Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Krelus on December 26, 2008, 10:56:43 pm

Title: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Krelus on December 26, 2008, 10:56:43 pm: I'm thinking about the "grand finale" of a campaign I'm planning, and I figured I should determine if my climactic final battle would be at all possible before getting too ahead of myself. It will involve a BOE-ish engagement inside a 30km-diameter power core (think the last battle in Freelancer), followed by a frantic "ZOMGWTF ITS ABOUT TO ASPLODE" escape scene through a series of corridors (think second-to-last level of Ace Combat 5). Very "Descent" inspired. I figure actually making the model itself won't be too hard even with my fairly limited modelling experience, since an interior would be much, much less complicated then an exterior and mostly comprised of simple geometric shapes. What I'm curious about is whether or not this will cause the FS2 engine to completely bork, and whether or not it'll cause the AI to go into cardiac arrest.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Stormkeeper on December 26, 2008, 11:10:29 pm: Is possible. Just model a massive ... model ... with all those openings and corridors. And it would be time for really fancy flying. The AI will go into cardiac arrest. Cardinal Spear has a similar scene when you :

Spoiler:
Have to destroy the Karnak in the last mission by destroying its internal reactor.
That was a pretty heart pounding scene for me.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Droid803 on December 26, 2008, 11:39:44 pm: If pull it off correctly, it would indeed be epic.
The game engine wouldn't crash, and if you keep the power core low-poly enough, it shouldn't tax resources too much.
The AI would work during the battle inside, but the AI will absolutely fail at trying to escape, unless you waypoint each and every single fighter or something like that.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Krelus on December 26, 2008, 11:54:56 pm: Quote from: Droid803 on December 26, 2008, 11:39:44 pm
If pull it off correctly, it would indeed be epic.
The game engine wouldn't crash, and if you keep the power core low-poly enough, it shouldn't tax resources too much.
The AI would work during the battle inside, but the AI will absolutely fail at trying to escape, unless you waypoint each and every single fighter or something like that.

Actually, the AI won't be trying to escape. Everyone will jump out, but your drive will jam and you have to leave the hard (fun) way. Cliche, yes, but too fun to resist.

Having a low-poly count is a win-win, then, because it A.) won't tax the system and B.) I'm not a terribly good modeller.

I was just wondering if this was at all feasible. I won't even start working on it for a while, since I just started work on mission number four out of what might very well wind up as a 25+ mission campaign.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: FUBAR-BDHR on December 27, 2008, 12:08:21 am: Vidmaster actually made an "indoor" dogfight for TBP so it is possible. Some issues in multi like respawning outside the object sometimes and passing through walls occasionally but single shouldn't have that issue.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Aardwolf on December 27, 2008, 12:35:46 am: Wasn't the final mission for the original Robotech mod fought inside some sort of boss enemy?
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: karajorma on December 27, 2008, 02:12:46 am: Quote from: FUBAR-BDHR on December 27, 2008, 12:08:21 am
Vidmaster actually made an "indoor" dogfight for TBP so it is possible. Some issues in multi like respawning outside the object sometimes and passing through walls occasionally but single shouldn't have that issue.

I have a fix for the former from Quiet. It will be added after the code freeze ends.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Getter Robo G on December 30, 2008, 11:00:02 am: WOW that's news to me! The original mod (you can still download from robotechlan.com I believe) only had 2-3 missions.

Perhaps you got confused by my old screenshot test of the SWA Death Star model I used to simulate the inside of SDF-1 for a city battle test.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Aardwolf on December 31, 2008, 01:41:12 am: Maybe I mixed it up with some other mod, I remember seeing something like that on youtube though.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Flaser on December 31, 2008, 09:21:58 pm: Actually the model won't have to be low-poly. It only has to use detail boxes. Shadows of Lyat will be the first MOD to heavily use it.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: esarai on December 31, 2008, 11:53:12 pm: what are detail boxes? are they LODs or something completely different?
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Droid803 on January 01, 2009, 12:57:08 am: Detail boxes are a subobject that will only be rendered if the player is a certain distance from it.
Well, that's how it works.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: LeGuille on January 01, 2009, 01:04:11 am: So, how do you make a detail box?
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Droid803 on January 01, 2009, 01:23:03 am: Its a subsystem, which you then define in PCS2 I think.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Krelus on January 01, 2009, 01:24:58 am: Hm. Another possible option, instead of making one huge honkin' corridor complex, would be to make many modular corridor segments and fit them together like K-Nex. Actually, that'd work better, since if for some reason I decide to retool the layout 3/4 through the process I won't have to redo any modelling.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: LeGuille on January 01, 2009, 01:35:30 am: Like making wall segments and piecing them together?
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Droid803 on January 01, 2009, 01:59:33 am: It'd take up more ship slots in the tables though.
If you aren't anywhere near running out, then its of no consequence, so ignore if that is the case.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: FUBAR-BDHR on January 01, 2009, 02:35:51 am: Well if your ran out of ship slots you could move corridors from one location to another depending on where the player ship is.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Grimper on January 01, 2009, 02:40:57 am: Its weird how there has never seen a serious attempt at this before...
I would have thought people would love having a Descent style mod, but maybe people just like playing Descent more.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Krelus on January 01, 2009, 03:09:31 pm: Quote from: Droid803 on January 01, 2009, 01:59:33 am
It'd take up more ship slots in the tables though.
If you aren't anywhere near running out, then its of no consequence, so ignore if that is the case.

