where you could assign other created pilots to fly the mission with you. It wasn't perfectly implemented, but it was the closest you got to knowing the other pilots. In subsequent games, that relationship between pilots is lost. The caring over whether a pilot lives, dies, or is captured.
- the power management, targeting system, and speed system in the original X-Wing. Sure you want to make the speeds more true to canon, but the importance of speed and power management should still be there
- TIE Fighter- the sense of dialogue in mission briefings and debriefings. Getting to talk to different characters
Wrong:
- 2 fighters against a star destroyer? Two X-Wings could easily tackle a Star Destroyer in the game X-Wing. One X-Wing could easily take out the shield gens by himself. Now TIE Fighters may be a problem, but the other X-Wing could usually handle it. I think this was partially because of the AI. In the game if ordered to attack, the AI wouldn't know to dumb fire warheads or to target the shield gens first. Which then would often leave the player to do the dirty work of taking out the shields and have the rest of the squadron do most of the hull damage. Now I'm not saying it should be impossible for two X-Wings to take down an ISD, or even one. . . but it should be nearly impossible.
- anachronisms- your squadron should start out in a nebulon b frigate or a modified freighter, not immediately in the Independence, Defiance, Liberty, or Home One. Go through the Ackbar rescue and then later have the fleet built. To me the building of the fleet is what I really want to see in a space combat sim. I want to see it in its infancy all the way up to it actually becoming a force
- the HUD in X-Wing Alliance. What a mess. What's the point of a 3d cockpit if you've got all the stuff on an overlay?
- in X-Wing Alliance the two concurrent plotlines. It was a mess. Going back and forth between family and rebel alliance missions. Once I join the Rebel Alliance, screw Aeron, Emon, and Anton and their moneymaking schemes. I don't really care about them.
- X-Wing Alliance also stumbled in having Emkay be your personal robot friend. I want an astromech droid. I don't care if I can't understand him, give him subtitles or something. This also is blatantly missing when you're in an X-Wing or Y-Wing in the game. I want a little R2 freaking out when I get hit, trying to fix things and such.
- the whole concept of following a certain pilot's story. This is most evident in X-Wing Alliance, but in X-Wing, I'm not whoever I name myself. . . I'm Keyan Farlander. I don't like that. I'd really like to forge my own story. If I complete a bonus objective, I don't really care about points. I want to know it added a bit of difference. Linearity = not ideal.
- there's not much point in closing your S-Foils
- ignoring vectors at hyperspace points in XWA. In the original, you had to escape along a certain vector, which could be blocked by a capital ship. In XWA, vector was unimportant, and your nav computer never checks to prevent you from hitting an ISD on the way out.
- lack of a squadron identity. In one mission you're flying an A-Wing as Green 4 and in another you're Red 2 in X-Wing and in another Gold 3 in a Y-Wing.
- lack of further customization. All X-Wings have the same astromech droid, the same paint pattern, etc. I see in your models section that you had custom X-Wings, so :D
- death star missions- awful. Just leave them out, or have the pilot play a support role in them. They aren't as fun in execution as they look in the movie. And they often take far, far too long in the game that they're reduced to a boring tedium. Also, I'm not Luke Skywalker, Wedge Antilles, or Lando Calrissian.
- closing your S-Foils is meaningless
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:welcome:
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One thing I'd like to see compared to the TG games is much less emphasis on energy management. I've been playing XWA again recently and one of things I remembering is how much of your time in game is taken up with managing your power systems, it really detracts from the fun in my view. Also the number of occasions that you end up using ridiculous power tricks like doubling your speed by dumping to engines.
That's not to say I think power management should be removed entirely. For example, I think the way that energy management was handled in Freespace 2 was much better. It took more of a sideline role, you could use power to your advantage but also you could largely ignore it if you wanted.
I think the focus on power management in the TG games also added to their "slow" feel. Killing a shielded fighter in those games was a case of gradually wearing it down. Whereas the impression I always got from the films was that a good rapid fire burst was enough to overload a fighter's shields and take them down. Having someone on your tail was dangerous, whether you had shields or not.
I don't think power management slowed the game down so much as shields. I liked having to dump shields and lasers to go full speed on recon missions, when evading TIEs, etc. When you take that extra risk for that added speed / maneuverability, it makes you feel like an ace pilot.
I think a lot of the problems with the X-Wing games comes down to map design, and they never really really train you to fly risky. And they never put you in enough situations where that's a must.
I wouldn't do away with power management, but make the game be more speed oriented and less shield oriented.
As for the movies, I always assumed that they weren't at full shields. The battles they were in were so massive that they reached the point where speed is far more important than shields. If you sacrificed speed, you'd just get hit far too often and your shields would be useless. So it is more of a pre-battle thing. Plus very often I'd assume all power would go to the most vulnerable side, whether front or back deflector shields. They switch power to front deflector shields, but the TIE fighters get them from behind in.
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Hi badmotivator, I can address some of your suggestions here.
-Though cockpits are probably not going to be a part of the first release, they will eventually be included and will be based on what you see in the movies, though probably with some concessions made for the sake of gameplay.
