Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The FRED Workshop => Topic started by: Zero Serenity on December 03, 2012, 09:35:02 am
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This isn't a completely fleshed out idea, but I want to put some thoughts on the table before attempting to get serious about writing the scenario. Some things have bothered me about the original campaign and some of it's touches. This started all when I considered the mission Out of the Dark, Into the Night (Escorting the Plato) and wondered why the Plato would never jump out if it made the jump node.
So what if it had?
Then it got worse. I then considered The Darkness and the Light (Capture the Ramses) and wondered why after disabling and disarming the cruiser nothing happens. I've run into an akward scenario when playing Darkness Rising (The OEM demo) where I managed to ravage all Shivan forces and sat around for an hour (time compressed) waiting for the Taranis to kill the Ramses.
So what if it was captured?
These ideas are bubbling up and remaining in my head for a remake I'd like to flesh out some more. My suggestions? If the Plato makes it, the Avenger Cannon becomes available for OpEval for Pandora's Box and if the Ramses is captured under fire I'm thinking of making Tenderizer easier. I don't want to make it like I'm trampling all over :v: but after reading the synop for Silent Threat: Reborn, I just had these ideas.
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Reminds me furiously What If - Another Great War (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,56156.0.html)
I'll be veeeeeery interested to play something like this :yes:
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personally I am pro remake to tweak, fix and use modern features where appropriate so long as the mission design is up to a decent standard, I can forgo voice acting though if the community can rally around then great, not canon? dont care.
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I think I forgot to make the point of I was looking for more than just thoughts, I would like to see if you guys had any ideas or suggestions for the project. Stuff you think needs doing.
I'm already thinking about fixing a few "plot holes" like the Galetea picking up Shield Units from Ikeya when it's in Beta Cygni (just changing it to the Bastion) and scouting the Lucifer before you even take on the mission you find it in.
The bible's mentioned on the "What If?" Page but I cannot seem to find it on Voliton's site. Is there an alternate link for it around?
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At quick glance, if you follow the link Satellight gave, you should find working DL links going through the author's website.
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I think I forgot to make the point of I was looking for more than just thoughts, I would like to see if you guys had any ideas or suggestions for the project. Stuff you think needs doing.
let me have a think and I will throw a few ideas at you
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Have you checked this out?
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=71795.0
If you haven't, that should get your mind whirring...
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What If was cool :yes:, but still not enough to be decent Great War remake. I'd like to see Shivans with beams, and terrans and vasudans with pre-GW ships and railguns/gauss guns/plasma cannons/whatever, and also with WiH-style tactics.
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What If is a bit old but, for a campaign that long, was quite enjoyable and polished.
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What If is a bit old but, for a campaign that long, was quite enjoyable and polished.
Hmmm, sounds intriguing...
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What If was cool :yes:, but still not enough to be decent Great War remake. I'd like to see Shivans with beams, and terrans and vasudans with pre-GW ships and railguns/gauss guns/plasma cannons/whatever, and also with WiH-style tactics.
So, an entirely different game, then? :p Not something I'd personally be interested in, but it sounds like Fury's "F Project" he tried to get going a few years back. Maybe talk to him.
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Here's an idea doc since I'd rather not retabulate for forums.
Splat. (https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=BE54843FC96143CE!690&authkey=!AJ7cRTrxv8_V_c0)
Also, I found this (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=68161.0), which I'm figuring if stuff works out with my plans we could combine into a bigger project. I haven't asked him about it or much of anything else, but it was an idea.
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A remake seems like a waste to me.
I have been playing What IF. There have been some new missions, and I have enjoyed most of them, but there are also many missions which are remakes of original missions. And many of them (not all, there a couple of good ones) just feel like a chore to me. And I feel that the time could have been better spent. Sure, the maker probably really enjoyed putting their own personal spin on the campaign, and if that's what you want to do, then you're not going to listen to me.
The FSport was a worthy remake because it was a total upgrade, but just using the existing technology seems a waste, it's not as if there are burning issues to fix. Instead, I would suggest expanding the original campaign with new missions. Maybe I can think of some. Maybe the first two or even three could be Operation Thresher. The first one you win a victory, a nice easy level to start off. The next you are introduced to your base capship, and have to protect it. You do that as part of a larger assault but watch the Vasudans obliterate most of the rest of the forces sent for Operation Thresher. And the third mission is the retreat where you have to escape with your life.
