[Neural_Kernel]

I have an idea for a game and I want to run it by as many people as possible. I think, after looking at several software projects and their respective communities, that the Freespace Engine might be able to do what I have in mind with a bit of work. While I think I can do most of the work myself there are some pretty big gaps in my understanding of how do some things I need.
First I guess I'll try to paint a general outline of the game I want to play.

Boiled down, it's a semi-realistic tactical space simulator with a “newtonian” flight model and an emphasis on small fleets of large ships in a large theatre of operation. The ship models would be very simple, constructed procedurally from a list of subsystem (themselves coloured geometric primitives) forming a convex point cloud “hull”. I think a good way to represent a wide range of the myriad gameplay options the Freespace Engine has to offer is to deliberately use the simplest graphics possible, including just enough visual detail to convey useful gameplay information. Although a governed top speed and unlimited but weak navigation thrusters can be justified (every ship needs a magnetic sail according to the safety regulations?) I think the main engines should be limited to a total amount of deltaV like in real life. The way to do this that makes the most sense to me is to treat the weapons and thrusters as the same thing. Any rocket motor with decent specific impulse would be a sweet particle beam and mass drivers are useful for far more than just pelting enemies with ball bearings. Make every shot apply accelleration to both the firing ship and any target it strikes, make almost every weapon use finite ammo to represent limited deltaV. Now now only can you knock enemies off course even if you can't directly harm them but you can boost allies to greater speeds than they'd be capable of solo by shooting them in the ass!
This has real world precedent, mass drivers by definition can be used as thrusters and the MagBeam concept expands the concept to plasma rockets.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagBeam

As well as imparting different amounts of deltaV Mass Drivers would damage the hull directly. Particle beams would degrade the magnetic sail (shields) and directed energy weapons would drain energy (by heating the radiators, thus lowering the efficiency of the generators).
The six systems above are all the different types needed for gameplay, three weapons and related “defenses”. Kinetic / Armour, Particle / Sail, Laser /Radiator.
Radiators represent energy production, a hotter reactor means more energy but also more waste heat. They must be arranged in a convex shape to avoid warming each other, one more reason to keep ship hulls simple! The energy produced can be directed between engines, weapons and shields... but the more heat you radiate the easier you are to detect. The weapons ARE the engines, but the magsail can also be used as a ramscoop so an afterburner for the otherwise feeble navigation drive can be justified and can draw power as the engines. Higher energy directed to the weapons will make them hit harder and give you more thrust per shot. Sails (shields) are treated like “normal” deflector shields.

 A compact, graphically lightweight Total Conversion completely free of any IP complications would also simplify distribution and make impromptu events like LAN parties easier to set up.
I'm most interested in developing this mod to explore the “real world” tactics of space combat, but there is the possibility of either developing a whole new storyline or adapting an existing universe with a permissive license. The Universe I would personally most enjoy adapting a space combat sim for is Eclipse Phase. It's a fairly hard science fiction RPG released under a Creative Commons license and is set in our solar system after a devastating war with machines gone wild.

I would tentatively like to call this Total Conversion “Re: Action” to emphasize the Newtonian flight model and hacker friendly intentions of the project.

Thoughts?

[zookeeper]

There's a few major obstacles I can see:

1. AI. If you mean it to have a single-player mode, or AI-controlled ships in multiplayer missions, then there's no way the AI would be able to play it properly.

2. The armour/sail/radiator mechanics are also probably somewhat possible with scripting, but there's really no telling for sure beforehand, as it seems that often when you try to script something complicated and hacky like that, it might work but end up interfering with other things in unacceptable ways.

It's hard to say whether it's possible exactly according to your spec or not. There's more to it than just checking whether there exists scripting functions which in theory provide you with all the necessary information and controls.