-Although FSO's dynamic music system isn't as nuanced as I'd like it to be, it does provide for music that changes between combat and non-combat situations, as well as giving musical cues for ship arrivals and different mission outcomes. All of the music in FotG will be completely original in order to help us avoid getting shut down, though it borrows heavily in terms of style and instrumentation from the original trilogy soundtrack.
-Most of what you're talking about regarding squadron assignments can probably be achieved using FRED's advanced team loadout features and a thoughtfully laid out campaign.
-FSO already has a great power management system, which we are using, and it is customized on a ship-by-ship basis.
-While there's not really any framework I know of for something like talking to the Emperor's secret operative dude like in TIE fighter, debriefings (and the following briefings in the case of campaigns) can change based on your performance and be made to give you recommendations on how to improve on the things you did wrong.
-The cap ships will not be pushovers. If you take two fighters against a Star Destroyer, you will barely be able to scratch it, and it will most likely kill you at some point with a lucky turbolaser shot or two.
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I once remember you mentionned a super star destroyer named the allegiance class... I know nothing of it: could you describe? Is it still going to be present?
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The Allegiance is a type of Star Destroyer shown in Dark Empire, it's bigger than an Imperial Star Destroyer, but nothing close to the scale of the Executor (I don't remember off the top of my head, but I believe it's about 2-3km long)
Anyways, it's a good mid-step between the ISD and the Executor, and also a fairly close size match to Home One
Aha, here we go
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/dagger.html#allegiance
That article says it's 2.2km long, the wookie says either <3.2km or 3.8-5.2km, depending on the article -_-
Anyways, it's a long way away till we get it in, so it's entirely possible we could scrap it by that time, but I'd still like to see it make it in
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As I understand it, the next Star Destroyer planned is the vidicator/Interdictor class, then perhaps the victory, and then maybe less well known ones
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Well the allegiance is a good choice, and I would love to see it ingame...
However, you certainly have several ships falling in that category, such as giel's flagship, jerec's vengeance, or even the interdictor SD (not the interdictor cruiser, but the 2 bridge SD with gravity wells)...
actually, giel's ship and the vengeance would be closer to the "middle" of the scale between an ISD and an executor...
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Well the allegiance is a good choice, and I would love to see it ingame...
After I don't know how many years of development, I would be satisfied with seeing a working, textured and POFfed Imperial Star Destroyer in-game. :sigh:
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well there are still those uncompleted mod vids made by metal in which star destroyers look quite interesting me thinks... Not to mention the vengeance or the executor which were pure beauties...
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well there are still those uncompleted mod vids made by metal in which star destroyers look quite interesting me thinks... Not to mention the vengeance or the executor which were pure beauties...
O MY GOD its Jar Jar.
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Aside from a few specific campaigns I'm not sure we'll need anything bigger than an ISD any time soon.
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Exactly, this is all stuff for the far off future.
And I chose the Allegiance (or Imperial-class Super Star Destroyer, if you wanna go by the wookie, ugh...) because all the other mentioned SSDs are only seen as one of a kind, while the Allegiance is shown to be very, very mass produced
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Funny, that makes 3 imperial designs now... :lol:
aside from that, it's true that giel and vengeance are sort of one timer designs, yet I only recall the "allegiance" as being referred once in the dark empire series... at least that's all I know...
For all we know perhaps the vengeance was also popular... Canon is quite uncertain at that point!
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And then you could land mid mission for a quick swap! Done taking out the enemy fighters in your interceptor? Switch to bomber now to pulverize the capships! Or you could make some sort of crazy hybrid like every fanfic writer in history has made! Then when the enemy moncal cruiser or stolen SSD comes along, you can use your ring of power!
"Interceptor!"
"Fighter!"
"Bomber!"
"Avenger!"
"Defender!"
"Heart...?"
"GO EMPIRE!"
Captain Empire, He's not evil.
When he sees rebels he goes medieval.
He's our Fighters, bastardized
And he's fighting on the Empire's side!
I really, really want to see Captain Empire as FotG's Volition Bravos.
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The Enterprise would actually be a great candidate for a "Bravos" ship... After all, what do fanatical SW fans hate more than Star Trek? :P
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The Enterprise would actually be a great candidate for a "Bravos" ship... After all, what do fanatical SW fans hate more than Star Trek? :P
prequel trilogy?
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Hayden Christensen? Kevin J. Anderson? George Lucas for the last 30 years?
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lol Venator as a Bravos
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I actually quite like the Venator, it's one of the only prequel ships that actually fits somewhat. Minus the 400 fighter hangar bay and the beam cannon in the hangar that is.
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I wnat thsi project to be te next mult-milion dollar game hit seller. Lik Caommand and conqeur, only bigger.
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Couple problems with that:
1) We can't sell it, we don't have the rights
2) We have no budget
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The Enterprise would actually be a great candidate for a "Bravos" ship... After all, what do fanatical SW fans hate more than Star Trek? :P
That Star Wars fans are Star Trek haters is a misconception at best, and a narrow-minded generalization at worst.
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:wtf:
...Hence "fanatical."
