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.
Who we have
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@FCfromSSC - 2D/3D artist
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@netstack - developer, tester, and suggester of great ideas
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@Mantergeistmann - writer
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Me - developer
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
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developers: “mission” code, “strategic” system map code
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artists: 2D (user interface), 3D (space ships, weapons explosions)
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writers: worldbuilding/lore, quests, characters
What we have
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Concept art for a long range missle cruiser, curtesy of @FCfromSSC
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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.
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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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A “tactical” RTS-like in-mission view where you can give commands to your ships.
Updates
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The System Map and the Tactical View got minor pimp-ups. The System Map now shows the ship names, and the Tactical View has a grid to help with orientation, draws ship icons if the ships are too far away to see, and draws waypoint, and target icons to give some indications of the ship's current goals.
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The System Map now supports Battle Groups, and the player is now in charge of one - the original GTC Trinity cruiser, and a wing of fighters.
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We now have “just in time” mission generation. Like I mentioned in the previous thread, the scripting API gives you access to the file system, so it was pretty easy to generate a mission file on the fly. This has some advantages over using a “blank” mission file and setting up the mission via the API, because not all mission features are exposed to the API. The most obvious example here will be how there's no longer an “extra” player ship, just the ones explicitly declared for the System Map (in the previous versions you'd be flying a fighter, even though in theory there were no fighters in the System Map).
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Thanks to the fighters and their current load-out it's actually not that hard to win the game at the moment. Your cruiser will easily dispatch the Shivan one, and as to the corvette, you can order your ships to run away, and take out the turrets yourself, then order your ships to attack. It will take a while, but with a defenseless enemy it's only a question of time.
What's next
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The System Map didn't get a lot of attention so far, so I'd like expand it. It would be nice to move around an actual star system, add camera movement, and split/merge mechanics for fleets.
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The Tactical View is somewhat functional, but still needs to give a player handle on what's going on, and better control over their ships. I wanted to add subsystem status, beam cannon charge status, and a handier way to give advanced commands.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I would maybe be interested in getting involved.
I have programming experience. Usually front end web UI type stuff, but I've done lots of weird one off things in other areas.
Here is my late night sorta drunk take on an idea that I haven't seen before:
Solar system scale wars, with fleets of frigates, one or only a few super large scale ships, and a system of assymetric information warfare.
You would not know what your opponents are doing, only what your own ships are doing.
You'd be slowly capturing orbits with the solar system to expand your awareness.
Dreadnaughts are needed to take down dreadnaught shields.
If your dreadnaught knows the positioning of an enemy dreadnaught, if they are close enough it can take a shot and take out the shields.
The shields take a while to regenerate.
In the meantime frigates can do damage to the dreadnaught.
I'm having trouble fleshing out the full explanation of what I have in my head. But it gets you different size fleet engagements, with a long view of preserving your frigates, until you can get a decisive victory by destroying the enemy dreadnaught. You are trying to hide your dreadnaught from the enemy fleet while also positioning it for the kill shot.
Smaller engagements will see just a few frigates and their fighter squadrons trying to kill each other off.
Medium engagements might be a dozen frigates engaging each other for prime positioning of a dreadnaught.
Large engagements will have dreadnaughts facing off with multiple dozens of frigates to support them.
Strategic map mishaps and information assymetry could cause any of these fleet types to mix. And victory for your side might mean annihilating the enemy or escaping to bring back information about the enemy fleet location.
Happy to have you! Web UI experience is perfect, as FS2 allows you to modify it's UI with libRocket. It's basically HTML + CSS + scripting, except it uses LUA instead of javascript for the latter. Not all HTML/javascript features are available, but it's close enough that you should feel right at home.
@FCfromSSC, I'll bring you in here since you wanted to talk about mechanics, and cjet focused heavily on it.
I'd like to go for a balance. Just like the Total War games have you go back and forth between grand strategy and battlefield tactics (and you could imagine adding Mount & Blade on top of that if you wanted to get up close and personal), I like the idea of half the battle being setting up the chess board in the system map, and the other half a proper execution of the battle plan. In my opinion, barring an overhaul of in-mission mechanics, the game's engine heavily favors a fighter perspective. We could even incorporate that into the story, with one character being a hot shot pilot, and the other a wise admiral, and you'd be assuming the role of one of the other depending on the situation. I could see it making sense to sometimes assume control of a capital ship, if your fighters have an overwhelming advantage and you don't want to get bogged down in the details, or your plan depends on having a specific ship in a specific place.
