[Exquire]

Hey crew

I want to introduce what I'm doing here 'cos no doubt I'll soon be asking for truckloads of advice.

I'm creating a LARP game called Nibelungen which is a space opera about a group of renegade alien refugees who have crash landed on Earth.

Much/most of the game will be spent on earth staying alive, blending in with humans, making repairs to their ship and mobilising an army to take to the skies and defeat the baddies in their big bad ships.

But some of the game will be played in the space ship. In space.

There'll be about ten to fifteen people aboard the ship, four of which will be interfacing with the ship's controls to pilot it. I intend to build a "bridge" and set up a projector screen and whopper of a sound system. This is the likely configuration:



I've got a total playing time in Freespace of a few hours, but I'm absolutely convinced this is the one to use. I'm going to have to make/mod the following fighting environments:

1. Earth's atmosphere
Ideally with clouds, and cities/ oceans below the clouds and the evening sky above them.

2. Fighting above Earth
Dog-fighting alone or in groups against swarms of fighters. Earth in the backdrop ESSENTIAL.

3. Big ugly ships in space the players can fly into/out of - like a 3D maze inside a massive spaceship. Stuff like fly in, shoot the core, fly out, boom. Terribly exciting.


I don't have any questions yet, but watch this space 'cos I'm bound to have a lot. If you guys have feedback on this stuff: "Oh, there's a downloadable map just like that" or "You're missing vital controls in your configuration!" please let me know. If you're in New Zealand and you'd like to play, definately let me know

I'm looking to start running games in early 2007. I've done a lot of work on it all already, but just started my foray into software for the space sim. I'm absolutely stoked to find such a bubbly community and I just had to tell you what I'm doing.

[aceofspades]

Uh...the first thing I can think of saying is that you've set your expectations rather high. You know that everything the SCP did took several years, right? Anyway, the main thing I'm talking about is having a fight on Earth. Modding that is a huge project, the fs2_open engine has to bend a lot for that. However, there is something similar to what you might be thinking of: the Starfox:Shadow of Lylat project. A while ago they released a trailer showing a fighter flying around fighting inside a city. I'll point you to the trailer if I find it and you can't. You should really just consider asking how you could use some of the modding they've done.
As to dogfighting above earth, the actual fighting part is basically what fs is all about. It happens in practically every mission in existence. The 'earth in backgroun' is trivial, since the're are planet background images in lots of missions. The main reason there are typically not earth is that the pilot is often cut off from the Sol system. Nonetheless, it has already been done: the Inferno mod has a mission where you're involved in a massive battle between multi-destroyer fleets with the earth in the background.
As to flying inside ships with weird shapes...that's rather extreme. I don't know how the engine would handle that, or how complicated it would be to model. BUT it's well known that some ships, juggernaughts for example, have massive fighterbays capable of holding capital ships. So it's fairly easily possible to make a mission where the player has to fly into the insides of a suitably shaped ship, with a crucial subsystem located there that cannot be reached otherwise. Once the player is inside, they blow up the system. A SEXP makes the subsystem's destruction cause the ship's destruction. Then, of course, the player has to get OUT of the ship before they're vaporized   
I hope that helped, and I wasn't too discouraging.

[Exquire]

Exactly the kind of info I'm after.

I've set my expectations pretty high so I can expect to get close I'm well aware the software side of things is likely to be pretty long and complicated, and I'm definately willing to compromise. Maybe the fight in the atmosphere just has to be a fight "close" to Earth instead. I'll find out along the way - as I play the original and its mods and learn what's possible.

[NGTM-1R]

While the FS engine is to some extent a child of the Descent engine, the FS AI can't handle combat in enclosed spaces; Woomeister had similar plans for the SH Gargant once, but interior defenses proved difficult to implement as they'd subtract from the exterior turret count (which has to be pretty high if you're flying around inside; even the Colossus and Sathanas don't have that much volume), and AI-controlled fighters kept smashing into things, blowing up, and looking generally dumb. You can technically get them to follow a path through the interior via waypoints, but not fight properly inside.

[Annorax]

A cross between Alien Nation and FS? Sweet.

[Exquire]

Thanks for your help, guys. I've been off getting hardware/costuming etc but the software issue is really looming

So I can start trying some of the basic stuff I wanna do, can anyone link me to a few earth backgrounds? I see them in screenshots but I couldn't find anywhere to just download the background..