[Mito [PL]]

Whew. That was an experience. The story is as simple as it needs to be, and the missions are built in a rather minimalistic way, but that comes out to be a good thing. The most original part of the experience is, of course, the matter of the tone of this campaign, story and "dialogues". Oh, and the interface! Everything feels very alien, but there's enough info for the player to complete any of the mission objectives. Also operating with the use of typical Freespace mission profiles help a bit.

Now, the part that got me the most: the ending. Such use of audio and visual effects made it into a quintesence of space horror. It's just perfect. Barely any sci-fi makes these kind of scenes as good as this. Really.

And the imperfections I found:

Hidden Text: Show

Playing on Insane.
- Now I know why Shivans in FS1 don't rely on their secondaries that much. They ****ing suck!
- The regeneration feature is really interesting, but it seems to not regenerate countermeasures. Also, Nephilim's shields are on while regenerating, is that intentional?

M1:
- Some Terran fighters are guardianed
- Ugh... I think Terran fighters at the time didn't have intrasystem jump drives? At least, canonically.
- Wingmen tend to often enter "pacifist mode" and stop firing at designated targets.
- Cargo: Spoons lol

M2:
- More spoons! Also, more funny cargo!
- It's actually horribly tough to survive the athena + valkyrie wave that attacks the Taranis later in the mission... Unless valks don't show up at all for some reason?

M3:
The mission is outright great, but a few questions. If the fighters escape with the info nothing happens? Also, is the Vasudan science ship supposed to be just left there like that?

M4:
- Fun cargo again
- Check the waypoint paths, cargo transports tend to miss the fighterbay entrance.

M5:
- A nice and simple mission, but makes me cringe when it comes to Scorpion's primary gunpoints...

M6:
- Oh my, is that the Galatea?

M7:
- One of the last Isis transport is named "Vasudan Fighter"
- After the transports manage to get by the cruiser, they just... Fly further away. Shouldn't they jump out?
- After the friendly cruiser jumps out, the enemy cruiser just stays in place. Shouldn't the Cain jump out only after every Vasudan ship is dead or departed?
- Also, the bombardment effects are awesome, but shouldn't Lucy actually use its beams?

M8:
- So uhh nothing but the station gets rekt in the mission? ;_;
- I think Krishna's initial orders are empty.
- One of the cargo boxes has got purple designation for some reason. The one with spoons in it.

M9:
- Deva here also seems to not have initial orders.
- I can't help but notice how Mecross gets rekt by totally anything that looks bad at it. Poor cruiser.

M10:
- Pretty straightforward, nothing to add.

M11:
- The hardest part of the mission is to not get instakilled by fighters, after that it's a perfectly easy win.
- I believe that subspace variants of Shivan fighters need to have their radar icons assigned.

M12:
- I had Ursas spawning in literally just outside Lucy. Some of them even in its fighterbays, wut?
- The muting of sounds in the later part of the mission is super annoying since you can't hear most of the stuff that makes you know that someone's about to kill you.
- Also, how the hell did so many enemies just appear out of nowhere?
- The whole cinematic sequence is just on another level. It's just awesome. I can't praise it enough. Makes the whole campaign feel like falling down into the abyss of total space horror.

[Asteroth]

*snip*

Wow, I'm quite impressed you had the determination and skill to play through a campaign that ended up much harder than intended (even after numerous nerfs) on Insane. You also have quite a few legitimate bugs and good observations here so I'll respond to just a few of the actual questions.

Spoiler:

Countermeasures should probably regenerate, yes, and the Nephilim's shields while regenerating is intended

I unfortunately realized a bit late that fighters indeed couldn't intersystem jump yet, and there is no easy fix without fundamentally changing the mission. I've also noticed the wingmate strangeness in the first mission, for me, I notice they tend to "forget" very quickly about their assigned targets as well as enemy turrets not shooting at the player, both of which were difficult for me to bugfix, and only seem to happen in M1.

