[Deepstar]

About "Waves".. i was thinking about it a several times.


I think the reason why the enemy is always in superios numbers is only because it is a gameplay requirement. In FreeSpace you have the waves, because all is based in the same area... in Wing Commander you fight also hordes of Kilrathi and especially Nephilims in Prophecy at every nav point and in X-Wing or TIE Fighter it was mostly the same.

You are always outnumbered, your wing consist of maximum 6 pilots, also the other wings, and they will never get reinforced by an additional wave... also the enemies do not use a craft that is very superior. You are able to bring down even Seraphims with an Apollo and Avenger Cannon. And at least, all other crafts are controlled by an AI. Against them, a human being will be always superior in this game.

I think about, how the retail mission were, if they have a complete other balance. Enemies do not use waves of the same wing instead they use crafts that are harder to defeat. More (shield)hitpoints or weaker weapons for yourself.

[Lorric]

Unfortunately this wouldn't work on Freespace, though I'd like to try this balance myself. I once FREDded up a mission where I put in a few Shivan fighters against a mob of Amazon drones. And the Shivans just flew around trying to evade the drones getting shot up by the drones when it should have been a turkey shoot.

Wait, sorry, need to engage my brain here. You're talking about equal numbers and superior opponents. Yes, I think that would work. It would be interesting.

[Black Wolf]

The only reason "waves" of fighters exist in the first place was as a hardware limitation. There was a limit to how many ships could be on the screen without killing the CPU and making the game unplayable. In reality, all ships would be launched before any major operation and be somewhere on the map, and with jump drives, especially within striking distance. Massive waves of enemies getting shot down just mean they are incompetent at taking out one fighter(you.)

I'm getting the impression that you think that missions would be improved if there were 40 or 50 enemy fighters and the same number of friendlies. I can guarantee you that (collision issues and CPUs notwithstanding) that wouldn't be the case. It would be more realistic, sure, but remember that we're making missions here - levels for a game. They're meant to be playable - fun, even. Having that many fighters would not be fun (is not, I've tried it). It just becomes an insane scramble just to survive - there's never any question of following your objectives or progressing the story - it's just jink, dive, evade, and hammer X until you run out of countermeasures.

I too dislike the Sync/Transcend/Derelict/lots of other older campaigns model where you just fight wave after wave of identical fighters. But the solution really isn't just putting them all in at once.

So how do you make this more interesting? You have to find a way to make it harder. Make accomplishing one small goal, like killing a fighter, or a cruiser so incredibly difficult that it warrants your attention.  You also need to avoid black and white scenarios and move into grey zones, so no clear win/loss situations, but trade-offs.

The biggest problem with Freespace right now, even FSO, is that the ships are too perfect. There are no problems with take offs/landings because there aren't any...there are no engine problems/failures, colliding with ships doesn't kill you outright, shields never fail, missions always end "perfectly" which is to say either you win and proceed or you don't win and repeat. Even if the mission requires you to lose to proceed it's all "planned."

Try Bem Cavalgar - in that, you're expected to fail at least some of your objectives. Major consequences for failure in every single mission though would dramatically increase the number of missions per campaign, for relatively little gain. Outside of RPGs (and even there it's generally very limited) true branching stories like that don't even happen in AAA games, let alone mods. It's just not a realistic expectation. The idea that there should occasionally be equipment failures and stuff like that, sure, that's reasonable, and it happens every now and again already, but again, we're making games here, and telling stories - military realism is all well and good in a Tom Clancy novel, where you want all the grime and failure to be right in your face, but for a FS mod, if it doesn't add fun to the gameplay or advance the story in some way... you really have to ask whether or not it's worth adding it in.

With regards to waves, I think there are situations where they work - they can be made to make sense and be fun to play, but they have to be used sparingly. I find that, in an assault mission which has patrolling fighters present, adding a second wave to some of those initial fighters is often good - it extends the initial furball before the player settles in to try to follow his objectives, and it makes sense (there would be ready fighters standing by somewhere, responding to the initial call for help).

