[Carl]

stop trying to make Freespace into more than one game, people.

[Bobboau]

hmmm, freespace with a FPS engine, that reminds me of something but I'm quite sure what...

[StratComm]

Thank you Bob, the similarities were becoming quite eerie.

In short, if you want to play a FPS, do it in an FPS.  There's no place for it in a flight sim, and games that try to do a combination of the two inevitably suck at both.

[Deepblue]

Can we please get bumpmaps, and for the love of god can someone please fix the stars so they look nice?

[Lynx]

FPS or not, it'd be immensly useful for cutscenes, though. It's a difference if you have 50 mb of cutscene models and levels isntead of 500mb rendered cutscenes.
Of course it'd be cool if the FS engine itself had the ability to pull that off, but right now it hasn't.

[Turnsky]

Originally posted by Carl
stop trying to make Freespace into more than one game, people.

i agree with carl here, Freespace is a space sim, pure and simple..

if you wanna get "FPS-y" with freespace, the best one could do, is a launch sequence from a destroyer, like, from the flight deck, carried by that arm, to the launch area.. that's about the limit of it, i think.. and with those little low-poly figures milling about like ants below you.. like i mentioned before, it'd add dimension to it all.. but having an FPS, would be a bad idea..

the best use of an FPS theme would be a POV shot of the pilot as he/she walks to the briefing room, and takes a seat, ala starlancer.

and bob hassa point, it's freespace, not derekspace

[Lynx]

Originally posted by Turnsky
i agree with carl here, Freespace is a space sim, pure and simple..

Read.my.post.

 I didn't say anywhere that I want an FPS, but it'd be very useful for making cutscenes of any sort, á la Freelancer for example, without the downside of rendered cutscenes that take up loads of space. This way you could fit many character based cutscenes into the game without them taking up as much space as prerendered ones; and you wouldn't be limited to a certain resolution for them too.

As for other ideas, a killboard would be cool for character based campaigns. Not what we have now, but a real killboard where you could look how you compare with other pilots.

[Bobboau]

hmmm... if it wasn't a colosul amount of work I'd like the ability to skelitaly animate subobjects. the ability to have charicter models in game would own, the best we can do now is just have a static charicter sit there motionless,or animated as a serese of subobjects.
it would be cool to fly up to a window on a ship and see people wlaking along. all we can do right now unfortunately is have them sitting there.

but this has given me an idea. one day I will use my subobject detail code and add in rooms and people to my Deimos model that you'd be able to see through the windows, they wouldn't do anything, the'y be to engrosed with there desk work to notice the massive space battle going on outside there window, you know you've seen one confrontation to save all humanity from certan doom you've seen them all.

[WMCoolmon]

Well, now that you've said that, Bobb, I feel a little more comfortable about making this post.

What is an FPS. It's basically a big fat model that other smaller models move around on top of. We can make big models. We can make small models. We can make a skybox, and we can make small models that move around.

Next you have the classic gun and HUD that's been around since Doom. Yep, we can do that with the ingame cockpit code, make a model and set the eyepoint correctly.

Now you have to make the stuff walk around, jump, shoot, die, etc. This is the part that Freespace can't do (along with gravity). If something gets hit, it has to disentegrate in a ball of fire.

For walking, you need some sort of looping skeletal animation with start/stop segments.
For jumping, same thing.
For shooting, you need an animation that plays when the gun shoots. Bobb's submodel animation code?
For dying, you need to have another skeletal animation.

Gravity- objects need to fall at a certain rate until they hit another object below them. Messy.

Now for the controls. A 'jump' is a lot like hitting the afterburner once, while sitting still and facing 'up'. That's easy enough - replace the afterburner sound with a grunt, make its duration extremely short and only recharge it once you hit the ground again.
Moving forward is like going to full speed with a really fast acceleration/deceleration time, while you hold some key. Okay, that's doable - again, replace the sound and make full speed only apply when you hold the '\' key.
Moving left and right? Hell, that's already in!
Moving backwards? Duplicate the forward motion. Since FS operates with 'desired velocity' and not 'desired forward speed', it should be as easy as copy-paste and changing a bunch of positives to negatives.
Looking up-down-left-right is a bit harder. The mouse has to be changed to move the eyepoint and gun, not the whole 'ship'.

