Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: karajorma on July 03, 2009, 10:14:15 am
-
While I was sme coding I had to take a look at the original FS2 missions to see what red-alert-carry-status had been used for. Rather than simply open up SM3-09 and check I simply grepped all the missions and found something a little surprising. Although Clash of the Titans II is the only mission that ends in a red alert, it's not the only mission with ships set as red alert. Even more interestingly, even though red-alert-carry only works with fighters it has been set for several other ships.
Now some of this is probably just simple mistakes but some of it is obviously by design and gives us a glimpse at the early mission designs and script of the game.
1) The Place of Chariots and The Romans Blunder appear to have been designed as a linked pair of missions. The Freighters in the first mission appear in the second one and have been set to carry cargo containing the same things. Both freighters and cargo have been set to red alert.
2) Rather bizarrely the Sathanas is set to red-alert in High Noon. Not entirely sure what that means. It could be a simple mistake or it could be an indication that the Sathanas was meant to accumulate damage from a mission proceeding it (There is a systematic error in the :V: missions where they set red-alert-carry on both the mission proceeding the red alert and the red alert itself).
3) The Azrael that carries off Bosch in Return to Babel is also set to red-alert.
4) Most interestingly of all, Alpha wing in Their Finest Hour is set up to red-alert. I tend to feel that this is good proof that originally the last three missions were meant to run back to back. This probably proved too difficult so the first mission was turned into a stand alone.
Now if that's what I could glean simply from a single ship flag, I wonder what else becomes more obvious if you take a good look at the missions themselves. :D
-
Oh snap, I bet we would've gotten to find Bosch. D:
-
So, if I'm reading that correctly, there may have been an intention to have a mission after Bosch was taken from the Iceni that involved his transport?
-
Or maybe more of the transport in the mission immediately afterwards. The one where you find the Knossos in the nebula and the second Sathanas appears.
-
Straight, No Chaser.
Some intriguing comments can also be found in the Designer Notes box of most missions as well... Like "This is my first mission on the job lul"
-
Yep, lots of interesting stuff there. This comment, which combines both categories, can be found in the notes from SM1-03:
This was the first mission I created for Volition. Originally this was designed to be the recond [sic] of a red alert pair, to follow Brad's SM1-02. The difficulty was toned down several times to make it suitable for the beginning of the campaign.
-
The Azrael that appears in the mission where the Iceni goes up can be destroyed, I don't think it was supposed to be carrying Bosch.
-
Fair point.
-
2) Rather bizarrely the Sathanas is set to red-alert in High Noon. Not entirely sure what that means. It could be a simple mistake or it could be an indication that the Sathanas was meant to accumulate damage from a mission proceeding it (There is a systematic error in the :V: missions where they set red-alert-carry on both the mission proceeding the red alert and the red alert itself).
I thought that was responsible for making the main guns stay dead?
-
The Azrael that appears in the mission where the Iceni goes up can be destroyed, I don't think it was supposed to be carrying Bosch.
What the debrief says is that the 203rd arrived too late to capture Bosch, so if it wasn't destroyed, Bosch might be in it, but if it is destroyed, Bosch would then be on a transport that had already left.
2) Rather bizarrely the Sathanas is set to red-alert in High Noon. Not entirely sure what that means. It could be a simple mistake or it could be an indication that the Sathanas was meant to accumulate damage from a mission proceeding it (There is a systematic error in the :V: missions where they set red-alert-carry on both the mission proceeding the red alert and the red alert itself).
I don't think it was a mistake. :v: might have removed it because of the low probability of the player destroying all four beam cannons on the juggernaut. If they are all destroyed, then the Red Alert will make sense because there was no fleet for the Sathanas to obliterate. However, if Red Alert was set and at least one cannon was still operational, the Sathanas would have obliterated a GTVA fleet, and it would definitely have sustained some damage during that skirmish, in which case the hull integrity of the Sathanas between Bearbaiting and High Noon will no longer be the same.
-
I thought that was responsible for making the main guns stay dead?
They used a different method in the end for that. I suppose it could be a hold over from attempting to do it that way though.
-
I don't think it was a mistake. :v: might have removed it because of the low probability of the player destroying all four beam cannons on the juggernaut.
Huh? low probability of the player destroying all four beam cannons? Dude, I wipe out all four, wipe the flak turrrets and still have about 30-40 seconds to dogfight in my bomber... Ok I admit It took me a lot of time to learn how to properly position myself so the bombs blow up properly, and I died quite a few times, but nowadays its a one-run mission.
-
And I managed to get the rear beam. On insane.
-
And I managed to get the rear beam. On insane.
