Aaand we're back... yet again!
The goal of this thread is to coordinate development on our project codenamed HighSpace - a mod for Freespace 2 that will be a mashup between it and High Fleet. A description of how the mechanics of the two games could be combined is available in the first thread.
General Status of the Project
Between just being busy with life, and my general predisposition of jumping into a project and not really finishing it, I can't really promise that this time around will see more consistent updates than the last time. The good news is that if you kind of thought this project is cool, but you're afraid of joining and flaking out - don't worry about it. As you can see I'm no better, and the half the reason for this project is to have a community activity for TheMotte's tinkerers and artists.
The biggest update is a change in the approach to writing / art direction. Originally I was hoping we'll get enough people to hop in, divide jobs according to our strengths, and manage the project by some dialogue / mindmeld / flat-hierarchy mechanism. Writing specifically not being one of my strengths, I figured I'd leave everything vague, so someone better can have more freedom. That didn't pan out, so it became obvious that I'll need to take charge here, but the other problem was - I really didn't know where I want to go with the story, or even more broadly with world-building. Then, the other day, when I was stuck on a flight with nothing better to do but to daydream, I was hit with a sudden bout of inspiration. Ever since I had that thought about all my favorite space operas boiling down to Americans talking about their place in the world, I thought someone should make a non-Western Star Trek. I even had some vague ideas for a Gulliver-Travelsesque "fly around the universe bumping into various civilizations that satirize current-era humanity" story, but I never put pen to paper, and it's not really the kind of thing that works well with a space shooter, so it was of no use here. I don't even remember how I made the connection, but somehow I thought about Attack On Titan, and how well they pulled off the feeling existential threat, and I figured that that's the missing piece - some good old fashioned existential horror wreaking havoc, and a scrappy pack survivors trying to make it through.
So here's the setting: Sometime in the far far future - no one even knows when anymore - humanity conquered the stars and colonized the galaxy. All was well until the aforementioned horrors showed up. No one knows what they are, and what their greater goals are - not least because nearly all historical records were lost to the apocalypse they brought - but they do seem to seek out sentient life and "consume" it, assuming it's shape and behaviors in the process, but never getting it quite right, leading an uncanny appearance, as if to mock their victims with their existence. The once-glorious empire of humanity was annihilated, all that remains are nomad fleets and deeply hidden colonies. Several generations passed since this apocalypse, and the survivors got quite good at surviving, either by deploying superior tactics, or by becoming expert at hiding. Their current situation is stable, but they must maintain iron discipline at all times, and any slip will likely result in tragedy.
...and then it struck me that a post-apocalyptic Eastern European (that's where I'm from, so that's what you're getting) Star Trek with incomprehensible horrors looming at every turn is, yet again, a mashup between Freespace and High Fleet. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.
Updates
Not much to show off yet, but the whole Demo Scenario is getting revamped to reflect the changes in the setting. The current idea is as follows:
Someone did make a slip. A logistics taskforce flew right into the hornets' nest, and are now being pursued by the Incomprehensible Horrors. Captain Playername receives their distress call, and as the nearest ship, rushes in to help. Reinforcements are on the way, but will need time to assemble. The logistics guys can't jump to another system due to [McGuffin, or some clever Subspace jump mechanic I'm yet to come up with], so they opted to scatter throughout the system in an attempt to buy time and minimize casualties.
The player is in command of a mid-size carrier, and has to rescue as many friendlies as he can find, before the IH's get to them. Each successful rescue gives the player a new ship at their command (in case it's one of the escorts), and/or resources like bombs/specialized ammo (when it's one of the transports), but generates more aggro (which itself has trade-offs - more aggro on you means less on the relatively defenseless friendlies). All this culminates in an assault on the IH super-capital ship, that is the source of all this trouble. This will resemble an arcadey boss-fight, where fighters will need to take apart some critical components of the enemy ship, so the friendly capital ships can approach it safely and finish it.
I think a scenario like this will be more manageable. The previous one (where the player would have to hunt down pirates raiding freighters coming to/from a mining colony) would require a pretty complex AI, while here I'm planning to go with a pretty basic "chase the thing with the highest aggro" approach for the enemy.