No worries, though. :)
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The Enterprise would actually be a great candidate for a "Bravos" ship... After all, what do fanatical SW fans hate more than Star Trek? :P
That Star Wars fans are Star Trek haters is a misconception at best, and a narrow-minded generalization at worst.
I agree - I think it's much more accurate that the above referenced "Bad Star Wars" things such as the prequel and Kevin J Anderson are hated far worse by Star Wars fans than Star Trek is. Most of us, if anything, just ignore the Trekkies and hope they go away. Some of us are even trekkies ourselves.
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Why do Star Wars fans hate Kevin J Anderson? I read his stuff after the Timothy Zahn series I don't remember it being bad, in fact I remember going down to the local Chapters book store, meeting him and getting him to sign the books I had.
Clue me in?
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A Brief history of Kevin J Anderson's career with Star Wars:
1994: The Jedi Academy trilogy. Here we're introduced to a bunch of retarded or whiny new Jedi Knights, and the Sun Crusher, the completely invincible superweapon more powerful than the Death Star and the size of a fighter. Also includes Admiral Daala, who is so retardedly incompetent that it's amazing that she hasn't been written out of continuity entirely, luckily she dies at the end. Also Han Solo goes skiing and Kevin J Anderson steals one of Timothy Zahn's Characters (Mara Jade) and makes her retarded.
1994-1998: The Tales of the Jedi comic book series, where we're treated to a frantic attempt to make the backstory of the Jedi Academy trilogy make some sort of sense, which didn't work so well.
1995: Darksaber. Kevin J. Anderson makes a Death Star shaped like a lightsaber. We're introduced to Durga the Hutt, who would have been Jabba the Hutt except he was dead, so KJA just came up with another name on the fly and wrote Jabba in anyways. Also Daala is back, turns out she didn't die, she just jumped away at the last second. KJA steals another of Zahn's characters again, Pellaeon and makes him retarded (Are we seeing a pattern yet?). Luke falls in love with a Jedi who's trapped in a computer and Crix Madine (the Chuck Norris Guy from Return of the Jedi) is killed off, because KJA hates Chuck Norris.
1995-1998: The entirety of the Young Jedi Knights series. Nuff said.
1996: A Boy and his Monster. A short story about how the Rancor and Handler used to be best buddies and how when the Handler was out walking the Rancor they were attacked by sandpeople and the Rancor saved his little buddy.
1996: Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88. In this we find out that the entirety of the second Death Star was actually under the control of IG-88 the entire time, and that the empire really had no control over it at all. Yes, that's right, IG-88, a bounty hunter who had a brief cameo in ESB, actually WAS the second death star. In this story he plants a virus and plots a huge droid uprising and just as he's about to launch his dastardly plan into action, Billy Dee Williams blows everything up while screaming "Yee-Haw!"
2001: Bane of the Sith. Well, I'll just let the picture do the talking:
(http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/b/b0/Gamer-3-bane.jpg)
After he was pretty much forcibly removed from the Star Wars writers circle for trying to ruin the franchise, he decided to ruin Dune instead.
But mostly we hate him because if not for him we wouldn't have to put up with this guy:
(http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/b/b9/Kyps.jpg)
I'll close with some famous Kevin J. Anderson quotes:
I mean, I wasn't stupid. I knew we'd make money and sell a lot of Dune books.
I want to make it so that so many things happen... that you didn't expect would happen in this series, that you realize that you have to read every one of them.
The people who make policy decisions should damned well know what they are talking about before they make the decisions. There is nobody who is an expert on cloning who would be afraid after seeing Attack of the Clones.
We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet.
Because I've done these Dune books, and I'm a big outdoor hiker and mountain climber, I think that you can get along just fine with forests and things.
Each book will have a lot of cliffhangers, because I like that.
Star Wars has all the color, the humor, the action, the monsters and lots of aliens, so why not come up with an epic storyline that has all the politics, wheels within wheels stuff from Dune, but all the color and space battles and aliens from Star Wars, and just turn everything loose?
And my favourite:
I'm playing amateur psychologist here, but these are very diehard fans and I think there's a little bit of jealousy here. I think they wish they had gotten picked to write Star Wars books.
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Kevin J Anderson actually wrote the first Star Wars books I read. The Jedi Academy Trilogy was actually what got me started in the whole thing. And at the time (I was in middle school) I enjoyed them because I didn't know any better. Then I got to read some of Timothy Zahn and realized what "good" Star Wars fiction was like, came to realize what an utter crock of ridiculous nonsense the sun crusher was, etc.
I enjoyed many good Star Wars novels after that...what killed the genre for me was actually the X-Wing series. I haven't read any Star Wars since somewhere around book 3...
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Well I was too young to remember. Since the prequels I've pretty much written off any other Star Wars fiction other than the original trilogy and the Heir To The Empire trilogy.
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There is one awesome Old Republic book though. Its called Outbound Flight, and guess who wrote it, Timothy Zahn. It also contains Thrawn, which makes it even more awesome.
