Hard Light Productions Forums
Community Projects => The FreeSpace Campaign Restoration Project => Topic started by: starlord on May 09, 2009, 04:50:28 pm
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Hello to all, :)
I've recently observed the work of the FSCRP and I must say that it's addition to the various FS project has been more than a success: Allowing old campaigns to be preserved appear to be extremely appreciated by the fans.
As such, I wonder if the functionnalities of the FSCRP might also be extended to the babylon project (as it's the only TC I know of for which older campaigns were made. A very select few of which today (like tales of janus) are incompatible with the recent builds).
Of course, this remains nothing more than a question, and I hope that no harm will be made from asking, but since aside from the tales of janus, no campaigns need restoring, I thought it might be interesting to consider...
What are your points on this?
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There is never any harm in asking. :)
I suppose that it is mostly a question of interest. I have seen the Babylon 5 TV show maybe two or three times and no more. Thus I haven't really thought about it. I do believe that there is some controversy around updating TBC at present for some other reasons.
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Yeah, the idea of graphical updates to TBP caused a huge stir in the community, which resulted in the project leader alienating the rest of the team, who thought that supporting a mod for graphical updates, like FS2's mediavps, was a good idea. The project leader didn't, and wound up angering the admins, his team, and the devoted fans.
He's made maybe two posts since, and that was a while ago. Actually retooling the campaigns would probably be a bad idea with TBP. The fact is, we could start what happened in, like, February all over again. Don't get me wrong; it's a good idea, but TBP isn't ready for it. Besides, TBP isn't THAT old.
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Actually, far from creating a graphic update for janus, the goal would rather be for it to run under recent builds of TPB. It would be a shame to lose that campaign (especially since it's one of the only one covering the earth minbari war)... ;)
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So basically, what we would need would be a volunteer fredder to redesign the missions (since miburo is here, he might provide insight).
Although, I suppose that should you encounter said fredder, you will first plan on finishing the promising titan rebellion...
However, should someone feel fit for the job, miburo might be interested...
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This may seem a little strange by why oh why wasnt this in the TBP forum , and why oh why dont you have a look in the TBP forum.....
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,62508.0.html
this was first posted 2 weeks before the first post in this forum......
and
So basically, what we would need would be a volunteer fredder to redesign the missions (since miburo is here, he might provide insight).
Although, I suppose that should you encounter said fredder, you will first plan on finishing the promising titan rebellion...
However, should someone feel fit for the job, miburo might be interested...
is already working on it and has asked for volunteers to help
most of what happened earlier in the year has calmed down now and some advancements have happened , namely Zathras (thanks to fubar) so please if you have questions and suggestions for TBP post them in that forum and they can be answered by the ppl who are involved in that project .....
please can this be moved to TBP forum
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Dude, look at the first post. He's talking about extending the FSCRP into TBP as WELL as FS.
Please, READ what the original post says before you ask someone to move this, kthxbai.
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ok , maybe i missed that a little but at the same time no one steered him towards tbp to have a look at a process that had already started ,
but i agree with my initial misreading i will remove my request for it to be moved
but still think that part of the first reply could have been "have you asked TBP if it has any plans"
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Hello to all, :)
I've recently observed the work of the FSCRP and I must say that it's addition to the various FS project has been more than a success: Allowing old campaigns to be preserved appear to be extremely appreciated by the fans.
As such, I wonder if the functionnalities of the FSCRP might also be extended to the babylon project (as it's the only TC I know of for which older campaigns were made. A very select few of which today (like tales of janus) are incompatible with the recent builds).
Of course, this remains nothing more than a question, and I hope that no harm will be made from asking, but since aside from the tales of janus, no campaigns need restoring, I thought it might be interesting to consider...
What are your points on this?
just try this , go to link in my first post , redownload the janus vp and follow the instructions, it is no not perfect but playable ..... good luck
andi
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updated here
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,62508.40.html
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I won't start another topic cos that'd be pointless. This is another Simple Question:
Are you guys here is FSCRP going to upgrade the retail campaign? I mean only correcting some errors (like hauler 1 and 2 that'd fetch cargo from colossus/ changing Regulas to Regulus (IIRC that's still there), and others I forgot about?
