After @urquan's recent post about participation on TheMotte not being as enjoyable anymore, I dropped a comment suggesting a group creative activity, to take our mind off the Culture War, and give people other reasons to come here. The idea to make a mod for Freespace 2 got fairly good feedback, so I'm making this post to give you my pitch, and to coordinate development.
High Fleet (in Spaaace)
Freespace is a space fighter sim that sends you to fight alongside massive capital ships duking it out with each other with giant beams, shells, and missiles. It does a very good job making you feel like you're a part of a bigger war machine, doing your part to fulfill a grander strategy... the problem is most of that is accomplished through good mission design, scripting, and storytelling. You might sometimes wonder if you could have turned the tide by knocking out a beam cannon, or disabling a ship's engines before it gets away... why yes, you could, and this is why these subsystems have been made indestructible during that particular mission. Such are the joys of story-driven games, so I'm not even mad, but this made me feel there's something missing in the game.
By contrast High Fleet is a part-strategy part-action-arcade roguelike, where you take your fleet behind enemy lines to strike at their heart. The combat mechanics are the least interesting part of the game in my opinion, but the strategic view in which you spend most of your time feels very compelling. You can split your fleet, and have your detachment clear up the area to prepare for the arrival of your flagship, gather intelligence, or look for allies. You do all of this while dodging patrolling enemy strike groups.
So why not combine them? FS2 had been open sourced, and now features an extensive Lua scripting API, and an optional libRocket based interface. It is possible to implement a High Fleet-like strategy game in libRocket, and dynamically generate a combat mission upon encounter. The lore of Freespace has a few things that lend themselves to this sort of strategy game:
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FTL is done through subspace jumps. Throughout the vanilla campaign there are references to ships needing to power up their drive before they can make a jump, and while to my knowledge rules governing subspace drives have never been hashed out (and may in fact be contradictory, in service of the storyline), setting up something simple like “bigger ships need more time to charge their drives” will already create quite a bit of strategic depth. Maybe you have a destroyer that's more than enough to deal with a threat you detected, but if you use it, it'll be comitted to that battlefield for an extended period of time, what if they're just luring you away from their true objective? Do you scramble a few fighter wings, and send them instead, since they'll be easier to recall if necessary?
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Inter-system jumps rely on “jump nodes”. This limits where you can travel to from the current system, and allows for blockades which you might need to break through (or set up yourself if you want to make sure your enemies won't escape).
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Subsystem mechanics. Each ship has a bunch of subsystems, typically: weapons, engines, sensors, and navigation. You might not have enough firepower to destroy an enemy ship, but maybe it's worth it to sacrifice a few fighters to knock out a subsystem? Maybe you're want to raid a freighter convoy, but there's a patrolling anti-fighter cruiser nearby that will make mince meat out of you. If you knock out it's engines it will give you enough time to deal with the freighters. Maybe you're trying to lose a pursuit, and there's no way you can jump out of their sensor range - why not knock out their sensors then?
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Ship specialization. It's hard to give justice how much room to play there is here, even with just the vanilla assets. Some capital ships are very good at taking out fighters, some are very good at taking out other capital ships. Bombers are a threat to even the biggest capital ships, but are vulnurable to fighters and interceptors, and need to get into point-blank range or there's a high chance their payload is intercepted. Reconessaince will be very important, and the player will need to adapt their strategy to what they have vs. what they're up against.
Hopefully, the result will be the best of both worlds - dynamic strategic gameplay, with a fun combat system.
What we have, and who/what do we need?
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I'm a developer, and I'm happy to handle to coding side of things, although the more, the merrier
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@FCfromSSC has offered to handle the 2D/3D art. I don't know if you can/wan't to handle this side in particular FC, but we'll need someone who can design a nice interface.
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@netstack has provisionally offered to join in unknown capacity.
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a writer would be nice to have. A strategy game could still be fun with no/minimal story, but if we're cloning High Fleet I think it would be nice to have a storyline. If nothing else, can someone please come up with a title for this project!
What's the plan?
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I'd say step one would be the UI, and the intra-system strategic gameplay, and dynamic mission generation.
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After that we have to decide about the inter-system/"high level" strategic gameplay. Do we indeed just copy High Fleet, or are we adding/changing something?
