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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  9mo ago (text post)   Edited 9mo ago   1465 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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Aw shoot, I forgot destroyers. We've definately gotta have destroyers.

To my way of thinking, you really do need two classes at least to cover the cruiser spectrum; the gap between destroyers and battleships is just too wide otherwise. I'll admit that there's no actual rule here, since in real life the designations are more like guidelines than actual rules, but a decade of playing naval wargames has cemented the difference for me: Destroyers are escorts, cruisers are independent, multirole ships. Destroyers mount light singles in turrets, light cruisers mount destroyer guns in double or triple mounts. Light cruisers are minimally armored, heavy cruisers are both armored against anything smaller than themselves and heavily up-gunned.

And then you have battlecruisers, which sound awesome but are basically battleships minus the armor.

The gap between destroyers and battleships is a pretty big one, but modifiers are pretty useful, so maybe it works out to just go with "cruiser" as a class, and use light/heavy/battle modifiers within the class? I could live with that. Good thinking, sir.

Good points all. But I've always disliked having a bunch of cruiser designations that span wildly different weight classes. Rule The Waves for example has annoyed me to no end with its CLs and CAs and BCs, but at least it had the excuse of being historical. I hope that in the future we can invent a few new terms to cover that gap!

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