Actual changes since last version
I started writing the map generator. Currently rescuable ships are spawned randomly throughout the system, and I'm now working on having the enemy spawn in their pursuit (far enough away from the friendlies to no immediately detect them, close enough that they'll get picked up by patrols sooner or later). I fixed a few bugs, but apparently introduced a whole bunch of new ones (random crash to desktop with a mysterious message, for example).
Now Hiring:
Slapper-in-chief
Do you have a sadistic streak? Did I get on your nerves while posting here, and now you really, really want to slap me? This is your opportunity!
If you're not up for joining in a creative capacity, one thing that I think would help me greatly, is someone to smack me if I start slacking around. The feedback I got from @netstack helped me a lot before, so like that guy that hired someone to slap him every time he opened Facebook, I figure that regular interactions where I report on what I did, what I'm planning to do, get screamed at for not meeting my deadlines, and get some feedback on what I accomplished would help me to stay focused.
The usual
Other than that I'll still need help from other creatives, including:
- developers: “mission” code, “strategic” system map code
- artists: 2D (user interface), 3D (space ships, weapons explosions) (@FCFromSSC, still interested / do you have more time nowadays?)
- writers: worldbuilding / lore, quests, characters
- testers: the way the any program works always makes sense to the developer, so feedback from people who aren't me is always appreciated. This is a pretty easy way to get involved, though it does require an initial investment of buying Freespace2, at least until we manage to turn it into a proper total conversion, and use only our content.
A small note for potential contributors:
Don't be afraid to ask questions however small, or silly you might find them. This is literally one of the primary functions this thread has. The Hard Light documentation is... there... but it's not great, and between that, the peculiarities of LUA, the FS2 scripting API, RocketLib, and other parts of FS2 modding, it really might not be obvious how to resolve issues you run into. I might not be able to answer all questions, but I've dabbled in all these things, so there's good chances I'll be able to help.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Art Update ...I've been working on an art pass for the freighter, working on normal-map detail and actual texture. Work's been busy so this has been slow going, but I'm hoping it will snowball more and more as I get a better handle on freespace's art pipeline and build up more of a working library of art assets.
Nice!
It's been too long since I imported the earlier designs, so I completely forgot how the art pipeline works, but I remember it wasn't too complicated, I think I figured it out within a day. Let me know if you need any help.
BTW, I think I'll be moving all the HighSpace commentary to the Tinker Tuesday threads. The idea is that my top level comment there will act as the HighSpace thread,
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I've been making a bunch of spaceship models, but so far all of them have been fairly rough concepts. I've done some simple material coloring for the concepts, and I did some very simple UV-work and flat-color diffuse mapping for the frigate and the cruiser we got into the game, but they looked like complete ass. So last week, I took a couple days off work... and promptly got super sick, and spent my vacation days and the weekend also in a fever haze.
But on the way down and the way back up, I decided to finally dig in to Blender's normal-baking systems. The freighter is the next ship up, so I took one of the simple cargo container modules, and modeled up a high-poly version, and baked it down to a normal map for the low-poly version. I'm working on figuring out how to bake down ambient occlusion as well, and that should improve the diffuse maps dramatically. actually modelling out high-detail versions of the ships will be its own challenge, but one step at a time.
Nice work!
You have some renders of this? Was curious what it looks like with something other than the bright-colored textures from the last commit.
By the way, I ended up setting up a separate repository for the game's art. Maybe this will be easier to work with, as you don't have to worry about pulling upstream changes, or inadvertent merge conflicts.
Nope, those are the diffuse maps. They're pretty dreadful without any additional mapping and texture.
Thanks for the link. I'm gonna try to get the freighter into the game next, and try to get something better on it than the raw diffuse color.
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Freespace 2. Absolute best space sim ever. Freespace Open and Blue Planet circa 2010 were the best space mods ever and I honestly till now think it has the best capital ship effect gameplay.
I unfortunately cannot contribute any meaningful art, coding or other actual useful development asset to the project. However, I will highlight one key aspect of Freespace capital ship matchups that proved to be frustrating to early modders in capital ship balancing: TerSlash.