I'm also working on a TV War era mission right now which uses a couple of waves of Amun bombers (2 per wave) against a Fenris. Without shields, and against a relatively weak capship in a Fenris, the Amuns are very effective, working like little gunships, but more than two at a time would be really difficult (nigh impossible) for the player to deal with. There's a time for realism, but there's also a time for gameplay considerations, and they're both important.

I think the critical thing with waves is to keep them realistic, yes, but also fun. A second wave in is probably fine in some situations, as long as you're not utterly dependent on it. A third wave, you'd need to have a really, really good reason I think. If you're going beyond that, you almost certainly need to look at your mission design.

Beyond the waves, the issue of keeping missions from getting tedious is a pretty important one - and a really, legitimately hard one to do. One thing  I've found that helps to keep a mission interesting that hasn't been brought up is the idea of setting - not just "nebula"/"asteroid field" setting, but also the environment of the mission as it's placed in FRED. There's a lot to be said for dogfighting right up close to big things, especially if a mission can be set up so that part of it happens close to the big thing, and part in open space. When you have large, complicated objects around, you can use them as cover, or slip through holes which the AI will inevitably crash into to in an evasive tactic.

They don't even have to be active parts of the mission - hell, it's probably better if they aren't. There are a lot of good models that can add this kind of atmosphere. If you're attacking a cargo depot, bracket it with Polaris (or Shah) pylons. Add a few great big asteroids to your asteroid field, and set you mission around those. I wish we had more derelict models - those would be great for this, but ST:R shipped with some busted up Atens which would work well too.

[Lorric]

The only reason "waves" of fighters exist in the first place was as a hardware limitation.

There is truth in this, but at the same time, the bigger the battle, the less impact the player can have on it.

[Deepstar]

The only reason "waves" of fighters exist in the first place was as a hardware limitation. There was a limit to how many ships could be on the screen without killing the CPU and making the game unplayable. In reality, all ships would be launched before any major operation and be somewhere on the map, and with jump drives, especially within striking distance. Massive waves of enemies getting shot down just mean they are incompetent at taking out one fighter(you.)

I'm getting the impression that you think that missions would be improved if there were 40 or 50 enemy fighters and the same number of friendlies. I can guarantee you that (collision issues and CPUs notwithstanding) that wouldn't be the case. It would be more realistic, sure, but remember that we're making missions here - levels for a game. They're meant to be playable - fun, even. Having that many fighters would not be fun (is not, I've tried it). It just becomes an insane scramble just to survive - there's never any question of following your objectives or progressing the story - it's just jink, dive, evade, and hammer X until you run out of countermeasures.

I remember that there was a Bearbaiting remake release that show a real battle... in which the SJ Sathanas starts its complete fighter complement to push into the Capella system...

Good luck in surviving it... and do not forget to take down at least two forward beam weapons .


It is the same if the Lucifer would swarming you with all these Scorpions like in one of the CBanims. Now imagine missions like "Running the Gauntlet" or "Good Luck" with it for a "real experience". I do not think that this would be make some fun.

Unfortunately this wouldn't work on Freespace, though I'd like to try this balance myself. I once FREDded up a mission where I put in a few Shivan fighters against a mob of Amazon drones. And the Shivans just flew around trying to evade the drones getting shot up by the drones when it should have been a turkey shoot.

I am not very good in fredding (in fact i can only fix missions, but can not create my own ones ), but i think, you have to use the different AI Classes for such problems. Shivans should be in fact more intelligent than a handful Drones... so they need a higher AI Class. Even i do not know exactly what is different between the classes.

[Lepanto]

I'm getting the impression that you think that missions would be improved if there were 40 or 50 enemy fighters and the same number of friendlies. I can guarantee you that (collision issues and CPUs notwithstanding) that wouldn't be the case. It would be more realistic, sure, but remember that we're making missions here - levels for a game. They're meant to be playable - fun, even. Having that many fighters would not be fun (is not, I've tried it). It just becomes an insane scramble just to survive - there's never any question of following your objectives or progressing the story - it's just jink, dive, evade, and hammer X until you run out of countermeasures.

