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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   892 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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For what it's worth, the actual answer to "how long does it take" has multiple answers:

  • A few hours, usually, though sometimes longer
  • Longer than it should take
  • I've got some ideas for improving this but they take a good deal of implementation time

So yeah, issue acknowledged, you're not wrong; it's something I would have fixed in a week with a small cadre of programmers, but it'll likely take longer as-is.

I was trying to point out was that there's no indication that a post needs approval, on either the post-creation page or on the sidebar.

While I'm sure a programmatic fix would be the best option for optimizing the time until a moderator approves it, it was mostly that I didn't know the post was in limbo until I checked the front page, saw it missing, and did more investigation.

A simple note of: "All posts for now require moderator approval before being visible on the front page and it may take X-Y hours before a moderator approves it. Contact one if no feedback is received in that timeframe." on the Post creation page would resolve my question (and potentially future posters' questions) with minimal programmer work needed (hopefully).

Honestly, a good part of that is intentional. Most people never notice - it's meant to be a completely hidden process. It's meant to be part "don't put up another barrier for people who want to post", and part "don't tip off trolls or flamers that this is going on". I think this would overall work out great, if we approved stuff faster.

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