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
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@FCfromSSC - 2D/3D artist
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@Southkraut, @RenOS, @netstack - Interstellar Warfare Consultants
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Me - developer
I hope you don't mind I moved you to Consultants for now, @netstack. I'm always torn between keeping people in their originally declared roles as encouragement, and not wanting to harass them into contributing, when writing the contributor list. I'll be more than happy to re-add you as a dev if you're still on board.
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
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developers: “mission” code, “strategic” system map code
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artists: 2D (user interface), 3D (space ships, weapons explosions)
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writers: worldbuilding/lore, quests, characters
A small note if you want to contribute:
Don't be afraid to ask questions however small, or silly you might find them. This is literally one of the primary functions this thread has. The Hard Light documentation is... there... but it's not great, and between that, the peculiarities of LUA, the FS2 scripting API, RocketLib, and other parts of FS2 modding, it really might not be obvious how to resolve issues you run into. I might not be able to answer all questions, but I've dabbled in all these things, so there's good chances I might be able to help.
What we have
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An official Highspace Github Org and Repository
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An official Highspace Wiki
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Even more concept art for ships, curtesy of @FCfromSSC:
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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.
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A “tactical” RTS-like in-mission view where you can give commands to your ships.
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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.
Updates
It was another slow month, but things are finally starting to move. Literally. I added a current time display (set to the very beginning of the universe for now), and time can be paused / started / fast-forwarded. I also added a side bar with some help text (I thought the controls were relatively obvious, only to realize that what seemed obvious depended on the game I was most recently playing). The planets are the only things that move on their own for now, but I should be able to extend that feature to ships pretty soon. I'm not sure if this idea will go anywhere, but I'm thinking of having ships be able to move through conventional and subspace drives, the former obviously only being useful for planet-moon type distances.
Other than that I spent a lot of time optimizing. Brute-forcing my way through "find me the ship under the mouse cursor" was fine for a proof-of-concept, but I was finding myself making more and more "get me the nearest X" queries, so it was time to shove everything into a spatial index. I'm quite happy with the result, but it's not really something you can show off visually (well, unless you really want to).
What's next
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Getting the ships to move along an orbit.
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Real-time ship movement (sub-space, and conventional)
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Obstacle mechanics for the planets
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
@ArjinFerman - Integrating ships turned into a bit of a rabbit hole, and then I had a bunch of personal nonsense the last week and a half. Plus my laptop died. I'm working on rebuilding the sandbox mod I was using for integration testing before, but in the meantime, I figured we could talk ship creation workflow, and what's involved.
On the art side, ultimately, I'm going to need to do finished models, normal baking and a full texture pass, LODs, debris, shield and thruster geometry, turrets, etc, etc. for each ship, and then we need a custom table entry, and probably custom weapons too. All of that is going to take a while, though, and in the meantime I'd like to get simpler versions of the ships in for testing and evaluation purposes, so we can actually see and shoot at them. So what's actually needed for a simple implementation?
I've pushed a frigate .pof file to my repository; it's got the hull and four turrets, and the turrets have firing points. I'm pretty sure the textures didn't make it into the file, since it's not stored in a proper hierarchy, but I'll fix that shortly. My question is, can you give me a list of what you need set up on my end to be able to drop ships into the mod on your end? I'd like to get all the current hulls ready for integration with at least basic textures and weapon setups if possible. Or if there's a better way to handle all this, I'm open to guidance.
Also, is there a way to do fixed guns on capital ships? do you just make a turret with no rotation?
I only dabbled in them a little bit, but I think pof files only has store a reference to the texture. When I first imported one of your models into the game, I slapped a vanilla FS texture on it, and I did that by adding a .dds file in the 'maps' folder, that had the same name as the texture in the model. Seems like the docs are saying the same thing:
For me the .POF models and .DDS textures are enough, I'm happy to handle the ships and weapons tables (well, to start I'd just use vanilla weapons).
I'll need to look into how it's normally done, but I think so. Most guns in FS2 seem to be just fixed "exit points", they're not even particularly gun shaped. Everything I read up on (modelling, turret setup, animation code) seems to indicate that fixed turrets are the default, and animated ones is what takes additional setup.
.POF of the escort Cruiser is pushed up, along with flatcolor maps for the hull and turrets. If you have trouble attaching the maps for the gunship frigate, let me know; I think I figured out something on the workflow on this one: you need to rename the materials on the meshes in blender if you want them to transfer to POFtools cleanly. I haven't confirmed whether it matters in FS2 or not, but if it does I'll re-export that one.
Alright, I imported the models, they all seem to work!
