[An4ximandros]

...Hitlerian...

I am trying really hard to avoid Godwin-ing here...

[Lorric]

Wings of Dawn is a love story set during a war which our protagonists are losing really, really badly.

What love story? Do you know something about what Spoon is doing for the remake?

[An4ximandros]

Subtext... Jest... Come on! It's not hard if you think about it, mate...

[Lorric]

Subtext... Jest... Come on! It's not hard if you think about it, mate...

I know

Spoiler:

Misuzu has a "thing" about Crystal

if that's what you're getting at.

[Mongoose]

EDIT: While Darius' idea is really cool. Brian Herbert has been known to nuke fan projects...

Hasn't he already done enough nuking of his dad's own work?

[swashmebuckle]

EDIT: While Darius' idea is really cool. Brian Herbert has been known to nuke fan projects...

Hasn't he already done enough nuking of his dad's own work?

I read Dune for the first time last week and I thought the afterward by the son was more interesting than the book itself. I mean it was pretty much an attempted emotional assassination between the hero worship and the generally not good writing and the fact that he just wanted his dad to play catch with him or something and the dad was like "No son, these worm riding space princes aren't going to write themselves," but it was just such a breath of fresh air after all the the layers of contrivance, and I thought it actually did a great job of helping the book stick in my head and salvaging some of the things that didn't really work.

Like I thought the hereditary themes in the book were kinda silly, but revealing the author's family issues immediately after finishing the story like that made them kind of wow. Maybe every book should have a bunch of lurid unseemly details about the author's life on the back flap instead of the boring facts they usually write about themselves, and then you can choose whether or not to read it and have it ruin and/or post-modernize your experience.

So yeah, I'd probably have a subconscious need to nuke that universe too if I were him, though I don't think that's what he (the son) is accomplishing. I mean maybe it's all just a desperate coattail riding thing and his dad was actually awesome, but even if that were the case I thought the afterward added an interesting perspective and helped turn it from a read-and-forget experience into something that I'll probably be thinking about whenever I think "man this author must be such a tool!" which sort of happens a lot. Pretty much every time I read one of my posts, actually.

[Mito [PL]]

A dream mod? Something allowing capships to take also visual damage from beams and bombs... involving in-game editing of textures and ship's geometry... So that the ship wouldn't need to scream "we're massacred"

[Nyctaeus]

I was thinking about Post-apocalyptic FS. Something like AoA, but focused more on destroyed interstellar society. TBH I never felt destroyed GTA in AoA. With only single Orion hulk... I'd like to see planets after orbital bombardment, hundreds of hulks, groups of survivors with custom modiffied ships, trying to survive etc. I was working on something like that, called Nocturnal Skies/Ultima cena but later it evolved into something different.

[T-Man]

Oh where to begin...

Nah, My 1st big dream would've been RTS, but Admiral MS has already begun making that happen! Incredibly advanced RTS perhaps wouldn't suit most FS games as your meant to be a pilot not top brass but I like the idea of being able to tell cruisers 'move over here it's safer/better for your when you attack' or 'jump in from this direction, they'll be screwed' (...And yes, my inner child did squee when I played Eyes in The Storm for the first time...)

My big one at the moment (though unlikely to happen as I cannot begin to imagine the coding required) would be more advanced capship behaviour, as in they could be programmed to move in a way that suited their design when told to attack something (so in BP for example, the Chimera or Karuna/Nara could be set to keep their front facing the target when told to attack, and ships like the Diomedes turn to keep their side facing the target... so essentially Homeworld 2 really ), and maybe if the ships lost those turrets they could work out the best positioning to maximise what they had left. You can sort of do this already with very clever SEXPs and waypointing (as you see in BP) but that that can restrict how much ships can move in the mission and it would be cool to have it hard-coded so it worked anytime for every missions. Was happy to hear MS already has a basic version of this behaviour (where ships told attack work out a position to have the most turrets facing the enemy) so maybe there's hope for one day...

Oh and there's of course the holy grail of the above; 'hang on I'm about to crash into that other capship in front of me, maybe I should go round/wait for it to move out the way' and it's close cousin 'oh, there's a friendly between me and my in-range target, I should probably stop trying to fire through my buddy and wait till I have a clear shot' (I had that recently in a mission of the 'Pandora's box' campaign with an Aeolus and Typhon and it drove me insane ).

(...I probably need to cut down on smileys...)

[Spoon]

'oh, there's a friendly between me and my in-range target, I should probably stop trying to fire through my buddy and wait till I have a clear shot'
(...I probably need to cut down on smileys...)

A 'check friendly hull' flag for turrets would be lovely indeed.
Some capital ship formations are just a downright hazard because friendly fire happens so much.

[Dragon]

Not to mention accounting for free flight time if checking whether the missile has a clear shot. With VLS launchers, you need to arrange your formation so that the ships don't fire missiles into each other, and somehow ensure they don't break this formation...

[General Battuta]

Enhanced warship AI is much less important than more precise and powerful tools for scripting warship behavior. In general as a mission designer you want your warship to be doing exactly what you want, not whatever it wants - so you need better ways to tell it what you want.

[T-Man]

Enhanced warship AI is much less important than more precise and powerful tools for scripting warship behavior. In general as a mission designer you want your warship to be doing exactly what you want, not whatever it wants - so you need better ways to tell it what you want.

