Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: azile0 on June 25, 2012, 04:11:33 am
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Note: This is more or less me talking to myself. Don't feel obligated to respond.
I've been playing X3TC lately, and I was struck by how well the Freespace universe would fit into a gameplay style like that. I always felt that Freespace had so much potential that was limited by the linear mission system. Granted, the system works great in its own right, but I would have loved to have the ability to fly through jump nodes, dock on carriers and so on without being broken into chunks. The core idea would be the same- you're a fighter pilot on board a larger ship. But having the fluidity of movement would make the game feel so alive. Escort missions would be less dull if you were able to accompany your charges for the entire journey, not just small segments.
While open world tends to offer itself towards open player choices, I don't think that would work so well. You wouldn't be able to go trade or pirate, (at least in the core 'campaign') you'd be a loyal GTVA pilot. Maybe you'd lend yourself more towards bomber roles, or interceptor roles, or whatever. There wouldn't be RPG elements, so no leveling up or anything but you would be able to secure upgrades and other advantages by accomplishing certain goals, which is where the open-galaxy element would shine.
Say in this new campain, the Shivans are back just because it's the classic storyline. You'd have a 'galaxy map' of sorts that would show areas of Shivan incursion; your destroyer/carrier would travel to wherever it was directed and you would follow- either out in space or docked inside the ship itself. Inside, it wouldn't be quite the same as the ship would have a countdown timer to arrival- for realism's sake, the timer would be several hours long, but you could theoretically simply wait it out. In that time, you would run training exercises, interact with your squad, requisition supplies, etc. When you as the player are done preparing, you send your character off to rest and the timer cuts to zero, where you launch your fighter and fly the mission.
As you fought in star systems, asteroid belts, nebulae, etc, you would secure resources for your destroyer to spend on R&D, construction, and simple survival. Let's say that in this circumstance you're cut off from the main GTVA supply lines and this is your only method of staying alive. And since this is an open-world game, unpredictability and random events should be common place. You could be ambushed while en-route to your destination and must scramble fighters. Your recon teams could spot an important target and if you've risen high enough in the ranks you could divert and attack it.
Ah, yes- ranks. In Freespace as it stands now, rank means pretty much nothing. Getting to Admiral either takes a lot of time, or a bit of cheating. I believe it affects who you can order around, but most campaigns have hard-coded that fact. In an open-world game, as you rise in the ranks you would have more control. First, you merely take orders from your wing leader. Then you give orders to yours. Then maybe you order around several wings, then minor capital ships. Ultimately, you would reach a high enough rank to make command decisions regarding your fleet's movements. This would be done out of forced necessity, as your casualties rank higher and you need every able body in space.
And finally, the exploration. Say that the Shivan threat is dealt with, and you now have a carrier of your own to command. Now the true open-galaxy aspect comes to life. You take orders from High Command to deal with certain threats, but ultimately you're on your own. You go forth and attack Shivan holdouts, rebel uprisings, Vasudan agitators, etc. And if there are no pressing wars (rebels, etc are all randomly generated) you can search for new jump nodes and fresh new systems. Maybe discover new alien life.
Anyway, that's just what I've been thinking about lately. While there is an extremely small chance of this game actually happening, I do hope to see a game LIKE IT come out in the forseeable future. I'm working on a trilogy of science fiction novels that might actually lend itself to this style of game... Hmm..
Thank you, Hard-Light, you have just made me aware of a new opportunity to attempt to seize in life. But now I'm getting ahead of myself. Finish school, then books, then game. Right. Talk to you folks later.
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tl:dr
Basically, if I read correctly the beginning, what you want is something akin to Freelancer, right ?
Always wondered why noone made a FS mod for Freelancer yet. The FS universe could fit nicely in the FL gameplay.
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Freelancer, X3, or Starshatter would all be appropriate engines for this sort of endeavour (although Starshatter will require some work before that happens; the simulated universe there is pretty barren and lifeless at the moment).
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I guess that if we ever get an FS/BP mod for Starshatter (somebody once mentioned that he'd like to do that), then you'll get what you want. Of course, Starshatter will need a lot of work before the game would be truly "open galaxy", but I guess that it'll be possible someday. This engine has even more potential than FS, but has only recently been released as open source.
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From my perspective, the only thing Starshatter really needs is a scripting interface, so that things like an in-game economy can be modelled without having to touch the core mechanics.
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That and a ton of bugfixes so that the game doesn't look like it's actively trying to prevent me from playing it... :rolleyes:
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Starshatter also needs another definition level for systems. Right now you define the star in the Galaxy.def and the planets in the System.def. Problem is that you only get ten regions in a system to play around with. As a workaround I've used the Galaxy level for the solar system and each planet as a separate system. It needs one more level for planets so you get ten regions for each planet.
