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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   824 thread views

The Motte Moddes: HighSpace (September 2023)

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

  • @FCfromSSC - 2D/3D artist

  • @netstack - developer, tester, and suggester of great ideas

  • @Mantergeistmann - writer

  • @Southkraut and @RenOS - didn't formally join the team, but in appreciation for their feedback I am granting them the rank of Consultant

  • 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

  • developers: “mission” code, “strategic” system map code

  • artists: 2D (user interface), 3D (space ships, weapons explosions)

  • writers: worldbuilding/lore, quests, characters

What we have

  1. Interceptor

  2. Pursuit Frigate

  3. Patrol Frigate

  4. Light Missile Cruiser

And we've made some attempts to import them into the game, just to see how they'd look:

  1. Interceptor: Mission Editor, In-Game
  2. Cruiser: Mission Editor, In-Game

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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,

  • 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.

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Man, it's been a while. Still alive, guys?

...writing updates is less fun than making spaceships

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?

The Hard Light modding portal is... not the best

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.

Things might have got a bit out of hand.

Goddamn, that's amazing! This is probably already enough ships and factions for an entire faction already.

this chunky guy

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.

Next major goal is a fully-functional ship.

Ooooh yeah!

My feedback tends to boil down to "me likey / no likey" so maybe it's not particularly constructive...

Naw, that works fine for me.

These here also seem pretty cool at a glance, though I can't find them on the close up.

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.

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?

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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