[Dark RevenantX]

I have been planning for a campaign that features you inside Capital Ships.  You won't ever be able to get in a destroyer for obvious reasons, nor will you be in a corvette very often (think 2-3 missions of the 20 or so).  It isn't very easy to survive in a measly little cruiser next to gargantuan destroyers, so cruisers are what you will be stuck with for almost every mission.  You get to use all the terran/vasudan cruisers+corvettes, but not the shivans (even though I really wanted to let you pilot a Rakshasa).  The missions will include "destroy convoy", "protect convoy", "form blockade", "run bockade", "destroy ship", "protect ship", "join battle", and some special missions that fall under no category.  The storyline starts during the NTF war and ends when Capella goes supernova, but does not exactly follow the retail story.  The computer that could run Windows imploded upon itself a while ago, and a replacement will come "soon", so I can not actually make the campaign now.

I know what you are thinking, "It's impossible!  Learn the limits of FS2 and SCP, noob!", but I have a response.  ITS POSSIBLE!  I am fully aware of the hard-coded limits of the game and have worked around it.  Using a complex system of SEXPs, I will make it so you can control every aspect of the capital ship you are flying.  For example, with five SEXPs used, you can push key X and have your Fenris's main beam unlock fire at your current target until you push key X again, when it will lock and stop firing.  This can be done as many times as you would like, so if you target the Cain infront of you, but suddenly change your mind and wish to attack the Lilith to the left of the Cain, you can target the Lilith and push key X twice to target it instead of the Cain.  Without this system, all turrets will fire at the enemy automatically.  Without this system, your beam would continue firing at the Cain while you scream at the computer to "f*cking fire at the god d*mn Lilith!".  The automatic fire can be used to your advantage when dealing with normal turrets.  You would push key Y to make the turret fire at your current target, and push key Y again to make it fire at whatever target the AI chooses while you are busy trying to blow up the Lilith.  You could also hit key Z to disable your weapons and engines for 30 seconds while your ships repairs its subsystems by 20%.  Also, the CTD when you get more than 6 subsystems on your damage display is fixed with WCoolmon's latest builds.

I need your opinions and suggestions before I am sure about weather or not I should do this.

[Ghostavo]

I have two doubts:

- Is it fun?
- Is it challenging?

Other than that...

[Dark RevenantX]

Its challenging when the odds are against you, and fun because you have choices about what to do.  One choice will leave you relatively fine, but the others will either impair you or kill you.  Example: A convoy of 2 Argos, 3 Elysiums, a Triton, and 2 wings of Hercules is going across your screen.  You are in a Fenris with a wing of Myrmidons at your command.  The mission objective is to either destroy the convoy or chase the convoy away by making them jump away from the area, but do it before the convoy reaches the jump node.  You are given many choices right from the start; you could send your fighters to attack, or have them cover you.  You could fire the beam on the Argos, which is better armored, but would save you the trouble of killing them when more enemies arrive.  Or, you could fire the beam at the Elysiums, which would be a quick kill, and a kill would disrupt the convoy and give them a likelier chance of bailing out.  Either way has its advantages and disadvantages, and because you are in a slower ship than a fighter, you have more time to think about it.  What would happen in the mission is that after a convoy ship (non-fighter) is killed, an Aeolus will jump in after a 15 second delay, followed by another wing of Hercules 60 seconds later.  Also, if the Elysiums are the last convoy ships left, they will jump out.  Since the node is relatively close, you can't afford to take the time to kill every convoy ship.  The winning strategy in that case would be first having your fighters go in after their fighters, but not allow the enemy fighters to get out of range of your AAAF beams.  During this, you would kill the Argo at the front of the convoy, and work on the second one just behind the first.  When the Aeolus comes in at the 45º angle away from the convoy, be sure to order your fighters to disable the rear beam on the back of the Aeolus while you get in behind it.  After a while, it will die.  If timed right, you will have time to kill the last of the second Argo and the Triton.  After the Elysiums jump out, victory is yours!