Capital ship beam weapons are the highlight of all Freespace capship engagements. The giant beams of destructive awesomeness that melted a fighter if it so much as glanced the hitbox of the massive instakill beam. The sight of hp% values dropping with a single volley... or nothing happening if you were using terran.
For whatever reason TerSlash and VSlash coded beam weapons have massive variable damage due to the miss variable never being calculated correctly, and that highly affects theoretical balance of any capital ship. The greens always were better performance, but I do think the devs thought the slash effect looked better in cap ship engagements.
I will take a look at the stack and see if anything jumps out, but it looks super fun! Looking forward to throwing AI fleets at each other for space destruction!
Fascinating, I played the game quite a bit, but never noticed that.
Depending on how well things go we might not even use the vanilla weapons, and just code our own. Plenty of other mods did that (Wings of Dawn shipped with multi-locking missiles and beams), and it the worst case fixing the Terran beam should be no more complicated than adjusting some tables / scripts.
It became super obvious whenever the medium terran capships (called corvettes for some insane reason defying ship classifications) did broadside engagements with each other during the first few NTF missions. The blocky GTCv corvettes all shot their green beams all over the place, barely glancing each other at times when head on. Only broadsides saw massive damage because the slashing beam sometimes travelled the length of the ship, whereas for headon engagements the TerSlash just grazed the bow of any ship. Super frustrating when seeing Shivans against Terran ships, since the Shivans usually had at least 2 fixed forward beams that pumped damage consistently.
I distinctly remember the TerSlash being a cause for me dying randomly during a few times when I tried to fly the useless Hercules II and snipe subsystems. Made no sense that I'd be nuked for no reason since I was away from the target, but I still got clipped.
Should be easy to code new variables, but the visual engine for the beam weapons remains the highlight. Maybe adjusting the anti fighter beams would yield good results; using the damage effect of a BGreen to show an oversized explosion even though the particle beam is a thin lance of pain.
God, Freespace is so damn good. I highly encourage mottezens to see this awesome clip.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=n47eKbMebMo&pp=ygUOZnJlZXNwYWNlIG9wZW4%3D
For something based off 20 year old (if not more) tech, it retains excellent particle effects and highlights. And the capship scales... so good. Fighting around a Hecate class in a nebula remains a standout experience. Irritating, but standout.
Not to mention the plot! Wing Commander got all the accolades (and even name-brand actors), but most of its story was melodrama. It never managed to convey the same sense of desperation as Freespace, of fighting a true all-out war for humanity's survival against impossible odds.
Chris Roberts wanted to act out his Star Wars Starfighter only fantasy so hard he blew all his money to get Luke Hamill as an actor for 15 minutes for bis now TEN YEAR OLD trailer for a game that still isn't released.
Freespace may be the only media that successfully gave the inanimate ships a weight of history and despair and affect that makes you care about the outcome of this hunk of metal. (Homeworld Cataclysm somewhat achieves this too)
I wrote a long dump on how the Psamtik and Colossus had emotional weight to their presence because of their direct intervention in the MCs journey, and the impact of their destructions in highlighting the stakes of the plot, but it got too rambly. Freespace simply managed to hit on the sauce, hitting a near perfect combination of progression, mechanics, player emotional investment and especially flair.
Freespace stands out because its capship fights had flair. No other space sim managed to recreate the sense of starships really smashing into each other, mainly because streams of pew pew lasers or waves of torpedoes don't look interesting compared to big honking beams slashing giant ships - and Freespace did hit it on getting the sense of scale.
Chris Roberts needs I M M E R S I O N to sell his Luke Skywalker self-insert dream, but Freespace made me feel I was actually blowing up a Death Star and not just some spiky macguffin.
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So what's the actual end goal here. A dynamic mission creator for FS2? Or full campaign + total conversion? If the latter how crusty are you looking to get?
First the former, and if god permits, the latter.
One of the frustrations I had with vanilla Freespace is the feeling of being on rails too much. Losing wingmen meant nothing, and neither did keeping them alive, and neither did keeping alive / blowing up capital ships. That's why I thought adding a strategic dimension to it with some resource management would be cool.
