[Singh]

No chat?
Darn...

anyways, i've continued writing up the plot and i'm up to mission 4/10. problem is, i'm at a crossroads and seriously don't know where to go. The mission is such that many things can happen to effect the game and i just dont know what to do :/

[Knight Templar]

Originally posted by redsniper
All right, I think this should be done similarly to all the other campaigns (only the people working on it know the plot) but I also think it should have a much larger staff than the other campaigns.  Basically all of the HLP veterans/Gods/l33t etc. know the plot but the n00bs (myself included), and lurkers are left in the dark until it's finished.
For my plot suggestion: I remember from back in my lurking days there was someone claiming to have been one of the storywriters for FS3 before it got canceled. The story was that both the Great Wars had just been products of a bigger war between the Shivans and a fifth race: the Andarta, and that a task force was sent deep into Shivan space to investigate.
Whoa.. that was probably my biggest post yet

I don't think he was actually a writer, but he was approached by V to help write it, or something to that affect. Either way, it's on  his website, here.

Show some love to your master. :thepimp:

[karajorma]

Behind Enemy Lines

Quite a nice idea but nothing much seems to have happened to it. Now maybe if the community got behind it

[Nico]

Originally posted by redsniper
I just did a search for Freespace 2.9 and didn't find anything.  It must have been on the VBB.  Oh well, I'm sure one of the VBB survivors remembers what I'm talking about.

nah, I remember it, it was at HLP too. Btw, the plot was hella  bad so, you know...

edit: KT, no need to click my avatar, the site is gone, GS deleted my whole folder

[Martinus]

Originally posted by Singh
No chat?
Darn...

anyways, i've continued writing up the plot and i'm up to mission 4/10. problem is, i'm at a crossroads and seriously don't know where to go. The mission is such that many things can happen to effect the game and i just dont know what to do :/

[color=66ff00]I'd like to get a lot of people together on IRC at some point for some discussion.

At this point it looks like the jury plan is the most popular, nobody wants the open plot anyhow. Bear in mind that the jury might not be something you want to be on, you'll know the entire plot intimately. As to how the jury will be picked, well that's not decided at present but thanks for all the enthusiasm.
[/color]

[kasperl]

irc.sorcery.net #nodewar

not really HLP, but most people hang out there.

[Anaz]

yes....you will join #nodewar on irc.sorcery.net

[Ace]

Originally posted by Knight Templar



I don't think he was actually a writer, but he was approached by V to help write it, or something to that affect. Either way, it's on  his website, here.

Show some love to your master. :thepimp:

He approached Volition with the story, Volition replied that they were not interested or something to that effect.

Volition has a clear outline for FS3, the staff there who worked on FS1/2 still want to make FS3, but it's not going to happen anytime soon.

[Unknown Target]

For those of us who can't get on IRC, could you give us a brief overlay of what was said after you're done?


*still wants to be a judge*

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]Don't worry we're not going to be doing the IRC chat until we can find a suitable time slot that is convienient for a lot of people. We'll keep the discussion to the threads here for the time being.
[/color]

[KARMA]

some free thoughts:

if you want a "new game" (as I'd like..), you will need to avoid using copyrighted stuff at all (the code will remain under (c) so the game must be distributed for free obviously, but it will not be required to have fs2 to play it); this mean new interface (that can be done, as reported by black wolf, building up a little team), new sounds (shouldn't be so hard), new textures/models.
This means to don't use at all ships from fs2.
This could be necessary anyway since we are talking of old artwork, when we want something actual (in pcount and details) that fit the new possibilities of fs2open, but will also limit our possibilities of making a sequel of fs2, unless we rebuild completely most of the original ships.

At this point, well, probably the best solution would be to make something completely new, in a different universe than fs2,
OR
to imagine a far future that the timeline of fs2, with completely new freespacy ships (except a few that can be rebuilt at all).

I personally vote for the first choice, and i have an idea that could be *great* about a completely original story, but if we want to remain into the freespaceverse, we have to make some thoughts about
1-when (50 years after fs2 is ok i think)
2-what happened meanwhile (earth node opened with a portal, shivans never returned, new tecnology, problems with vasudans and earth people, too limited resources to build a fleet that can match shivans 'saths, politic discussions between those who want to completely isolate the known systems and those who want to explorate new systems, new allys/enemyes, new ancient artifacts, new informations about shivans,their origins, how they think, who lead em,etc etc )
3-what will happen now(the best starting point will be the answer to the questions opened in fs2 and those of point 2 in my list).

[Unknown Target]

Uh, no. This is a Freespace upgrade project after all, not a different game + universe.

[Tiara]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
Uh, no. This is a Freespace upgrade project after all, not a different game + universe.

[karajorma]

I still don't get why everyone has got such a bee in their bonnet about throwing away everything that wasn't made by the community.

