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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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You can also have "casing" components that you'd need to destroy to expose something beneath them, I saw a few mods doing it. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. I really like the idea of fighters/bombers doing subsystem strikes to take out a specific advantage the enemy might have. I did also have concerns that this tactic might be overpowered. In vanilla FS2 they get around it by most subsystems, except engines, not really doing anything unless explicitly scripted. It makes sense because if taking out the weapons subsystem of a capital ship actually took out all it's weapons, they would be way too easy to defeat. You can compensate by giving subsystems a lot of health, but adding a casing would make it a look more interesting, since you can see it get blown off. Hopefully you can also give the casing a different type of health than the actual subsystem, so you'd need to use anti-armor weapons to blow it off, and then anti-subsystem weapons to actually disable the system.

I played the BattleTech video game quite a lot, it has a very similar system, and it indeed has a bit of a problem with component targeting being overpowered. One way to balance it a bit is to not have general "weapon subsystem", which is indeed stupid design, but to have each specific weapon be it's own component, so that even if the opponent has shot some weapons to pieces, other weapons function just fine. Likewise there isn't a single "cooling subsystem" there are multiple "cooling components" located throughout the ship. Another is to give components some redundancy so that they are still somewhat functional even if significantly damaged. Casing/Armor for each component should also be present, I agree, and in general each component needs a surprisingly high amount of health/armor compared to the general hull points to make anything but component targeting viable (or you need to make component targeting very difficult).

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