Have faith in me!

[kv1at3485]

I think a demonstration is in order.  Get FREDing.

[Mefustae]

Sounds like a really great idea, but how are you going to handle the HUD? I mean, you COULD have the normal fighter HUD, but it wouldn't be very interesting. Would it be possible to make a custom HUD, so that you could make it look like you're the Captain of the vessel looking out the forward viewport. Also, how are you going to handle looking around, i mean, to handle a Capship you really need to be able to seen in any given direction, like when you switch to the Turret view in Freelancer for example. How are you going to handle these hurdles?

[Dark RevenantX]

There is a key that lets you turn your view but not the ship.  Anyone is welcome to provide me with a new hud.  I can't make it now, my Windows-capable computer is dead.

[Jetmech Jr.]

This will be interesting. If you can pull it off...

[Singh]

I think it can be FREDed.

Not only FREDed, but done not too difficulty...


*remembers something Karajoma was explaining recently with strings and the any-of variables.

Hooooly ****. I have an idea.

*goes off to plot SexPs!

[Jetmech Jr.]

Why don't you and Revenant work together? The more Competent FREDders, the better the end product.

[WMCoolmon]

A new hud can be hacked into the code rather easily. Doing something a bit more flexible is something of a pain in the ass, though.

OTOH, custom gauges might still work...so go figure.

The HUD is actually one place where a full scripting language would come in handy. Although it could be done with SEXPs, that would involve making another editor. OTOH you could use it for mod-wide SEXPs.

Edit: One thing I thought about doing was adding in the ability to load HUD data from DLL files. You'd have to have at least some programming knowledge, but it would allow you to make pretty much any type of gauges you wanted.

There really isn't a good, easy way to implement hud gauges. Nothing in life worth doing is ever easy, and all that, I guess.

[Singh]

WMCoolmon: one minor question for hte hud.

Can we have as many primaries or secondary weapons as we want, without requiring new textures/art for it?

[WMCoolmon]

Yes and no.

The code should support as many primaries as you can stuff in weapons.tbl. The limits come from screen size/clutter (remember, there is 640x480 to think about) and other parts of the code. Most notably the weapons loadout screen.

So I think the limits are 3 primaries, 4 secondaries, but I've never really tested that. It may even be 4 primaries.

But. You can have as many gun mounts as you like. All the new dynamic selection screen art code does stuff dynamically. And as far as I know, the selection screen is the only place where you can't just bump the limits and have things work (at least, it shouldn't be, but there are probably other parts of the code that will break/behave oddly with different numbers).

Edit: Every time I think selection screen, I think or put down "techroom".

[Singh]

hmm....so would it be possible to fly a fenris, and say, be able to use all it's turrets as selectable primary cannons?

[Dark RevenantX]

If someone can make a game made completely by squares and triangles then this should be quite possible.

How did Inferno get so good?  Easy!  The makers followed The Magical Steps of FREDding©

1. Plan The Mission:  See what will work best for what you have.  Make something that will have a good story, good playability, and good feel; it's like making a movie!  In my case, I need a campaign that doesn't judge your hand-eye coordination or dogfighting techniques, but is a test of strategy and planning.

2. Create The Mission:  This is the boring part.  You FRED it and fix the bugs.  No mission flow in this section.

3. Make The Mission Fun:  This is the fun part.  You shape the mission into something that is enjoyable.  Instead of having the player shoot the beam at the cargo box and then jump out, have the player shoot at the Arcadia while repelling waves of fighters and eliminating the pesky cruiser from behind you.

4. Fine Tune The Mission:  Add all those little nips and bits here and there to make the mission perfect.  Only stop when you are truly satisfied with the mission after many playtests that don't include you!