I hope you won't flame me
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We will probably not do anything with the retail campaign. Changes to that are usually made by the media VP upgrades. There are a lot of problems with upgrading the retail campaign that we would not want to venture into. Other than upgrading the graphics no one has done much of anything with the retail campaigns of either FS1 or FS2.
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We will probably not do anything with the retail campaign. Changes to that are usually made by the media VP upgrades. There are a lot of problems with upgrading the retail campaign that we would not want to venture into. Other than upgrading the graphics no one has done much of anything with the retail campaigns of either FS1 or FS2.
That's kinda... weird. I don't mean some uber changes just the bugfixes and this crappy haulers xD
OK, ok I think that you probably know better, you've been here for far longer than I dudes.
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We only deal with user made campaigns. The original campaigns of the game have been left alone. FSPort did Silent threat reborn but they pretty much created a new campaign. Working on the original campaigns would be like trying to repaint the Mona Lisa. Even if you could do a better job you'd probably be publicly executed. It's really a firestorm we prefer to avoid.
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We only deal with user made campaigns. The original campaigns of the game have been left alone. FSPort did Silent threat reborn but they pretty much created a new campaign. Working on the original campaigns would be like trying to repaint the Mona Lisa. Even if you could do a better job you'd probably be publicly executed. It's really a firestorm we prefer to avoid.
That's a likely outcome. Just recall the death of the Colossus thread a few months ago. I imagine some go-getter would want to recreate or tweak the mission to make it like "[V] would have done if they had time or so my retrospective telepathy tells me".
You can imagine what side of the fence I would be on.
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To be fair, that particular mission has FRED events/waypoints that flat-out aren't even being used due to that seemingly last-second Colossus disabling (not to mention the glitch with the beam-free events on the cruisers), which results in the in-mission dialogue not even matching the situation as it's presented. That's just about the sole case where I'd be firmly in favor of tweaking the mission, since we have a fairly clear picture of what it was "supposed" to be and could make it that way without affecting the underlying purpose of the mission.
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What about remaking the retail campaign(s) without even pretending to be compatible? In other words, a whole new campaign with the same story and missions as retail, but sort of in a "reboot" style... kind of in the vein of High Noon 2.0 and similar projects.
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What about remaking the retail campaign(s) without even pretending to be compatible? In other words, a whole new campaign with the same story and missions as retail, but sort of in a "reboot" style... kind of in the vein of High Noon 2.0 and similar projects.
Have at it if you want, but that is way beyond the scope of the FSCRP. Look how long it took the FreeSpace conversion group to do Silent threat Reborn. We (FSCRP) don't have the resources to do something of that scale.
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Alos, don't forget for what FSCRP stands for.
It's a FreeSpace Campaign Restoration Project, the only case in which they would get interested in something like ST:R would be when it will be outdated and needed to be restored. :)
You will need to start your own project (FS2 Reborn for example) and find a team for it.
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To be fair, that particular mission has FRED events/waypoints that flat-out aren't even being used due to that seemingly last-second Colossus disabling (not to mention the glitch with the beam-free events on the cruisers), which results in the in-mission dialogue not even matching the situation as it's presented. That's just about the sole case where I'd be firmly in favor of tweaking the mission, since we have a fairly clear picture of what it was "supposed" to be and could make it that way without affecting the underlying purpose of the mission.
See that's exactly the thing I'm talking about. Some people think the mission should be tweak. Others, like myself, don't. My sentiment is that regardless of what the mission was going to be, the end product is what is in the campaign. If someone shoots a movie and in editing they cut out a bunch of scenes, should someone unrelated to the original production and revisiting that movie re-introduce those scenes into the final cut???
