[Towani]

What do you think the prospects are for adding the ability for players to fly capital ships fully into the Freespace 2 source code project?

Currently the situation is if you set a mission as a Red Alert you can have players flying any ship. One of the biggest problems is that the turrets don't work. Yet the turrets work on the Bombers that have them, so is there something in the source code disabling the turrets if a player is flying a capital ship or non-player ship?

Making your own mission to test flying a capital ship is easy, but I have made an example mission anyway. It's a multiplayer Co-Op mission I've called 'CapShip Race' and it can be found here:
http://www.angelfire.com/falcon/danproject/fsfiles.htm

Here's some notes on the mission:
1. As the game is set up to not allow players to fly capital ships normally it is unstable and may crash during play.
2. There's a bug in FS2 that makes it so there are faces but no message text. As a result you may not know who won until you reach the debriefing.
3. Remember the '.' key on the numberpad allows you to pan around your ship. (Flying a gunless Capship can get boring. But at least you can choose where to fly it.)
4. Try editing the mission to change the Capship you are flying. Some are more fun than others. (Caution: FRED will remove the player starts, so you will have to text edit them back in.)
5. There are no respawns because respawning in a non-player ship turns you into a Ulysses.
6. It takes a while for an Orion to jump out.

[FreeTerran]

One PILOT fly a BIG CAPITAL SHIP ?

[karajorma]

For once I agree with Free Terran. Since you can`t control the turrets the big question is what is the point?

Now if you can get millenium falcon style turrets which you revolve around and shoot at fighters there might be more of a point but flying around at 10m/s is not my idea of fun.

[Petrarch of the VBB]

Ahh, but if it were made like Allegience, where every ship, every turret is controllable, then FS could be made Massivley-Multi-Player!

[FreeTerran]

Imagine you 300 human players steering a Colossus in the multi player mode.

OH MY GOD

[Petrarch of the VBB]

Are you happy? Your pestering has paid off, my little Acolyte.

[FreeTerran]

Argh....
Don't named me ACOLYTE !!!

[Petrarch of the VBB]

Why ever not, my little Somtaaw?

[FreeTerran]

Whats a Somtaaw ?
And how many posts must i write that i'm a Tapper ?

[Petrarch of the VBB]

Originally posted by Free Terran
Whats a Somtaaw ?
Oh dear
And how many posts must i write that i'm a Tapper ?
You're not. I was a tapper the moment I joined, so were the others. However Shrike must have decided that you are an acolyte

[FreeTerran]

[WMCoolmon]

Just make the Orion a little more maneuverable, remove its engines, and you have a...
Hercball bat![/i][/u]

[Petrarch of the VBB]

Quite.

And I suppose the goal would be the hole in an Arcadia?

[WMCoolmon]

That's the secret Volition's been keeping all these years.

And the Cain would make a great catcher...

[Towani]

Has anyone ever flown a Star Destroyer or Assault Frigate on XWing Alliance? You only need a modified shiplist.txt.

Of course, capital ship support in that game wasn't fully implemented either. But the turrets do work, just differently: Only around 15 can fire at once instead of all of them, the ones nearest the target fire so which ones are shooting spreads across the ship at the target moves. The fire is much more intense than an AI controlled capital ship and the lasers are always the rebel type. Also it is much easier to disable the systems of a player capital ship but on the other hand the systems auto repair.

In that game there is a tatical purpose to flying capital ships. You can turn your ship to protect the shield generators, which the AI is pathetic at defending. You can also swat fighters if they don't move it once you start turning vertically, as collisions with starships tend to be very deadly. Players know when someone is blindfiring them with missiles too and can quickly target the offending vessel. An AI starship ignores blindfired missiles heading for its hull. With a player flying the primary mission objective the other players can have more confidence in its survival. Following the same old attack routine every time won't work.

In Freespace 2 there is more potential scope. Firstly, you can actually send messages to the other players in game instead of being limited to 4 preset messages. The player would be acutely aware of their ship's status, which may well be a mission objective to protect, and could quickly communicate to allies for assistance. Secondly, even if just the turrets were fixed so they fire and nothing else by using the ignore target order you could redirect firepower more to the immediate threats. Thirdly Freespace 2 is much more moddable so there is the potential for someone to create a much more fun to pilot capital ship, but only if there is the implementation there to build it for.

[Galemp]

You'd get more leverage on the Colossus though. Smack a Demon into the arms of a Sathanas...

Just to make this post not entirely spam, don't forget about the subsystem-damage gague on your HUD. Too many damaged turrets and the game crashes. Good capship flying would only be possible, IMO, in Freelancer, where you can control the turrets either as gunpoints or in tracking mode. (I'd like to see an automated mode, too, but that's not relavent.)

[KARMA]

i'd like to fly a capship in game only in multiplayer and only if this mean that the capship commander have an overall strategic view (with something like homeworld commands)
that would be great...but this would also mean a completely different kind of game than actual fs2...

[Hippo]

I made a mission for flying an orion... ships could leave MY hanger too, but beam damage would crash the game, and you can't warp out because the orion only hits 15m/s...

[##UnknownPlayer##]

Interestingly most of the problems here just sound like they need to be isolated and have some bounds checking added (most crashes = overwriting memory you don't own). I reckon we could make flying capships pretty damn stable in fs2_open.

[StratComm]

Originally posted by Free Terran
One PILOT fly a BIG CAPITAL SHIP ?

What, you would expect more than one person to fly the thing?

Pilot 1:  "Coming to port 25 degrees, hold her steady..."

Pilot 2:  "No, let's go left!"

Pilot 1:  "But I'm going right!"

Pilot 2:  "I want to go left!"

And the ship gets lost in confusion as it trys to simultaneously turn in opposite directions...

Seriously though, the pilot wouldn't be the commanding officer (or even necessarily close to command-level) but there would still be only one pilot.

As for player-flyable capships, make the forward beam array primary, but let the rest of the turrets operate autonomously at an enhanced level of AI.  That way you wouldn't have to multitask so much when controlling shots and such, just point and shoot.  The orion would be problematic, as it has no forward beam weaponry to speak of (they are only on the big double-axis turrets, not actually forward-facing) but most FS2 ships would do fine with some [extensive] modification.