Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The FRED Workshop => Topic started by: ne0natas on November 06, 2010, 02:58:04 pm
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I want to download a great mod... what should I start with? :confused:
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Second Great War Part II (http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.206).
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[shameless ad]Blue Planet.[/shameless ad] :)
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Please don't post the same question in multiple boards, it'll only become a mess.
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Please don't post the same question in multiple boards, it'll only become a mess.
You'll notice that he didn't. I moved it.
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There's many people and hence many opinions of what "the best mod" is, and they're all equally valid. But some of the ones that pop up frequently are the FreeSpace Port (if you consider it a mod), Silent Threat: Reborn, Derelict, Vassago's Dirge, Transcend, and Blue Planet (2 parts) - ordered more or less chronologically.
And, of course, there's the Second Great War Part 2, a must play indeed.
EDIT: *confused by board mixup*
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Do not play Second Great War Part 2, it's terrible and useful only to laugh at how bad it is. People suggest it as a joke.
I suggest starting out with Silent Threat Reborn and Blue Planet, both of which are voice acted and consistently picked as some of the best campaigns ever. There are many other excellent picks after that.
Honestly? Just run the FreeSpace Open Installer (up top) and it'll give you a good selection.
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I'm using FSOpen right now... but it seems there are additional mods for that as well... I'm a bit confused. Can I only use those mods or can I use any mod with fsopen?
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I'm using FSOpen right now... but it seems there are additional mods for that as well... I'm a bit confused. Can I only use those mods or can I use any mod with fsopen?
FSO is the updated game engine upon which all modern mods are run
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You can use any mod with FSOpen. FSOpen is the game engine. Mods run on it.
To pick a mod, open up the launcher and select it in the mod tab. For example, 'blueplanet' is the first Blue Planet chapter. 'fsport_str' is Silent Threat Reborn.
Make sure you've got a 3.6.12 Inferno Release build selected in the launcher's top line, next to 'Browse...'
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gotcha. :P
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Do not play Second Great War Part 2, it's terrible and useful only to laugh at how bad it is. People suggest it as a joke.
[even more shameless ad]I have made an LP of it here (http://www.youtube.com/user/PlayDaMan#grid/user/78E67F2C8E149EE6)[/even more shameless ad]
Ontopic, I'd suggest Shrouding the Light. :) It is a really good campaign, not necessarily one of those that people suggest immediately when they are asked, but it really deserves a playthrough.
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Second Great War Part II (http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.206).
Seconded.
Don't listen to the haters.
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Blue Planet.
Second Great War Part II was enjoyable, both for the laughing and the killing tons of stuff. (But scanning. :ick: ) Don't start with it though. Do play it before releasing a mod, lest you discover that your mod idea was SGWP2. :P
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You know, if we had a rating bar on the wiki (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=72371.0), we'd be able to answer this question definitively...
Just sayin... :p
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Blue Planet
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You know, if we had a rating bar on the wiki (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=72371.0), we'd be able to answer this question definitively...
Just sayin... :p
No.
In fact this thread is a great example of why it wouldn't work.
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What is the greatest mod?
A matter of taste!
Though the ones already mentioned are among the most liked around here.
Wings of Dawn is also great.
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Taste is the key word here.
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Blue Planet tastes good. :yes:
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Depends. :p I'm not a big fan of talking characters and character-driven situations (with all their implications... I prefer to do things the :v: way). I appreciate all the great effort devoted to create BP, but that saga does not match my style. That's why I like variety and would love to see completely new stuff, like Wings of Dawn. :)
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...but Wings of Dawn is an even greater departure from :v:...
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It's something original. I like the concept behind its creation and the fact that it's a solo man work. :)
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You know, if we had a rating bar on the wiki (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=72371.0), we'd be able to answer this question definitively...
Just sayin... :p
No.
In fact this thread is a great example of why it wouldn't work.
I respectfully disagree. In fact, this thread is a great example of why such a feature would be useful.
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It's something original. I like the concept behind its creation and the fact that it's a solo man work. :)
So was BP! And Wings of Dawn has talking characters who drive the plot, just like BP! And now Wings of Dawn has grown into a team effort, just like BP!
This thread is going stupid places. Let's not do this.
You know, if we had a rating bar on the wiki (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=72371.0), we'd be able to answer this question definitively...
Just sayin... :p
No.
In fact this thread is a great example of why it wouldn't work.
I respectfully disagree. In fact, this thread is a great example of why such a feature would be useful.
You've already got a zillion votes for BP, butthurt over people who would downvote BP because it's 'not their style', and squabbling over whether Second Great War Part II should or shouldn't be recommended.