In M3 the Kestral has the technology (or claims to) to track Shivans through subspace. Merely knowing that this technology existed from its escorts doesn't really help the GTA or PVE very much, and yes, you can leave the Menhit if you like, the Shivans don't really care what happens to it.

And for M4, it's entirely dock orders and depart via fighterbay orders so not much I can do there.

For M7 in the Vasudan bombardment cbanim the Lucifer is shown using these blue beams from its side instead of it's normal beams. Maybe they're specifically planetary bombardment beams?

[Mito [PL]]

Hmm, okay... so, how about:

Spoiler:

There are a couple ships in FS1 that are actually quite fast. Centaurs, Poseidons, I think Hermes too? You could redesign the mission around fighters defending freighters and some smaller ships attempting to sneak in. Also, the station is supposed to be completely unprepared.

As for docking paths, I think it's possible to have these transports depart in the fighterbay using a normal waypoint path going into the place mixed with "departure: in fighterbay" tag.

And the beams - yes, that's probable, but I think I didn't see any of these planetary ones firing - but there were "bombardment" effects visible on the planet.

As for the difficulty, it was okay in my opinion. The campaign is hard enough to make players look for alternative solutions and plan their actions properly, with several replays of every mission, and really think of the loadouts. So, diving heads-on into enemy is definitely not an option here. However, it is easy enough to be playable, and on Insane difficulty you are supposed to have problems and a need to grind your approach to the mission a bit.

[AdDur]

One more thought - in second Hope mission, no matter how long you wait/let isis dock and repair Hope, the destroyer doesn't escapes - maybe there should be some possibility of screwing mission so badly, that Hope manages to retreat?

[Nightmare]

BTW, Asteroth did you read my earlier idea with the text? I think it went under in the derail.

I think it would be cool if there was a TrueType font that would auto-translate the text (it would be written in plain text) to code, so that the player could choose between the code version (default) and the readable version (without the translation script). I don't think the player could specify that in mission though...

From what I've seen in the translated parts, Asteroth has put a lot of good ideas into the way the Shivan language is set up, encoding this makes it invisible (and it felt a bit as if the story just passed by).

[Asteroth]

I did, yeah. If you want to set something like that up, be my guest, but I'm ultimately happy with the way it's currently presented in game. All the Shivan stuff was written with the knowledge that it would pass most players by in mind.

[General Battuta]

You mentioned this earlier and I can't remember if you explained it - why did you end up keeping the original Terran names for Shivan (and otherwise) ships?

[Nightmare]

I thought it was a cool idea to do that, but I'd have to figure out how to edit TTFs for that and I've got enough unfinished projects for now. Nice to hear you like the basic proposal though.

[Asteroth]

You mentioned this earlier and I can't remember if you explained it - why did you end up keeping the original Terran names for Shivan (and otherwise) ships?

Well, I probably shouldn't have mentioned it because both reasons are kind of embarrassing, but at first it was simply that I didn't know how to do it, when you're dealing with the FSPort, the FSPort-MVPs, and the MVPs, modifying ships in a .tbm becomes way easier than trying to copy an existing ship. I later would feel comfortable enough doing that, but then Shivan wing names became the odd man out (still having Terran names, that is), I simply couldn't come up with a naming scheme for them I liked, so I simply decided to leave the ship names as well, so at least it wouldn't be quite as jarring.

The names would've been Rain, Sleet, Snow and Hail for the fighters to keep with the weather theme (although 'Snow' sounds a bit too fluffy and harmless), and Lightning and Thunder for the bombers.

[Admiral-Sabree]

Ah so what is there to say about this campaign. Other then we be shivans. No I've got more to say. It was an interesting perspective to play. I liked the very ominous and foreboding tone set. The Missions were well designed and give or take that one with the transport fairly reasonable to understand from the image briefs. Also the diverging events, it was unexpected and welcome at the same time.  If anything there is to say, its that wow are the shivan ships just terrible. The scorpion is probably the most well balanced. Decent everything and definitely usable. The Manticores are death traps. I wouldn't even bother putting the AI in those things as they would last a total of 5 seconds. The Basilisks and Dragons seemed to have the best survivability when given to the AI. I preferred the Basilisk for it health pool and missile capacity although I'm certain its a death trap of its own on hard and insane. I'm not going to even bother talking about the weapons, except that there's a reason why they take awhile to kill you.

