Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The FRED Workshop => Topic started by: ShadowGorrath on August 22, 2008, 10:04:25 am

Title: Background battle
Post by: ShadowGorrath on August 22, 2008, 10:04:25 am
Any help on how to do that? I want to have random explosions appear in the background/far away, and to have them be looped: to appear quickly, and then appear after some time again and again.
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: NGTM-1R on August 22, 2008, 11:04:06 am
It might be simpler/better to have actual ships out there, y'know. If they're reasonably far out it won't matter so much.

(I recall a shipyard attack I set up once that had your combat, one around the main station 7km out, and another battle at a destroyer and docking ring 15km out...)
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: TrashMan on August 22, 2008, 11:21:38 am
You have that special-explosions SEXP..

Make a few of them, each on a different coordiante and have them repeat many times with a reasonable interval.


You can also use a animated background...or simplified far-away battle models (simple texture, low-poly with only beam turrets)
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: FUBAR-BDHR on August 22, 2008, 01:44:14 pm
I thought about doing this before.  Was thinking of making a simple mission of the actual BOE battle in the distance then taking a screenshot and converting it to a background object itself.  Add just a few ships way off in the distance for live fire effects along with special explosions at random coordinates in that area of space. 
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: Vidmaster on August 22, 2008, 01:53:56 pm
You have that special-explosions SEXP..
Make a few of them, each on a different coordiante and have them repeat many times with a reasonable interval.

I use this in FH 2261 along with ships that move and shoot all over the place (took some time to script), used set-speed-events to improve their moving speeds. And occasionally, a ship blows up BUT only if the player can see it (using the training sexps).
What makes this mission so much overkill is that there is not only the massive background battle but a massive actual battle too, with capships everywhere. A pity that 3.6.9 doesn't support many ships.
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: Snail on August 23, 2008, 10:31:54 am
FS2 can support one ****load of ships if your computer can handle it, actually.
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: Vidmaster on August 23, 2008, 12:42:23 pm
not this ****load, believe me. Have you seen the B5 episode "into the fire"  ;7 ?
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: NGTM-1R on August 23, 2008, 02:33:35 pm
's only a trio of Omegas and fighter screens...of course, I forget what the fighter complement of an Omega is, 24 or 36...
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: eliex on August 23, 2008, 09:50:08 pm
Computer system report: CRASH
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: Vidmaster on August 24, 2008, 03:10:07 am
's only a trio of Omegas and fighter screens...of course, I forget what the fighter complement of an Omega is, 24 or 36...

no, into the fire has the army of light, the Vorlon Fleet, the Shadow Fleet, both planet killers and the first ones facing off against each other  :lol: :lol: :lol:   Wrong episode dude.
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: NGTM-1R on August 24, 2008, 01:33:53 pm
's only a trio of Omegas and fighter screens...of course, I forget what the fighter complement of an Omega is, 24 or 36...

no, into the fire has the army of light, the Vorlon Fleet, the Shadow Fleet, both planet killers and the first ones facing off against each other  :lol: :lol: :lol:   Wrong episode dude.

This is what happens when you don't have the room on your HD for all of it. :P

Besides, I assumed you had more sanity than to attempt that.
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: Al Tarket on August 24, 2008, 03:05:12 pm
the fred ship count is the limit, i actually did a boe mission before however even as i hit the limit with at least 40 cap ships and many many fighters, it did many weird errors i removed one ship and it was all fine.
(i have found the inspiration i need for the 3rd mission in my b5 demo campaign).

i dont see much point in a background battle, unless its a feel of being in a big fight against your enemy.

besides this "into the fire" mission, the shadow fleet in the b5 mod doesn't have that cloud with the superstructure inside more or less rendering this mission fiction and not canon, so pretty much irrelevant imo.
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: Vidmaster on August 25, 2008, 07:08:24 am
you'll be surprised  :)    I thought my previous works had convinced people that I am able to do some pretty innoative stuff sometimes...
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: Androgeos Exeunt on August 30, 2008, 04:18:15 am
I made an unfinished mission last time in fred2, and because there were so many ships in it, I crashed the whole program whenever I tried to add a large ship in. :wtf:

Is the ship limit in fred2_open still the same as fred2?
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: FUBAR-BDHR on August 30, 2008, 11:27:40 am
Depends on what build you are using.  Recent 3.6.10 builds support more ships. 
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: blackhole on August 30, 2008, 12:59:26 pm
It really wouldn't be hard to just request a larger ship limit. If the FRED2_open programmers were so inclined, they could make it an unsigned longlong max, which would let you support up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (18 quintillion).

Not that any computer system in the foreseeable future could handle that :p
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: karajorma on August 30, 2008, 02:55:41 pm
Parse_Objects is already dynamic so you can have as many of them as you like in a mission. The problem is that Ships[] isn't. And if you fancy editing all 300+ references to MAX_SHIPS, be my guest. :p


Then again, you only said it wasn't hard to request a higher ships limit. Which is true. Similarly it's not hard for the SCP to insult who ever asks and say no. :p
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: Androgeos Exeunt on August 30, 2008, 11:13:34 pm
Depends on what build you are using.  Recent 3.6.10 builds support more ships. 

Drat. I'm still using fred2_open 3.6.9. :lol:
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: Snail on September 01, 2008, 03:25:35 pm
fred2_open 3.6.10 doesn't work for me. At all.
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: blackhole on September 01, 2008, 03:40:22 pm
Parse_Objects is already dynamic so you can have as many of them as you like in a mission. The problem is that Ships[] isn't. And if you fancy editing all 300+ references to MAX_SHIPS, be my guest. :p

There's 177, actually. :D
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: blackhole on September 01, 2008, 06:38:56 pm
So I went and made Ships a vector object, and while I could get most things working, changing Ships into a vector<ship> seems to have broken all the lists, as they are now seemingly unable to find the end. I found one workaround by using list.next->prev, but that only works some of the time, so I have no idea whats going on now.

Either way, its the lists thing thats the hard part about making it dynamic, not the MAX_SHIPS, which were taken care of with a couple of find/replaces.
Title: Re: Background battle
Post by: Excalibur on September 02, 2008, 10:13:40 pm
I know my computer and 3.6.9 can handle 100+ Erynies and 20 Fenris' + 1 Hatchepsut. And 40+ Drones.
And I only have a 1.5GHz CPU, with some old graphics card. (Even if half the SCP features are turned off...)