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.
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Notes -
It's quite an amazing coincidence, but a lot of these, including the variants are either available out of the box, or can be done with just a touch of modding. It's just a question of modifying the parameters in weapon definitions, and re-skinning them. For example, Freespace has these slow-moving plasma projectile cannons (which always felt a bit underwhelming to me, even when they managed to score a hit), what's a railgun if not that, but with faster projectiles, and a different look?
FS2 flak guns with a different skin.
I think I saw mods with "bendy beams", should be no problem.
Yeah, that's not gonna be a problem. There's a ton of built-in support for that, and lots parameters you can play with.
On that note, I was thinking it might be fun to have some in-mission resource management for ships you control. Even vanilla sort of has that for fighters, by letting you allocate energy to engines, guns, and shields. I'd like something more complex for capital ships but I'd like to finish the basic Sysytem Map and Tactical View features before jumping into that.
Is the idea here that you would see the beams getting reflected from the outside? That might be a lot of work, but should be doable, and would look insanely cool!
If we want to go full-anime, how about "disco ball" turrets, splitting the beam to hit multiple targets?
Much like beams, lots of built-in support.
Available out of the box, and work exactly like you described
Depending on how you want to do it, that's either a very fast dumbfire, or a projectile cannon pretending to be rocket. If you want the acceleration to still be visible to the player, it should be doable with some light scripting.
Available out of the box, but in my opinion will need better maneuverability than vanilla. These rockets always felt useless to me.
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