[mikhael]

Originally posted by Stryke 9
Few games can aspire higher than to be a clone of Independence War, don't see what the complaint there is. Unless it's the evil evil I-War 2 you're thinking, which is evil and should die and not be imitated in the least because it sucked ass and was a puzzle-based game. That's not personal taste, that's the truth- it murders Christian babies and sells their captured souls to Satan in exchange for puppies to torture and drown.

Iwar2's Flux is what every space combat game engine wishes it could be. All others are week and pathetic by comparison.

[Stryke 9]

Graphical engine was nice, yes. Matter of fact, everything was nice except the game they'd made to use all that stuff, which was why it sucked so horribly. Otherwise, it would have simply been a **** game, end of story. It was like they made the engine, finished the physics model, did the ships, crafted the Universe, did all the weapons and balanced out combat and so on and so forth, then got sick of it and let Billy from Mrs. Henderson's fourth grade class handle the gameplay and story arc.

Contrast to the original- ugly as all hell, you only get one (albeit quite versatile) ship, thoroughly linear until the very end, maddeningly difficult, and fun.

One had you improvising in combat and pushing a vessel that handled like a space cow to overcome often ridiculous odds for a clear cause, the other had you ferrying around ****in' cargo crates to no end. See a slight distinction?

[karajorma]

I didn't mind I-War II when I went off on my own and pick fights but the main campaign had some serious problems.

I got quite far but I gave up when I got to the final chapter when I came across a mission I couldn't beat after 3 tries. It wasn't that the mission was too hard that annoyed me. It was that it took 9 f**king minutes of complete inaction to get to the point I was failing on. In the rest of that time my ship was simply travelling to the location where the mission took place.

And lets not mention the fact that places actually took longer to get to once you got the capsule drive because the ship insisted on flying to an L-point and taking 3 minutes to get somewhere it could get to in 30 seconds using its near light speed drive!

[mikhael]

I remember a heck of a lot more combat than cargo pod ferrying. Off the top of my head, I can only think of three times when you had to ferry a cargo pod--unless you're talking about Jafs pickups.

The thing that killed me about Iwar2 was the unfinished nature of the engine. Infogrames forced PS to release the game before it was ready. That's why we had framework for, but no actual hooks for, upgradable PBCs for example. The story arc was enjoyable, pirating rocked (though the random distress calls should have been done better and some civilian cruiseship pirating would have been nice) and I absolutely loved the combat. There was a grand total of one mission that annoyed me (Escort the antimatter cargo, toward the end).

The only serious changes I would make to Iwar2 to make it better would be to add:
- time compression
- remove flight assist completely
- add a proper vertical thrust vector (you have to disable laterals to get a dorsal/ventral thrust right now)
- switch POG out for Python
- reimplement all in game systems in POG (basically ship control and weapons need to be rewritten)
- add a Padlock view

That pretty much covers it. Everything else about the game is spot on, as far as I'm concerned.

[Unknown Target]

Milo, I'm not saying the game is bad, I'm saying it can use some work, at least on the model front.

In fact, I think the game is quite incredible, especially considering that it's all done by you, correct?

I have not played the latest release, however, so I don't know what everybody's saying. But from my experience, you have a pretty solid game going, you just need better models If you need any help, I'll  be glad to give it

Anyway, if I may suggest one thing about the ships: you need to define the ship stylings. If you do not have a storyline just yet (another thing many people here, including myself) could help out on, you should get a rough thing down, and define a "good" side and a "bad" side, and decide on ship stylings for both.

[Flipside]

Well, the laser effects are good, ad I get the feeling, much as the stuff that was done for the SCP at first, there are a couple of 'let's get the Engine working' ships in there. It's easy to enhance, and I'm sure a few models will see a re-work before the end

Good stuff

Flipside

[Stryke 9]

Mik: Perhaps I have more discerning tastes in piracy, I dunno. I think it wouldn't have bothered me half so much if I got a clear idea of some sort of exchange rate- it was all "collect X number of random cargo class and we'll give you another PBC", X being just about anything and "random cargo class" being same. After a while of putting up with this ****, I found it was much easier to just go on random raids and grab whatever I could without dying than it was to remember what specific exchange would get me what desirable item. And that was just lame, turned the whole thing into "future grocery trip"- I didn't know what I was getting, didn't know whether it was worth bothering for, didn't have the flexibility to do anything more fun than shoot the transport then blow up the escorts (read: board and hijack the ship, use fleet tactics or set traps beyond the basic-beyond-basic mines and "go get 'em, boys" which didn't really have any advantages over just rushing in- though I hear Ifleet solved this, lay total siege to stations in exchange for larger hauls), it was a wash. Were the piracy any fun at all (and, I mean, come on. Escape Velocity managed to make piracy fun as all hell, game was a quadrillionth as complex as I-War) I could have put up with the lame campaign. Were the campaign anything more than basically a series of puzzles (and rather nonintuitive, awkward ones at that), I could have mostly ignored the bad piracy and just gone through the campaign. Both sucked ass.