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Why only 10?
:p
In all seriousness, though, I've been thinking of that as well. Starshatter has the unique possiblity to be used as not only a space sim, but a flight sim as well. It probably will never match a proper simulator in the sense, just as you probably will never make FSO stand up to Orbiter in competition for realism. But, for some of the projects considered on HLP in the past, air combat is the principal draw. Landscapes take up a lot of resources, unless you're replicating a very old simulator. Being able to break landscapes up into regions is thus of great importance.
Actually, I've never tried it, but Starshatter did have an airship battle mod in the past.
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Disclaimer: I don't know everything, so if somebody that knows better, go right on ahead and correct me where I'm wrong. ;)
... I would have loved to have the ability to fly through jump nodes, dock on carriers and so on without being broken into chunks. The core idea would be the same- you're a fighter pilot on board a larger ship. But having the fluidity of movement would make the game feel so alive. Escort missions would be less dull if you were able to accompany your charges for the entire journey, not just small segments.
The main problem I see between FSO and this type of gameplay is the fact that FSO missions are only single-sector. Granted, you can very much fake a multi-sector map by spacing each sector very, very far away from each other, but:
- You run the risk of a player or AI just herp-derping straight to another sector without jumping to it
- You also run the risk of an AI engaging targets in a different sector
One of FringeSpace's major things to do is to look into adding multi-sector support for missions. Obviously, the "easiest" way out (still a big challenge) for the coders to do is to add a sector support in the mission files themselves, and then have mission designers copy-paste their favorite region into each and every unique mission they do.
The more flexible way to do it is to add Galaxy and Region (solar systems) files, which will essentially are special FRED mission files that outline the basic jumpnodes and static assets (such as bases, asteriod fields, and debris fields). The actual mission files themselves could bootstap on top of Galaxy and Region files, thereby using them as a sort of template. (Recap: "Universe" -> Galaxy file -> Region file -> mission file)
There wouldn't be RPG elements, so no leveling up or anything but you would be able to secure upgrades and other advantages by accomplishing certain goals, which is where the open-galaxy element would shine.
This addition may be as simple as placing a ranking check per weapon. However, this goes against the current retail behavior because pilot files are currently accumulative. Meaning, if you finish the campaign and restart it, you retain your ranking and all of your won medals... which complicates things.
Say in this new campain, the Shivans are back just because it's the classic storyline. You'd have a 'galaxy map' of sorts that would show areas of Shivan incursion; your destroyer/carrier would travel to wherever it was directed and you would follow- either out in space or docked inside the ship itself. Inside, it wouldn't be quite the same as the ship would have a countdown timer to arrival- for realism's sake, the timer would be several hours long, but you could theoretically simply wait it out. In that time, you would run training exercises, interact with your squad, requisition supplies, etc. When you as the player are done preparing, you send your character off to rest and the timer cuts to zero, where you launch your fighter and fly the mission.
Implementing this would probably mean a great deal of work on the mainhall area, mainly due to that timer get up. It may be possible to disallow access to the ready room, where the campaign missions would be accessed, and open up other areas in the mainhall for traning, etc. The real challenge would be figuring out how to adjust the timer per secondary mission, simulations, etc.
As you fought in star systems, asteroid belts, nebulae, etc, you would secure resources for your destroyer to spend on R&D, construction, and simple survival. Let's say that in this circumstance you're cut off from the main GTVA supply lines and this is your only method of staying alive. And since this is an open-world game, unpredictability and random events should be common place. You could be ambushed while en-route to your destination and must scramble fighters. Your recon teams could spot an important target and if you've risen high enough in the ranks you could divert and attack it.
Anther big stride in the code, as your essentially creating a sort of credit/monetary system for your R&D. While credits might be able to be rewarded in-mission via SEXP's, currently there's no way to spend it in the mainhall.
In an open-world game, as you rise in the ranks you would have more control. First, you merely take orders from your wing leader. Then you give orders to yours. Then maybe you order around several wings, then minor capital ships. Ultimately, you would reach a high enough rank to make command decisions regarding your fleet's movements. This would be done out of forced necessity, as your casualties rank higher and you need every able body in space.
It may be currently possible to use ranking checks per mission to determine what equipment, ships, wings, and overall command authority you have, but again, the current ranking system is based on the difficulty setting and not your overall campaign progress. However... it might be possible to change the existing ranking system into a "Skill" system, so that instead of actual ranks you'd be awarded a fitting fighter title such as "Rookie, Veteran, Ace, Top Ace" like in XWA. The actual "Rank" that you achieve would then be done via SEXP's per mission, and otherwise bootstrapped so that you can progress your ranking as you complete mission goals, etc.