I too dislike the Sync/Transcend/Derelict/lots of other older campaigns model where you just fight wave after wave of identical fighters. But the solution really isn't just putting them all in at once.

I still think a massive fighter brawl could be awesome, but only if it was tightly FREDded, and done only as an occasional set-piece, and only if technical considerations permit.

One thing  I've found that helps to keep a mission interesting that hasn't been brought up is the idea of setting - not just "nebula"/"asteroid field" setting, but also the environment of the mission as it's placed in FRED. There's a lot to be said for dogfighting right up close to big things, especially if a mission can be set up so that part of it happens close to the big thing, and part in open space. When you have large, complicated objects around, you can use them as cover, or slip through holes which the AI will inevitably crash into to in an evasive tactic.

Environmental objects would definitely make missions more interesting, though the FS AI isn't great at navigating around them and tends to bump into things a lot.

About "Waves".. i was thinking about it a several times.


I think the reason why the enemy is always in superios numbers is only because it is a gameplay requirement. In FreeSpace you have the waves, because all is based in the same area... in Wing Commander you fight also hordes of Kilrathi and especially Nephilims in Prophecy at every nav point and in X-Wing or TIE Fighter it was mostly the same.

You are always outnumbered, your wing consist of maximum 6 pilots, also the other wings, and they will never get reinforced by an additional wave... also the enemies do not use a craft that is very superior. You are able to bring down even Seraphims with an Apollo and Avenger Cannon. And at least, all other crafts are controlled by an AI. Against them, a human being will be always superior in this game.

I think about, how the retail mission were, if they have a complete other balance. Enemies do not use waves of the same wing instead they use crafts that are harder to defeat. More (shield)hitpoints or weaker weapons for yourself.

Making the enemies stronger/smarter is another good way to get more gameplay time/value out of each group of enemies. Fury AI made BP2's enemy fighters notably more competent, so the mission designers could still give you a challenge with fewer enemies on screen.

Would people say, especially in more serious campaigns, that missions should try to have as few enemies in-mission as would still give the player and their allies a challenge?

I'd say the method of unleashing fighters also matters on the "context" of your campaign. If its something more like soft-story telling, you can probably get away with outnumbering the player with easy to kill fighters without much context. If you're going for a stark and gritty campaign, you might need to give a bit more thought to how fighters and forces are deployed.

Seconded. A BP-style detailed tactical model improves some campaigns and also helps their mission design by killing repetition, but for something light-hearted like WoD or absurd like JAD, you don't need to intricately justify the deployment of every enemy on screen as long as the mission is fun.

We've talked about waved wings a lot so far, but does anyone have any other ideas/rules of thumb for keeping missions entertaining in other ways?

[docfu]

We've talked about waved wings a lot so far, but does anyone have any other ideas/rules of thumb for keeping missions entertaining in other ways?

As short-lived as it was, the introduction to Vassago's Dirge features you getting blown out of your ship and picked up. I much prefer that kind of personalized introduction to a campaign over long and slow panoramic shots. Also, it really breaks the mood when a mission moves to a cut scene and then back especially for something as stupid as a capital ship jumping in. If I wanted to see that, I would play the mission again and look for it specifically but anything that takes control away from the player, unless the player actually loses control for some reason, is a big no-no (in my book, and only I write my book).

Stupid quirks on the other hand can make a normal mission a ton of fun, like a beam disruptor that only works at random and craps out on occasion so that players need to evacuate before getting blown to bits. I've yet to see a mission where you could power down your ship and hide in asteroids then come out to strafe convoys before ducking back in again. Would be cool to have a mission like that combined with Bem Cavalgar where your success gets you more stuff. It also seems like there are very few missions where you get to take out capital ships that aren't guarded by fighters for one reason or another. Not every mission needs a damn dogfight to be interesting. The deep space missions where you fall asleep in derelict were great story telling devices even if you never replay them solo. Let the game tell the story.