1) Interplay don't appear to be the ogres they could be. They haven't complained about the HotU download. They haven't complained about fans distributing FS2 files in mods. In fact the only thing they've ever complained about is third party MVE players/extractors/converters. Apart from that they really don't seem to care about FS2 at all.

2) As I keep saying any community project based on FS2 automatically is copywrite to [V] or Interplay anyway AFAIK since it's based on their copywrited material. If I were to go out and write a Star Wars book and try to publish it I'd get sued cause my work would be judged to be a derivative work.
  AFAIK the same thing applies to video games. If Interplay decided that they did want to be evil they could come in and claim that all our campaigns based in the FS2 universe were infringing their copywrite and get them shut down.


 So no matter what we do with this project unless we set it in our own universe we'll never be completely safe from the (very slim) chance of someone taking exception and trying to close it down.
 All I'm saying I really don't think anyone would care if the FS2 Upgrade Project files included some stuff that belonged to the original FS2. So why make life difficult for ourselves?

[Black Wolf]

As I understand it, it's more Gamespy we need to worry about. As I understand it, one of the ultimate aims is to make the upgrade project downloadable on Fileplanet, and that means gettign through GS and all the copywrite laws that is has to abide by. We could probably get away with a few old V textures, or the old monochromes, but putting up the entire V interface, or some of the more recognizeable V ships (Orion, Fenris etc.) then we'd be just asking for trouble.

[kasperl]

why use GS?

why not put it up on Kazaa, or use lot's of FTP serves, like swooh, or HOTU, why not burn it on cd's and stuff it down people's throat?

[Gloriano]

because GS has Fileplanet  and   bandwith limits is proplem in other sites and kazaa is too slow


as for this topic make campaing that has good plot and few story twists

if this project using OTT models time line would be 30-80 years after capella

[Nico]

it may use the models, but there was no requet concerning the plot. so for me I don't care what they do about the ships history and stuff.
It might be a good idea to reskin all the terran ships btw, in that regard. In OTT there's clear reasons for why they look different, but for that project, people would wonder why the hell the terran ships are black or white/red and stuff.

[Unknown Target]

Could we move all download discussions into another topic? This, I believe, is storyline only

Anyways, one last parting word: we should use a different filesharing program, and bill the game as FS2.5, I believe. After all, we DON'T want Interplay getting involved (which they will have to, if we use a GS server), and the title will inform people of what the game is a continuation of. Also, we could put the game on a different server (such as freehosting, or some other such place).

[KARMA]

well i think this isn't only a thread to discuss about the story, (it has no sense to start posting the plot, if we still have to decide how the making the plot will be managed)

about copyright issue:

as far as i now, the laws are not completely strict, since (C)  shouldn't be applied to nonprofit projects that don't cause economic damages to the copyright owners. Problem is that this can lead to ambiguous interpretations, and if you really intend to produce an fs2.5 or fs3 or whatever, and release it as a standalone game, I suggest to take more informations possible about (c) problems.
Some examples: some years ago Paramount started some legal actions against owners of startrek fan sites, with the intention of being the only Startrek source on internet. As far as i know they failed (but i don't know if the legal action failed or they simply considered that there were too many fan sites and that it was turning in bad marketing)
a couple of years ago Sony started a legal action against all the magazines with a title containing playstation, psx or other variants, for making moneys using the name of their console
Some years ago a member of the community forums of xwing posted a communications he had with LEC (lucasart entertainment company, different than LucasFilms) where they said that they was going to start legal actions against whoever found using without permission the original artwork of their games.
At the same time Lucasfilm maintain a friendly policy with the fan sites, like TFN, that host a HUGE collection of unofficial comics, novels, games, films etc etc.
Recently Blizzard succesfully closed a community project, similar to ours, for an open source RTS, because it was too close to its own games and because it could use the same file format of some of his games.

What I'm trying to say is that if you don't get money from your work and you don't cause economic damage, you should be ok, but still you can have problems, depending by the company's policy, and you will have more likely problems when you use artwork that costed em money/time.
I know that always had a very friendly policy with us, I also know that interplay is surely not evil, but the point is that it would be better to reduce, and possibly avoid at all, any possible legal problem, to avoid working two years on a project that could be stopped whenever others want.
This is also the reason for Inquisitor some times ago was looking for the source code of the demo, since there was the possibility to distribute the demo artwork and therefore the possibility to distribute the mods as standalone game avoiding those (C) problems.
You can instead release mods, even when they use original artwork, since they require the original game to be played, and therefore not only they don't cause damages, but they also are be an addictive value to the original game.

Personally I think that, if we want to release this thing as a standalone game, we MUST contact first and or interplay and ask them permission to use the freespace storyline and the original game artwork for a new free open source game based on the fs2code, as IIRC others did for another community project about a new descent game.