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I respectfully disagree. In fact, this thread is a great example of why such a feature would be useful.
But you'd still have all those issues related to tastes.
What about introducing a rating bar focusing on exclusive content (such as new ships, effects, etc.) and gameplay (absence of bugs)?
So was BP! And Wings of Dawn has talking characters who drive the plot, just like BP! And now Wings of Dawn has grown into a team effort, just like BP!
This thread is going stupid places. Let's not do this.
But BP takes place in the FS2 Universe. That prevented its character-driven nature from matching my personal tastes.
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It takes place in the BP universe. It is its own story.
What about introducing a rating bar focusing on exclusive content (such as new ships, effects, etc.) and gameplay (absence of bugs)?
This is what I'd support. A rating bar for individual assets. (Not exclusive content, that's bull****.) But ratings on a model page, that's a good idea.
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You've already got a zillion votes for BP, butthurt over people who would downvote BP because it's 'not their style', and squabbling over whether Second Great War Part II should or shouldn't be recommended.
If BP has a zillion votes, it'd get upvoted on the wiki. If it got downvoted, I like to think that our community is mature enough that people would recognize it as an excellent campaign, and knock a few points off for being out of their personal style. So maybe it'd get 90% instead of 95%. For that matter, downvoting something because it's not in your preferred style is perfectly legitimate, IMO. It's a personal rating.
"I personally enjoyed this campaign this much, My vote is of equal value to the dozen others who voted for it. They all enjoyed it that much. The average is the consensus of the community." If you accept that peoples motivations are all equally relevamt (and you should) then what, exactly, is wrong with that?
And as for 2GWP2, if you go and look at its wiki page, you'll see a clear description of what it is in the comments section, so even if by some confluence of people who think it's funny to vote it at 100%, people would know what they were getting into before they downloaded it.
And look at the rest of the thread - people throwing out the names of campaigns they have enjoyed. A rating system would be exactly the same, except quantified, and easy to access via the campaign list on the wiki.
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What about introducing a rating bar focusing on exclusive content (such as new ships, effects, etc.) and gameplay (absence of bugs)?
The script doesn't work that way I'm afraid. You get one rating bar per page. A bar for mods (i.e. new ships) is almost certainly going to be going ahead, but at the moment a bar for campaigns is what's contentious.
[EDIT]Apologies for the double post, thread is moving too quickly.
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It would add the objective, indisputable element of an aggregate score. Getting a high score would become an objective: witness IRL game studios that use Metacritic scores as targets. Projects would be incentivized to boost this score with advertising, personal favors, withholding assets and help, and undercutting competitors.
Any ranking is by nature zero-sum. Moving any given campaign up a notch requires taking another down a notch. This is not a zero-sum community; we are all in this together. We don't need a ranking system that splits people.
If you want to have general tiers - 'high quality', 'mid quality', 'low quality', and vote campaigns into that, fine. But nothing more discrete.
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Uhm, I'm a bit skeptic on the way campaigns should be rated. I'm totally against a binary vote (I like it - I don't like it) because it wouldn't do justice to a great many campaigns and, more importantly, it would be extremely inaccurate.
Votes ranging from 0 to 10 are also a bit inaccurate IMHO, as people tend to give 10s and 0s out the n00bish way without caring too much about the consequences. Any alternatives?
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Yes: we don't do it at all. The installer already supplies a pretty good spread focused mostly on high-quality stuff.
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And let many good campaigns disappear?
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It would add the objective, indisputable element of an aggregate score. Getting a high score would become an objective: witness IRL game studios that use Metacritic scores as targets. Projects would be incentivized to boost this score with advertising, personal favors, withholding assets and help, and undercutting competitors.
Any ranking is by nature zero-sum. Moving any given campaign up a notch requires taking another down a notch. This is not a zero-sum community; we are all in this together. We don't need a ranking system that splits people.
If you want to have general tiers - 'high quality', 'mid quality', 'low quality', and vote campaigns into that, fine. But nothing more discrete.
The script doesn't give you general tiers, just a number out of 100. And ranking isn't neccesary - it can be implemented as a guage on the individual campaign page and then referenced in a new column on Narwhal's Campaign List. And frankly, I don't see how an indisputable, objective score is a bad thing. Sure, campaigns are going to be subjectively judged by everyone indivdually, but a good campaign will get a good score, and a mediocre campaign will get a mediocre score. I can;t imagine anyone looking at acampaign with a score of 89 and saying "Well, I'm not playing that! It's under 90!", but I can definitely imagine someone skipping over a few campaigns with ratings of 40 or 50% - and really, if something has a rating of that low, it probably deserves it for more than subjective issues - it's probably buggy and poorly written and what not - and these are things that people should want to fix! Striving for a higher score is striving for a better version of your campaign, one that fixes the bugs that would see it downvoted. How is this a bad thing?