But anyway. Enough about one of the many names of the Devil. Starshatter. Right. Um, not a lot to add there. It does its thing, ugly models, everything else fine in my boat. Think I covered my initial impressions.

[mikhael]

The key was knowing where to get stuff. Say you needed to drop some bulk load lifters (which is construction gear) for a Neturon PBC.  You head off for a developing planet and jack the freighters coming by. Mainly the whole grocery list thing was a way of getting you to be more discerning about your piracy. Me, I just found rich rich rich LaGs and jacked the hell out of them. Of course, I went on pirating trips for fun.  I don't see where you get "lots of puzzles" from (like I said, I remember what? three? and they were all on one mission). Each to his own.

I never played Escape Velocity, but I keep hearing its good. One of these days I will seek it out.

[an0n]

The demo is good, if not somewhat lacking in......pazzaz. But it is, after all, only a demo.

Whatcha need to do, milo, is release an updated demo.


Oh and make the textures more detailed.

[Carl]

Originally posted by milo
Anyway, see if you like this design any better.  It's a more advanced fighter that you encounter later in the game.

much better

[TrashMan]

Originally posted by milo

Yes, but I don't like the way the Freespace ships look.  I prefer designs that are sharp and angular, like the Raptor I posted above.  Everyone has different tastes.

Fortunately, Starshatter is easy to mod.

WOW!!!!
Freespace 2 as a sim-strategy!
Can't wait to command a fleet of Orions and Deimos!!!!

[Unknown Target]

Hey Milo, are you planning multiplayer?

[Stryke 9]

Mik: You should, it's definitely one of those bits of gaming history. Um, stay away from EV Nova, though, it's not all that great. Pretty, but not as freeform somehow.

[milo]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
Hey Milo, are you planning multiplayer?

Yes, multiplayer support is basically done.  You can run fighter melees head-to-head, or starship missions, or co-op ground assaults, or whatever floats your boat.  The multiplayer game host can use the built in mission editor to create a custom scenario, and the game will automatically distribute it to all the other players.

You can run the game as a dedicated multiplayer server, or host the multiplayer server in the same process as the player GUI - just like in Freespace 2.  Unlike FS2, you can join missions in progress if you arrive at the server after the game has already started.  If you are not the game host, you can even exit the simulation and reenter in control of a different ship.  There is a cool wargame scenario where two small fleets square off in a single system.  You can take command of the carrier and create fighter packages to attack enemy ships, and then real live pilots can jump into the fighters and fly them.

I don't know how well it will work over slow dialup connections.  The game design requires a lot of data to be shipped over the network, especially if you are in a starship battle with lots of defensive gun turret fire.  But it works great on a LAN, and seems to be fine over cable and DSL.

I just need to add some code to check that everyone is using the same version of the game, and has the same list of mods configured - to make cheating more difficult.  I was originally going to use an SHA1 digest challenge/response to verify the mods, but I'm concerned about performance.  DamoclesX's Babylon5 mod is well over 150 MB of data (compressed!).  I need to test the SHA1 code to see if it will take too long to digest a mod archive of that size.

Anyway, it's not quite the level of multiplayer support you'd find in Quake 3 Arena, but I think it is above average for the space sim genre.

[adwight]

If Starshatter is better than sex, this world is coming to an end.

[Baron MacDoblin]

Repent, harlequin!

[an0n]

Originally posted by adwight
If Starshatter is better than sex, this world is coming to an end.

Or Milo is becoming the next Bill Gat.......oh.....wait. Nevermind.

[TrashMan]

A one-person job...awensome!

Hey Milo, if you need any help at anything, I'm sure the people of the HLP will be more than happy to help!:yes:

[Baron MacDoblin]

IMHO, the Vega Strike games under Howard Day have done a good job of making the Terran ships both utiltarian and unique, if a bit vertically-oriented.