More than that, their very presence suggests that they were meant to be not used. See if there were no waypoints, a person could argue "well they didn't have time to set that up and test it, so I should add them in". But instead people are saying "well there are waypoints so they obviously had the time to do the mission that way, but they chose not to, but I believe that if they had the time they would've used those waypoints even though that makes no sense at all". It's like the Sathanas. Some of the missions call it the Apocalypse or Armageddon. Think it's Apocalypse. So should we re-name it the Apocalypse because they were thinking about it but then changed their minds?
But anyway.
A thought just struck me. Remember the Yamato? Imperial Japanese Battleship? I blieve original plan for its final hours was to scuttle it in shallow waters and use it as basically an unsinkable island of firepower (but then the americans bombed it to the bottom of the sea enroute). What if it was similar with the Colossus. What if they thought, let's just park it there, and smash anything that comes our way. The captain seemed pretty intent to draw them there until it's done.
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I understand your comparison to adding cut scenes to an already-completed movie, but at the risk of derailing this thread further, I feel like there's still a fundamental difference here. It's my opinion, though maybe not anyone else's, that Their Finest Hour as it stands contains severe inconsistencies that are mechanical more than anything else. The Wiki walkthrough page (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Their_Finest_Hour) does a good job of outlining them. Most notably, you have Command ordering the Colossus to avoid destruction and jump out, and the Colossus's commander nobly refusing to abandon its post, which is all well and good...except for the fact that the Colossus's engines are randomly disabled, which makes both Command and the ship's comm officer look like flaming idiots. Said disabling isn't referenced in any of the briefing or in-mission dialog, either. And then there the other friendly capital ships in the mission, whose sole purpose is to enforce the Capella blockade...except they don't use their main beams once, completely ignoring the fact that Shivan cruisers and corvettes are flying right past them into Epsilon Pegasi. From an in-mission viewpoint, nothing that goes on during it makes one iota of sense.
Out-of-universe, though, you can see exactly what was going on under the hood. The Colossus has the infamous waypoint path defined in the mission file that's never used due to its disabling. I've heard karajorma and a few other FREDders state their belief that :v: wanted the Colossus to pull off some fancy maneuvers, but because they couldn't get it to move just right to be in the right position to meet its demise (if you do enable the Colossus's images, I think it winds up not getting offed by the Sathanas), they were forced to disable it. The whole thing smacks of running up against a deadline and employing a crude, stopgap solution, as game developers so often have to do. As for the friendly capital ships not using their beams, that seems more like a flat-out error than anything else. There is a beam-free-all event for them, but it's timed literally a second or two before they jump in. There's no in-mission reason for them to be disarmed, and I can't see why :v: would bother putting capital ships in a mission as part of a blockade yet not letting them actually fight. The simplest explanation is that someone just got the timing wrong.
Look, I'm not advocating going through the entire campaign with a fine-toothed comb and tweaking the hell out of every single mission with the end purpose of putting some sort of "enhanced" version in the MediaVPs, because I don't think anyone wants that. But in this one extremely limited case, with this one mission, I'd not only be fine with such an endeavor, I'd want it. Based on the dialog we hear, both in-mission and during the briefing/debriefing, the mission as it stands doesn't make sense, but that can be changed very easily using what :v: has already given us. Fix the beam-free-all event, so that the blockading ships are actually blockading. If the Colossus's current unused waypoints are unusable, create a new path that does let it take out the Ravana and get destroyed by the Sathanas, but either way, get it moving. Make the mission match the spirit of the dialog, because you can do so without changing anything significant about its progression and outcome. I believe the FSU team has already made tiny tweaks to a few missions, things like correcting briefing icons that show the wrong type of ship; in my mind, this is just one and the same.
(And just to comment on something mostly unrelated to all that, while the Sathanas may still use earlier names in certain mission file events, there's never a point in-game where any dialog refers to it as anything other than its final name.)
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Doesn't the Colossus have some wierd centre of gravity which makes it turns look stupid? Maybe that's why the waypoints weren't used. I think in most of the missions it takes part in it just flies in a straight line or moves not at all.
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It did turn somewhat in High Noon, which is where I think everyone first noticed the "baseball bat" effect. I'd imagine there has to be some way to tweak the ship positions in Their Finest Hour to try to minimize the amount it has to turn.