Aye that's true; I've been thinking much the same myself in hindsight, every hardcoded behaviour is another factor you'd need to work around. If ever doable it would perhaps be best as an a system where you could switch each of the possible behaviours on and off? Would mean a designer can pick-and-choose, and possibly add their own if they wished (am reminded of BP's fight with the Macduff and it's behaviours); that might open potential for stuff like 'preferred tactics', captains with 'signature manoeuvres' or ships with special abilities like in BP.

[Dragon]

Enhanced warship AI is much less important than more precise and powerful tools for scripting warship behavior. In general as a mission designer you want your warship to be doing exactly what you want, not whatever it wants - so you need better ways to tell it what you want.

That depends on what kind of mission you're writing. Note that capship command script opened a whole new can of worms regarding warships. With improved warship AI, capship-focused missions, as well as very small capships, would become much more viable. Also, it would become possible to use capships without very tight scripting and constant waypointing, which would be good for small, agile warships like frigates and gunships, which should, IMO, be less predictable than carriers or line battleships. Of course, an option to restrict a capship to a scripted path should remain, if only for the aforementioned line battleships.

[General Battuta]

Having spearheaded the entire capship command effort, I'm well aware of what it needs - which is a way to manage warship behavior contingent on the player's behavior, using tight scripting and constant waypointing. It's not hard to make these unpredictable. What is hard is giving the warships roll commands while also giving them courses, stuff like 'keep your top facing waypoint X' or whatever. This is the primary challenge mission designers have when handling warships right now.

Dynamic waypoints solved most of the other extant challenges. What we need to avoid are hardcoded AI behaviors, as T-Man said. As much warship behavior as possible should live in FRED and scripting so it can be accessible to designers.

[Dragon]

Isn't that simply implementing capship AI FRED-side, though? If you've got a mission that uses dynamic waypoints to make it's warships react to player commands, the situation at hand and mission designer's ideas, how is that different from essentially designing an AI system? Of course, that way, AI behavior is exposed to the FREDer, but I think that this should be a feature of FS AI system, and not only for capships. In your example, perhaps it'd be better to program an attack routine into AI that would move towards a waypoint while keeping the ship's top pointed a specific direction? Having such behaviors hardcoded, but still tweakable from within FRED, could make writing capship missions easier.

[General Battuta]

The short answer to your question is 'no'. The long answer is this:

I am okay with expanded warship AI as a crutch for beginner designers and RTS style situations, but it will probably never replace good FRED work.

Unlike fighters, who only need to occupy broad volumes and express wide behaviors, mission designers need to manage the precise position and orientation of warships. In my example, it would be much worse to program an attack routine into the AI that would move towards a waypoint while keeping the ship's top pointed a specific direction, because this is not exposed to the designer and cannot be modified to the demands of the mission. It is easier, safer, and more powerful to say 'go to this waypoint. Set this waypoint's position here. Set the ship's orientation as it moves, preferring to keep local Y+ towards this waypoint.' than to say 'Attack this target, and do whatever the **** you want.'

Please, believe me when I say that I have spent probably more time managing precise warship behavior in unusual situations than anyone else. FRED is extraordinarily powerful, and its power lies in its flexibility and accessibility.

When you're working on a sophisticated mission you need warships with essentially no intrinsic AI except their turret behavior. The basic reason is that warship behavior is highly consequential and it depends on a spectacular number of variables which no AI could robustly account for. To be really specific, I need to be able to say that destroyer X is making a broadside pass on destroyer Y at exactly this point in the mission and be able to tell it NOT to do that, to instead run for distance, contingent on some other aspect of the mission. You cannot do this with AI.

[General Battuta]

There is zero chance you could build an AI that knew how to say 'Ah, the player has destroyed subsystem Z, enemy bomber wings A B and C, and finished their conversation with character Bob. Once the music hits a big peak, I will swing into a nose-on attack and fire all my main beams, but only if my escort gunboats are within 400 meters and my anti-torpedo flares are currently firing. Otherwise, I will roll to port.'

Whereas this is like a minute's work in FRED.

[Dragon]

Well, I wouldn't say a minute's work, unless the rest of the mission is already written. But it's the sort of situation where FRED is better, mostly because the situation is very specific.
The thing is, "classic" FS mostly operates all capships like line battleships or carriers, which, unless directly controlled by the player RTS-style, generally don't have much flexibility in how they can move, if they move at all. Even the smallest cruisers are slow, and anything involving a capship maneuvering is an important moment. This might not always be desirable in other universes, where capships can actually move and turn at decent speeds, and their actions might not be as consequential as usually in FS. For such situations, being able to tell a ship to simply "attack this target in an optimum way, while keeping formation" would be preferable to scripting this all. Note, warship AI doesn't only apply to destroyers (static enough for scripting to pretty much always win out), it covers anything bigger than a bomber. Scripting a gunship to move in circles around a convoy moving at a set speed might not be easy, especially if you don't know when it will break this pattern (though it can be done, an AI function to automate that would probably be handy).

[General Battuta]

Right, but remember that the FreeSpace AI cannot reliably avoid collisions even with objects as small as fighters. Whenever you leave a ship under AI control you are going to hit jank, and the bigger the ship, the more awkward and incredibly visible it is. A huge ship that moves at 40 m/s and can turn only as fast as a bomber is going to hit major major trouble when it needs to avoid collisions with 3-4 other ships of the same size, all moving dynamically.