As for the gamaplay in the system map, my vision is very close to cjet's:
The only rub being, that I'd like space exploration to be part of the game, and getting bogged down in a solar system for too long would turn exploring the cosmos into a bit of a drudgery. Of course we could just have the early systems be relatively undefended, and have the massive solar system scale war be the Last Stand of the game.
How hard is "hard"? The autist in me would love to go as hard as possible, but I can already tell you we will have to make compromises. For one, is it really hard-scifi if you don't even have Newtonian flight-, and orbital mechanics? But right off the bat I can tell you we're not doing that, as FS2 is made to give the "WWII aircraft in space" vibes common to space fighter sims, and even simplified orbital mechanics could result in massive velocity differences between encountered ships, crashing into planets, etc - stuff I don't want to deal with as a programmer, at least at first pass.
When it comes to weapons, my opinion boils down to: lore should serve gameplay, not the other way around, and we should make use of what the game engine offers us out of the box.
I would like to make use of the game's subsystem mechanics. Surgical strikes on specific subsystems would make it more interesting to spend your time flying a fighter. You could use them to take out the enemy's engines so your ships can outmaneuver them, take out their subspace drives so they cannot retreat, take out their sensors so the rest of your fleet can slip by, etc. So a that would imply a dedicated anti-system weapons.
I have to say, I do love FS2's massive beam cannons. It's mostly a visual thing though, and I think we can make rail guns look just as cool, so I'm not invested.
Having shields would also add to the variety, because that would mean dedicated anti-shield weapons. We could follow FS2, and have shields for fighters, but not for capital ships. I've also seen mods with shielded capital ships, and they were fun enough as well. Or we could go with cjet's idea:
I have to say I like it. Though that raises a question, is the idea that dreadnoughts are impervious to anything other than another dreadnought, including bombers delivering their payload at point-blank range, or anti-subsystem strikes? I think it's a workable idea, especially since you want to use them very sparingly, but we have to be sensitive to balancing.
If we opt for making them vulnerable to bombers, we could have the dreadnoughts rely on their escorts for remaining impervious. FS2 offers extremely effective anti-fighter turrets that can be attached to capital ships (In fact I added them to the Shivan cruiser in the latest update, I forgot to mention you probably shouldn't fly too close to it as a fighter), so we could have special anti-fighter frigates, guarding dreadnoughts, and the whole formation being basically unstoppable unless matched with firepower, or their commander's incompetence (war nerds can correctly me if I'm wrong, but I think I heard that modern carrier battle groups work sort of like that).
I love the idea. I don't know how well it fits with your vision, but one thing I'd like to keep from vanilla FS2, is subspace jumps. Long story short, FTL in Freespace happens via these jumps, and ships have to recharge their drives between each jump. It's not explicitly stated in the lore, but other mods played with the idea of "subspace maneuverability" i.e. how often a ship can jump, what kind of trajectories can they plot, etc., with the basic idea being that the bigger the ship, the more time it needs to charge it's subspace drive. This would allow for a "luring" mechanic in the strategic map. A dreadnought entering the battlefield would be a big deal, because that means it would be committed to it for a while. Maybe that means it turned the tide, or minimized casualties in an otherwise evenly-matched engagement, or maybe it means it fell into an ambush, or left another strategic point unguarded.
I kind of want to say the former, but something is telling me a super carrier / mothership / mobile logistical center for your fleet, would be more practical. Then again if you have that, dreadnoughts could be a dedicated platform for taking the super carriers out.
I always feel like I've wanted a space exploration game, but also every space exploration game I've ever played has felt like a disappointment. Even the latest version of No Man's Sky has kind of boring exploration mechanics. Its just that they made so many of the other mechanics in the game workable and good that the lackluster exploration has fallen off as a point of criticism.
Realistically, Space is a whole bunch of nothing. A bunch of rocks, some glowing balls of fusion, and lots and lots of nothing. Freespace in particular is in a rough position to make exploration interesting. I'm not even sure what level of mechanics are allowed, but I feel that traditional space exploration would be limited to obtaining new skyboxes, or reading text of something happening off screen.
