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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  9mo ago (text post)   Edited 9mo ago   1350 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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First Asset Import Attempt

So I took a stab at importing @FCfromSSC's models into the game. Right now this is just the view from the mission editor to get an impression of the relative sizes. The textures are all goofy since I just slapped the ones from vanilla assets on top of our ships, with no regard for proper mapping (in fact, I'm not sure how to do proper mapping yet).

I first tried to scale the interceptor to one of the vanilla fighters.

Then I applied the same scale to the cruiser.

Like I thought the FC's cruiser is already about destroyer-ish sized, but somewhat smaller, so I think that's reasonable. If our dreadnoughts stay within the Collosus-Sathanas range we should be fine.

@FCfromSSC, for now I merged your changes into a new ship_concepts branch to keep works in progress separate from master. If you pull it back to your repo I can send .dae exports of some of the vanilla ships. Turns out that some of the ship's game features are already saved in the model, for example:

  • The shape of the shields, like I expected
  • Location of turrets,
  • Location of all the subsystems
  • The shape of the debris chunks the ship falls apart into upon destruction
  • Docking points
  • Location of weapon mounts

So designing the ships might be quite a bit more work than initially expected, though I think I can help out with that. If you want to take a stab at exporting the vanilla ships yourself, you'll need VPView32 to extract the models from the game, and POFTools to convert between .dae and .pof formats.

Heck yeah!!!

Judging by the interceptor/Ulysses comparison, the ships still need to come down another 25-40%, which should make them even smaller relative to the FS biggies. I'll start digging into the actual implementation side of stuff soon, maybe try some super-simple texturing as well; I can get the scales ironed out then. No worries about the extra ship setup stuff, I was expecting it and I don't think it'll be a problem. I've just gotta have some free-time to dig in and figure out the workflow.

Judging by the interceptor/Ulysses comparison, the ships still need to come down another 25-40%

I tried eye-balling the size of the cockpit of each fighter to make them relatively the same size, so it ended up scaled down by 1/6. Here's the result:

The Cruiser ends up being something between an FS2 corvette and destroyer, so I think it's right on the money.

I also couldn't resist trying to see it in-game. Right now you get a tonne of warnings, and the glow points make no sense since they're copied from a Deimos class corvette:

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