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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  9mo ago (text post)   Edited 9mo ago   1344 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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OPSEC and project resources

I do a lot of my project planning in google docs, and I'm planning on setting up a doc to store ship, tech and weaponry concepts; this will prevent digging through multiple threads and also allow displaying images in-line, which generally is easier and more visually pleasing. The downside of Google Docs is that it might connect to your google profile in a public way, which I'd imagine people here might not appreciate. I've already set up a burner gmail account for this project, and it might be a good idea for others to do the same. If there's a better option for organizing info, I'm open to suggestions as well.

What about some sort of wiki? There's hosting services for it, they're friendlier to burner accounts, and offer a better structure for categorizing your documents. The downside is that editing might not be as smooth.

never played with a wiki before. I'm willing to give it a try. Got a preference?

I have some experience with self hosted ones, but I don't want to set up a website for this project (at least yet), so the only preference is externally hosted, free, and no ads. https://miraheze.org/ and https://wikitide.com/ look interesting (they run the same software - mediawiki).

we now have a wiki.

It's currently set to open access. Probably we should have people register and then lock it down to only those people?

I'm in, too.

Do you and @ArjinFerman need to apply to be admins, or is there a way to do that on my end?

Did you manage to figure out the permissions? I wanted to take a stab at adding some pages, but I think I don't even have edit rights.

...I think, maybe, possibly I've got it sorted out. the UI was not intuitive. Let me know if you're able to edit? @netstack, same to you?

More comments

I don't see any option to do so on my end. You might be able to set permissions in the View User Groups option on the sidebar?

While I appreciate the trust, I don't think I particularly need to be an admin to contribute.

I just signed up!

It's currently set to open access. Probably we should have people register and then lock it down to only those people?

Yeah, if anyone wants to join later they can ping us.

I'm getting one set up with miraheze now. will post once it's up.

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