The only interesting thing a freespace player can really explore are new ships and new mechanics.
In my opinion, the issue here isn't exploration, it's the sandbox. No Man's Sky is boring because it doesn't have much to say, what you'll find through your exploration boils down to new life forms, gadgets, biomes, etc., in the end pretty superficial stuff. Contrast that with something like Star Control 2 that follows a "scripted main quest with no guard rails" formula. You're running around the galaxy, looking for allies, and clues as to where to go next to solve the main quest / current side quest. The clues you get are often vague, so you're never sure if you're headed the right way, and what you're going to find, and you have a good chance of finding something valuable by random chance. It's quite enjoyable.
But in this case I was thinking of copying HighFleet - clear direction, some degree of freedom of movement, goodies spread out on your path randomly.
Realism is for training simulators and, ironically, sandbox games.
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Ever play Escape Velocity? That is the only space exploration game I've really ever enjoyed.
No, I checked my library on steam. Nothing. Then I checked for the game on steam to see reviews and description. No space exploration game by that name came up. So I go and search for it on the internet, and find this wikipedia entry. If that is the game then holy crap. It was released in 1996 almost thirty years ago. No wonder I hadn't played it.
...Man, now I feel old.
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Endless Sky is a free (actually free, no microtransactions) and modernized Escape Velocity clone. There are several others but that's the most polished and complete of them.
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Additional thoughts:
The shields are for protection within subspace travel. The faster you want to go, the stronger the shields need to be.
Rule of thumb: fast travel between solar systems needs dreadnaught sized shields. Fast travel between planets needs frigate sized shields. Fast travel between planets and their moons can be done with fighter sized shields.
The shields can pull double duty and be used in combat as well.
Not sure about these:
Funnily enough, that's literally the opposite of what I had in mind - I thought fighters would have a higher in-system mobility, but I think I like your idea more in the end, because otherwise they'd be overpowered (hit and run strikes from anywhere within the system feels like a bit too much). I like that there are several implications to this idea. If unaccompanied fighters are jumping in to attack you, that means there has to be at least a frigate in the neighborhood. If they're jumping in with a frigate, taking it out cripples their means of escape allowing you to mop them up later. If you want to ensure your strike force's ability to retreat, you might want to leave a frigate behind nearby, instead of committing it to the battle. Very cool!
I'm not sure about it either, but it sounds like a relatively cheap thing to implement, so we can try it out at some point.
#2 might be doable (I think you just make a 3D model for the ship's shield, but I haven't checked). #3 would require modifying the game engine quite significantly, so that's a no for now. Vanilla FS shields let smaller craft pass without resistance.
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A pet idea of mine that I have literally never seen implemented in a game and that I still wish to implement at some point myself is the idea of location-based information and information propagation. For example in space warfare, if ships can travel at say 1/2x the speed of light and information travels at the speed of light, and you send out scouts towards an enemy that you suspect is coming towards you, then you can only "see" the opponents at 1/2x of the distance between you and where the scout found them, not the moment the scout finds them. And as you move yourself across the map, you will get more recent knowledge of some parts of the map while the knowledge of other parts gets increasingly outdated to the point that if you still have troops beyond just scouts there they're de-facto on their own and can't meaningfully be supported in time.
Though admittedly such a system makes the most sense in a (historic) 4x games, since I think the speed by which information travelled is a big part of why kingdoms tended to break down beyond a certain size and why capitals tend to be in certain places that is just entirely missing from contemporary 4x games.
I guess there’s Achron. Though it’s not information-based so much as their resolution of time-travel mechanics.
The only game I’ve played that really bothers modeling intel in such detail is Nebulous: Fleet Command, and it’s limited to radar geometry over kilometer-scale battlefields. No relativistic effects. Unless they’re coming in the solar system update, which I doubt.
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I don't think any existing space combat sim has relativistic effects, certainly not this one. The closest is a very hard scifi game called Children of a Dead Earth, which has only plausible 20 years in the future tech, so a far cry from relativistic velocities.
I think I ran into the dude making it, when I was working on a Kerbal Space Program clone.
The absolute madman... Will have to give it a spin.
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