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Lorric: How about a mission involving the Orff, which jumps out at some point after taking some hits then suffers the breakdown after jumping out (or was forced out)?
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Lorric: How about a mission involving the Orff, which jumps out at some point after taking some hits then suffers the breakdown after jumping out (or was forced out)?
The Orff could be involved in Operation Thresher and take it's damage there.
Another idea is I believe it says the fighters which attack the Orff in the first official mission are from a Vasudan convoy that was recently hit. You could make a mission where the player hits that convoy. I'll try and think up some more mission ideas for the first act of FS1.
If you didn't want to do Operation Thresher, that could be a good first mission. Lots of Vasudans but stack the odds in the player's favour, for an easy first mission.
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The Terran-Vasudan war offers a pretty limitless scope for new missions. Only your imagination and how many missions you want before the Shivans arrive will limit you there.
You’re also pretty free to do whatever you want with the first encounter with the Shivans. Only after that do you have to start sticking to the story somewhat.
The PS1 game Colony Wars: Vengeance has hostile aliens arriving and intruding into a an interstellar war. The game has branching paths, so there are two such first encounter missions which both occur in similar style to in Freespace, attacking both parties. They might be useful for thinking about a new first encounter with the Shivans mission. Here’s one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2zITr3FFcc&feature=BFa&list=PL6C2AC8FCEE999854
Can’t find an example of the other. In that one, you have to defend a disabled frigate from enemy fighters. After awhile if it has survived, the aliens jump in and destroy your opponents then jump out. Then an alien capital ship jumps in, and unless you can do enough damage to it to make it retreat, it will grapple the frigate and jump out with it!
So that will take you up to mission 5 in the official campaign. There isn’t really anything to take from mission 6 (the asteroid field mission) However, after you beat mission 7, you get told that a separate strike team captured the Shivan shield technology. That is a prime opportunity for a mission.
If you don’t care about having the player control one character and decide to focus on the larger picture, you could stage the battle you get told about where the large decoy convoy is completely eliminated. Since everyone dies there, the player would have to die too. So the objective would either be for the convoy to survive for a set amount of time, or to survive a set amount of attack waves. Or even both. Once that time hits you would end the mission with the debrief that a sufficient fight was put up to convince the Shivans that the shield technology was indeed with the convoy and the Shivans were sufficiently weakened to allow the second stage of the plan, and everyone died to achieve this.
Also, if you don’t care about the player being exclusively terran, you could do a mission where the Vasudans pick up the second leg of the convoy escort. If neither of these apply though, I’d suggest a diversionary strike mission, to draw as many shivans as possible away from the shield shipment. You could even do all three missions.
The final mission of act 1 involves capturing the Taranis, and the player comes in on the final leg of the mission after the Taranis‘ defences have been thinned out.. There is plenty of scope here to flesh this out with one or two missions to flesh out how this was done. You could have something like hitting a Shivan supply convoy to draw the Taranis’ fighters, or playing cat and mouse with the Taranis to draw it’s fighters or intercepting the Taranis’ fighters while they’re on patrol or suckering the Taranis’ fighters with another dummy convoy. Many possibilities.
A further mission could be escorting the Taranis to Tombaugh. I would have mentioned the Lucifer’s attack on Tombaugh too, but the link I posted further up the page, the final mission of that does such a great job of the attack on Tombaugh that I’d leave it alone.
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I would rather stick to the single perspective thing. The constantly shifting role of the pilot is enough for me.
I think I can do more missions, but I'd want the community to help me playtest them since I'm not confident in my skills.
But now that I'm somewhat committed to the project, I've hit a snag. I don't know how to decompile (is that the word I wanna use?) the campaign. I see the missions via text editor in fsport-missions.vp and the campaign in freespace.fc2.
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Do you mean you don't know how to get them out of the VP file so you can FRED them?
That's where I got my program to do it:
http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.109
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I think I was looking for improper filenames. I was looking for "training" but it's called btm-01.fs2. Hang on a second.
:banghead:
Okay, I feel better.
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I think I was looking for improper filenames. I was looking for "training" but it's called btm-01.fs2. Hang on a second.
:banghead:
Okay, I feel better.
You can always check out the filenames in the techroom too.
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What If was cool :yes:, but still not enough to be decent Great War remake. I'd like to see Shivans with beams, and terrans and vasudans with pre-GW ships and railguns/gauss guns/plasma cannons/whatever, and also with WiH-style tactics.