I'd love to make a full campaign for it as well. As I said in the post I was hit by some amount of inspiration, so I even know where I want to go with it, but I feel like I have to temper my ambitions here. I'm just one guy, and my grand plans have a tendency of fizzling out after an initial bout of enthusiasm. Hopefully it's something that can be alleviated by the weekly meetings with cjet, but I'd rather take things step by step.
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Tramp Freighter
"A bare-bones hull designed to transport cargo as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Weak engines and an unshielded, externally-mounted jump drive give it poor maneuverability and long jump times in emergency situations. Completely unarmed, it relies on escorts for protection from hostiles."
Turntable concept here
One of the last requests was for a transport for use in our first scenario. So here we go: a flying block of cargo containers. The ship proper is little more than a heavy tug mated to a cargo frame, with a bargain-basement jump drive mounted externally out front. The goal was "cheap" and "utilitarian"; I kinda think it could use some cargo-handling cranes or something similar to give it a bit more visual interest.
Love it!
The cranes could be a nice touch. Freespace has these neat little support ships hauling missiles to fighters and bombers, which could use a rapid-reload mechanism themselves. Between that, and the idea of "nomad fleets" that's been bouncing around my head, I could imagine "space trucker" being a full-time job in the unvierse, and freighters being something more like "mobile factories" and/or "mobile logistic centers". But for the time being, this looks awesome.
I can dig it. Sorta like an 18-wheeler being run in a stable corporate environment, versus the same truck being lived out of long-term by the driver and his family... Pure transport, versus transport/utility/shipyard/mining base/fuel depot. So less clean containerization, more signs of repurposing and jury-rigging for short-term needs?
BTW: What software are you using to make your models? I noticed that all the files are called
*_EXPORT.dae, which made me wonder about what native format you're using. Right now I'm using Blender to import / export them into Freespace, and so far it feels insanely unintuitive to me. Was wondering if there's an easier way to handle it.I use a program called Silo for the base modelling, but I save them as .objs, import to blender to handle normals and UV-mapping, and export from there for freespace. I think I was adding _EXPORT as a tag to mark which models were which in my archive.
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Yes, exactly! This might be generally a good vibe to go with for the non-combatant ships, but we probably won't need more of them until the demo first scenario is finished.
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I'd actually thought about you recently and volunteering as a slapper in chief. Not because I think you are lazy and haven't done enough. But because I'm lazy and have done far less than you on projects I might want to do.
I almost want a weekly standup session where you have to justify yourself to peers on what you've accomplished.
If that sounds like something you think would help I'll do it. I just request that I be held accountable to some of my own projects.
I'm also willing to do writing. I've been independently thinking of ways to incorporate xianxia cultivation and completely breaking physics into making a space epic rational story.
I think I've commented in most of these threads, but not done anything outside of them. I suck.
I'm definitely down for a weekly standup session. I actually write a moderately popular xianxia story, and have been trying hard to break the habit of leaving all my work until Sunday mornings.
Hi! Sounds good! What timezone are you in and what's your availability? We settled on some time during work hours EST with @cjet79 (last time was around noon, I think). Would something like this be doable for you, or are you limited to specific days / hours?
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Oh yah, what story?
Link
Yep. Beat me to it.
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Yes!
I was thinking of setting up something like that as backup, in case no one picked up the slapper-in-chief thing. Justin Murphy hosted calls like that on the (now defunct) https://www.indiethinkers.org/. I never tried since it had a paywall, some goofy casting process, and you were expected to give your real name, so I don't know exactly what it looked like on the inside, but I always thought found the idea interesting.
Come to think of it, maybe I should have set up these threads like that from the start - it seems more likely people have their own side projects rather than having too much time on their hands and wanting to hop into someone else's project.
This is awesome! When do we start?
I started coming up with my own ideas, so I'd have to find out what exactly you have in mind to see if that's where I want to go. OTOH I do kind of suck at writing, and maybe it is better to hand it over to someone else :D
Nah. The feedback itself was helping a lot, and I don't think I have any right to expect others put in voluntary work.
