[Angelus]

Isn't there a (Online??) game that allows you to play RTS style with FS2 Ships?

Have to find that link...

[Droid803]

You mean the FreeSpace mod for Homeworld?

[StarSlayer]

Actually after nosing about through the thread it might be a neat trick to modify Fred be able to run a battle simulation.  Granted it would be difficult to accurately gauge the player impact during a sim, on the other hand it would probably allow the mission designer to view the overall effectiveness of the non player assets more easily then say running the mission and having to fart around in a invulnerable fighter trying to see what happens.  You could tell right off if Orion TF 1 following waypoints A, B, C is going to be effective or not.   Maybe its a silly idea, but it strikes me as a possibly useful feature for mission design if it were possible.


Disregard the goofy ideas above, i discussed it with Axem and he convinced me it doesn't really add any real utility to mission design

[Aardwolf]

 

Nuke and I were talking about the prospects of this mod yesterday and a little this morning.

Among other things, we talked about how we could manage the code more conveniently, taking into account the on-and-off nature of our past work on it. The idea of using SVN came up, and as an alternative to copying and pasting blocks of code over IM or using an online paste site, that sounds pretty good.

He also suggested simply posting changes in a topic on HLP. I don't particularly want to do that, because then the entire mod would effectively be open to everyone. I don't mean to say that we want to keep it to ourselves, but the project wouldn't really get much benefit from that openness aside from testing. It'd probably also mean more work explaining stuff to people who can't get it to work. That'd be too much of a hassle.

I'm still trying to figure out how well we agree on things, particularly on having other people contributing to the project. If we agree that we should get other people working on this too (and I can't guarantee we will) I may try to get a forum [board] on one of the big FreeSpace-related sites (game-warden, sectorgame, freespacemods, or maybe HLP (but I doubt the Admins will want it considering the rate of progress so far)).

Note that we haven't really decided anything at this point. We still need to think about it some more, and see how much support we would get on this.

[Nuke]

yea im being totally undecisive about the whole thing atm.

[Grimper]

Actually after nosing about through the thread it might be a neat trick to modify Fred be able to run a battle simulation.  Granted it would be difficult to accurately gauge the player impact during a sim, on the other hand it would probably allow the mission designer to view the overall effectiveness of the non player assets more easily then say running the mission and having to fart around in a invulnerable fighter trying to see what happens.  You could tell right off if Orion TF 1 following waypoints A, B, C is going to be effective or not.   Maybe its a silly idea, but it strikes me as a possibly useful feature for mission design if it were possible.


Disregard the goofy ideas above, i discussed it with Axem and he convinced me it doesn't really add any real utility to mission design

Eh what are you talking about? That would be a great idea because you could see battle not involving the player. If you want capships to duke it out or something like that, you need to make sure they don't kill each other too quickly or hit subsystems they shouldn't. All those tiny little details you normally have to load up FS for, you could just do in FRED.

And in regards to the RTS, could you give us another video showing the buttons and selection and stuff like that?

[Nuke]

probibly, easy enough to fraps, but i dont want to do it

[Grimper]

Aw why not?

[Aardwolf]

Hey,

Following the suggestion to release another video, I decided to make that fancy background I posted in some other thread, and also to do some general testing of the mod. Unfortunately, it seems there are some speed issues that I didn't realize were present the last time I did anything with it. While the screenshots are pretty and all that, I don't think that a video would be very fun to look at -- especially when you factor in how Fraps makes FS2 lag when recording stuff that isn't normally slow.

Anyway, we are (or at least I am) thinking about making some rather big changes to the mod, like doing some things with the engine itself rather than the external scripting system. When I get a chance, I'm going to talk to WMCoolmon (or simply post in the Scripting board) about what would be necessary for some of the things we want to do.

We also need to do some more planning, if necessary rethinking things from the ground up--suffice to say, we didn't really do a very good job of that in the beginning. Since we have the current scripts and files backed up in at least two places now, we'll be able to revert any changes which might accidentally mess stuff up, and we'll be able to look at them for reference.

[Nuke]

my quad core can handle it im sure. this might be something i can work on today

[Aardwolf]

If anyone is interested in helping the RTS mod by making 2D interface art, let us know. More details will come when we figure out what we need and how badly we need it.

At present, this means action buttons, with two states -- normal, and pressed (and possibly a third for mouseover).

[Aardwolf]

We now have a forum

[Grimper]

It died.

[Aardwolf]

It died? What died?

[Grimper]

The forum. It's back up now.

[blowfish]

The Freespacemods forum was down for maintenance I think.

[DeepSpace9er]

This idea/ concept looks so awesome. I'm picturing something along the lines of a mix between Empire at War and Sins of a Solar Empire.

[Titan]

really?

no offense, but i was picturing a slight modification of the game's existing orders system. And nothing more, save a new interface

[Aardwolf]

This idea/ concept looks so awesome. I'm picturing something along the lines of a mix between Empire at War and Sins of a Solar Empire.

Out of those two, (if my memory serves me) it is much closer to Empire at War.

i was picturing a slight modification of the game's existing orders system

The problem is the existing order system doesn't have really good support for some of the stuff we need to do... terrible for other kinds of things.

[Aardwolf]

Still alive. We have done some major cleanup of the scripts. Well, I have anyway; Nuke's hasn't been doing much on this recently. Although there aren't too many superficial changes, it is running a lot nicer under the hood, so to speak. I've also been paving the way for a proper button interface. The version on the SVN even has working buttons (but they aren't set up to do anything yet).

Somehow I neglected to post this here; we've got a site, thanks to the guy running freespacemods.net, swantz aka achtung. It can be found here: http://rts.fsmods.net/

I've been posting primarily in the Development Blag 2.0 thread on the mod's forum, instead of in here. If you look there, you can find more up-to-date info on the status of the mod.