[Royal Hammer]

My recent purchase of an x-52 pro HOTAS has rekindled my interest in space sims (Star Citizen helped too), and I've already played Diaspora and Wing Commander Saga, and loving them. Are there any mods/total conversions to FS2 that include more of a sandbox universe, dropped loot, and trading? I know, maybe I should just go play Freelancer or X3, but I'm geniunely curious. There's a lot out there.

Also, where should I go/what mod should I play to actually find people online in multiplayer? I need to brush up on my skills!

[procdrone]

Uuuum... I would say that Freespace has nothing to do with Sandbox, looting, and trading... so maybe Axem work may be something closer to your desire... but well... i think there is no mod like this.

As for mutli? idk, i don't play freespace online

[The E]

Yeah, FS isn't really well-suited to sandboxish things.

[General Battuta]

Nobody plays multiplayer right now because the netcode needs an upgrade to make it really fun.

FreeSpace is, at its heart, a mission-driven space simulator. It doesn't do sandbox or loot out of the box; that's not what it was built for, and not why anyone came to love it. FreeSpace is about nimble fighters and spectacularly huge ships slugging it out in tightly scripted missions.

However, enterprising modders have pushed our open-source engine in some crazy directions. For an example of some of our wilder gameplay, check out The Antagonist and JAD 2.22.

[Mikes]

FreeSpace is, at its heart, a mission-driven space simulator. It doesn't do sandbox or loot out of the box;

And am I the only one who would add a "and thank god for that" at the end of above's sentence ?

I'm not sure if I'm too old school or what but everytime I hear a friend ranting about games having to be "sandbox" and worse "loot driven" ... 

... it reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c


In short: The ideals behind most of the work created on this site are pretty much the same of what I would consider the ideals of "good" entertainment that respects the player, while in the commercial video game world, nowadays, we almost always see some kind of cheap psychological hook (i.e. loot and or stat progression) to artificially extend playtime with cheaply made repetitive filler content. - with some of the worst (MMO) offenders offering little else but a cheaply designed grind for items and stats that abuses our own brains achievement/reward mentality to do the most idiotic/menial/repetitive tasks for more stat "increases".
(The old Everquest satire is still as relevant as ever: http://progressquest.com/ )

Kind of a pet peeve of mine so bear with me for going off on this tangent.

I just couldn't help but comment to a situation I would consider similar to someone walking into a high class restaurant and asking if they could have McDonalds style fast food.

[Dragon]

Well, Goober once made a prototype RPG-style tech-demo, and now Axem is expanding on it with scripts and stuff. Who knows, maybe we'll see the day in which missions can be more procedural and less cinematic (can't say there won't be a place for cinematic missions, but only as "special events"). Since scripts are also being developed for capship AI and commanding, maybe in a few years it'll be possible to build a Freelancer-like RPG on FS engine.

[The E]

It may be possible, but it's always going to be something the engine just isn't built to do.

[Royal Hammer]

FreeSpace is, at its heart, a mission-driven space simulator.

Ok, I gotcha. And I love the game as it is! I was just curious if more variety was available within this great platform. I will continue to play the **** out of Wing Commander Saga, and perhaps I'll try the Babylon Project next.

[Goober5000]

Don't forget Lt.D's Bem Cavalgar.

[Black Wolf]

Well, Goober once made a prototype RPG-style tech-demo, and now Axem is expanding on it with scripts and stuff. Who knows, maybe we'll see the day in which missions can be more procedural and less cinematic (can't say there won't be a place for cinematic missions, but only as "special events"). Since scripts are also being developed for capship AI and commanding, maybe in a few years it'll be possible to build a Freelancer-like RPG on FS engine.

I actually started thinking about doing exactly this when I saw what Axem was doing, but pretty quickly came to the conclusion that the amount of work involved in making any kind of sandbox/rpg style game more complext than has already been done (ala Bem Cavalgar) would rapidly go from "huge" to "insane" to "utterly impractical" over the course of adding even a few basic RPG like features (things like an inventory, currency etc.), let alone an even pseudo-dynamic environment, which would be hard enough. Even with Axem's advances (clickable communication menus for talking to toher ships, the system map etc.), FS really doesn't have the framework to do an RPG justice.