Yeah, I've only added maybe 20 if that many ships to the table. What's the limit, anyhow?
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: FUBAR-BDHR on January 01, 2009, 08:00:19 pm: 130 regular 250 Inferno
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: LeGuille on January 02, 2009, 03:19:02 am: Well, not only that, but most walls are easily added, so really only need a few segment types, small, big, large, long, wide, tall, circular, box, etc.... for basic purposes, and the rest of the visual would be texture replacement.

This actually sounds really neat.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: FUBAR-BDHR on January 02, 2009, 06:29:00 pm: The idea about moving corridors I posted earlier would be to avoid the 400 ship limit and reduce the number of objects in the game at one time. You could literally make an endless maze with only a handful of objects in mission at any one time.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: BengalTiger on January 03, 2009, 07:35:35 am: And when the player gets to some door or airlock, an SEXP could red alert him/her/it/whatever to the next segment, something similar to what was done in Half Life 1.

Also- create special units that turn on a dime and fly slower than stock units, it'll help AI navigating through tight corners on their waypoint path.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Droid803 on January 03, 2009, 12:25:08 pm: Quote from: FUBAR-BDHR on January 02, 2009, 06:29:00 pm
The idea about moving corridors I posted earlier would be to avoid the 400 ship limit and reduce the number of objects in the game at one time. You could literally make an endless maze with only a handful of objects in mission at any one time.

You'd have to be quite creative with your SEXPs though. And it may be a bugger to bugfix.

Red-Alerting isn't the best plan, since more than one red-alert makes you incapable of going to the one before it to fix it up if you find you took too much damage in the first section to survive another.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: BengalTiger on January 03, 2009, 01:11:21 pm: Repair bay: A place where your HP increases when you get close enough.
Rearm bay: similar, but weapons reload.

I think it would be doable (at least the repair part), but then again I don't know too much about FRED...
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Droid803 on January 03, 2009, 01:15:17 pm: Well, you could do the repair bay quite simply in FRED with distance(-ship-subsystem) SEXP and repair hull/subsystems.
You could add it onto essentially any ship (like say an Orion's fighter bay - fly in, park and you get repaired)
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: FUBAR-BDHR on January 03, 2009, 02:29:32 pm: Quote from: Droid803 on January 03, 2009, 12:25:08 pm
Quote from: FUBAR-BDHR on January 02, 2009, 06:29:00 pm
The idea about moving corridors I posted earlier would be to avoid the 400 ship limit and reduce the number of objects in the game at one time. You could literally make an endless maze with only a handful of objects in mission at any one time.

You'd have to be quite creative with your SEXPs though. And it may be a bugger to bugfix.

Red-Alerting isn't the best plan, since more than one red-alert makes you incapable of going to the one before it to fix it up if you find you took too much damage in the first section to survive another.

Never said it would be easy just that it could be done.

If you designed the sections so that they all have exactly the same distance from center to each corner then placing them would be a lot easier since their centers would all be on a grid no matter which way you rotated them. You would only need a few sections. Straight, dead end, 90, T, 4-way, 5-way, and 6-way. Lay it out in cubes and have events triggered when you hit a certain area to move all the objects from one position to another. Another event reverses the process. You could lay each section out in FRED and save the type, coordinates, and facing needed for each block of objects for use in the events.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: Aardwolf on January 19, 2009, 02:36:49 pm: Apparently the mod I was thinking of was some Macross mod.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: BengalTiger on January 19, 2009, 06:49:39 pm: Quote from: FUBAR-BDHR on January 03, 2009, 02:29:32 pm
If you designed the sections so that they all have exactly the same distance from center to each corner then placing them would be a lot easier since their centers would all be on a grid no matter which way you rotated them. You would only need a few sections. Straight, dead end, 90, T, 4-way, 5-way, and 6-way. Lay it out in cubes and have events triggered when you hit a certain area to move all the objects from one position to another. Another event reverses the process. You could lay each section out in FRED and save the type, coordinates, and facing needed for each block of objects for use in the events.

Reminds me of this cube...

Now we'll need to figure out how to make different booby traps in those segments (a variable giving the segment a number, with the same segment being able to have different numbers, and an event linked to this number?), and we can make a cool horror.
Title: Re: Feasibility Question: Interior Battle
Post by: FUBAR-BDHR on January 20, 2009, 12:17:31 am: Random-multiple of at the start to place the pre-determined hazards and another random event to set the position of the cubes