There is themotte discord, maybe we break out another channel on there "motte side projects". Plan to do a weekly meetup time through voice chat. People can join up from here if they want. Keep it unstructured unless it gets big and unwieldy and then we aggressively gatekeep like others do.
I'll tentatively suggest Wednesday night 9pm eastern. I'm open plenty of other times that is just plausibly a time I'm often available and when I'm available next this week. First meeting can be about how to do this.
I'm highly open to writing within a restricted set of circumstances. I brought up the xianxia stuff as a thing I've been thinking about. I'm often very head in the clouds type of writer. Getting me grounded is helpful. I think I've written some of my best stuff while under restrictive circumstances.
If I'm being humble I'm not a good writer but far from the worst. If I'm bragging I'm a good writer, but far from the best. I think I'm above average. I have a longform story that got popular on royalroad. I have some short stories that got accolades on small subreddits.
Mostly I can confidently say I like writing. I am a programmer by trade, but that's cuz it pays the bills. If I could pick between the two I'd choose writer.
I always need more motivation and more practice at writing. Especially since I don't have an active long form story going right now.
Excuse me, sir, are you <edit>referring to</edit> the Castle's Forge?
I have a bit of an aversion to Discord, but from what I understand there are no good alternatives, and if Mottizens already hang out there, that's a plus that's hard to dismiss.
Unless you're referring to eastern Europe, we're going to have an issue here. This would be 3am my time (CET). There are days when I work from home, so if we don't take too much time, I think I could pull off something around midnight on the day before, that would be 6pm EST. Or - I'm an early morning person, so another option is that I get up at 5am, and you hold on untill 11pm. Otherwise there's always the weekend. I don't have any big commitments so again anything between 5am and midnight could potentially work.
As for writing, if you're interested - you're hired! I'm not sure how to get it started, so maybe we can talk it out on discord, but the first step would be to write the setup for the prologue / demo scenario. Stuff like the content of the distress call, some dialogue between the PC Captain and his crew, and between each encountered and rescued ship.
The castles forge? If you are asking about discord username, no, I am the same username on discord as I am here.
I also don't like to use discord much, but if we want easy voice and text chat together with some persistence it seems like one of the best options.
I can actually be available during work hours. The times I'm consistently unavailable are 5pm-9pm on weekdays, unavailable until midnight on Thursdays, and generally totally unavailable on weekends.
My sleep schedule is weird right now. Sometimes I'm up between 2am-4am. Other times I stay up until 2am.
The channel name "motte side projects" is nice and all, but we it's so much better when the name is badass!
EDIT: just noticed I somehow skipped a few words when writing the last comment...
Perfect! I should be able to either take a break on a work-from-home day, or already be off in those hours. I guess we can take that part of the conversation to the PM's
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@ArjinFermin - Man, I haven't touched spaceships in a while. it's a pity I didn't do any more on them; life just got too crazy there for a couple months. Where'd I even leave off...?
Buffering posts:
Yoo, took me a while to actually click the link, that looks awesome! If that's not touching anything in a while I don't know how much you get done when fully focused!
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Yeah, no worries!
As you can see I let this project collect quite a bit of dust myself, and I probably have a lot more free time than you. I was just checking in to see if you're still interested. Feel free to jump in / out of the project at your leisure
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Highlight reel from past threads / "What we have":
An official Highspace Github Org and Repository
An official Highspace Wiki
Even more concept art for ships, curtesy of @FCfromSSC:
Capital ships
Fighters
A cruiser, loaded in-game
Turntable render for a cruiser
Turntable render for a destroyer
Some of the ships concepts are now imported into the game
A proof of concenpt for “strategic” system map we jump into on start of the campaign. It contains a friendly ship and 2 enemy ships, you can chose where to move / which enemy ship to attack.
A “tactical” RTS-like in-mission view where you can give commands to your ships.
A somewhat actual-game-like workflow. Attacking a ship launches a mission where the two ships are pitted against each other. If you win, the current health of your ship is saved, and you can launch the second attack. If you clean up the map you are greeted with a “You Win” message, or “You Lose” if you lose your ship.
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