It seems like missions that were the most memorable weren't say, Bearbaiting where you take out the Sathanas's front beams. For me it was blowing up the gas miners in the nebula before the Sathanas showed up that was one of the more fun missions. You start off with something nice and easy that goes well until something big jumps onto you. Also, easy missions where your wingman are looking to leave you in the dust for kills are a riot such as Into the Lion's Den where you are clamoring to blow stuff up before your mission window ends. Blue Planet's Forced Entry also comes to mind as "just get your ships from A to B." Hell's Kitchen where you tag stuff for destruction.

Now that multiple in-mission jumping is possible, it might be fun to have a mission where you play cat-and-mouse/hide-and-seek across multiple jump points. This would require a bit of randomization to keep it interesting, hunting a convoy while being hunted by a destroyer, or luring a destroyer into a trap.

Finally, it seems like a lot of the alternate weaponry doesn't get a lot of love. The Shield breaker is something I've never once had a specific purpose of using in game. Would be nice to see a mission that requires it...

[Axem]

We've talked about waved wings a lot so far, but does anyone have any other ideas/rules of thumb for keeping missions entertaining in other ways?

As short-lived as it was, the introduction to Vassago's Dirge features you getting blown out of your ship and picked up. I much prefer that kind of personalized introduction to a campaign over long and slow panoramic shots.

Technically Vassago did start with long and slow panoramic shots of the Vassago! And I don't think there's anything wrong with panoramic shots if it sets the mood for the campaign or mission. Burning Heaven started off with an amaaaaazing long and slow panoramic shot (which doubled as a intro credits sequence). But I think once you're in the thick of the campaign, cutscenes should be limited to the beginning or ending of a mission (unless there's a super good reason).

_{(Of course JAD breaks all those rules I just mentioned, but then again, it always did!)}

[docfu]

Would definitely prefer end of the mission and skipable if they have to be in there. WIH was good about having dialog at the end of missions and you could warp out if you'd played it before, but the cutscene in Delenda Est with the cruisers warping in after you disable the Carthage just ruined the flow for me and...this topic is about removing tedium so...

[Axem]

I see where you're coming from. JAD (especially the missions I'm making now) has a lot of smaller cutscenes that link together parts of the mission, and replaying those missions a billion times makes it pretty tedious, so I do insert my own little skips that the player will eventually be able to use to get right to the action.

But there's a few different paths to take with having readily skippable cutscenes, and that's if a player skips a cutscene, should we just reset the camera so the cutscene continues to play out but now its from the player POV, or should we skip ahead to where the end of the cutscene would be? One is easy to do, but it gives a skipping player an advantage that a player that doesn't skip get, and can affect the balance. The other way is a lot tricker to do, especially when you need to interrupt a ship warping in.

[docfu]

And yet some games put neat and interesting twists into these old flawed premises.

I mean, what are some ideas that you have? Talk's cheap, but this being a space sim game, I'm hard pressed to think of things you could do that aren't "fly around and shoot stuff".

No, that's exactly why I'm here and why I still play this game. I want to fly around and shoot stuff. X1-3 and Eve Online(not that I will ever play that mess) took care of trading and simulation for me.

Blow stuff up? Let's make a mission where blowing stuff up is the bad outcome, in which the whole mission revolves around talking and scanning (to, say, find proof) in order to prevent a fight.

Isn't this exactly what happened with the fight between Gallactica and Pegasus when Starbuck showed up with camera footage of the resurrection ship? And yet this mission has already been done in the original Freespace where you scan the Shivan destroyers.

I think the real problem here is that it isn't the missions that need redesigning, it's the ships.