The big problem is that, at present with a very small number of exceptions, everything FS does is based on what can be stored within a single mission file - as you'd expect for a game of this sort. But these mission files barely talk to each other, and so much of the RPG experience depends on location independent factors, like characters that can move around, or react to events that have taken place elsewhere.

I suspect that doing it right would require some heavy duty scripting/coding to allow the storage of arbitrary data within the pilot file or an external plain text file of some kind, to make things like currency and inventory independent of the mission system, but FS would still lack an equivalent independent "character" system that would let you store things about individual ships in a way that is associated with that ship, rather than with the mission file. Even if we had that, the amount of sexping associated with all the potential conversations you could have with every potential ship in a given location at any point during the campaign would be mind boggling, and incredibly hard to test.

In short, if the FS Sandbox RPG is a cake we're baking, we're slowly gathering the appropriate ingredients, but it'll be a long time (if ever) before we have an appropriate mixing bowl.

[General Battuta]

Storing independent data isn't hard using just FRED alone - you have persistent variables for that, and you can use bitwise to pack a ton of flags into just one. It's mostly the content generation required that makes it impractical.

[Goober5000]

In addition to persistent variables, saving arbitrary data is already possible thanks to the in-mission jump scripting tools.

[Phantom Hoover]

How well does FSO hold up when missions are run for a very long time, out of curiosity?

[Black Wolf]

It's the sheer number of variables you'd need that makes it tough. If you could throw things into a mission-independent character, you could tell FRED to bring in, say, the GTD Aquitaine, which would have everything that the player had ever done to the Aquitaine stored within it. Doing it with campaign persistent variables you'd need to store all that data, in every mission, for evey ship that could conceivably turn up in that mission. It would start to spiral out of control very rapidly.

[Goober5000]

But that's why I mentioned the in-mission jump scripting.  You can do something like save_ship('Aquitaine') and all the Aquitaine's hull, subsystems, etc. would be written to a file on the hard disk.

[General Battuta]

Yup. Makes checkpoints a lot easier.

[karajorma]

I think the tools do exist to do a reasonable job of a sandbox style campaign but I agree with BW that it would be quite a large undertaking at this point.

[mjn.mixael]

Using the shipsave script to save basic ship info is something completely different than saving say... Bits for every conversation had with that ship in any mission/location... Or possibly trade options based on environment, achievements, and who knows what else. I think this is the kind of cross mission stuff BW is saying could fly way out of control.

[General Battuta]

Using the shipsave script to save basic ship info is something completely different than saving say... Bits for every conversation had with that ship in any mission/location... Or possibly trade options based on environment, achievements, and who knows what else. I think this is the kind of cross mission stuff BW is saying could fly way out of control.

That's the easy stuff to handle with long string and int variables, though. As long as you've got a robust system down it's not too ludicrous.

Really it's the content generation that's the problem, not the technical aspects.

[mjn.mixael]

Yeah.. I still think you are minimizing the amount of stuff it could turn into.

Now start thinking of character histories and saving all of that data. I'm not talking about just basic ship info.. things that could affect dialog, story outcomes, or items acquired. So like, character interactions from damaged by, where, and when... to like what conversations have been had in what order. Current and past locations.. Upgrade history, etc.

And it's not just that all of this can be stored in a variable. Big whoop, we know it can be done. The point is keeping track of it all. Doing a full on sandbox with string and int variables would be a ludicrous amount of work with the way FSO is currently constrained to saving data and passing it between missions. It would take document after document to even remember which bit stored what info and for which character. Not to mention the SEXPing required to even do something with all of that info in any and every mission that's part of the "campaign".

I mean, we aren't talking about variable tracking for some BP dialog tree. We are talking about tracking full on sandbox data for any number of systems, planets, nodes, characters, upgrades, ships, and whatever else needs to be packed into a space sandbox to make it interesting. It's not that it can't be done. It's that trying to use any form of FSO variable-SEXP system to make a sandbox is like trying to build a real house out of Legos. I'm sure someone could do it, but it would be a stupid amount of work.. and Legos just weren't ever meant for that.