[Hoot]

I would love to play in a multiplayer setting where many big capital ships stay really close to one another, between which the players would have to fly through and battle each other.
So that players are almost constantly under fire from the opponent's capital flaks and lasers and would have to mind "random" Big Beams that strike after capitals as well.

I could imagine this narrow-walls-setting could add a lot to  adrenaline ... Does anyone know if such a setting exists? I am sorry that I am not familiar enough with FRED to create such a scenario myself.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Haven't tried to make such a mission in a couple of years so this may still not be the case but it was pretty much impossible.  I know some of the issues have workarounds (like ships close together jumping all over the place on the client side can be resolved using the unmovable flag) but AFAIK others still exist.  Dogfight missions just weren't meant for non-player ships shooting at things.   Also the one issue that I know hasn't been solved is getting people to actually stay near the ships.  Every mission ever made with ships to fight around always ends up in the players moving away from the ships until it becomes just another NWTR style mission.   

[karajorma]

Making it a King of the (Exploding) Hill mission might solve that issue.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Except the ships tend to not quit exploding after respawn. 

* FUBAR-BDHR waits for the inevitable I really need to rewrite that respawn code response from Kara.

[karajorma]

Actually I'm not certain what you mean.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Well depending on how you kill a player ship you end up with issues after the respawn.  For instance self destructing a player ship via sexp can cause the client side ship to repeatedly self destruct after respawning (or at least it used to).  Killing the player with fire say a fire beam sexp had a similar effect.  The beam that killed you turned around and shot you again after you respawned.  Then there is always the possibility that you respawn outside the playfield causing the death condition to fire again since it has to be a repeating event and you don't know how quick or slowly someone will actually hit the respawn button.  Use of variables didn't work well either client side (unless passing variables to the client was ever upgraded) so even trying to implement a timer to allow the player to get back in bounds was a flop. 

Again I haven't tried to make such a mission in a couple of years so some of these things may well work now but I doubt enough do to get a reliable working version.   

[chief1983]

Why not just shoot it out inside a giant sphere/box, cage match style?  I imagine the game once had issues with something such as that, but haven't changes to the engine over time made that slightly more feasible?

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Well the problem with that is the code tends to respawn you outside the area no matter where you set up the spawns at.  It must do some kind of radius check and move you outside.

[karajorma]

It does. I have code to stop it doing that which I was planning to integrate as part of the respawn code rewrite.

[soilder198]

What would be even more fun is, everyone has to pilot an ulysses, and instead of shooting each other, you must race between the capital ships while they fire at you.

[Hoot]

What would be even more fun is, everyone has to pilot an ulysses, and instead of shooting each other, you must race between the capital ships while they fire at you.

That's the spirit! Sounds like a multiplayer mod with a bunch of those special missions (Capital Ship Run, Spiked Trench Dogfighting, Hide And Destroy, ...) could become quite _very_ interesting. Any coders out there who would like to give it a try? I cannot code (other than HTML, CSS and some PHP), but at least would offer beta testing and basic voice acting.

If so, we should open a new topic on this, "Mod: Special Multiplayer Missions" or similar.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Why would you need a mod for this?  The code needs fixed for these types of things to work and no mod is going to help that.  Once they are fixed you just need to create the missions no mod needed. 

[Hoot]

Well, true, "mission pack" would be more correct; yet a mod could be interesting if there would be special things like trenches or tubes or other special effects in/as stage fields.