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Do we use the Freespace universe or make our own? The former is easier, and we can reuse existing assets, but maybe our artists want to run wild?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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@arjin_ferman - Was busy driving all weekend, but I've bought Freespace 2 and am going to be trying it out this week. I can take a crack at interface assets if you can lay out what you need. Are we planning on the sort of heavily-skeuomorphic UI stuff High Fleet does?
On the art side, I've been putting together a compilation sheet of reference art of cool-looking space ships, as well as some examples of the High Fleet ship sprites: Ref-Sheet-01-Copy.png
I'm starting on modelling a spaceship component kit of modular pieces we can use to build hulls from, and putting together some rough concepts of unique ship designs. If anyone has ship designs or ideas they particularly like, post 'em up, and I'll try and add them to the mix.
If there's more important art stuff needed, let me know.
[EDIT] - If you're polling for what we wanna do, I wanna make ships and guns and missiles and explosives. space stations are good too. the spaceship kit stuff should generalize to interior environments for the UI as well, if we're doing the freespace environments thing.
Provisionally yes, but I'm not married to any particular vision yet. What I liked about the High Fleet UI was that it really made you feel like you're manning a giant airborne ship. I want something that reproduces that feeling for a starship. At first the basic functionality of the UI would be the same - a map, fleet management, maybe target info.
My main question is how many do you think you can do? If we can pull off a couple of designs for each class of ship, then we can drop the FS universe and you can let your creativity run wild, and @Mantergeistmann will be a lot less constrained as well. If you don't feel up for it, we should either stick to the FS style of ships, so we can reuse vanilla assets, or at least find a relatively compatible mod that we could fall back on. I do love the idea of making it modular, then worst case scenario we can hack something together from the stuff you've done.
@Mantergeistmann, while we're discussing this, do you have preference for the scope of writing your want to do? Would you want to write a whole new universe, or just create a story set in one? Any preference for the main quest? I was thinking of more or less lifting the one from High Fleet - break through enemy lines, and strike at their heart. If we go with FS, we'd need to adapt it a little bit, because the BigBad (the Shivans) of that universe are an eldritch horror beyond our comprehension, and I don't like the idea of striking at their heart, so the idea would be something like: due to a subspace jump accident, your fleet found itself deep in Shivan territory - find a way back home, and don't go insane in the process. Any preference, or ideas of your own?
I'm not sure what you mean by that, how would that work?
My goal at the moment is to do custom ships for all classes and at least a couple of distinct faction styles, but I want to get a handle on the implementation process for freespace before I start making promises. I'm currently working my way through the shipmaking instructions in the hard light wiki. Unless I hit a serious roadblock pretty quick here, I'd vote for ditching the FS stuff completely. I'm gonna try to have my first ship built and in this week, family engagements permitting.
Freespace does that initial hub interior shot with the various sub-menus selectable by various doorways. I haven't looked through all the menus yet, but at least the initial hub is a full ship-interior environment. A lot of the structural and utilitarian kit pieces I'm working on can be recycled for interior environments as well, I think.
For the moment, I'll assume we're just reskinning the existing UI, and we can go from there as plans develop. That sound workable?
I think we could push through even if you do hit a roadblock, we'd just split the work in that you'd make the designs and I'd take care of doing whatever adjustments are necessary to make them compatible with the game.
I do like the idea of ditching FS lore, it will give us a lot more freedom.
I wouldn't work on the assumption of mere reskinning, I think we'll need to revamp the whole thing. The FS interface has a specific workflow that works for a fighter sim, with mission-based campaigns. I don't think it's going to work well for something more open-world-ish. Even boyond the High-Fleetesque strategic view, I'm not sure the ship selection, and weapon loadout screens are viable for a fleet with more than 3-4 fighter wings, and other capital ships in tow.
I think @netstack had the right idea about where to start:
So I'd use the stragic view as the entry point, and build everything else around it. Main halls might be a nice idea for story/immersion but to be honest my first thought was to ditch them for a classic menu.
By the way revamping the UI is probably a lot easier in practice than it sounds. The library they're using works on something like simplified HTML+CSS, so it's not much different from designing a website.
I'm game for ditching the FS lore and starting from scratch, from a writing standpoint.
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