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1995: Darksaber. Kevin J. Anderson makes a Death Star shaped like a lightsaber. We're introduced to Durga the Hutt, who would have been Jabba the Hutt except he was dead, so KJA just came up with another name on the fly and wrote Jabba in anyways. Also Daala is back, turns out she didn't die, she just jumped away at the last second. KJA steals another of Zahn's characters again, Pellaeon and makes him retarded (Are we seeing a pattern yet?). Luke falls in love with a Jedi who's trapped in a computer and Crix Madine (the Chuck Norris Guy from Return of the Jedi) is killed off, because KJA hates Chuck Norris.
Well at least A.C. Crispin makes the Hutts and Durga of Besadii whole hell of a lot more interesting in the Han Solo Trilogy. Legitimate pan galactic organized Crime Lords rather then delusional Space Slugs building malfunctioning Death Star lasers with their legion of space ferrets.
Oh god the IG 88 story, "I think therefore I am"? oh god was that awful
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I found the guys who wrote Death Star and The Black Fleets Crisis series to be a lot worse than anything that Kevin J. Anderson wrote.
The worst was the Jedi Prince series. I knew those were bad when I was a kid! They're a good example of why it's necessary to pick and choose what will be put in this game.
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Forgive me, but it so happens I have a question regarding star wars canon (albeit a little technical):
the question revolves around the dreadnaught class (that ship which is mandalorian in design): if I recall well, XW vs TF as well as XWA picture them as we know them (the bulky design), yet the old tie-fighter game features a dreadnaught whic borrows much more from the corellian corvette in appearance (especially in the engine area)... are the 2 designs actually the same?
Also, the Xwing games do feature a few inconsistencies: for instance, the imobiliser cruiser (interdictor) features 2 engines in tie fighter, yet we see it with 3 of them in XWA...
Your imput, gentlemen?
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Couple problems with that:
1) We can't sell it, we don't have the rights
2) We have no budget
Nonsense! Be a man men. Do the right thing! Sell it and force LucasArts to bow before your superiority!
Seriously, though. It's pretty much shaping up to be an awesome mod already.
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A Brief history of Kevin J Anderson's career with Star Wars:
Thanks Brand, that was very thourough. I'd been wondering myself what you all had against him, and now we know. In my opinion though, Kyp wasn't all bad, especially when other authors got a shot at him.
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Other authors did try to redeem him a bit, but it depended on the author, some made him into an actually somewhat cool if bad-ass Jedi master, others kept KJA's desire to keep him as a whiny little brat, but oh well.
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1995-1998: The entirety of the Young Jedi Knights series. Nuff said.
...but I liked that series... :(
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starlord: the more recent source overrides the less recent one, if there's a contradiction unless explicitly specified otherwise (this refers to your Interdictor question).
I'm not sure about the Dreadnaught issue you have raised. It's been so long since I played with any X-wing game. There are two primary designs for the Dreadnaught-class heavy cruiser, however: the Rebel one (the one you're comparing to the Corellian corvette) and the Imperial one, which is the bulky one. Since I can't recall what the DREAD looked like precisely in TIE Fighter, I'm not sure it answered your question.
1995-1998: The entirety of the Young Jedi Knights series. Nuff said.
...but I liked that series... :(
All the more reason to stop arguing over tastes. Clearly some members think their idea of Star Wars canon is superior to anyone else's, and therefore should be considered as fact.
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starlord: the more recent source overrides the less recent one, if there's a contradiction unless explicitly specified otherwise (this refers to your Interdictor question).
I'm not sure about the Dreadnaught issue you have raised. It's been so long since I played with any X-wing game. There are two primary designs for the Dreadnaught-class heavy cruiser, however: the Rebel one (the one you're comparing to the Corellian corvette) and the Imperial one, which is the bulky one. Since I can't recall what the DREAD looked like precisely in TIE Fighter, I'm not sure it answered your question.
1995-1998: The entirety of the Young Jedi Knights series. Nuff said.
...but I liked that series... :(
All the more reason to stop arguing over tastes. Clearly some members think their idea of Star Wars canon is superior to anyone else's, and therefore should be considered as fact.
i remember the dreadnaught in XvT being kind of like the CC, just, like you said, bulkier.
actually, a lot like the lancer frigates in general ascetic.
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Dreadnaught is more of a class of ship than a specific model.
A dreadnaught (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Core_Galaxy_Systems_Dreadnaught)
A dreadnaught (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dreadnaught-class_heavy_cruiser)
A dreadnaught (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Invincible-class_Dreadnaught_Heavy_Cruiser)
A dreadnaught (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Kandosii-type_dreadnaught)
A dreadnaught (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Dreadnaught)
A dreadnaught (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dominator_%28Interdictor%29)
A dreadnaught (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Corellian_Dreadnaught)
A dreadnaught (http://media.photobucket.com/image/corellian%20dreadnaught/mjr6988/screen109-1.jpg)
A dreadnaught (http://media.photobucket.com/image/corellian%20dreadnaught/ob1dylan/YZ-775.jpg?o=1)
See all those types of dreadnaughts?
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We're talking about this:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dreadnaught-class_heavy_cruiser
You can compare the main picture with the one below the "Offensive and defensive systems" section. Those are the two looks of the Dreadnaught we're talking about. However, the Wookiee makes no mention of Alliance and Imperial variants.
