[IskatuMesk]

I would like to make a total conversion for FS2O. I intend to do all sound engineering, voice acting, and music composition myself. I'd also like to do all of the mission scripting and stuff, but for now that's way out of my league. I have some questions about the capabilities of the engine and such to ask before I dedicate myself to anything, though. Perhaps you could answer a few? I would deeply appreciate it. Keep in mind I have been scouring these forums previous to this post.

Also keep in mind I do not plan to have this TC be multiplayer compatible (or at least the primary campaign). I intend to design the models and textures (Assuming I find a modeller) catering to high-end systems. This is more of an attempt to as accurately recreate one of my novels as possible than to make a widely-marketed modification.

- What are the sound format specs for general SFX, speech, and music?

- What are the limitations of weapons?...
Is it possible to have a weapon bounce across multiple targets?
Is it possible to give a beam weapon the appearance of lightning?
Is it possible to create a psionic shockwave type weapon, that throws fighters across several KM?
Is it possible to give a weapon, such as a nuke, a sunflare or such type effect when it goes boom?

- The AI in FS2's campaign, specifically that of fighters, is very disappointing. Can it be improved, or is that a huge programming challenge?

- There are Undead energy-metal ships. According to lore, they appear as glowing glassy metal that absorb light around them. Is it possible to give them this kind of effect with the current FS2O capabilities?

- Is it possible to give ships and/or weapons a "light distortion" effect, ala cloaking? Incidentally, is it then possible to have them permanently covered in flickering lightning, such as when a capital ship is in critical?

- Apparently there is virtually no limit to map or ship size. I am aware of a subsystem limit, however. Is it possible to have weapons on a non-player ship that do not need subsystems? If so, are these limited as well? Is a ship with 40 beam weapons, 20 cluster rocket launchers, and assorted smaller armaments feesable?

- Are non-player fighters with beam turrets possible?

I hate to bombard a community that doesn't know me with questions, so I'll leave it at that for now. Just would like to know what exactly the limits are.

[aldo_14]

This is actually outside (mostly) the stuff i've been doing, so if I'm wrong.... correct me!  Bear in mind my knowledge of exact SCP features is rather sketchy

- What are the sound format specs for general SFX, speech, and music?

Offhand, I believe there is WAV and ogg support.  Not sure on specifics beyond that, unfortunately.  Music is, I believe, split into multiple 'event' type tracks.

- What are the limitations of weapons?...
Is it possible to have a weapon bounce across multiple targets?
Is it possible to give a beam weapon the appearance of lightning?
Is it possible to create a psionic shockwave type weapon, that throws fighters across several KM?
Is it possible to give a weapon, such as a nuke, a sunflare or such type effect when it goes boom?

In order;
No
Yes (Machina Terra did this with pre-SCP FS2)
Yes (using the blast effect; you can also create a 'pull' effect too)
Yes (don't know  how to offhand, but the BSG TC has this effect)

- The AI in FS2's campaign, specifically that of fighters, is very disappointing. Can it be improved, or is that a huge programming challenge?

Yes, and yes.

- There are Undead energy-metal ships. According to lore, they appear as glowing glassy metal that absorb light around them. Is it possible to give them this kind of effect with the current FS2O capabilities?

Not 100% sure what you mean.  You can't get a ship to affect the lighting of those around it, but you can edit spec, glow maps in order to make something jet black in all lighting conditions.  Again, depends largely on exactly what effect you want to achieve.

- Is it possible to give ships and/or weapons a "light distortion" effect, ala cloaking? Incidentally, is it then possible to have them permanently covered in flickering lightning, such as when a capital ship is in critical?

Firstly, there was a cloak effect implemented a while back; I'm not sure if it was formally feature locked, though, I had a feeling it was OGL only.  I don't know the status of the cloaking code, though.

Secondly, I don't think you can have a permanent lightning effect.  Don't know how hard it would be to add.

- Apparently there is virtually no limit to map or ship size. I am aware of a subsystem limit, however. Is it possible to have weapons on a non-player ship that do not need subsystems? If so, are these limited as well? Is a ship with 40 beam weapons, 20 cluster rocket launchers, and assorted smaller armaments feesable?

All weapons need a subsystem, and there's also a sub-object limit.  You'd still be looking at a large number, though; I think it may have been bumped up to 120 subobjects (so about 100 turrets) by the Inferno bods, but I'll have to let an SCP peep answer that for good.

Obviously map / polycount limitations are going to be dependent on the running system.  One thing worth emphasising is that having multiple texture maps (i.e. disparate files) on a ship tends to cause a fair bit of slowdown compared to a single map.

- Are non-player fighters with beam turrets possible?