Spoiler:

Onto the missions themselves.

Not much to say exsept for mission 3, It took me about 4 trys before I relised I needed to hope into regeneration mode and stay in it. (I only relised this when i noticed the AI also went dark in this mission) Partially my fault for not understanding the description. But have to say proably one of the most unique ones.

Not sure which mission it was, but we had to defend the Tenpest. From like 3 wings. That died in 30 seconds and the mission was over, It was just kinda jarringly fast.

Then the Cargo depot mission, I think number 7? That was a fun challange, tricky to manage the Shivans effectivly. Meanwile defending the cargo, I kinda ingnored the bombers even after the mission was over and when we finally killed them i noticed the tempest was sitting at a wopping 4% hull. Just a fun note.

Mission 8, Lost hope was a short and sweet one. But the Karnack. That thing killed me a lot blowing up. The hardest part was not dieing from the shock wave. Just another fun note.

Onto the last mission. It was just an interesting mission. When the sound cut out with only the ambiance and the pilots screams it was jarring in once again all the right ways. Also first time I've heard some of thouse pilot death screams. A lot of them never are used due to the rariety of them triggering. It was just a brutal exspirance. Great ending.

Thats about all from me. Will have to go back for thouse spoons at a later date. When I saw the spoons and forks I thought it was just a in game nod to Vassago.

 

[CJM]

Beat the campaign twice on Medium and Insane difficulties. Pretty fun and unique. In case you plan to keep working on it in the future, here are some suggestions: https://pastebin.com/NG0rxkJv

[0rph3u5]

So, in my ongoing effort to reduce my backlog, I gave this a try and well....

This campaign heavily relies on the strength of its pantomime* (or just "miming" if you are british), which is makes it worthwhile to check on as it is unique form of presentation. However that also turns out to be the root of its biggest flaw IMO.
^{*Technically it is not a "silent feature" but as text and audio are cryptic, I will regard it as such.}

Said flaw is that it relies heavily on repetition for some missions to explain themselves, and FS_Open is not exactly set-up for quick-out-and-back-in-again cycles. As such it would be a great help if additional directives would unlock upon successfull completion of mission ciritical steps for future playthroughs - this would be esspecially helpful if you don't play the campaign in a single sitting (I played it across and entire week).
Normally you can keep that to a minimum because you either dialogue to foreshadow stuff or you keep such "need to remember" moments to a minimum, e.g. in Walking on Ashes I've kept that to a 2 instances per mission maximum (usually related to "oh there is an LRed").

[Antares]

CTD upon completion of False Hope.

~

Error: shv-09.fs2 (line 1480):
Error: Required token = [#Goals] or [$Formula], found [+Event Flags: ()].

File: parselo.cpp
Line: 303

EDIT: Never mind, that particular error pops up for a couple of different missions toward the end of the campaign. Clicking through some debug window prompts allows the game to continue. Still annoying.

[Nightmare]

Are you using a recent nightly build? If you use one that's older than a few months it probably has some issues bc of the Event Flags having been added.

[Antares]

Using 19.0 final; the first post says 19.0 RC1 is sufficient.

[Nightmare]

The error message says something different. What build is Knossos configured to use?

[Antares]

The default build for the campaign is set to the latest nightly, but I have it set to 19.0.

[Asteroth]

Given that list of flags is empty it doesn't seem necessary. I wonder if nightly FRED that I use is automatically putting that in, especially since the last few missions are the ones I've most recently edited. I'll be able check it out tonight.

[Nightmare]

It is, that's why I bumped into it.

[Mito [PL]]

How about providing a standard debug log? I think you are familiar with the procedure?