[Fineus]

The trouble being of course - that you need an objective that can be completed whilst still swamping the player in ships (both friendly and hostile).

Ironically - XW:Alliances final BoE missions actually pulled this off as you struggled to reach a certain place / kill a certain number of enemy and what have you. It's very hard to do.

[Woolie Wool]

Originally posted by InfernoGod
Yeah, I've tried BoE missions a few times (becuz they were absolutely critical to the storyline of the campaign I made), and they are a huge pain in the ass. It takes forever to get everything balanced, and to code everything just right. I have a computer that can handle the BoE missions, but just because mine can it isn't saying that others can't. So don't try looking. Because you won't find many- if any at all.

Yeah. The knife-edge balance is destroyed by the hordes of ships. Inferno is about as far as you can go in that direction and still have it enjoyable.

[Getter Robo G]

In the last mission of the Macross part of RTII you should get the feeling that you are in a battle with 4 million enemy cap ships... In the alpha test I had waves of Caps instead of just fighters (each one individually fredded for arrival based on time back then as SDF-1 obilterated several every few minutes.)

[MetalDestroyer]

Hum, There are a time I was fredding to much i realize some BoE mission, and the computer are still alive, BUT the mission will be too difficult that i Have to play on GOD mode.

I've put at first one Sathannas, followed by a multiple cruisers (Demon, Ravana, Rakhasa, and so on, with a multiple wings og fighters and bombers.

But i put 7 wings no more because FRED2 doesn't support more than 300 objects. So to make a good BoE, I have to deal with the reinforcement.

[MetalDestroyer]

Originally posted by Kalfireth

Ironically - XW:Alliances final BoE missions actually pulled this off as you struggled to reach a certain place / kill a certain number of enemy and what have you. It's very hard to do.

If you take the final BoE from Rogue Leader, there no limits on killing ennemy.

[Woolie Wool]

I'm planning to use backgrounds to simulate the hundreds of thousands of cap ships that slug it out in Starforce battles. Just make background images depicting huge fleets and put them wherever.

[TopAce]

X-wing Alliance did the same, I don't suggest it, it does not make the feeling of having encircled with warships.

[Dark RevenantX]

Fred2 crashes when I reach a certain poly-count.  This means that I have 14 induvidual Sathanases, and if I add another, it crashes.  If I add a Triton, it does not.

I tried BoE styles before, and I realized that it becomes a game of Dodge the Bar with all the red and green beams criscrossing in every possible direction.

[karajorma]

I don't think it's the poly count that's killing it. It's the number of subsystems.

[StratComm]

Yeah FRED has a hard limit on the number of objects in a mission, which refers to anything with hitpoints.  I think the formula is (number of ships + total number of subsystems on all ships), not counting fighters in additional wings.  By the time you get that high, Freespace will be crawling anyway unless you're using highly optimized models, and even then you've got issues with the number of rendering calls on all subsystems.

[TopAce]

[size=12]MISSION[/size]

This is a gigantic mission.

[taylor]

Subsys_status is dynamically allocated now in the new builds.  There could be other limits to worry about but theoretically this will allow *really* large missions.  There are plenty of existing missions which go over the old limit.  New builds will allocate it in relatively small blocks, until you run out of memory anyway.  Should be able to fit at least 1,500 without worry though.

The other issue for mission size is the number of different models used.  Before you were limited by the number of ships/subsystems, now you are only limited by the number of different ships loaded.  If anyone has a large mission which still doesn't work with the newest builds then let me know and I'll see what I can do about it.  No promises but we are in the process of removing as many hardcoded limits as possible anyway.