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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  8mo ago (text post)   Edited 8mo ago   1320 thread views

The Motte Moddes: HighSpace (August 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

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

  • Concept art for a long range missle cruiser, curtesy of @FCfromSSC

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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).

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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I would maybe be interested in getting involved.

I have programming experience. Usually front end web UI type stuff, but I've done lots of weird one off things in other areas.

Here is my late night sorta drunk take on an idea that I haven't seen before:

Solar system scale wars, with fleets of frigates, one or only a few super large scale ships, and a system of assymetric information warfare.

You would not know what your opponents are doing, only what your own ships are doing.

You'd be slowly capturing orbits with the solar system to expand your awareness.

Dreadnaughts are needed to take down dreadnaught shields.

If your dreadnaught knows the positioning of an enemy dreadnaught, if they are close enough it can take a shot and take out the shields.

The shields take a while to regenerate.

In the meantime frigates can do damage to the dreadnaught.

I'm having trouble fleshing out the full explanation of what I have in my head. But it gets you different size fleet engagements, with a long view of preserving your frigates, until you can get a decisive victory by destroying the enemy dreadnaught. You are trying to hide your dreadnaught from the enemy fleet while also positioning it for the kill shot.

Smaller engagements will see just a few frigates and their fighter squadrons trying to kill each other off.

Medium engagements might be a dozen frigates engaging each other for prime positioning of a dreadnaught.

Large engagements will have dreadnaughts facing off with multiple dozens of frigates to support them.

Strategic map mishaps and information assymetry could cause any of these fleet types to mix. And victory for your side might mean annihilating the enemy or escaping to bring back information about the enemy fleet location.

a system of asymetric information warfare

A pet idea of mine that I have literally never seen implemented in a game and that I still wish to implement at some point myself is the idea of location-based information and information propagation. For example in space warfare, if ships can travel at say 1/2x the speed of light and information travels at the speed of light, and you send out scouts towards an enemy that you suspect is coming towards you, then you can only "see" the opponents at 1/2x of the distance between you and where the scout found them, not the moment the scout finds them. And as you move yourself across the map, you will get more recent knowledge of some parts of the map while the knowledge of other parts gets increasingly outdated to the point that if you still have troops beyond just scouts there they're de-facto on their own and can't meaningfully be supported in time.

Though admittedly such a system makes the most sense in a (historic) 4x games, since I think the speed by which information travelled is a big part of why kingdoms tended to break down beyond a certain size and why capitals tend to be in certain places that is just entirely missing from contemporary 4x games.

I guess there’s Achron. Though it’s not information-based so much as their resolution of time-travel mechanics.

The only game I’ve played that really bothers modeling intel in such detail is Nebulous: Fleet Command, and it’s limited to radar geometry over kilometer-scale battlefields. No relativistic effects. Unless they’re coming in the solar system update, which I doubt.

I don't think any existing space combat sim has relativistic effects, certainly not this one. The closest is a very hard scifi game called Children of a Dead Earth, which has only plausible 20 years in the future tech, so a far cry from relativistic velocities.

The closest is a very hard scifi game called Children of a Dead Earth

I think I ran into the dude making it, when I was working on a Kerbal Space Program clone.

With an N-Body Simulator (the kind NASA uses to plot spacecraft trajectories), all orbital phenomenon from hyperbolic orbits, Lagrange points, and orbital perturbation are all correctly simulated.

The absolute madman... Will have to give it a spin.

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