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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@Southkraut and @RenOS - didn't formally join the team, but in appreciation for their feedback I am granting them the rank of Consultant
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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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An official Highspace Github Org and Repository
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An official Highspace Wiki
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Concept art for several ship types, curtesy of @FCfromSSC
And we've made some attempts to import them into the game, just to see how they'd look:
- Interceptor: Mission Editor, In-Game
- Cruiser: Mission Editor, In-Game
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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
I didn't have as much time to work on the mod as I would like this month, but I managed to update the System View. It now has camera movement and zoom, but more importantly it is now a view of an actual solar system (our's to be precise).
Neither the sun, nor the planets currently do anything - they don't move, they don't block your movement, you can even fly right into them - but they do look cool in my opinion. I also added ship grouping (separate from the idea of merging fleets into Battle Groups) in case the zoom-out is so big, the icons start running into each other. It's still a bit glitchy, but it gets the job done.
What's next
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I'd like to continue working on the System View. @netstack wanted to add real-time ship movement, with pausable/fast-farwardable game time, and planet movement feels like a natural extension of that. I'd also like to add orbit calculation and movement for the ships. After that, I'd implementing various forms of obstacle mechanics - you won't be able to fly into, or through the planets,
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If I get tired of the System View, I might work on the Tactical View improvements I mentioned in the last thread: subsystem status, beam cannon charge status, and a handier way to give advanced commands. The scripting API also allows you to add objects to the background, so I'd like to calculate the appropriate positions for suns and planets, based on your location in the System View.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Spent some making turrets, figuring out how POFtools wants the hierarchy set up, and digging into Blender's texturing tools. A quick flat-color UV pass is now done.
Nice!
You want to make your own textures, or reuse the ones from the game/some mods? I can help you extract them, if you want.
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September Art Update 001
Man, it's been a while. Still alive, guys?
...writing updates is less fun than making spaceships, so for the last six weeks or so every time I went to write an update, I ended up just doing more modelling instead. Also, I took a couple weeks off to work on another project, read The Last Angel, whose space battles felt pretty on-point for this project, and generally sunk into a funk over the apparent suicide of Unity as a game engine.
Today we break that pattern.
Three new ship concepts - New cruiser, new destroyer, and a new frigate to replace the old patrol frigate, which I've scaled up to serve as a destroyer hull.
New Patrol Frigate - This one was designed pretty much off the old patrol frigate description, after I found a general shape I liked while mucking around. I'm still playing around with the silhouette and armament, and it's the hull I've been using to try to learn ship setup in FS2. I think the current design still needs a belly railgun turret.
Tech Destroyer - The first designs were generally minimalist or highly specialized, so here I went for more of a general-purpose, advanced hull. This destroyer is armored, shielded, and packs an array of heavy spinal railguns.
Escort Cruiser - This one's designed as a multi-role hull. It's equipped with both a primary and secondary shield generator, backed by a respectable glacis of composite armor. The primary armament consists of four triple-railgun turrets, two on top and two on bottom, plus a spinal heavy laser array mounted in the bow. The laser can be directed using the trainable primary aperture or be split between three independent light beam periscopes, each capable of covering a very wide arc around the ship.
...Once I figured out how to crack into Freespace 2's game files, I wanted to play around with fighters some as well. My original interceptor concept is very long, and a lot of the freespace fighters are very compact, sort of cubic; I think it's so they display better in the targeting window. Anyhow, I wanted to try concepting some more fighters. Things might have got a bit out of hand. Still, it was a fair amount of fun, and a relaxing way to spend a few evenings. Square designs definately trend toward a sort of bathyscaphe feel, as with this chunky guy.
Other than modelling, I've been working on learning FS2 ship modding. The Hard Light modding portal is... not the best, particularly the newbie tutorial that allows you to shuffle the order of their step-by-step instructions, but I've managed to actually get a ship loaded in-game, and am working on figuring out tabling and ship-rigging.
I also figured out how to edit the wiki, but had the same problem adding content there as writing updates here. I'll try to get the collected info posted up sometime soonish, maybe.
[EDIT] As a parting gift, here's a turntable render of the new cruiser concept.
[EDIT] and here's one of the new destroyer
Next major goal is a fully-functional ship.
Comments welcome.
@netstack @Mantergeistmann @Southkraut @RenOS @ArjinFerman
Lovely ship designs, as always.
I'm glad you're mostly staying away from wings for space fighters, and that your ships generally have a sensible central fuselage or body rather than bifurcating all over the place. All this pleases my medium-hardish space sci-fi sensibilities.
As for long VS compact fighters, I fancied the following. That long fighters would be used either for high-speed jousting or for long-range standoff fire, so that they can minimize their profile vis-a-vis incoming fire. And that compact fighters would be better-suited for dogfighting where they cannot ensure that all fire comes from a single direction.
Now for the capital ships.