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Well, I suppose the design has somewhat varied since tie fighter, so I guess it's the same and unique dreadnaught model...
you should no doubt play it again! :nod:
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Yeah there's that too. That particular Dreadnaught is only EU so it's been drawn quite a few different ways, and the games have been limited to how much detail they can bring in from the drawings too.
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All the more reason to stop arguing over tastes. Clearly some members think their idea of Star Wars canon is superior to anyone else's, and therefore should be considered as fact.
I don't see anyone arguing, nor do I see anyone talking about whether something is canon or not based on their opinion.
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Except most of the post here are about how much the Star Wars EU sucks and how much they shouldn't be part of Star Wars canon (See any post from Turambar) and how inaccurate some sources are because there are two-millimeter differences between two ship reference images. See the Nebulon B Frigate thread for a very clear and explicit indication of this.
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A bit more than two-millimeters:
(http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/8294/nebbcomparison.jpg)
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I wonder how many non-nitpicking modelers actually care about that. It's science fiction, not real history. Even in history a lot of sources contradict each other. You fail to acknowledge that those were humans that made these sources.
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I care about it. I'm a sculptor just finishing up my BFA, so these things are really apparent to me. Visually, the ships from the original trilogy were impressive. They had variety of form, unity, and contrast. The whole shebang. They looked good, and you could tell the people who designed those ships had talent. Many of the EU ships don't have that feeling of excellence. They're either rushed-looking or just plain unremarkable. Same problem with many of the prequel ships. It's like all the talent evaporated and Star Wars just became a money making machine. There are exceptions, of course, but the original ships were good.
The nitpicking about the form of the ships is the difference between making a visually-mediocre game and game that is visually excellent.
p.s. The differences between the two nebulaB versions is pretty huge.
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TopAce, that really is a significant difference. Fact is, the EGVV is off on pretty much ever model it depicts, by surprisingly high amounts in some cases. For instance , the section that was completely removed from the Corvette, behind the docking rings in front of the engines. The Nebulon is no better. It's basically as if they were drawn from memory. With the number of people we _still_ get saying that things are incorrectly proportioned, if we didn't have the proof to back it up that they are correct, we'd have quite a few upset fanbois running around.
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By which you presuppose that the EGVV was made for modelers.
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No, I'm just saying it's fairly useless for them, whereas you seem to be saying it should be fine.
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It's because your expectations are sky-high. I say it's fine because I cannot see why similarities that are minor to my eyes are huge discrepancies to you.
It's a kind of discussion that can be dragged on and on and on until the thread gets locked or the situation gets out of hand and someone gets banned.
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Good.
High expectations ideally result in high quality. From what I've seen to date, that's all I've seen. I'm very happy to wait for something that will play "how it should" and "look like it should." And that is what I expect from FotG. ;)
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I think the sheer amount of comments along the lines of "It's too short/fat/skinny/long" have shown that people actually do care about these things.
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While seeing renders. That's all you have then. If they're in game, it's got gameplay, a story, some interface, music, sounds, and lots of other things. You can't comment on anything else while seeing only renders. A game isn't only about graphics.
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Of course it isn't, but my contribution to the game is solely graphics, that's my department and that's what I do. Of course I'm going to push to create the best graphics I can because I trust the other people in the project to take care of the other things.
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It sounds like you think that this is somehow holding up our progress too, when I can assure you that's not the case. Currently Brand is our primary modeler, he's one guy doing this in his spare time. Most of the models we've received have at least required his attentions before being ready for conversion, so pretty much every POF we have has gone through him at some point. It has nothing to do with too much attention to detail. The hard drive crash didn't help either, but that again is unrelated to the amount of attention paid to detail. That was just unfortunate.
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It sounds like you think that this is somehow holding up our progress too...
I didn't want to imply that, but I still think the amount of time we spend analyzing itty-bitty details is an overkill.
I'll leave it as that.
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It is those "itty bitty details" that can make the simplest of things interlock correctly and give the gamer the more rich experience.
Good example: if you ever played Call of Duty: World at War, or either of the Modern Warfare. there is grim and blood on the hand holding your gun. You can read German propaganda posters in some boards. These and MANY more itty bitty details, make the game a rich environment that most games take for granted as far as stopping and looking. Then you look at games that but far less attention to detail and you get something that seems like Final Fantasy. The cinema scenes are great, but the actual game seems to have little detail in it.
In FotG, we are in space so there is little to reference to make it a higher caliber experience for the gamer to get involved. so nit picking on the ships is rather important. That is just from an artistic representation stand point. Forget the technical "making everything look right".
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You know, considering the length of the game, I though FFVII had pretty vivid worlds :)
And yeah, thanks for pointing out that fact. Hopefully our models will be of a detail such that we don't need separate ones just for cinematography purposes.