There were no more issues with textures. The game seems to be case-insensitive when it comes to filenames, so I could even rename the files without modifying the models. Once you know what you're doing, the turret setup is pretty easy. Turns out that animated turrets are handled automatically by the engine, when you make them multipart. So if you want a fixed turret, the barrel will need to be defined as the base. I think the rotation / translation properties are there for non-turret animated subsystems (or, I guess you could attach a fixed turret to subsystem with animation code, if you want something more complex).
How were you thinking the guns on the Cruiser are supposed to work? Fully rotatable, or mostly forward facing?
The changes are in a development branch for now, but if you don't plan on making further changes or making more tests, I can merge them to master.
P.S.: I'm starting to think - wouldn't it make sense, as a matter of practicality, for these long thin ships to be able to fire backwards, so they can maximize the amount of time the enemy is under fire before they close in?
Heck yeah! ...I'm uncertain about the current flatcolor paint-jobs, but eh, they probably work for the moment.
It looks like Freespace actually does allow you to set traverse and elevation limits separately. The cruiser's turrets are currently modelled to have a traverse of 142 degrees to either side of centerline, leaving a 76-degree dead zone where traversing further would run the gun barrels into the hull. Elevation range should be +40/-1. I swear, I am actually going to dig into POF tools more so I can actually handle the setup for these myself and free you up for more on the code end.
Go ahead and merge to master, I'd say; I can make more changes if there's anything specific you'd like to see, but at the moment I figure the hulls are probably good for the moment. The major thing they're currently missing is the rest of the maps, but if I understand it correctly we can drop those in once I get them figured out.
I am planning on eventually doing a final pass on these, when we have all the components figured out and I'm doing finished, full-detail, fully-optimized and -mapped models.
For now, I guess the bigger question is what would you prefer the priority be on the art side?
Concepting more fighters and capital ships is my favorite thing to do, and I default to that when there's nothing more pressing. If you have a preference for more of either fighters/light craft or capitals, let me know. I'll try to get the chunky fighter concept loaded up sometime this next week so it's on-hand if we need it.
The existing hulls probably need additional components at some point. I have a file full of turret concepts, I've considered making destructible armor plate components, ships need debris and shield objects, shield meshes and so on.
Digging into the texture/mapping workflow for existing hulls, to improve the current cartoony visuals of the ships we have.
We probably need UI art at some point; is that point now?
In other news, I got a new laptop, and need to actually get the mod installed so I can see this stuff myself.
...I read the description you gave of a test scenario below, and it sounds quite excellent to me. Is there anything I can do on my end to help make it happen? Is that your current longer-term goal?
Yeah, I saw that, but you also asked about fixed guns, so I wanted to ask what are these meant to be. I actually wish you could have the dead-zones be dependent on each other - in theory these turrets should be able to do a 360 rotation if the barrel is raised high enough.
Done!
Since I started the project as a personal repository, but have since set up an organization, there's a bit of a mess that I think we should clean up. I think the easiest way to go about this is to rename your current repository on github to something like HighSpace-Backup, also rename your current local folder you've been working in, fork the org repo, clone the fork to your machine, and copy over any uncommitted changes to the new local folder. If you work on a repository that's marked as fork of the official one, you'll be able to create pull requests. I also sent you an invite to the organization itself, which should give you admin rights.
The directory structure has changed a little, so ships are in
core/data/models, and textures are incore/data/maps. It might also make sense to work in a feature branch. Our work shouldn't conflict, but it's pretty annoying to have to resolve one, when you pull upstream changes.Pretty much what you outlined, in exactly the order you listed. I'd reallyleave the UI art for last, I have a bunch of building blocks from other mods / vanilla, and they're perfectly fine to test things out. I expect we'll be changing the interface a lot anyway, as we add features, and figure out what info is useful for the player to see.
For ship models, I think it would be useful to add a few fighter types (1 of each for fighter / bomber/ interceptor maybe), then we can see how they interact with each other. The scenario will also require a freighter.
Heh, when I saw how much is involved in making a model and importing it into the game, originally I wanted to do something to free you up, but I have to admit, the more features I add, the more I have to keep track of, so I might have to take you up on that. After playing around with POF-Tools I think the import process shouldn't be so complicated, and tables aren't that hard to figure out either, once you get the hang of it. So if you're up for it, you can take the ship creation end-to-end, and I'll deal with the code.
If you want a working fully-featured example to reverse engineer how POF-Tools works, you can try this ship, there's a download link at the bottom, and you can just extract it, without having to also figure how deal with
.vppackages. And of course if you get stuck on something let me know.Yes! Even longer term I'd love to do a full campaign, but let's see how long this scenario takes first.
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