Make all those changes, and you have a basic FPS.

Anyway, I'd like to see submodel animation code as well, 'twould be awesome to have cutscenes with ingame characters, but it'd be pretty difficult, I imagine.

[Bobboau]

you mean skelital animation, we have submodel animation.

[Omniscaper]

Wow Bob, that announcer must have been on some uppers. HOW DARE THEY "PAN" Deus Ex!!!!

I was planning to model a deck crew (frozen in time) once I finish the BSG's lower hangar deck.

[Drew]

windows would just extentuate the obscene scale problems FS2 has.

[willy_principal]

Originally posted by StratComm
Eh, it's simpler to set up but not as robust.  Basically you're letting the AI do a good bit of the setup for you, which may or may not act like you want every time.

To willy_principal:
Event: Variable Arrival
When
-Arrival conditions
-do-nothing

Arrival Cue:
When
-isEventTrueDelay
 -Variable Arrival
 -0

That's what i ussually do...
the problem is when i reorder the events...the arrive cues don't actualize.

Here is an example of what is happening...
Willy's mission Before:
events:
- Start secuence
- Enemy arrive cue
- Enemy has arrived
- Enemies destroyed
- RTB
enemy's arrive cue:
- IsEvent TrueDelay
-- enemy arrive cue
-- 0

Willy's mission After:
events:
- Start secuence
- Start chat
- Convoy arrive cue
- Convoy has arrived
- Enemy arrive cue
- Enemy has arrived
- Enemies destroyed
- Convoy departs
- RTB
enemy's arrive cue:
- IsEvent TrueDelay
-- start chat
-- 0

[Turnsky]

this might be an interesting idea, radio chatter among pilots.. event based, or general..

like, amongst all the usual "incoming subspace signature, hostile configuration" you have the more quieter, and sometimes garbled "alpha 2 seeking targets" or "damage control on decks 12 and 13.. we've got wounded" just general radio chatter.. and in the midst of a larger mission, where the combat is intense, such things add to the atmosphere of the mission, and make the pace hectic..

[Bri_Dog]

geomodding

[NGTM-1R]

Originally posted by Turnsky
this might be an interesting idea, radio chatter among pilots.. event based, or general..

like, amongst all the usual "incoming subspace signature, hostile configuration" you have the more quieter, and sometimes garbled "alpha 2 seeking targets" or "damage control on decks 12 and 13.. we've got wounded" just general radio chatter.. and in the midst of a larger mission, where the combat is intense, such things add to the atmosphere of the mission, and make the pace hectic..

That is possible, to some extent, but it would be a real pain to FRED.

[Turnsky]

Originally posted by ngtm1r


That is possible, to some extent, but it would be a real pain to FRED.

i forgot about that..

mind you, it could be under a tag, like have a selection of files attached to each ship class.. like "enemy destroyer scalped" or some other random thing.. not specifically attached to each ship, just a general class..

also, having garbled radio chatter coming from your target/escort when damaged, or just general panic.. think of the potential amount of radio chatter between vessels during a pearl harbor situation...

it'd be cool, really, but yeah, could be a problem for the fred stage.

could give a nice effect, however.

[Deepblue]

You want Freelancer-esque radio chatter then... God, I loved that.

[karajorma]

What would be nice would be for each ship to have a chatter editor window available from ships editor that allowed you to turn the persona messages on and off in the same way you do with player orders etc.
 Then you could add other types of chatter to this via a table.

Never gonna happen though.

[Lynx]

It would be even better to have the chatter defined in messages.tbl for each persona.
Also good would be an entry that controls the verbosity of each persona. This way you could have hotshot newbie pilots that gab all the time and die-hard vetarans that rarely talk, for example.