There is, in fact, a new version of AGW which indeed includes older Terran and Vasudan ships and railguns and new capship weaponry for the Vasudans, though you don't see that much of the new stuff. Also, this has not been released yet. :)
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I saw Orion with UEF's Gauss Cannons in his three-barreled turrets. Looks interesting :yes: :D, when are You going to release it?
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I'm worried giving Shivan cruisers beam weapons would completely break the game. With the anti-fighter flavor pretty much wrecking anything at 1500 meters, no Maxim gun and the Stiletto being a bomber only weapon (until the Phoenix 5, which is at least comperable) I have the feeling I'll be staring down a lot of fustrated players. Granted, Cruiser-to-Cruiser the GTA and PVE just don't really stand much of a chance anyway, even without beam weapons mixed in. I just feel giving them beam cannons would ramp the challenge up too much.
Lucifer excluded.
But maybe I should test this. FRED a mission putting a Demon next to an Orion and have them sort it out by themselves. If the Demon wins, I really do not think giving them beams is a good idea.
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Another Great War proved that this can be overcomed by good mission design.
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I gave the board a search and don't see Another Great War. Can you point it out to me?
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Reminds me furiously What If - Another Great War (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,56156.0.html)
I'll be veeeeeery interested to play something like this :yes:
From this very thread.
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:banghead:
It keeps being called What If so I guess I lost it somewhere.
Feel free:
:snipe:
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It works surprisingly well in the What If campaign. It gets balanced out by the GTVA getting flak guns on their ships for improved anti fighter capability. Well, maybe it doesn't, since the Shivans get anti-fighter beams too. But it's not just the Shivans which get an upgrade.
Remember, you nearly always only see Cains or Liliths, which only have one beam weapon. If you can take it out, it's back to normal again.
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I played the first three missions of What If before the game glitched and died.
But already I can tell that what it does I do not want to do. It seems to me that the mod was designed for FreeSpace veterans, not the necessarily in the spirit of the original campaign. I found it very difficult on normal (and not because I'm used to having shields) and completely off the wall with weapon selections. One of the things the original campaign does is introduce you to very limited weapons and then ramp up selections as you go. Weapon (and ship for that matter) seemed completely random and not following any sort of coherency. The chatter of your wingmen is okay but rather silly and in dire need of voice acting, but it disturbed me that pilots were allowed to chatter that long.
But my greatest complaint is what happens to the story. Starting with the Avenger cannon completely removes the "We're ****ed!" moment when the Shivans do arrive. Otherwise, I highly doubt the GTA could keep a secret about the Shivans when the Admiral Wolf won't shut up about them. I won't say it ruined (as in rewriting it too much) the story so much as it makes about as much sense as a dog playing poker.
So, I didn't have fun is what I'm saying and I didn't get any great ideas other than "don't do this."
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I played the first three missions of What If before the game glitched and died.
But already I can tell that what it does I do not want to do. It seems to me that the mod was designed for FreeSpace veterans, not the necessarily in the spirit of the original campaign. I found it very difficult on normal (and not because I'm used to having shields) and completely off the wall with weapon selections. One of the things the original campaign does is introduce you to very limited weapons and then ramp up selections as you go. Weapon (and ship for that matter) seemed completely random and not following any sort of coherency. The chatter of your wingmen is okay but rather silly and in dire need of voice acting, but it disturbed me that pilots were allowed to chatter that long.
But my greatest complaint is what happens to the story. Starting with the Avenger cannon completely removes the "We're ****ed!" moment when the Shivans do arrive. Otherwise, I highly doubt the GTA could keep a secret about the Shivans when the Admiral Wolf won't shut up about them. I won't say it ruined (as in rewriting it too much) the story so much as it makes about as much sense as a dog playing poker.
So, I didn't have fun is what I'm saying and I didn't get any great ideas other than "don't do this."
What the... that doesn't sound right at all. Hang on a sec...
As I thought. Are you sure you've got that set up properly? The first 3 missions you only have the ML16 laser, the disruptor, A railgun which only does hull damage, and two weapons which do less damage than the ML16 laser, including a machine gun. I have been playing on Easy, I always do that with a new campaign, but have had little trouble.
Wingman chatter is kind of a problem in a sense I had to keep stopping to hit F4 so I could read. I wouldn't do anything like that either. Save it for the briefings/debriefings if at all. Also, I'm confident English is not the creator's first language.