Escort Cruiser: I like it, but with two caveats. 1. I don't like the abrupt change from the rectangular majority of the ship to the cylindrical bow. Maybe the trusses could extend a little further to partially cover the cylindrical element and make that transition a little gentler? 2. The turrets being mounted side-by side seems awful, to me. This ship can really only bring two turrets to bear for a broadside, and manages to aim at one target with all four only when the hull points exactly the right way. How about making them superfiring instead, or having one each per side of the hull (top, bottom, left, right) instead of two each on top and bottom? Or just having one turret on the top and bottom each, but making them a little bigger?
Tech Destroyer: Sleek side profile. Nice. Can we please get a shot from a different angle, too? This one matches my aesthetic spaceship preferences exactly. If I had to buy one, this would be it.
Patrol Frigate: Decent enough for a small ship we may see a lot of. Seems unassuming, doesn't command much attention, just right for something that shows up by dozens but shouldn't distract from the fancier, bigger ships.
Also, man, Unity. I'm going back to my old Model-View-Controller ways and writing exclusively C# Model code for the time being, but it doesn't look like Unity will pull itself back together. I've been reluctant to commit to Godot, but where else to go? This time I'll stick to MVC and use the engine as little as possible.
What's your feeling on "arms" or stub-wings? Something to attach weapons to, or a way to put thrusters further away from the center of mass to increase agility?
Sounds like a good plan.
Good feedback, I'll get it done on the next pass. I need to add some more guts inside the truss skeleton as well.
Given the way the design has evolved, I think superposition might just be the best and easiest solution; for what it's worth, this ship is heavily optimized for "front toward enemy", and in their current configuration the turrets can rotate 60 degrees to the opposite side from centerline. That's not a pure broadside, but this ship doesn't want to be doing broadsides in any case; you massively increase your profile to incoming fire, and massively decrease your armor's effectiveness. Superposition means you can shoot over the shoulder, which is a significant advantage when running away.
A lot of what I'm hearing now is that they can't legally enforce it, so it's a list of things that aren't gonna happen. I dunno. My studio's decided we're gonna keep using it, at least for our current projects. I've installed Unreal, but haven't had the guts to actually dig into it yet.
Were you thinking just a big, rectangular brick of a hull?
Absolutely fine, but that's just not how wings on fictional spacecraft are usually used. As long as the wings actually do anything, I don't complain. Though given that Freespace launches all of its fighters from carriers, the wings may need to fold up or be removable for storage.
Makes perfect sense, and if it fights purely in a nose-on-target attitude then the side-by-side turrets aren't a problem. Still, I'd say superposition gives additional advantages if the layout allows for it.
Yes, because that fits my preconceptions. Cylinders and spherical elements in the rear, and a giant monolithic rectangle in the front, is how many of the ships I designed look (and I use "design" in a very loose sense). But that's just a weird inclination of mine; not at all a request or recommendation.
Sensible. For me, the spell has been broken - Unity being that thing that just works and I needn't think about what goes into the sausage. Now it's that thing that's barely holding disparate components together with spit and duct-tape, that's billions in debt and cursed with incompetent leadership, has always had a bad reputation among gamers and is now hated by developers as well. Objective reality may not have changed, but my perception sure has.
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More replies later, but:
Does this work?
That works. So, the hull narrows! That's where the shadows came from. I'm a little disappointed that it's not as brutalist as I thought, but I guess this does make a lot more sense and is more visually interesting.
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Yeah, I'm still here, and largely had the same problem. Well, that and having to take care of some IRL stuff. I'm back in the saddle now, but don't have anything to show off yet. I fixed the glitchy ship-grouping in the System Map, and I'm now going down the rabbit hole of optimization and refactoring.
Re: writing updates not being as fun... originally I was envisioning these threads being mostly for "hey guys, how do I do X?" type of stuff. I do like the epic longposts outlining the vision for the game, because we can raid these for ideas later on, but going forward we might want to focus on troubleshooting and short updates?
Yeah, I think their wiki got a bit outdated, which is why I'd encourage anyone running into problems to post here for advice. I have some amount of experience by mucking around with FS2 over the years, so I might be able to help off the top of my head. If not, if we figure stuff out together we can later distill it into some tutorials of our own.
Goddamn, that's amazing! This is probably already enough ships and factions for an entire faction already.
My feedback tends to boil down to "me likey / no likey" so maybe it's not particularly constructive, but I really like that one. These here also seem pretty cool at a glance, though I can't find them on the close up.
Ooooh yeah!
Naw, that works fine for me.
Here ya go! Top Shot, Bottom Shot
...One of these, I got frustrated with because it started reminding me too much of a protoss interceptor from starcraft. The other two... I hadn't branched out the designs enough, and I felt like they were getting too far away from the square style. I'll probably come back to all of them at some point, because they were the best I was getting from the first couple batches, before I started branching out the design space more. Once I get the ship creation workflow down, I wanna do more of these. They were really satisfying.
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This is probably a much better plan. Here, have a render of the new cruiser to commemorate our accord.
I can't believe it's happening
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I always wanted to write "Interstellar Warfare Consultant" in my CV!
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