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Wolf: Comparing a commercial product to a community-developed mod is unfair and therefore unnecessary. Not only are there more developers during the development of a commercial game, they do that for a living (for good money), they are well-trained and experienced in their professions, there are more testers, they have real-life(!) references to work with, and one can continue this enumeration until infinity. FotG, on the other hand, is a community project that its developers do in their spare time, for free, there is no force holding them back from taking month-long pauses or quitting the team will not cause any financial problems. Hell, we aren't even talking about existent or once-existent things. Remember that there's an apparent conflict between the EGVV and ESB in relation to the Nebulon? That cannot happen in a World War II FPS, so even in this regard, the developers of CoD have an easier job.
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TopAce, I'm sorry but that's not really true. There are many mods and indie projects that have surpassed the bulk of commercial products in terms of content quality. We probably have just as good, if not better references than the TG developers had when they made X-wing and TIE Fighter. I bet they didn't even have access to the studio models themselves, not that they could have ever come close to that level of quality with the technology available at the time. And just because the X-wing/ISD/etc can't actually fly in space, doesn't mean there isn't a very real representation of it, that many fans are probably intimately familiar with. All it would take to make a good version of the EGVV is a decent analysis of the studio models. Someone even asked Brand for ortho renders of his models because he's been doing such a good job on the details, in a fairly short amount of time for most ships. If we had a converter with as much experience as him we'd probably have a full fleet by now, so our attention to detail isn't really what's holding us back. Even if he learned conversion himself it'd just slow down the modeling process and take away from the spurts he spends working on the ISD.
The EGVV authors probably didn't have access to studio models either, the book is somewhat old and the models were probably not on tour at the time. If they were, they were probably just looking to make a buck rather than generate a real technical document (on that note, I bet the Trekkies get a better representation from their Technical Manuals).
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If we had a converter with as much experience as [Brand]...
And here's where my argument against comparing a commercial product to FotG comes into play.
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But how? Your argument is about too much attention to detail, and I'm saying that's not even causing a problem right now. You're just saying we should stop doing something that no one else minds and is a non-issue anyway.
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I was refering to my particular argument against comparing us to a dedicated game developing company that I wrote in response to Wolf's comment about CoD.
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Nothing wrong with that. Just because it takes us longer doesn't mean we can't produce a similar level of quality. Several mods have already proven that to be the case, and in areas where we may have to cut corners, like voice acting, it's more understandable than in others like model quality.
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I'd like to comment on the VA of the TCs I've seen for FSO...
For the most part, they're surprisingly good. The VA staff really cares about what they're doing and makes their best effort to produce a good sound, despite the fact that they probably don't have access to studio-quality equipment.
And for what it's worth, the VA done for the BtRL demo was exceptional...
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I'm just saying that with all the time we have spent, I don't want VA to be the thing holding us up. Especially if we're just going for a multiplayer/tech demo release initially and not a campaign or something.
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(http://endhits.portlandmercury.com/images/blogimages/2009/08/25/1251225957-grand_moff_tarkin.jpg)
This bickering is pointless. Now, Brand-X will provide us with the appropriately proportioned models by the time this Total Conversion is operational. We will then crush the prequels with one swift stroke!
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At once, Sir!
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Nice Swash!
I agree with Chief. Just because they are not "a commercial company" does not mean they can not do commercial quality. BtRL was on of the better space flight sims I got to tink with. (I just wished it was finished instead of dropped). By comparison I can think of several examples of horrible games in the same category made by "real companies". Free Lancer was not exactly the greatest of games.
Chief, the team is doing an awesome job!
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Nice Swash!
I agree with Chief. Just because they are not "a commercial company" does not mean they can not do commercial quality. BtRL was on of the better space flight sims I got to tink with. (I just wished it was finished instead of dropped). By comparison I can think of several examples of horrible games in the same category made by "real companies". Free Lancer was not exactly the greatest of games.
Chief, the team is doing an awesome job!
Just off of the top of my head I can think of several mods that were better than many retail products:
Desert Combat
DLA (ended up getting hired by Bioware to make commercial products)
Day of Defeat (ended up getting purchased by Valve and remade into DoD:source)
There's no reason at all to have low expectations just because it's a mod. These guys have proven that they're able to put out amazing work - let's continue to support them to do so.
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Just off of the top of my head I can think of several mods that were better than many retail products:
Desert Combat
DLA (ended up getting hired by Bioware to make commercial products)
Day of Defeat (ended up getting purchased by Valve and remade into DoD:source)
There's no reason at all to have low expectations just because it's a mod. These guys have proven that they're able to put out amazing work - let's continue to support them to do so.
Must add Moviebattles 2 ... best SW FPS team oriented action in a vid (and multiplayer/network only)
Carry on!
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finished :P
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finished :P
I concur. I'm wondering if other stuff being worked on, or if everyone is waiting for the ship models to be done? Is there a storyline? Missions full of placeholder ships?
I feel like this project ought to me more of a race where everything crosses the finish line together, rather than a relay race.
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There are several storyline ideas. None were confirmed to be the "official" one.
And there are some missions with our current shipset.
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finished :P
Deja vu! I said that when this thread started!
:lol:
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There are several storyline ideas. None were confirmed to be the "official" one.
And there are some missions with our current shipset.
So there's no story and there's a couple of testing scenarios?
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There's more than a few testing scenarios at this point, but no story put to missions yet.