Yes.  The SCP added in the capability for fighters to have beam weapons (including the player) as primaries (similar to the targeting laser, but working properly), and you can mount any type of turret on any fighter (flak, missile, etc).

[Nuke]

- There are Undead energy-metal ships. According to lore, they appear as glowing glassy metal that absorb light around them. Is it possible to give them this kind of effect with the current FS2O capabilities?

that all depends on how good your artist is. you have glow maps, shine maps, and env maps to work with, and with that id say its possible. the shine maps may be color, and you can create an irredessence effect with them (example: something that looks blue in the dark can be red in the light). env maps are greyscale and is essentially intensity of reflection. glowmaps are allways rendered fullbright on top of the diffuse map, typical effect is to have the unlit light sources drawn on the diffuse map and their glows in the glow map. you can have transparency to a degree as well, but it has some funky limits. there was some work on a new materials system that would add even more versitility, but im not sure about its progress.

[IskatuMesk]

Thanks for the responses!

Unfortunately I can't do low-poly models (unless you consider several million nurbs in rhino to be low-poly) so I'd have to rely on someone willing to remodel things I have previously created. Other then that, I imagine I could mess with textures and stuff to the point of getting a viable energy metal thing to work. To explain it more specifically --

The metal of Undead ships is a pulsating, glowing black-red (not unlike the Shivan in colors, except more energy-like in appearance). They are also extremely shiny, like glass.

Yes.  The SCP added in the capability for fighters to have beam weapons (including the player) as primaries (similar to the targeting laser, but working properly), and you can mount any type of turret on any fighter (flak, missile, etc).

Most excellent.

I am trying to get an idea of what aspects will be plausible to attempt to do given my limited knowledge (and lack of modelling skills).

Last time I tried a mod for FS2 a long time ago, it actually permanently modified the game. Are mods now capable of being temporarily patched in, or do you still need to replace a lot of data? How exactly does that work?

Is it easy to resize existing ships? I imagine I can use a lot of the existing models, but they'll need rescaling.

edit: to expand on the music question, I'd like to be able to call upon several long tracks for specific events, such as taking on an enemy supership in a fleet. Can this be done (and not have it interrupted)?

[aldo_14]

Last time I tried a mod for FS2 a long time ago, it actually permanently modified the game. Are mods now capable of being temporarily patched in, or do you still need to replace a lot of data? How exactly does that work?

The SCP added a mod switch that tells the game to look in folder xx for a file (actually it's even more flexible than that with subfolder and the like), so you can setup launch configurations to start the game running a particular mod (although you can't load mods-on-the-fly ingame)

Is it easy to resize existing ships? I imagine I can use a lot of the existing models, but they'll need rescaling.

No.  you'd have to convert back to cob (we can't convert from pof to any other format, although you can obviously do cob->xxxx with 3rd party progs like 3dexploration), resize it, possibly rebuild the setup (i.e. path, weapons point, etc data) and then convert back to pof.

edit: to expand on the music question, I'd like to be able to call upon several long tracks for specific events, such as taking on an enemy supership in a fleet. Can this be done (and not have it interrupted)?

Offhand, not 100% sure.  You could queue up a sound - such as a track - to play upon a specified event in FRED, but you'd run into problems with the dynamic music.  Offhand, the music is split up into several different parts for different occasions; i.e. they'll be a part played upon mission success, when it's quiet, when an enemy arrives, etc.  It may be that structure is enough for what you want to do, but for such a specific event as attacking a particular ship, I doubt it.

[IskatuMesk]

Could you completely remove or override the dynamic music?

[aldo_14]

Could you completely remove or override the dynamic music?

You could turn it off, yeah, provided you don't mind not having any music.

Albeit I'm not sure if playing large music files as messages (AFAIK what you'd have to do to SEXP them to occur at specific events) has any effects upon memory usage or the ability to play other messages.  That'd be something for a FREDer/coder to answer methinks.

[karajorma]

There are SEXPs which allow you to play music from a file or change soundtracks.

[IskatuMesk]

Now I just need to find out why FS2 isn't detecting the missions I made when I didn't change the directory. Perhaps my documents folder being F:\_MYDOCUMENTS_ might have something to do with it? (That's what it's defaulting to)

[Ferret]

Make sure your missions are in <Freespace2 folder>/data/missions/.

[IskatuMesk]

Make sure your missions are in <Freespace2 folder>/data/missions/.

Okay, this wasn't mentioned. Now it loads, but I get a slew of errors. At least we're making progress.

[Ferret]

Maybe we can help on the error-front?

[IskatuMesk]

Okay. I did the FRED help thingy and did the quick-start mission (place a fighter, assign the player to Alpha, run) And I get this when I load the map in FS2open...