[Neural_Kernel]

Is there no AI that can handle newtonian flight? The Cylons seemed to do alright and I seem to remember getting shot by a few fighters flying sideways in B5...
I don't want a fully newtonian sim or anything, just a sparsely populated arena a few hundred kilometers in radius, DeltaV of a few kilometers per second and the quickest ships topping out at maybe a couple Gs (unassisted...). It would be largely meant as a multiplayer game at first, but I figure a big part of space war is going to be fighting with drones anyways so I suppose developing AI routines for them IS a priority!
Honestly I'm not sure how to proceed, though. I've been playing around with blender, just building "point clouds" out of a half dozen types of "modules", but I don't even know how to set things up for a brand new TC.
Can someone just... sort of nudge me off towards where I need to go?

[zookeeper]

Is there no AI that can handle newtonian flight? The Cylons seemed to do alright and I seem to remember getting shot by a few fighters flying sideways in B5...

Yeah it can handle that, but the whole "weapons and thrusters are the same" thing not so much.

[Neural_Kernel]

I can tweak the AI once I get the environment set up it'll be flying in, that's currently the main stumbling block I'm hitting. All the tutorials out there keep telling me that I need a copy of Freespace to mod the open source engine. Getting a legit copy isn't impossible for me but it is a hassle and is part of the reason I'm interested in making this a completely standalone game. How do I set that up? Do I need to compile the whole thing from source? Can I just write up a weird looking set of mod files? I mean, it's meant to be a really simply looking game. Potentially lot's of effects from the engine but using very simple models and textures. Partly I want it to be extremely compact, not tiny but easily something you could copy from a thumb drive without getting bored watching the bar move. Partly I want lots of gameplay variety and the noise from procedural content seems like a perfect fit for building fleets of warships to duke it out with, mostly I just don't want to have to model and animate anything more than I have to! So how do I set up a modding environment with no existing content except what I make myself?

[MatthTheGeek]

If you want to mod on FSO and make a standalone without buying FS2 nothing prevents you to get started from TBP or Diaspora, who are both standalones, and hence have all the required content you'll need to at the bare minimum launch the game.

You can but do not have to compile the source code. FSO builds, although always designed with compatibility with retail assets in mind, do not require them, as proved by standalones like TBP and Diaspora.

[Neural_Kernel]

Nice, thanks! I figured I might grab a few tricks from both Diaspora and B5. Do I need to do any engine level tweaks to set up what amounts to newtonian capital ships?
Also, are the procedural ships as easy as it sounds? I mean... honestly I feel a little dumb already and don't want step 2 to be worse than both steps 1 and 0!

[Nuke]

pure newtonian flight doesnt work well in this engine. my atmo script included a basic set of orbital mechanics features, which dont work very well because of numerical stability issues. also the freespace ai was completely incapable of flying properly under the physics model. not even to mention the crashes resulting from shooting at things.

your concept sounds a lot like space combat or ksp. space combat sucked because it doesnt deal with numerical stability at all, and frankly despite its name it doesn't do a very good job at simulating combat. you are limited to 2 weapons, and the game is more about building massive starships that pretty much dont do anything useful. ksp lacks the combat aspect (you can get weapons with mods but ammo is a problem) and is more about launching and exploring rather than fighting. its a concept i like though.

i started a game engine written entirely in lua and want to port my atmospheric/orbital engine over to it to see if i can overcome the numerical stability issues. i kinda wanted the whole modular construction, an idea i got from the rts battleships forever. it would of course be done with geometry rather than sprites, sort of in the ksp way (except that building your ship would be done over time rather than all at once, as you buy, sell, and upgrade your ship as the game progresses). the game would also feature aspects like elite/frontier/privateer/freelancer/etc in that it would be an open game with some trading (though most of the money for upgrades would be gained through mission pay). you would start the game as a fighter and add on to your ship until you have a massive warship.

of course the freespace engine, even with scripting, is a poor choice for such a game. nothing really prevents you from faking or fudging it (in the way diaspora/b5 tcs do it). in which case realistic enough would suffice. modular construction can be done to a degree. and freespace has really good weapons with tons of features. so you could still produce a fairly good tc out of it, if you want to sacrifice some realism.

[Thaeris]

I would throw in a pitch for Starshatter here, as it has semi-Newtonian physics (this is actually a good reason to dig up Space Combat, which is full-Newtonian; you'll see the differences in flight between SS and SC pretty quick, especially when turning) from the get-go. It's also suited to controlling both capships and fighters. Considering that both programs are free, there's no reason not to try them.