And last but certainly not least, the most commonly forgotten:

5. Back The Mission Up:  Imagine this.  You are finally done with the campaign.  All 25 long and hard missions are over!  You had to sweat blood to get this thing done!  You are just about to post the missions on the internet.  You are right about to click "upload"... CLANK!!!!ZCLICK!CLANK!!!!ZZBUZZA!!!CLANK!!!!  Customer Service"Sorry, dude, your hard drive crashed!  Under warrenty?  Here, we will send you a new blank drive."  Bummer, man!  All that work for nothing.  MOST IMPORTANT RULE WHEN MAKING A CAMPAIGN: BACK UP THE MISSIONS TO A CD!  You never know what will happen!  No, this is not reinstalling SCP, this is TAKING YOUR HARD DRIVE OUT OF YOUR COMPUTER AND TOSSING IT IN THE TRASH CAN!  Don't let fate get the best of you!

Also, Inferno was not made alone.  Others helped.  A campaign seldom becomes great when one poor soul tries to make it all by himself.  This is why this thread was posted!  I need IDEAS!  I'm not that little kid whom could somehow make little papers look like starships in his imagination.  I'm some wannabe pro trying to make a campaign!

Holy sh*t!  Multiple posts while I write this!

Edit: Singh, that would be awkward.  To scroll down the primaries list to get to the beam cannon you want would be too slow for my taste.  Also, it would be impossible to fire all, say, Laser Cannons at one target.

Edit MK II: Singh, if you work with me, two things will be needed.  1. You wait until I can get a windows, and 2. I will do the turret firing mechanism by myself.  I don't trust many people with it because it has been done by many people in a way I think is either awkward or stupid.  Also, I think you will have questionable sanity if you work with someone who is just around the corner to turning 13.

[WMCoolmon]

if you did that with 3 or four gun banks and had them all locked in position to point forward, and edited the POF to have gun mounts where the turret guns had been...then yes.

But the code for turret weapons is pretty much completely different from that of primary weapons. Each turret uses the same data structure to store weapon information as the main ship (now), but that's about all the similarities there are.

If you wanted to allow customized turret loadouts...hmm. It'd be possible with an extra state and the new (lab) GUI stuff. It'd also give me an excuse to map out elements of the selection screens using the new GUI. This would also come in handy if/when phreak implements tertiary weapons.

[Dark RevenantX]

WMCoolmon, you would have to impliment it into one of YOUR builds, as yours seems to be the only ones that can handle a bunch of subsystems on the screen.  Though, if any others have done the same thing you have with fixing the subsystem damage CTD when you have more than 7 subsystems, those builds could be used too.

[WMCoolmon]

If I implement it, of course it'll be in one of my builds.

The non-crashing should be in all future builds now, maybe even the last one Goober posted.

[Singh]

hmm...
another set of questions: can the player have control of ship turrets at all? If hte primary beam turret can be changed to a mount, facing forwards, can the anti-fighter cannons be a different mount facing a different direction?

[WMCoolmon]

If by 'control', you mean so that the player can turn and fire turrets, yes. I don't know how hard that'd be, though. You'd need to: (Edit: By you, I mean whoever chooses to implement it - if anyone )

- Disable AI control of turrets (easy)
- Add some way of switching to turrets, I was thinking 0-9 keys could activate the first ten turrets of a ship. (Medium/Hard)
- When a turret is switched to, force the view to first-person from turret (Medium)
- Turn off all gauges except for the recticule and weapons gauge and targetting computer and lock-on recticule (Medium)
- Switch control of the ship to the AI(?) (Easy)
- Map the arrow keys to move the turret (Medium/Hard)
- Map the weapon keys to take efect for the turret (Medium/Hard)

That'd work for projectile-style weapons and missile weapons. I'm not sure how well it'd work for beam weapons, although we'd need to implement some sort of accuracy control, or else the player could easily pick off fighters with a BGreen or such.

[Dark RevenantX]

The reason that would not work is because the weapons you fire are very slow.  You can't possibly hit a fighter with a standard laser cannon.   Even then, AAA beams would be hard to use.  It would be impossible to get slash beams.  Besides, would the Fenris pilot control every weapon system's firing at the same time? no!  However, the captain would be able to order attacks and systems around.  So, in a sense, you will be able to control every turret.