Code: [Select]


Error: duel.fs2(109)
Error: Required token = [$IFF:], found [$AI Behavior: None].

Line: 551
File:parse/parselo.cpp


Then it goes on with the same file and line, in different windows after clicking "OK"..

Code: [Select]


Error: duel.fs2(110)
Error: Required token = [$IFF:], found [$Cardo 1: XSTR("Nothing", -1)]

Error: duel.fs2(111)
Error: Required token = [$IFF:], found [+Initial Velocity 33]

Error: duel.fs2(111)
Error: Required token = [$IFF:], found [+Initial Hull: 100]


Error: duel.fs2(112)
Error: Required token = [$IFF:], found [+Subsystem: Pilot]


FS2 does not actually crash and I can alt tab back in, but the map does not load.

[Wanderer]

Which FRED and FS_Open versions are you using?

[IskatuMesk]

20060421-fred2_open_r.exe

fs2_open_367.exe

To what I've been able to find, those are the most recent versions of both. (Although that seems to be sketchy as I've been cross-referencing information from here and the main SCP site...)

[Wanderer]

fs2_open_367.exe is rather old.. get a more recent CVS build from here (20060429) or from here (20060421)

[karajorma]

The problem isn't that 3.6.7 is old. It's that the version of FRED you're using is much newer than it is. None the less the solution should work.

[IskatuMesk]

I've heard the term CVS mentioned a lot, but haven't been able to find out what it means. What makes a CVS build different than others? Is it the builds that are released by individual coders?

Also, it loaded! Thanks! Except the fighters weren't using missiles but I imagine that's easy to fix. Now, to stick a couple hundred capital ships on a collision course for armageddon.

Quick q - Whereabouts do I enable that new unlock all beam weapon feature?

[Shade]

CVS is the Concurrent Version System, a tool for managing source code. A CVS build means it's not an official build, but compiled from the code in the CVS at the specified time. These tend to include newer features and bugfixes, but also new bugs. Essentially Beta builds if you will.

Older exes such as 3.6.7 are not compatible with missions made for newer CVS builds, as those can be stored differently and often contain features not available in the last official build.

Finally, there's a checkbox in FREDs mission properties for allowing all ships in a mission to use beams. If you want to select which to allow it for, you need to use events and the beam-free/beam-free-all sexps.

PS - A couple of hundred capital ships in a mission is indeed a course for armageddon. Just not in the way you think

[IskatuMesk]

Okay, CVS makes a lot more sense now. 

Mostly going to be seeing just how much chaos I can make before fs2 decides to stick a fork into an outlet. I heard there was a pretty big ship limit but considering how large my ships will be and some of the weapons I'd be giving them, I plan to stress test the game to my hardware specs.

edit:

Interesting. Actual combat doesn't lag but viewing a large number of Colossus' will cause a slight drop in fps. I must also make note battles in FS2 take longer than battles in my TC would. IE, a heavy destroyer vs a destroyer would probably be a 15 second fight, while a heavy destroyer vs a heavy destroyer would be 30-50 seconds at most. The Bloodstone battle event (equivelent of a big boss battle between one ship and an entire battle group) would take about 8-10 minutes.

Things I'd like to do include making beam cannons more powerful, adding nukes, and adding torpedoes. Aside from heavy Slug cannons and advanced beam weaponry, torpedoes are the primary form of capital vs capital damage. The torpedoes can be targeted and destroyed, but they have a fair amount of health, and their explosions are VERY powerful. Torpedoes also outrange all other weapons, capable of travelling across 1,000km or so, depending on the projectile. Slug cannons, or very massive matter projectile cannons, would have ranges of 20-80km.

Undead only possess Plasma torpedoes, which have an even longer range and cannot be targeted, but have weak guidence.

For superships, they have very special weaponry. An example is the Undead Bloodstone Battlecruiser. It's beam weapons have a 80km range, but it has no torpedoes. "Laser" type weapons would fire a lot faster and their projectiles would move faster.

Capital ships would also be faster. Fighters would have around 300-600 speed, and capitals could have 100-300.

Fighters would be a bit harder to destroy, given their speed and improved hull in comparison to FS2's. Undead fighters would have speeds exceeding 800, although they tend to have less hull strength in comparison to Anahn (player) fighters. Bombers would be very large and have a large number of special weapons, including fighter suppression capabilities.

Fighter weapons will be, in comparison to FS2, feesible against all types of targets. Most Anahn fighters have powerful autocannons or powerguns with extremely high rates of fire. These weapons fire either DU, solid Tiran elemental projectiles, or liquid metal. Since liquid metal is primary for anti-infantry, players will have access to DU and Solid Tiran ammunition. This means that even against capital vessels extended fire will do some damage.

Or something like that, anyway. Depends if I find a modeller.