If it glitched and died you mustn't have it set up right. Did you follow the instructions and download Stormfront? And have you got the Fsport running?
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FSPort (with media VPS) works beautifully. But yeah. The second mission is a bombing run (with the Athena), plus all the ammo weapons I couldn't quite decide if they were useful or not.
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FSPort (with media VPS) works beautifully. But yeah. The second mission is a bombing run (with the Athena), plus all the ammo weapons I couldn't quite decide if they were useful or not.
Oh speaking of media vps, I had to change the info in the mod file for media vps as it was out of date. I still have 13 errors when I start up, but have ran into no problems. Well, except a glitch on the mission where you have to steal the Shivan Dragon where the capture ship won't dock with it.
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I saw Orion with UEF's Gauss Cannons in his three-barreled turrets. Looks interesting :yes: :D, when are You going to release it?
Soon, I hope. ;)
I'm worried giving Shivan cruisers beam weapons would completely break the game. With the anti-fighter flavor pretty much wrecking anything at 1500 meters, no Maxim gun and the Stiletto being a bomber only weapon (until the Phoenix 5, which is at least comperable) I have the feeling I'll be staring down a lot of fustrated players. Granted, Cruiser-to-Cruiser the GTA and PVE just don't really stand much of a chance anyway, even without beam weapons mixed in. I just feel giving them beam cannons would ramp the challenge up too much.
Well, the Shivans were supposed to be one hell of an uber enemy when they first showed up. But to be honest, in the FS1 ingame gameplay they were not any tougher than Terrans or Vasudans as soon as you have shields. I think giving them beam cannons just makes them what they are supposed to be: A superior enemy with superior technology which can, in the end, just be defeated by tactics.
Now, let me make a more general statement on What If: Another Great War. The campaign was, from the beginning, more like a dalliance. I just wanted to play around a bit to see by myself how Shivans with beams and T/V with flak guns would feel fighting each other. The intention was to show the Great War from the perspective of the Storm Front timeline which does, in certain details, differ from the official FS timeline. Shivans always had beam cannons, Terrans always had flak cannons and railguns, Vasudans never used flak cannons but very powerful energy guns.
Then I started to think about the technological improvements Terrans and Vasudans newly introduce throughout the campaign. At the beginning, the Terrans only have the Apollo fighter and the ML-16 Laser. And then, within three months, they introduce about half a dozen newly developed ships and weapons? :wtf: Sorry, but that didn't feel very credible to me. This is why there are machine guns, Stilettos, Phoenix V, Athenas and Medusas right from the beginning.The latest version of the campaign will also include the Falcon, Shrike, Mustang Alpha and Atlas as older craft that have been removed from active service, but are still there. There will also be a couple of older Vasudan fighters.
The Avenger is indeed there from the beginning as well. But it is not very widely used, because it is very expensive. It's an experimental weapon that is just not worthwile to produce it in great numbers, so the GTA just issues them for special occasions. This changes when the Shivans show up with shield technology that make ballistic weaponry useless.
I hope I could make clear a bit why I did WhatIf, what my intention was and what the campaign was supposed to show. I do, of course, not suggest that I am the only one who has the right to remake the FS1 main campaign. Also I do not claim to have shown the "real" Great War. I showed my perspective of the Great War, how I would have made it from today's point of view. Anyone may feel free to go ahead and show his or her view. :)
Oh, and yes, I am not a native English speaker. Though I have improved since AGW. :p I hope. :nervous:
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I apreciate your sincerity. I was hoping to not nessisarily expand the story too much with my retel. I would like to fix a few "wha?" moments in it, such as cutscenes and briefings not completely matching where ships are and a some things in missions that make little sense.
Actually, as I'm writing more about this, I am reminded that in Avenging Angels the like "We are leaving system with Omega" doesn't make much sense.
If I add, I won't add much. 30 missions is already a rather good sized campaign, 40 is pushing it and 50 could just be ludicrus. Sofar I have slated to add at least three missions, a warm-up patrol mission with no working title, one titled "Operation Thresher" which is a mission that goes bad and a Convoy strike (Hinted at the debriefing of Eve of Destruction) that gets aborted as well. The Convoy strike will also introduce you to the GTF Angel, with a few reservations.
Sofar there's a lot to work out for the beginning in terms of additions. I'm considering adding some dialog to the "credits" mission to make the destruction of the Lucifer feel more organic than a bunch of heros flying aimlessly.