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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1yr ago (text post)   979 thread views

The Motte Moddes: HighSpace (October 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

I hope you don't mind I moved you to Consultants for now, @netstack. I'm always torn between keeping people in their originally declared roles as encouragement, and not wanting to harass them into contributing, when writing the contributor list. I'll be more than happy to re-add you as a dev if you're still on board.

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

A small note if you want to contribute:

Don't be afraid to ask questions however small, or silly you might find them. This is literally one of the primary functions this thread has. The Hard Light documentation is... there... but it's not great, and between that, the peculiarities of LUA, the FS2 scripting API, RocketLib, and other parts of FS2 modding, it really might not be obvious how to resolve issues you run into. I might not be able to answer all questions, but I've dabbled in all these things, so there's good chances I might be able to help.

What we have

  1. Capital ships

  2. Fighters

  3. A cruiser, loaded in-game

  4. Turntable render for a cruiser

  5. Turntable render for a destroyer

  • 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 “tactical” RTS-like in-mission view where you can give commands to your ships.

  • 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.

Updates

It was another slow month, but things are finally starting to move. Literally. I added a current time display (set to the very beginning of the universe for now), and time can be paused / started / fast-forwarded. I also added a side bar with some help text (I thought the controls were relatively obvious, only to realize that what seemed obvious depended on the game I was most recently playing). The planets are the only things that move on their own for now, but I should be able to extend that feature to ships pretty soon. I'm not sure if this idea will go anywhere, but I'm thinking of having ships be able to move through conventional and subspace drives, the former obviously only being useful for planet-moon type distances.

Other than that I spent a lot of time optimizing. Brute-forcing my way through "find me the ship under the mouse cursor" was fine for a proof-of-concept, but I was finding myself making more and more "get me the nearest X" queries, so it was time to shove everything into a spatial index. I'm quite happy with the result, but it's not really something you can show off visually (well, unless you really want to).

What's next

  • Getting the ships to move along an orbit.

  • Real-time ship movement (sub-space, and conventional)

  • Obstacle mechanics for the planets

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Like, burning at max speed away from pursuers, firing on them as they close? This used to be a preferred defensive tactic when I was playing gun-navy games like navyfield or World of Warships, but I think it's a bit more problematic in space.

Yes, exactly. I don't particularly like the idea of this tactic, but it just felt natural when I watched ships fighting it out. It felt particularly viable when a larger ship is pursued by a number of smaller faster ones, and tries to pick them off in order to be able to face the remaining ones.

Tail-away from the enemy is a pretty disadvantaged position; if you're doing focused armor/defenses, the armor's probably mostly going to be up front, and all these designs so far have the drive and reactors in the back.

On the other hand, I'm happy to leave it at that. Having an organic way to punish cowardice sounds great to me! Maybe with the exception of:

Trying to get the FTL charged/get to a jump point? Something else?

Yes, that's pretty much how FTL works according to FS lore:

  • You can jump out more or less instantaneously, unless your drive is charged, and hasn't been disabled.
  • Jumps discharge the drives, and require a recharge period after exit

So buying time for the drives to charge sounds like a valid use of the tactic. I like the idea of having the tradoffs you mentioned here. Maybe, with power management, it's better to redirect all power from the weapons to the enignes anyway. Maybe if you want to retreat you'll have to leave some of your ships behind, so they can buy time for the more valuable assets, etc.

Specific jump points are for interstellar travel, so I think the most common scenario involving these will be running blockades.

Also, missiles and torpedoes don't mind this scenario at all; in fact, you could probably get a pretty decent weapon specialization out of torpedoes optimized for use against pursuing ships; you can use a much smaller drive, since the enemy is accelerating hard into them from relatively short range.

Haven't thought of that, that sounds good.

Possibly do a "superturret", mount the turrets to a rotating assembly that can swing them around as a unit to face whichever direction? It'd be kind of a weird design, but weird designs can be interesting. I'm not sure I'd want all or even most capitals to use it as a core part of their philosophy, though. Alternatively, turrets mounted on tracks or on swing-out superstructure to allow them to adjust firing angle.

I love the idea, but I agree it should be limited to special ships. They'd also take more time to implement - we'd need to crack the animation code, and probably write a dedicated AI for them.

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