And finally, the exploration. Say that the Shivan threat is dealt with, and you now have a carrier of your own to command. Now the true open-galaxy aspect comes to life. You take orders from High Command to deal with certain threats, but ultimately you're on your own. You go forth and attack Shivan holdouts, rebel uprisings, Vasudan agitators, etc. And if there are no pressing wars (rebels, etc are all randomly generated) you can search for new jump nodes and fresh new systems. Maybe discover new alien life.
This is where it starts to get hairy, because now you have to implement non-linear mission design elements. This would mean a change to campaign file so that the overall results of each mission you do (and not do) have an effect on your future missions, possibly also including all of the fine details (such as total munitions available, remaining ships in the fleet, health of said ships, etc.).
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Why only 10?
:p
Well, ten is a nice flexible number. The game space of a region is essentially infinite so you can have your mission basically anywhere in it. The problem lies with planets like Jupiter. If you want regions for all the Galilean moons, plus the other planets, their moons, and atmo areas, you run out of regions really quick.
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the usable gamespace isnt really big enough for anything other than a small moon. that is if you want physics to work right.
no use multiple missions to represent various locales in a system. then have multiple systems. were talking a large number here. only indistructable objects would be placed in the missions, planets, scenery, etc. you would need scripts to fill in the mission with stuff and events to suit the current situation. if shivans hold a system, spawn shivan s ships, id its the terrans or the ntf do likewise. scripting is king here. you will use it for everything. there will still be sexps, but scripts will manage them. even then i think it would only work for single player. idk how to make it work in multi, especially when many players who may be in completely different systems (missions). other systems would need to be in place for that.
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A few side notes:
1) I posted this at 2:30 am. A bit rambly, but whatever.
2) I wasn't proposing this to be a change to FSO, but rather a new game or mod for a game already released. Freelancer might work, but its community is sparse and the game engine itself wouldn't really work out for what I had in mind. Its core gameplay mechanics are too stiff and hard to work with. There ARE freespace mods out for it, but they only add ship models. X3 would actually be the best choice, though X Rebirth might also be a viable option as it will be the new hot thing in open galaxy space sims, and would likely draw a lot of attention and support if a FS2 conversion were to be pushed through.
3) I'm not a techie. I don't code, script, model, FRED, texture, or anything like that. I'm more of a writer (I sound rather like the Beta Testers from JAD..) so the most I could offer to any project is organization, dialog/infocard text, proofreading, et cetra. The reason I mention this is due to z64's post. I understood only every other word.
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i thought about it a lot actually. the freespace engine would work fine for single player, and with engine tweaks, multi. the joy of open source is that you can do that. its just youre going to need several scripters and mission designers to pull it off. ive modded freelancer and it sucks, while it does give you some rather impressive game environments, it is quite restrictive in what you can do with ships and weapons (which freespace is really good at). use another engine, then you need people who can mod that game (and probibly have to learn how), modelers and model converters to tweak and convert models. you will probibly still need scripters/coders (really no difference), depending on engine. either way you go its a massive undertaking, and id say both routes have equal chances of success or failure.
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Obligatory FreeSpaceLancer post:
http://staff.hard-light.net/goober5000/downloads/freespacelancer.zip
I should really put this on FSMods so that more people know about it.
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This idea comes up pretty regularly and never seems to go away or be properly fulfilled. Which is a shame, because it would be really cool, if done right. Unfortunately, it's also a massive amount of work - either scripted the way Nuke is talking about or coding in an entirely new game mode (which would be ideal, but mean big changes to huge areas of the code - pilot code, mission code and god knows what else). Not only that, but we'd probably need new assets as well - the number of places to go would need to increase, so we're talking lots of small stations, shipyards, asteroid bases etc... you'd probably want more skyboxes as well, depicting orbit around multiple planets.
I'd love to sit down with Freespacelancer one day and really dig into it, try to come up with some way of putting at least a limited, pseudo-open universe together, but frankly I doubt I have the skill (as powerful as FREDding and the Sexp system can be, scripting, as Nuke says, would probably be required make this work and would almost certainly make it easier) and I know I don't have the time to do it justice.
That said, I wonder if we might be able to implement this piecemeal, kind of. Like, a bunch of different systems that could later be integrated together. One thing that might be viable is some kind of "Random Encounter Generator"... would this be possible, either scripted or sexped? I can think of... maybe a way to sexp it, but I don't have FRED in front of me to test it out... anyone else have any ideas?
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That said, I wonder if we might be able to implement this piecemeal, kind of. Like, a bunch of different systems that could later be integrated together.
