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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   863 thread views

The Motte Moddes: HighSpace (July 2023)

Since the original thread fell of the main page, I figured I'd turn this into a monthly thread.

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 pf how the mechanics of the two games could be combined is available in the first thread.

Who we have

Who we need

The more the merrier, you are free to join in any capacity you wish! I can already identify a few distinct tasks for each position that we could split the work into

  • developers: “mission” code, “strategic” system map code

  • artists: 2D (user interface), 3D (space ships, weapons explosions)

  • writers: worldbuilding/lore, quests, characters

What we have

  • Concept art for a long range missle cruiser, curtesy of @FCfromSSC

  • 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 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.

  • *New:* a “tactical” RTS-like in-mission view where you can give commands to your ships (see more in comment below)

What's next

The fun stuff can now begin:

  • The system map is only a proof of concept, for one, it's not really a map of a star system. Also, the enemies cannot move, your ship is instantly teleported instead of moving gradually as time goes by, etc.

  • Missions start with the player in control of a default fighter craft, because we need a mission file, and a mission file needs a player ship. An easy way to solve it is to turn the single ship in the system view into a group containing a fighter wing, that the player will be in control of. A more complex solution is a bit more crazy, but I think it might work - the mission files are just text, and the lua API has read/write access to the file system. I think it should be possible to dynamically rewrite the mission file to setup the player ship to be the one that was moved from the system map

  • The “tactical” view is also pretty rudimentary. The camera cannot be moved, only basic right-click commands can be given (move / attack / protect), wheras the game supports pretty complex stuff (disabling, disarming, attacking specific subsystems). As battles grow in scope, finding a way to show what the hell is going on in a clear and simple way would also be useful.

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Coding Update 003 - “Tactical” Mission View

This one was a bit of a pain in the ass, because as I was adding stuff, I was rearranging the code that was already there, but the good news is I think I finally settled on something that should be sustainable/scalable. Script files are split according to views, each view is split into UI scripts, game logic scripts, and graphics helpers for stuff that can't be handled by libRocket natively.

We now also have a “tactical” in-mission view (press ENTER while flying a mission), where you can give commands to your ship. For the moment I switched off the “kill all enemies” command that used to be given at the start of each mission, in order to make testing easier. The controls are standard RTS - leftclick / drag to select, right click to give order. The UI also shows the selected ship's current target:

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I'm also sorry I haven't been contributing. My previous posts were made on vacation, and since then I've been dealing with a spate of unavoidable personal commitments for the last two weeks, which will be ending on the 30th of this month. I've been able to do a bit of concept modelling done, and I have some general gameplay idea notes I need to type up, but I'm going to be sparse till the end of this month.

Yeah, no worries, it's just a hobby project. I figured most people here will have a full time job + family to take care of first.

Damn. That alone is pretty crazy, and I’m curious if any other mods have taken quite that approach.

I’m sorry that I haven’t really been contributing. You’re making great strides.

Thanks! Don't worry about contributing, we all have a life, and I might need to take a break myself in a month or so.

I'm more or less deliberately playing through mods right now, trying to find something that could be useful. The only thing close that I found was Blue Planet's tower defense mission, but other than setting up the towers, it's a normal fighter mission.

Then there's the Windmills mod but even though it's pitch is that you play the role of Command, it's not so much an RTS, as much as a... pseudo-intellectual postmodernist wankfest... ahem... anyway, it uses the comms menu to control the units, and the scenarios are very rigid and predefined, so not what I'm going for.

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