Author Topic: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)  (Read 86178 times)

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Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
well can anyone help me with installing this battle captains mod because on knossos it is showing that i cannot install the mod due to MVPS missing but i have installed all the versions of the mediaVPs and even the blueplanet complete mod

 

Offline Cyborg17

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Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
It's currently broken until someone with enough skill takes the time to fix it.

 
Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
Well, +1 for those who want to see it restored to its former glory.

 
Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
Would it be possible to put a warning on the Knossos description until it's repaired?

  
Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
Well good news, I was able to get it to launch and play the first half of it.
The bad news is yep, crashes at the checkpoint.

 
Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
Well... ngld gave me access to fix the dependency issues on knossos and i've done that much. I could now upload it so everyone can download and install it... but it's a bit of a broken mess. The mainhalls are broken so you can't see the buttons for baracks, techroom, continue, exit, etc... It looks like the mainhall tables are referencing anims that don't exist... perhaps from before Blue Planet Complete? I'll look into resolving that so people can at least start the campaigns and then get it uploaded to knossos/nebula... but it will be up to someone else to fix any issues beyond that.

 
Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
Okay! Battle Captains is back on Knossos and afaik working again. Download link below.

It took drastic measures to get it there.  The new TBC download has the old legacy (pre "complete") Blueplanet 1 & 2 mods bundled with it... so the download save is quite a bit larger than before. This does appear to have solved some of the most glaring issues... and, with a little luck, should resolve many of the in-flight issues people have been experiencing. I've also pinned TBC to some of the oldest version of FSO and MVPS available in Knossos in hopes of further limiting dependency rot.

I haven't had a chance to sit down and play through the whole campaign to see what's still broken. And I wouldn't have the skill to fix it if I did. That said, I am more than a little curious how many of the problems that have been plaguing TBC are resolved simply by giving it the correct (or closer to correct) dependencies. So feel free to post any issues that remain here... or even any issues that are now resolved.



Big shout out to Renegade Paladin who hunted up old copies of Blue Planet for me to use!
« Last Edit: February 11, 2021, 10:32:54 pm by jadeddragoon »

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
I think in the long run the right fix here is just to move the assets that are present in the old dependencies, but not in the new ones, into Battle Captains. Rather than duplicating the entire BP install.

But this is a good short term fix.

 
Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
I think in the long run the right fix here is just to move the assets that are present in the old dependencies, but not in the new ones, into Battle Captains. Rather than duplicating the entire BP install.

But this is a good short term fix.

This is what I would prefer... unfortunately I don't know which assets/tables those are. And this was also an attempt to create a best case scenario for everything in TBC to work. If it's mostly working, then I'll probably do a file/folder diff between bpc and legacy to see what exactly has changed.
« Last Edit: February 11, 2021, 04:11:18 pm by jadeddragoon »

 
Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
Note that this was accomplished through using the 2010 BP releases (from my own old computer), so if there are dependencies specific to 2014 when this was originally released, we might need to track down those files still. 
"Courage is the complement of fear.  A fearless man cannot be courageous.  He is also a fool." -- Robert Heinlein

 
Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
Note that this was accomplished through using the 2010 BP releases (from my own old computer), so if there are dependencies specific to 2014 when this was originally released, we might need to track down those files still. 

I totally forgot to mention the help you gave. Edited the post above to give credit where credit is due. :-)

 

Offline QuakeIV

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Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
I had actually been trying to resurrect old blue planet versions for a while (i did manage to compile some old SCP versions after a bit of fiddling but all I had was a circa 2014 version of BP with some kind of horrible lua error killing everything somewhat unpredictably) so I am actually pretty excited just to find that this seems to have a working copy of old blue planet packaged in (just finished the first mission).

e: By the way I'm getting an error in knossos on trying to extract what appears to be the actual battle captains VPs (as opposed to the dependencies), you might need to re-upload the file(s) it smells like it got corrupted during transmission or something.

Terminal output:
Code: [Select]
INFO:Thread-6:util.call: Running ['7z', 'x', '-o/home/[redacted]/games/FreespaceOpen/temp/tmpn9sfbejc/content', '/home/[redacted]/games/FreespaceOpen/temp/tmpn9sfbejc/tbc.7z']
WARNING:Thread-6:tasks.work2: Missing file "data/hud/AdmForrester.ani" from archive "tbc.7z" for package "tbc" (Blue Planet 2: The Battle Captains - GTVA)!
ERROR:Thread-6:tasks.work2: Failed to unpack archive "tbc.7z" for package "tbc" (Blue Planet 2: The Battle Captains - GTVA)!

e2: To be clear I tried re-validating/redownloading three times now, so I am actually fairly sure whats currently on the server is corrupt.
« Last Edit: February 11, 2021, 11:51:34 pm by QuakeIV »

 
Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
Bruh, doing God's work! Thank you!