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There is a certain spiffy complete mini-campaign script just sitting around there, looking awesome, waiting to be produced...:nervous:
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Hmmm. I'm just trying to gauge the progress of this mod.
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Slow :P
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well, they say all good things come to those who wait...
mind you, it has been 6 years waiting for 'minerva: out of time' so...if not an outright lie, take it with a grain of salt.
patience may be a virtue, but impatience gets things done!
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Just REMAKE THE CLASSICS... all the missions, and use the same voice overs. It's already there for us to use!
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Um.. yea. Already been explained that FotG is not about just copying x-wing or tie fighter with nicer graphics. Nobody preventing you from doing your own mod that does exactly that, though..
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Just REMAKE THE CLASSICS... all the missions, and use the same voice overs. It's already there for us to use!
This will not be happening.
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Just REMAKE THE CLASSICS... all the missions, and use the same voice overs. It's already there for us to use!
If you would like to play remakes of X-Wing and TIE Fighter, then I recommend that you get TIE Fighter Total Conversion and X-Wing Conversion (both are Mods for XWA).
But I think we can still remake the missions from those games after FotG has been released.
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I'd like to see a list of anticipated milestones with some target dates assigned to the first few, not in the interested of stressing out anyone but to give the delopers some target dates to rally around.
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Setting release dates could be viable for one-man projects but only if you know you'll have plenty of free time to dedicate for your mod. Otherwise, for team projects, my two cents would be for forget about it.
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Thanks for your input TopAce. I understand that taking on a project of this scope that is dependant on the time, talent and generosity of people who come and go makes a target date near impossible. But I do think setting time goals for short term milestones would help build momentum for the mod to finish. Perhaps target date is too strong a term for what I propose, rather what are the short term goals for the mod team. I guess, for me ideally, if the mod team said something like "Our goal for the next six months is to finish modeling the following ships, then move on to conversion" then the community could help with that goal.
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That's a nice theory that doesn't work in practice. Too many things dependent on one another. A texturer waiting for the modeler to finish work. The converter waiting for both to sign off on uv's as final. Freders waiting for some feature to be implemented. All it takes is one person in the chain to get detained by real life and the whole short term goal or milestone ETA goes out the window.
In practice, almost every volunteer project like this is the same in this respect; it'll be done when it's done, no matter how you try to phrase it.
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It's right that those milestones are rarely met, however even with that expectation, it does sometimes help to have them.
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If you have intimate knowledge and insight into the staff, our current assets, and possibilities, then yes.
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All it takes is one person in the chain to get detained by real life and the whole short term goal or milestone ETA goes out the window.
In practice, almost every volunteer project like this is the same in this respect; it'll be done when it's done, no matter how you try to phrase it.
cheif summed up what I was trying to say in a sentence that I couldn't say in a paragraph. LOL Whether the mod meets it's milestone dates isn't really important, but rather that they exist to help bring focus to the project.
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My main problem is that many smaller projects have them and they are reduced to a mere formality when they are completely incapable of ever coming close to reaching a milestone. The X-Wrt project is one example. They had the same 'milestone' posted for ages. Even the SCP had a milestone thread that was long ago rendered mostly useless but never managed or updated. So if someone were to set milestones, they would have to stay on top of them and adjust them according to those issues that crop up.
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I see your point. :blah:
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Instead of a story you are forced to play, travelling around and taking quests would be nice. An open gameplay.
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Instead of a story you are forced to play, travelling around and taking quests would be nice. An open gameplay.
That's not likely to happen in FreeSpace Open. It can be kludged in, very clumsily, but it's not what the engine is built for.
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The FreeSpace engine wasn't designed for an RPG-like quest system.
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actually, shadowolf is working on something the likes of this in his mercenary campaign...
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freelancer is better for that stuff.
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actually, shadowolf is working on something the likes of this in his mercenary campaign...
Has it been revived? I'm pretty sure that's been dead for years.
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he said he never intended to leave it die, along with that sequel to machina terra: origins!
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To answer the question:
I want FotG to be a worthy X-Wing successor but I think it shouldn't be a direct clone of the X-Wing Series.
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I want FotG to be a worthy X-Wing successor but I think it shouldn't be a direct clone of the X-Wing Series.
:yes: :yes: :yes:
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Instead of a story you are forced to play, travelling around and taking quests would be nice. An open gameplay.
Nobody will prevent the fans from creating an RPG-like minicampaign once FotG is released. :)
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Yeah, this isn't really the engine for that kind of game though...in that respect, it's going to have to more closely resemble TIE Fighter and X-wing.
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I was wondering how you would go about choosing ships for multiplayer. It would be frustrating if everyone were to choose the best ship and leave the rest to rust in the docking bay lol.
It would be great if there was a ranking system in multiplayer that could determine what ships you were qualified to use. The more kills you get the more your rank goes up.
I understand if the engine restricts you of coding such things but I'm sorta a noob so idk lol. Good luck and I hope it's done soon.