This is going to sound really stupid, but we need:

ships with cockpits and custom startup sequences,
custom loadout screens(different ship, different weapons, different usage)
actually selecting and arming missiles instead of just pushing a button to fire them all off...
different types of countermeasures,
actual window/visibility ports on spaceships to detect stealth instead of just being so close,
blindspots on ships here you can hide,
smart weapons/camera-guided weapons,
dust clouds,
forward dispensing countermeasures to stop head-on missile attacks,
weapons that actually KILL capital ships on the 1st or 2nd hit instead of needing dozens of bombs to do a take-down
actual functioning and malfunctioning radar with scanning limitations
visual target acquisition only, none of this push t-y to scan through everything in the universe.
a universe where the story happens around the game, not where the game happens because the story needs it to
actual technology development in the war...not just excuses to keep using the same WW2 style model over and over

...

The missions are never going to change, they've been played out. What needs to happen if Freespace is to evolve isn't evolution of the graphics or storyline, it's actual evolution of the in-game technology. If you make it realistic, add in launching and landing instead of just jumping in and out, and add a ton of technical limitations, you will get a more realistic and enjoyable experience. If you just keep pushing for prettier graphics(which are nice, by the way...) and more intense story plots without admitting that the keyboard interface is effectively flawed to begin with, you aren't going to get anything satisfactory in the long run.

The ships don't feel real. Yeah they shake and vibrate and blow up, but it still feels like you are flying a space sim with toy ships and action figures...

[An4ximandros]

I believe the real problem here comes from a genre flaw: There is only so many things you can do with the premise of "Dog-fighting."

We have reached the top, there are only so many variations of "Shoot this, stop that from being shot" that we can come up with. Heck, we've seen missions going from fighters to cruisers, but it's still the same premise.

Diaspora felt fresh to me because the combat was different, but it got old eventually once I adapted to the Newtonian movement.

What we need are new ideas. Something that wholly shakes up what we do in a mission. It need to be different from flying a cruiser or a stealth ship. Something that clearly breaks the laws of what we think is possible in this game.

[Axem]

Well any genre has that flaw if you distill it down that far.

FPS: Move around, shoot stuff.
RTS: Build units, send units to attack.
Puzzle: Throw it out the window.

And yet some games put neat and interesting twists into these old flawed premises.

I mean, what are some ideas that you have? Talk's cheap, but this being a space sim game, I'm hard pressed to think of things you could do that aren't "fly around and shoot stuff".

[An4ximandros]

We could try playing with these flaws.

Blow stuff up? Let's make a mission where blowing stuff up is the bad outcome, in which the whole mission revolves around talking and scanning (to, say, find proof) in order to prevent a fight.

Make the shooting stuff take place across an entire solar system, (this is way beyond the engine as I understand it, but for the sake of throwing stuff at the wall... and maybe someone gets crazy enough to try... ) Have finite ship numbers that need to be in different points of a system to combat an enemy fleet with finite numbers as well. With necessary key positions to win/lose the game.

Building something instead of destroying it. Maybe even come back later for a defense/attack mission based on what happens on a story.

Commanding a squad to protect you from enemies after you "space walked" into a station to sabotage the comm system and await extraction.

[Black Wolf]

Much of the stuff you can do in space sims other than the basic "Fly around and shoot stuff" is, generally speaking, not very exciting. Mining asteroids? Trading? Both possible, with heavy sexping/scripting, but both pretty... dull, really. A detective type mission might be fun every now and again, but how much challenge is there in just flying around? Unless you could somehow take some game mechanics from a point-and-click type game somehow, stripping FS of its combat is likely to make it significantly more tedious.

Building something, now that's interesting. Enormously challenging though - it would need a bunch of specifically made parts in the vein of the MCK, but probably more complex, and some heavy, heavy sexping to get it to work - probably you'd be better off going straight for scripting. But it would be cool, especially in mercenary or pirate campaigns, if you could build basic stuff (like defence platforms, or addons for ships) from scrap and seeing how they went in combat.