 
Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
e: By the way I'm getting an error in knossos on trying to extract what appears to be the actual battle captains VPs (as opposed to the dependencies), you might need to re-upload the file(s) it smells like it got corrupted during transmission or something.

e2: To be clear I tried re-validating/redownloading three times now, so I am actually fairly sure whats currently on the server is corrupt.

Yes, it's a checksum issue on the nebula servers. My uploads  have been getting hit by it left and right. Every attempt i've made to resolve it has failed. Atm, I'm waiting on ngld to see my pleas for help. I'm sorry for any confusion and frustration. I'll post here once it's resolved.

 

Offline QuakeIV

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Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
Didn't really feel either of those things since it looked like an honest mistake, for me at least its pretty 'eh'.  In any case I will await your advisement on that being fixed and then give it a try.
« Last Edit: February 12, 2021, 11:48:06 pm by QuakeIV »

 
Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
With the upload of 1.0.7, The Battle Captains is now downloadable and installable!

I'd appreciate any feedback on how broken/not broken the missions are. If all looks to be in relatively good shape I'll take steps the shrink the size of the download.

Didn't really feel either of those things since it looked like an honest mistake, for me at least its pretty 'eh'.  In any case I will await your advisement on that being fixed and then give it a try.

<3 I appreciate your patience and thoughtfulness. It's good that you weren't frustrated by it!

 
Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
My new PC is built, but with the storms in the NW it might be a while before I can pick it up. Regardless, I'm super excited this campaign has been salvaged!

 

Offline QuakeIV

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Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
Severanti seems to work fine, relatively simple mission of course but it clearly works.  Failed once due to all of the evac ships dying, and then finished it fine on the second try.


Lopez seems to mostly work fine.  The worst issue I had is I had a Sathanas randomly jump in and murder me after using the checkpoint while the convoy was on its way to the node.  The beam overloads also occasionally prevent your beams from firing at all (before eventually returning to normal firing mode) rather than making your beams go totally bananas and wreck some ****.  I think that last one was always a problem with that mission though.

I think I almost made it to the end (got the 'alright lets settle in for the long haul' dialog which I seem to vaguely recall is the ending?) on Lopez before colliding with a chunk of debris at 2% health and then dying (was only at 2% due to making the mistake of trying to use the beam overloads), so I think its finishable and mostly works.

By the way the checkpoints in Lopez seem to mainly work fine, I died quite a lot and therefore used them quite a lot, but only had the sathanas issue once.  I seem to recall the sathanas thing being a punishment for using cheat codes, however I did not in fact do that so that was seemingly a bug of some sort.

Died a few too many times to bother finishing Lopez for now, but (apart from sathanas) they seemed to be legitimate deaths so I don't really attribute that to anything other than me not being particularly good at that mission.
« Last Edit: February 13, 2021, 02:43:37 pm by QuakeIV »

 

Offline QuakeIV

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Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
Alright there was actually quite a lot after that, at any rate I did eventually make it to the end.  The sathanas made a few more appearances (which stopped when i restarted the mission completely fresh, implying something was wrong with the checkpoint), and there is a broken dialog option after the section with the vasudan cruiser that you need to try to prevent from getting TAG'd by the shivans (if you dont select 'skip', the dialog box will get stuck and prevent the mission from continuing).

Overall I'd say: playable (and rather difficult) but with weird bugs

e: An option to fix the dialog box getting stuck might be to just take away the option to skip certain dialog so it doesn't show up in the first place.  The few times the 'dialog skip' dialog box shows up its only skipping a couple lines, so I would personally say that just removing the option to skip them is not a big loss.

 
Re: Blue Planet: The Battle Captains (Fan Campaign)
Thanks! That's good info.

Just one question... did you change the version of FSO? I pinned the mod to FSO 3.8.0-3 as that's the oldest working version of FSO on Knossos (and the one most likely to work with the campaign)... but Knossos lets people over ride that.

Either way, my next step will be to try to reduce the size of the mod. I may also take a brief look at some of the issue you mentioned to see if i can alleviate them further... but I can't promise anything.