This somewhat plays into the bootstrapping method I mentioned earlier, with Galaxies and Regions/Systems being static mission files that are in turned loaded up by the real mission files. For now, you can possibly get away with making "template" missions to act as the Region/System and Galaxy files. You'd then copy-paste the assets from the template missions into the real missions, thereby making it appear much more expansive than it actually is. The only thing I see that can't be done is swapping out the skybox when your in a different "sector," unless there's a sexp or lua script out there that allows this already...
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There's a change sckybox sexp, IIRC.
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This idea comes up pretty regularly and never seems to go away or be properly fulfilled. Which is a shame, because it would be really cool, if done right. Unfortunately, it's also a massive amount of work - either scripted the way Nuke is talking about or coding in an entirely new game mode (which would be ideal, but mean big changes to huge areas of the code - pilot code, mission code and god knows what else). Not only that, but we'd probably need new assets as well - the number of places to go would need to increase, so we're talking lots of small stations, shipyards, asteroid bases etc... you'd probably want more skyboxes as well, depicting orbit around multiple planets.
I'd love to sit down with Freespacelancer one day and really dig into it, try to come up with some way of putting at least a limited, pseudo-open universe together, but frankly I doubt I have the skill (as powerful as FREDding and the Sexp system can be, scripting, as Nuke says, would probably be required make this work and would almost certainly make it easier) and I know I don't have the time to do it justice.
That said, I wonder if we might be able to implement this piecemeal, kind of. Like, a bunch of different systems that could later be integrated together. One thing that might be viable is some kind of "Random Encounter Generator"... would this be possible, either scripted or sexped? I can think of... maybe a way to sexp it, but I don't have FRED in front of me to test it out... anyone else have any ideas?
you still would use sexps so you would probibly have mission designers working hand in hand with scripters, mission designers would set up events for various systems in dummy missions, and then the scripters would cut and paste the sexp code from the mission file into script files. and you would also have some on the fly sexp generation as well. every mission is essentially a blank slate with no ships, and no events, the scripts would need to do this based on a dynamic set of persistent rules.
im also not sure how much of this will work. when we attempted the fsrts, we had a lot of good ideas that just didnt want to work. we hit roadblocks where we had to go in and make source changes to the scripting system. this is not always a bad thing though, as it adds useful features everyone can use, but it does cause organizational issues for the scp (for example lua.cpp is > 10k lines of not too well organized code). there are still a number of fundamental components of the game that have incomplete scripting access or none at all and those need to be addressed as needed. id like to see more mods make heavy use of scripting so that major holes in the scripting system can be identified and filled.
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I'm a little out of the loop. What is Freespacelancer? I have my Freelancer disk around somewhere, I could load it up if it's worth checking out.
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Not only that, but we'd probably need new assets as well - the number of places to go would need to increase, so we're talking lots of small stations, shipyards, asteroid bases etc... you'd probably want more skyboxes as well, depicting orbit around multiple planets.
try to come up with some way of putting at least a limited, pseudo-open universe together, but frankly I doubt I have the skill (as powerful as FREDding and the Sexp system can be, scripting, as Nuke says, would probably be required make this work and would almost certainly make it easier) and I know I don't have the time to do it justice.
That said, I wonder if we might be able to implement this piecemeal, kind of. Like, a bunch of different systems that could later be integrated together.
We're both working on the assets thing and in need of a more streamlined system for multi sector environments for FringeSpace.
Tachyon the Fringe did all this in 1999... and in multiplayer up to 64 players... but we only have a basic to medium understanding of how it pulls it off.
Perhaps it would be worth while to look at the past, to help determine the future.
If someone's interested in following up with me on this I'll get you a copy and set you up with the info and tools.
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I'm a little out of the loop. What is Freespacelancer?
See the link I posted above. It's a little proof-of-concept campaign I put together in 2005. It even works on retail FS2. :p
Incidentally, I think Babylon History X was going to explore the randomly-generated-encounter idea, but development collapsed due to infighting. :(
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How does one go about getting retail campaigns to work with FSOpen, anyway?
I've always used the launcher's mod selection tab, and don't even know what the old way of installing mods is.
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You select 'No Mod' and run? :wtf:
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If a retail campaign consists of plain missions, and only plain missions, with no other modified material, you're safe with dropping them into the main data/missions folder. That's a very limited case, though. For anything beyond that, just create a new mod folder, toss the campaign in there, and make a new mod.ini that references the MediaVPs.
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I suppose putting the missions in data/missions would of helped as well :blah: I feel like such an idiot.
Oh well. New campaign to play!
Edit: I was just looking for something to shoot. Can't believe I got disappointed in that regard, even if it is just a proof of concept. Guess this is only of interest to FREDders