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?
Forgot to respond to this part. What's the scenario you have in mind here? Like, burning at max speed away from pursuers, firing on them as they close? This used to be a preferred defensive tactic when I was playing gun-navy games like navyfield or World of Warships, but I think it's a bit more problematic in space.
The short version is that we can do it, but there's some moderate-to-serious tradeoffs, and I'm not sure how worthwhile it would be as a tactic, either gameplay-wise or fluff-wise, without a clearer idea of how FTL and the other ship mechanics work.
The long version:
Tail-away from the enemy is a pretty disadvantaged position; if you're doing focused armor/defenses, the armor's probably mostly going to be up front, and all these designs so far have the drive and reactors in the back. Taking damage to either can take a ship out of the fight completely, so this is a pretty rough situation to be in, which means you want to get out of it as quickly as possible. If you're running, where are you running to? Playing for time, keeping the enemy at max range as long as possible? Trying to get the FTL charged/get to a jump point? Something else?
Superposition turrets can shoot "over the shoulder", so if you can burn mostly away and still bring a closing enemy under fire. This is going to involve trading space/time for firepower, whether you burn at angles to the enemy, or tack back and forth to alternate fire and acceleration, you're going to be getting less acceleration than if you just burned straight away, and probably cost you some firepower too as the maneuvering cuts into your guns' optimal cycle time.
The other option, depending on the scenario, would be to burn toward the enemy. You get your armor and full guns toward them, and you minimize the engagement time. The head-on engagement is going to suck, but if you make it past them you're continuing to accelerate while they have to decel, flip, and accelerate from scratch, which means you could open up enough space to break contact entirely, if your ship isn't absolutely swiss-cheesed in passing. Definately a high-risk option; short-range spaceship combat could very well be unsurvivably lethal.
Also, missiles and torpedoes don't mind this scenario at all; in fact, you could probably get a pretty decent weapon specialization out of torpedoes optimized for use against pursuing ships; you can use a much smaller drive, since the enemy is accelerating hard into them from relatively short range.
Anyhow, the basic problem with making full-360 turrets is that only one turret mounted on the highest point of a given hull surface can work this way. Turrets mounted in superposition block each other, any sort of external protrusion or superstructure gets in the way... there's no ideal way to do it, just tradeoffs. For the current cruiser in particular, the sides can't take turrets this way, because the external fuel tanks and other components stick out too much, so you're stuck with just the top and bottom surface for turret mounts. A couple options.
Use the current turret layout, but space the turrets out more to reduce the dead zone at the rear as much as possible, maybe to something like
30 degrees.Use the current turret layout, but move the turrets up and back until the rear turret is high enough to clear all superstructure, allowing full rotation. move radars and other infrastructure to the sides... but then, at least fluff-wise, the sensors and guns have different blind spots, which is kinda annoying. meh.
Switch back to side-by-side turrets, move the turrets up and back until they clear everything. All four turrets can fire full salvoes in a 40 degree arc both ahead and behind, but broadsides can only use two turrets at a time. This is probably a better method than superposition since broadside engagements are the worst possible scenario in terms of survivability, but it still leaves the sensor problem at least from a fluff perspective.
Possibly do a "superturret", mount the turrets to a rotating assembly that can swing them around as a unit to face whichever direction? It'd be kind of a weird design, but weird designs can be interesting. I'm not sure I'd want all or even most capitals to use it as a core part of their philosophy, though. Alternatively, turrets mounted on tracks or on swing-out superstructure to allow them to adjust firing angle.
Hmm...
The superfiring problem only arises if all the guns' primary rotation planes are the same, including the sign of the area vector. That is a required premise to get "you can't have gun A above gun B and also gun B above gun A" - if "up" means different things for each turret, it is indeed possible for gun A to be above gun B from gun A's point of view and gun B to be above gun A from gun B's point of view.
...If I'm understanding you correctly, this was what I was getting at with "a given hull surface". The current cruiser has a square cross-section, so you could do a set of superfiring turrets on each of the four sides, but only the back turret of each set would actually be fully reversible.
Seems I screwed up. Sorry. Carry on.
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