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 -
Thanks much for this! It's neat seeing how different people approach the problems involved!
I'd agree with the railguns; they're crit-seekers, at least at the low-to-mid end when the projectiles are too small to fit a nuke warhead. I'm leaning toward beams just being balanced, in that they just sort of melt ships generally. The best defense against beams to my mind is speed, since faster ships have an easier time avoiding their engagement envelope while pelting them with projectiles. So that incentivizes the ship-builders to put heavy beams on faster ships, since they'll need to close the distance as rapidly as possible... or else just use a much bigger beam, and compensate by having it run on expendable coolant or something similar. Or possibly both; booster fuel could be dual-purpose coolant. A frigate that runs its beam for five seconds and then has to refill on coolant could be just fine, if that five seconds is enough to core other frigates or severely damage a destroyer.
Re: Armor, shields and point defense, the way I'm thinking about it is drawn more from what I know about modern naval combat, and the idea is that no defense is particularly good. The best defense is not to get shot at. Failing that, the defenses are there to make the best of a bad situation, and they all come with significant drawbacks. Armor's too heavy, and I just made a big post about various options for making shields less First-Order-Optimal and more of a specialized, situational defense.
I'd disagree. PD cannons, whether chemical or railgun, have a basic problem: they use small guns with lower velocities and shorter effective ranges to engage projectiles closing at very high speed. Pushing the engagement distance out as far as possible is very beneficial, but the further out you go, the more you need to compensate for lack of effective accuracy against a moving target with sheer volume of fire. This means your PD guns are probably better off firing very inefficiently in pursuit of marginal increases in effectiveness, because there's no point preserving ammo if the ship gets cut in half by a torpedo. I'd say PD guns should absolutely be limited by ammo, heat, capacitors, whatever other mechanics seem appropriate; fire efficiency is not really something they can afford.
Yeah, this is the sort of thing I'm really hoping we can execute in terms of encounter logic and, I suppose, enemy AI. I'm definately trying to think of directionality and intended attack profile for the ships I'm making. The gun cruiser I'm currently working on has beam periscopes in the nose of the ship, so it can cover something like a 340-degree arc, able to target pretty much anywhere but directly behind it, while the railgun batteries are set up to fire straight ahead only.
Shields generating heat would be a fantastic drawback, wish I'd thought of that for the writeup!
Excellent writeup sir, thanks for taking the time!
Tbh, while the Three-Body-Problem book series includes a lot of silliness, I think it's right that the most reasonable extrapolation of modern combat into future combat is an ever-widening gap in favour of offense, until almost all war is just shooting at all stars in the general vicinity of any signal you notice, with the purpose of blowing them up and eradicating all life in the system. So in a sense, I may even argue that I'm not just agreeing, I think you're not going far enough. But in games, realism is a tertiary concern for me; Imo, internal consistency is the most important (which admittedly some also call realism, which annoys me to no end) and balancing/variety of gameplay is the second most important.
My main issue is that if you want people to bother with defenses, you need to make them worth it. If armor is just too heavy people just won't run it, if shields build up heat and also depletes easily, people will preferably spend their heat budget on nothing but beam weapons. In the real world people bother even with sub-par armor because they only have one life, but in my experience it just doesn't really work in games. Even if you force them into running some defense, if it's strictly and significantly inferior to offense they will almost entirely ignore it, and for good reason - in which case most game design paradigms will tell you to forgo the mechanic and instead focus your efforts on the mechanics that matters. So if you want such a system, I'd recommend to not really bother with different defense designs, just give ships/components armour and health points and call it a day, spend your effort on weaponry, detection and its interception, hitting and dodging, there are enough other concepts. Most gameplay will then center around positioning as you say, since actual combat will usually be over in seconds.
You probably know more about it than me, but I'm not sure this basic logic holds up in ultra-high (sight) range combat such as space combat. If you can see the projectiles coming for quite some time before impact, and they have very limited capability of swerving once they're at high speed, even relatively low velocity bullets may have a decent chance to hit them. If ~10-100 bullets are on average enough to hit a rocket and each bullet is so small that the rocket takes up 1k+ times as much space as a single bullet, PD will naturally have a very good fire efficiency even without prioritising it deliberately. Though if the projectile doesn't include an explosive component, such a PD will probably not have enough kinetic energy to actually do anything.
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