I do it on Hard, always thought Insane was plainly exaggerated in its difficulty...at least for the main campaign. That and it makes me scream at my monitor
-
Well from what I can tell the AI are incapable of missing on insane.
-
And I managed to get the rear beam. On insane.
I do it on Hard, always thought Insane was plainly exaggerated in its difficulty...at least for the main campaign. That and it makes me scream at my monitor
The reason Insane is Insane is because it puts you on a fair playing field with the enemy. There's no limit (if I recall correctly) to the number of turrets/hostiles who can be shooting at you at once, and you don't get much special damage resistance.
-
Well from what I can tell the AI are incapable of missing on insane.
Not incapable, but I think every shot it fires will hit you if you continue on a straight line path, the AI has almost perfect target-leading but as to whether that becomes a hit or not is up to you ;)
-
Going up?! HA NO I'M GONNA PITCH DOWN NOWZ.
-
Actually that's more or less it. In X-Wing it was called jinking, though I'm not certain if that's an official term or not.
-
There's no limit (if I recall correctly) to the number of turrets/hostiles who can be shooting at you at once
Wait, there IS a limit to this on lower difficulty levels? That would explain a lot :>
-
In the final mission, several of the freighters and other ships you need to escort apparently had different names. You can tell from the event and message names.
-
There's no limit (if I recall correctly) to the number of turrets/hostiles who can be shooting at you at once
Wait, there IS a limit to this on lower difficulty levels? That would explain a lot :>
Yep, definitely.
-
Yeah. The stupid thing is, they put this limit onto anything attacking anything else.
So if you play on Very Easy, only three of the Sath's main beams will ever fire at once, and the Aquitaine fail to kill the SCv Tiamat. In some cases, the turret limit makes missions HARDER because your friendly capital ships fail so hard at shooting anything. Not to mention it's a massive balance breaker. The whole limit thing is retarded anyway. (I mean, limiting turrets shooting the player makes some sense, but limiting ALL turrets? That's, excuse the profanity, ****ing stupid design!)
-
So that`s why the Phonecia never used to get beamed by all 4!
-
Funnily enough, I've see it get beamed by all four on Very Easy more than once. :P
-
I can attest to that too.
-
Three fire then the fourth one charges up and fires before the first three expire. That is possible. They wouldn't all start at or near the same time though.
The limitation is more prominent on a ship where multiple types of weapons can all target the enemy. The AI doesn't know how to prioritize the most damaging weapons, so they end up firing flaks and blobs instead of beams most of the time, making it so that the Raynor can't really use all of its broadside firepower, and the Aquitaine can't kill the Tiamat even though it technically should have more than enough firepower to do it. That's the thing that ticked me off mostly (not much qualms about Shivans not engaging with maximum firepower :P)
-
Three fire then the fourth one charges up and fires before the first three expire. That is possible. They wouldn't all start at or near the same time though.
That looks cooler than all 4 firing at once I think.
-
Yep, in the same way how instead of 3 ships capships arriving at once, between each one there is a small delay.
-
Sadly FRED deals in seconds for delays so you can't make tons of subspace holes start one at a time and have them all finish appearing before the first ship sticks it's head through...it'd be better to have smaller intervals for chaining and delays... So I end up making everything jump in at the same time for a lesser effect >.> I'm talking about having stuff like 20 ships jumping in though.
(Yes, I know you can "hack" it using distances and stuff but IMO that's stupid and over convoluted for something that should be so simple!)
-
Actually you could, using the technique used for unknown subspace rifts/holes in Transcend. Use an identical class ship and as it appears use ship-dissapear SEXP. Repeat this for all other ships until the first ship to truly appear materializes.
However, for such an effect it takes a considerable amount of time and it is only worth doing for an in-game cutscene.
-
Three fire then the fourth one charges up and fires before the first three expire. That is possible. They wouldn't all start at or near the same time though.
But they do. I think it's a fire-beam sexp at work there.
-
Another thing we knew about the draft, Shivan ships in FS2 originally had Hindu-themed wing names like Kali and Arjuna. You can tell by the event names of some of the early missions involving Shivans, such as "Mystery of the Trinity". Similarly, NTF ships originally had names like Corsair and Bandit, this is actually seen in the briefing of "The Sixth Wonder", where we can clearly see a bomber wing named Bandit.
-
On lower difficulty levels, the rate at which the AI fires is restricted as well. On Insane, there is no limit, so they will be unloading everything that the game allows on you.
-
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Fs_trivia
There's heaps of information there already...
-
very easy, easy, medium, hard, insane
"$Max Turret Target Ownage: 3, 4, 7, 12, 19
$Max Turret Player Ownage: 3, 4, 7, 12, 19"