[Neural_Kernel]

I've already seen both games and played around quite a bit with various real newtonian simulators. I can already plot orbits, navigate from planet to planet and do a few celestial navigation tricks. A tactical game at that scale would be pretty cool but would probably need a engine built specially for it and isn't what I'm trying to make here. Starshatter is probably the closest existing game to what I have in mind, I'd probably put my idea partway between Diaspora, Starshatter and Homeworld... with a few extra tricks that approximate real life newtonian flight in certain ways I think would make for interesting and varied combat scenarios fun to play instead of a bunch of math homework

I may be calling it "Newtonian" when I mean something a bit different. I'm thinking of something like flying corvettes or frigates in Homeworld but with "high speed" drifting for "long range" flights of more than a few kilometers. What I want to "simulate" is closing with (or fleeing!) the enemy once you've already matched vectors on the larger scale. The deltaV / Ammo budget would be about a dozen kps depending on the various systems comprising the ship.In general you would have to trade accelleration for deltaV when designing a ship, with various other factors like energy or stealth requirements also playing a role.
As an example of a realistic "newtonian" drive I think the engine could handle, an Orion Nuclear Pulse Drive would be simulated just by setting a missile fuse to explode right after launch. Although it isn't a beam, I'd say it's fair to let the magsail absorb the "kick" from a nuclear blast, letting shields absorb the damage while you ride the knockback into a new vector. So basically it's just implementing a kind of "rocket jump" in the Freespace Engine, and any number of quake bots could probably be frankensteined into the AI somehow
Once I'm happy with a simple way to do procedural hull models I figure I'll start playing with weapon settings and placements to see what combinations work for other kinds of reaction drives. I figure beam weapons would work nicely for high isp rocket motors and explosives cover pulse drives... can you have AI wingmen dock with you? If you could "catch" and "throw" smaller craft that, along with a plain old "autocannon" mode would be ideal to represent Mass Drivers. Every ship will probably have a primary and secondary weapon so just assign one to normal thrusters and the other to afterburners. Include an invisible and massless "turret" to designate the thrust vector and have the individual engine modules all fire towards that vector whenever you apply thrusters. No ammo... no thrusters... unless you get someone to "rearm" you or shoot you with a missile...
The AI can't do it now, but I figure we humans (and any cylon or TITAN infiltrators...) can figure out some interesting tactical scenarios!
As far as realism goes overall... I don't want to include anything proven impossible by modern science but otherwise almost anything goes. If there is a gameplay element or engine limitation that gets in the way of doing things the NASA way then don't worry. I don't see any obstacles that need major modification to the engine itself to solve so far, might as well plan to keep it that way and see how close to "real" is possible with scripting hacks and the like.
I haven't spent much time looking at how weapons are handled, but there is knockback already present I believe, so that can be used to implement at least the pulse drive without too much trouble.
Just so I've got an idea, are there many of you interested in this project? I'm learning as I go and will keep playing around no matter what but if there's a few of you keen on what I'm going for I wouldn't say no to any help!
Once things are working even half-assed I figure I'll also need some folks to "spar" with and help come up with AI ideas and dirty tactics, I've got a few friends here that might fight me but some of them are pacifists and not many of them are mean enough to get into the proper mindset of a combat space pilot!!
Anyways, thanks to everybody for the feedback so far! Keep it coming!

[Blazar]

Why not Mod a game space tactical rts which already has these features in the game engine already.

This comes to mind:

http://nexusthegame.net/wiki/Nexus_-_The_Jupiter_Incident

http://www.moddb.com/games/nexus-the-jupiter-incident/#1929416

And the Modders at this site can help:

http://arparso.de/nexus/forum/index.php

[General Battuta]

Unless your game is multiplayer only you are going to need to do extensive AI work. FreeSpace has effectively no warship maneuvering AI; all warship handling beyond 'fly directly at the enemy' is pretty much scripted.

[Droid803]

You get get capships to fly like fighters (well, bombers), but that doesn't turn out pretty either.