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May we have specific ranks (mission design, plot, mods, gameplay, originality)?
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It would add the objective, indisputable element of an aggregate score. Getting a high score would become an objective: witness IRL game studios that use Metacritic scores as targets. Projects would be incentivized to boost this score with advertising, personal favors, withholding assets and help, and undercutting competitors.
Any ranking is by nature zero-sum. Moving any given campaign up a notch requires taking another down a notch. This is not a zero-sum community; we are all in this together. We don't need a ranking system that splits people.
If you want to have general tiers - 'high quality', 'mid quality', 'low quality', and vote campaigns into that, fine. But nothing more discrete.
The script doesn't give you general tiers, just a number out of 100. And ranking isn't neccesary - it can be implemented as a guage on the individual campaign page and then referenced in a new column on Narwhal's Campaign List. And frankly, I don't see how an indisputable, objective score is a bad thing. Sure, campaigns are going to be subjectively judged by everyone indivdually, but a good campaign will get a good score, and a mediocre campaign will get a mediocre score. I can;t imagine anyone looking at acampaign with a score of 89 and saying "Well, I'm not playing that! It's under 90!", but I can definitely imagine someone skipping over a few campaigns with ratings of 40 or 50% - and really, if something has a rating of that low, it probably deserves it for more than subjective issues - it's probably buggy and poorly written and what not - and these are things that people should want to fix! Striving for a higher score is striving for a better version of your campaign, one that fixes the bugs that would see it downvoted. How is this a bad thing?
I've made it clear why that's bad in the post you quoted. If you like I'll give you an example I've already given you.
Blue Planet 2 donated an arsenal of scripts, visual effects, and new table tricks to the 3.6.12 MediaVPs, well in advance of its release. These made up the meat of the 3.6.12 MVPs.
The MVPs enhance every campaign. If kept exclusive, those assets would have enhanced BP2 alone. This would have presumably earned it a higher score vs. other campaigns.
If this scoring system were in place, we would have no incentive to release those assets and the 3.6.12 MVPs would have lost most of their content.
The script doesn't give you general tiers, just a number out of 100
So this is a script you can't modify?
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Yes: we don't do it at all. The installer already supplies a pretty good spread focused mostly on high-quality stuff.
And who decides what goes into the installer? How do people choose ne campaigns once they've played the ones in the installer? Or if they get FSOpen via another avenue than the standard installer? A democratic voting system is the best way to get a quick, accurate guage of community opinion on something like this. Even subjective views will average out if they're fprced into a numerical form, and this may well encourage people to start expanding he comments section of campaign pages to 'explain' their votes. Adding to the wiki in this way is also a good thing.
So this is a script you can't modify?
I've made it clear why that's bad in the post you quoted. If you like I'll give you an example I've already given you.
Blue Planet 2 donated an arsenal of scripts, visual effects, and new table tricks to the 3.6.12 MediaVPs, well in advance of its release. These made up the meat of the 3.6.12 MVPs.
The MVPs enhance every campaign. If kept exclusive, those assets would have enhanced BP2 alone. This would have presumably earned it a higher score vs. other campaigns.
If this scoring system were in place, we would have no incentive to release those assets and the 3.6.12 MVPs would have lost most of their content.
If the BP team's only incentive was to get a higher rank, to enhance its score at the expense of other campaigns, then you'd be right. But that's not the point of this system - it's designed to separate the wheat from the chaff, not the wheat from the slightly better wheat. he difference between a 94, 95 and 96 is meaningless, and nobody will ever get 100% with more than a few votes. People already make choices to share or withhold assets without this system in place - adding it in would change nothing, except make it easier for new people )and a lot of older members too - no one individual knows every detail of the reputation of every campaign) to find the best campaigns, and avoid some of theless polished work.
So this is a script you can't modify?
It's certainly something I can't modify - I lack the skills, and I don't intend to start asking people to do it for me - not to change something that already works perfectly well, IMO.
May we have specific ranks (mission design, plot, mods, gameplay, originality)?
Again, not with this script. Not without making individual wiki pages for each aspect, which people would never go and vote on individually anyway.
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If the BP team's only incentive was to get a higher rank, to enhance its score at the expense of other campaigns, then you'd be right. But that's not the point of this system - it's designed to separate the wheat from the chaff, not the wheat from the slightly better wheat.