I think that the most interesting thing we're likely to see in the near future is the integration of the RTS fuctionality (when it's finalized) with traditional first person gameplay/campaigns, and the opportunity to do things like take control of turrets, which is already in the engine via scripting.

[Axem]

Your ideas are neat, An4ximandros, but they still mostly amount to "fly around", you've just removed the "shoot everything" part from most of it, which like BW said, might even make things worse.

I mean I've thought about all these different campaign/mission ideas too. The most outlandish and "doesn't at all belong in a space-sim" ones go to JAD (see buying Tacos). The rest sit around in my notebook of "make it one day", but they're more campaign-wide ideas rather than specific mission ideas. (Which in the spirit of getting back on topic, I'll try to get back to)

It can be real hard to come up with a fun mission sometimes, I'll rack my head for days or weeks trying to come up with something new and unique. And sometimes my new and unique idea have already been taken. I've now counted 2 other campaigns that did the artillery-beam tag-spotter concept before I thought I was being so original with it in Vassago. All I did was massively increase distance between the firing points and the ultimate target. People still seemed to like it anyway.

If you've got a mission and you find it a little stale, having things go wrong is the best way to spice things up. A hostile corvette arrives that you can't really handle. Weapons malfunction on the cruiser you're assigned with. Misjumpings, surrendering ships, mistaken identities, false intel. There's lots of quirks you can add to a mission to make it stand out a bit and not be "Just Another Escort". Just don't use the same trick twice, or else it becomes tedious again.

[docfu]

If you've got a mission and you find it a little stale, having things go wrong is the best way to spice things up. A hostile corvette arrives that you can't really handle. Weapons malfunction on the cruiser you're assigned with. Misjumpings, surrendering ships, mistaken identities, false intel. There's lots of quirks you can add to a mission to make it stand out a bit and not be "Just Another Escort". Just don't use the same trick twice, or else it becomes tedious again.

The keyword I think here is "how" you do the mission, not what you do in it. In order for new missions to be interesting to veteran players, you need more ways of "how" and less "whats."

I was working on a training campaign to have Blue Planet ships fly the original Freespace campaign to show what kind of difference they would make versus the original Freespace craft, but I deleted it because I thought nobody would want to play Freespace again (That and warhammers and Durgas seemed to do jack vs the Eva). Maybe I'll start it again. Every mission in that series should have an original so you can see the difference between fighter generations/hardware, and then a rebalance to make it difficult.

Of course, I'm guessing that UEF hardware vs the Shivans is going to see the light of day rather shortly now...so...what's the point?

[Black Wolf]

I should have put this in earlier, but let's not forget - people play Freespace because they enjoy Freespace. There's fun to be had with traditional missions and traditional mechanics, if they're well designed, well balanced and tell a story people can get involved in. Gimmicks and tricks and surprises can be great - they can make missions really fun and interesting. But so can a well designed capship strike mission, even if we've played a variation on it a dozen times before.

[Axem]

Well like it or not, your mission is going to be based off an archtype where you go around shooting stuff. Be it escort, attack, or sneaky stealth. You can do neat stuff like building station or playing detective, but unless you're going to be real post-modernist/avant garde here, half your missions are still going to be "typical". And there's nothing wrong with that.

I think the execution of a mission is more important than what the mission really is. Escort missions tend to be terrible because there's usually little variation. So you think about ways to make it interesting. It's an escort mission, but half the convoy mis-jumped. So you can only save one half of it, one's got weapons, one's got civilians. Which are you going to save? Can you actually save both? What if you could talk your way out of it? We still have an awful escort mission, but we're trying something new with it. And if it can be pulled off well, then we've solved the problem with it being tedious.

[Phantom Hoover]

The reason 'fly around and shoot stuff' becomes boring is that the player's higher brain functions have nothing to do. The solution to this is not to mess with the formula of flying around and shooting stuff (which, in the end, is a refined and basically fun experience), it's to add meaningful tactical decisions or an engaging story on top of that.