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It's going to be more old school than that, whoever is in the game will either agree on ship restrictions, or the mission will set what is allowed. I foresee mission restriction taking a bigger part. There aren't necessarily a lot of fighters that will be out and out better than one another, many will just depend on the pilot's ability to utilize strengths, I hope.
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What about "D" variants for fighters? It's possible to do, and I'd like to see a Z-95 stand a chance against an X-wing on even grounds. If we "go old school," that could make a more maneuverable Z-95, a la the X-wing series. Of course the less agile and generally inferior Z-95 could remain for single player.
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Hi All, First post and really looking forward to finding way to help out. Here are a few features I'd love to see if I had a say.
- Free look around the cockpit: this was a feature from x-wing alliance I believe, but it was great to look around the cockpit in detail and is a prerequisite for the next feature.
- Target tracking: once a target is selected, the camera view will track it so you're always looking at it regardless if it is under the fighter and you can't see it through the cockpit. I found it a good way to track and orientate instead of mindless banking only to find out you were flying circles around it.
- Second display for instruments: the HUD carries plenty of information and most space sims ignore cockpit displays and put everything on the HUD. But if there were to be other information display, it'll be great to keep it on a separate monitor.
- After action reports: instead of recording the whole fight from the fighter perspective, some overview of the action could be interesting after a multiplayer session. Even just stats like distance traveled or time spent per target or maybe some metric show how often you get missile locked by someone else.
- Quick response to help: If your wingman calls for help, you can quickly switch target to whoever is chasing him. This is a feature in another game and I think it's a great way to help team mates out in a fight.
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- Free look around the cockpit: this was a feature from x-wing alliance I believe, but it was great to look around the cockpit in detail and is a prerequisite for the next feature.
This is possible with freetrack or trackIR. I don't mean to steal FOTG's thunder, but you might want to check Diaspora's trailers for an example of how it works.
- Target tracking: once a target is selected, the camera view will track it so you're always looking at it regardless if it is under the fighter and you can't see it through the cockpit. I found it a good way to track and orientate instead of mindless banking only to find out you were flying circles around it.
This option is called "Padlock view" and is already implemented. It was scripted by Swifty.
- Second display for instruments: the HUD carries plenty of information and most space sims ignore cockpit displays and put everything on the HUD. But if there were to be other information display, it'll be great to keep it on a separate monitor.
Again, don't mean to steal FOTG's thunder here but since they don't have cockpits yet, you can see how we implemented a radar (dradis) display in the cockpit in Diaspora. Again, those RTT features were done by Swifty, who has a tradition of coding awesome things.
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- Quick response to help: If your wingman calls for help, you can quickly switch target to whoever is chasing him. This is a feature in another game and I think it's a great way to help team mates out in a fight.
I'd like to second this, for this and FSO in general. (If it already exists, please forgive me; while not a noob, I'm still pretty dense.)
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I believe there is a target your target's target button, I'm not sure. But that would involve targeting your wingman then switching to his target which may or may not be his attacker. So if he was on a bombing run, no dice.
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I think generally the wingmen only call for help when they are at a certain hull % rather than when they're actually under attack. At least that's how it appears to me while playing, I haven't looked at the code itself. Generally it appears to be incredibly useless, as I will get the "help me" message only seconds before seeing the corresponding dot wink out on the HUD.
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I believe there is a target your target's target button, I'm not sure. But that would involve targeting your wingman then switching to his target which may or may not be his attacker. So if he was on a bombing run, no dice.
I'm pretty sure there's a straight target target's attacker button.
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G - Target my Target's Attacker
J - Target my Target's Target
???
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+1
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someone get that snail a rocketpack!
Or at least some popcorn...
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I have been a Star Wars fanatic since 1985 (2 years old)!!! When will the Star Wars conversion of FreeSpace 2 be available for downloading? ;)
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As with most projects around these parts, When It's Done (TM). :p
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Yep, that's the right answer.
Are there any plans to release materials (craft, test missions, etc) in the near future? << See how carefully I worded that :D
Also, one feature that would be great is the ability to warp in and out (say, with hyperbuoys, like in XWA). Is this possible/planned, or will it be 'fudged' with red-alert missions?
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Also, one feature that would be great is the ability to warp in and out (say, with hyperbuoys, like in XWA). Is this possible/planned, or will it be 'fudged' with red-alert missions?
A mid-mission hyperspace jump? Maybe, maybe not. The current hyperspace effects we have don't support that, but if at some point there's a pressing need for such a feature then sure, we might try it. However, I'd think that red-alert missions ought to be good enough considering that the first mission will end with you jumping into hyperspace and the second one will begin with you exiting hyperspace.
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Vasudan Imperium and Blue Planet: War in Heaven have a mid-mission hyperspace jump without red-alert.
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Subspace =/= hyperspace. The effects and implementation thereof are very different, the same method wont work for us.
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I'll say this much: I can't wait for this project to be released.
I'm still playing XWA :D
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As I understand it, you do not maneuver in hyperspace, at all. No combat there, either.
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Yeah, extended Star Wars canon makes ships in hyper untouchable.
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Not to mention hard to trace without putting a tracker beacon on them. You can get an exit vector, but they could drop out a few lightyears away, change course, and you'll never find them after.