Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: blackbow on June 06, 2018, 02:26:31 am
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Has anybody toyed with the idea of a mod for the Honorverse? everything you need is pretty much already here. Beam weapons, sidewalls, missiles.
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I think that'd be better suited for another engine. While you can do limited capship command in FreeSpace, the engine would absolutely panic at the sheer distances involved, never mind fully Newtonian capship behavior. It feels like something that deserves its own game.
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IRRC the engine also would likely freak out at the speeds projectiles and ships travel in the honorverse. Plus the closest thing to a strikecraft (ie a traditional freespace player craft) are the corvette sized warships introduced at the end of the first Haven Manticorian war.
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I think if you want a true Honorverse combat experience, you gotta start with something like Children of a Dead Earth (https://store.steampowered.com/app/476530/Children_of_a_Dead_Earth/) and work from there.
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Smallest thing is a pinnace isn't it? Grayson katana LAC is going to be the size of an Aeolus at least.
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You know you can have the HUD scale up and down the numbers for speed and distance via the tables right?
If you were to.combine that with scaling down models it might be technically feasable to simulate combat at longer ranges in the engine... speed would be a different issue as scaling is purely cosmetic and speeds would use the absolute scale of engine...
... but then again there are various optical tricks to give an illusion of speed to the players perspective; due to fact that we gauge speed per visual reference points...
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You know you can have the HUD scale up and down the numbers for speed and distance via the tables right?
If you were to.combine that with scaling down models it might be technically feasable to simulate combat at longer ranges in the engine... speed would be a different issue as scaling is purely cosmetic and speeds would use the absolute scale of engine...
... but then again there are various optical tricks to give an illusion of speed to the players perspective; due to fact that we gauge speed per visual reference points...
The problem is more that Honorverse combat is boring on the level where FreeSpace usually plays at. As the series progresses, engagement ranges go out into multiple light minutes; even "fighter combat" happens at multiple tens of thousands of kilometers. Literally everything in the Honorverse happens beyond visual range; this is something you can't make work in FreeSpace (even taking into account HUD hacks and scaling tricks) and stay true to the source material. By the time you tweaked it enough to make it work and fun, you've changed so many things that you can't really call it a "Honorverse" mod anymore.
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Contact. 6 hours to effective MDM range.
6 hours later. MDM fire.
16 minutes later.
6 hour journey to hyper limit.
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Contact. 6 hours to effective MDM range.
6 hours later. MDM fire.
16 minutes later.
6 hour journey to hyper limit.
Well who would've watched a single Star Trek episode if anything was happening in real time?
Riker: Borg will be in range 5mins from now!
Picard: OK, I go to the toilet quickly.
Not entirely the topic but I thought once about doing something (ie converting ships) within the Orions Arm universe (a hard sci-fi worldbuilding project), simply because they released a huge model dump; but since most of them are habitats and sceneric stuff (and no FS-related combat) there'd be not much meaningful you could do with that, so not everything that could be done makes sense.
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They don't have toilets on trek ;)
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They don't have toilets on trek ;)
:shaking:
I. Must. Improve. My. Selection. Of. Sci-Fi-series.
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You know you can have the HUD scale up and down the numbers for speed and distance via the tables right?
If you were to.combine that with scaling down models it might be technically feasable to simulate combat at longer ranges in the engine... speed would be a different issue as scaling is purely cosmetic and speeds would use the absolute scale of engine...
No, this would still be an issue. Even if the ranges would "fit" inside of what FRED can handle if you're scaling down models AND increasing ranges to the limit of what the engine supports you'll run into float issues. See, if you're using float coordinates you have a constant tradeoff between precision and distance. The longer your distances the less precise you'll be which makes registering hits or calculating physics for very scaled-down models a bit of an issue.
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They don't have toilets on trek ;)
Actually they do. If you look at TNG there is a door on the bridge they never seem to use which supposedly goes to the toilet.
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Literally everything in the Honorverse happens beyond visual range; this is something you can't make work in FreeSpace (even taking into account HUD hacks and scaling tricks) and stay true to the source material. By the time you tweaked it enough to make it work and fun, you've changed so many things that you can't really call it a "Honorverse" mod anymore.
I obviously don't know the source material and from the dicussion here it seems like nothing I would enjoy (I am not a fan of realist fiction anyway, military tech porn esspecially)...
But in the fifteen minutes between reading this in the first time, I think I came up with enough viable concept to make it work. However only as pretenious AF commentary piece ... soo yeeeaaah...
Since external camera and "view from target" have been part of the engine since retail (not to mention SCP camera controls), it is not impossible to make beyond visual range combat a thing technically - at least on a capital ship scale. You would have to add some tweaks with the regards to aiming assistance (targeting lasers, scripted course projections, projectile tracking the HUD etc etc) and train players to aim from a non-POV persepecitve but technically it is all feasible.
The non-POV aiming is going to be the most difficult thing to get right, because through it you propably will create a sense of detachment between player action and effect (that's where the pretenious commentary comes in; the detachment of action and effect and withheld or impossible gratification *gesture to signify "etc etc"* in relation to the expected form of agency in video games etc etc and all that*).
* Dismissiveness for comic effect; It is an intruiging line of inquiry but I am not quite sure how to follow it without letting critique slip into self-engradising performance.
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You can always take unusual ideas and think about "That's awesome, how could I get this into FS?". Maybe you can find new gameplay concepts that nobody else would've even dared to think about, but the chance is always there that it turns out to be horrible **** when you see the results.
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Even if you somehow got around all the problems using a bunch of hacks good ****ing luck getting the AI to cooperate. It's full of hard-coded numbers that make it much worse if things get too fast or too small. And a ton of other behaviour is using hardcoded distance numbers.
And fully Newtonian ships that the AI can reasonably pilot? Yeah, no. I'd be much saner to simply start from a game that already does ~realistic space combat.
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I'm still waiting on a LOGH mod. We even have (a few of) the ships in the engine!
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I want a Macross mod
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Saga of the Seven Suns, please. :)
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How about you make your own instead of adapting stuff? :)
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Space: above and beyond would be great.
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It was tried once. DiamondGeezer actually got reasonably far but then it was all brought down by the fact that he didn't have permission for the models.