If that were the case, a tiered system should be used.
the difference between a 94, 95 and 96 is meaningless
Not to the gaming community. Differences of one or two points are subject to fierce contention. If the difference is meaningless it should be rendered invisible.
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But we're not (and don't pretend to be) professional game reviewers. Our votes aren't like Metacritic's (just to mention an example).
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Why do I believe that we're nearing locking? :D
By the way, if you say that - for instance - a 1 to 10 system wouldn't be accurate enough because people would mostly vote 1s and 10s, how can you argue for a tiered system which is basically just a rebranded 1 to 3 system?
Don't worry, no one will fire up the FS Wiki and go for a campaign that he (or she :D) dislikes just to vote it down. Personally I have no problems with the 1-100 scale idea, but if I'd be the one who decides, I'd make more (and longer) "text reviews" - basically expanded player comments on the Wiki page.
But to stay to the current discussion, I support Black Wolf on this one.
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May I address the fallacy of believing there such a thing as "the best" campaign.
There are no such things as absolutes, except the fact that there are none (see, it that isn't even absolute).
Well, I guess they exist in Math as well, but who cares about them?
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The shipyard for Tides of Darkness,both story of Blue Planet.... ;),the eipsodes 1 +2 of Black horizon(not SCP yet :blah:)
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Best mod? Depends whom you ask. Everyone will mention their own mod, for starters....
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Best mod? Depends whom you ask. Everyone will mention their own mod, for starters....
No, they won't.
I sure as hell won't, though I am amused that Operation Savior ended up doing some things with capital ships which weren't reprised until BP.
(Actually I think a number of things I did with Operation Savior have never been repeated.)
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Wait. You released a campaign?
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Operation Savior (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Operation_Savior)
Cleaning Crew (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Cleaning_Crew)
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I still want to play your proposed POONMOD in which all the briefings are in capital letters. It would be awesome.
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I still want to play your proposed POONMOD in which all the briefings are in capital letters. It would be awesome.
Not that it makes all that much of a difference in Bank Gothic though...
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I still want to play your proposed POONMOD in which all the briefings are in capital letters. It would be awesome.
It would only be like Nukemod and you know it!
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Second Great War Part II (http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.206).
Aah you tricked me! That campaign, I didn't even know what the heck was going on! I'm sure whoever made it learned a lot... well anyways.
Here is my favorite understated campaign.
FelixJim's campaign Dreams: http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=69034.0
It's a very easy download. (which I find very important in campaigns esp for newcomers)
It's original, has a good storyline and you can play it in one sitting easily (5 missions). It's a fun and short campaign to get your feet wet.
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Best mod? Depends whom you ask. Everyone will mention their own mod, for starters....
No, they won't.
I sure as hell won't, though I am amused that Operation Savior ended up doing some things with capital ships which weren't reprised until BP.
(Actually I think a number of things I did with Operation Savior have never been repeated.)
You just did. :lol:
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You just did. :lol:
I just recommended it as "the best"?
In fact, I just recommended it as good at all?
'cuz it really isn't. It's competent, maybe, if you don't squint too hard at the fourth mission. I did some relatively innovative things with making capships feel more interactable, shutting off guns and engines and more detailed damage and destruction messages, but actual revolutionary gameplay or terribly fun? Notrly. Never claimed otherwise.
Oh wait that's right, you're an idiot. I forgot.
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It's original, has a good storyline and you can play it in one sitting easily (5 missions). It's a fun and short campaign to get your feet wet.
Now that you mentioned short:
Uncharted Terretory is also a very good campaign. It too is short, but that isn't really a bad thing. I havn't been keeping up-to-date, but there was an effort to get it voice acted. Not sure if the VA's done yet though.
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Now that you mentioned short:
Uncharted Terretory is also a very good campaign. It too is short, but that isn't really a bad thing. I havn't been keeping up-to-date, but there was an effort to get it voice acted. Not sure if the VA's done yet though.
It's not quite done yet. Auditions on another site for Alpha 2, Commander and the Aquitaine closes the 14. and I have some good auditions for Alpha 2 and Commander. Everything else is done, except Alpha 3 which should soon be done with the recording.
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It's original, has a good storyline and you can play it in one sitting easily (5 missions). It's a fun and short campaign to get your feet wet.
Dunno who wrote that, but it wasn't me. :P
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Just to be clear, I was referring to FelixJim's campaign called 'Dreams'.
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Oh wait that's right, you're an idiot. I forgot.
Oy. You sir, really got to loosen up. No sense of humor. :blah:
And now, to be a complete hypocrite:
FLAMES OF WAR!
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Locked. I think this topic has done its part.