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[Tartiflette]

Well Uomoz and a couple of other modders tried to do that the other way around:

http://gfycat.com/DelectableAffectionateEidolonhelvum

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=2663.0

[Stalker]

Well Uomoz and a couple of other modders tried to do that the other way around:

http://gfycat.com/DelectableAffectionateEidolonhelvum

http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=2663.0

Wow, that is quite... something.

I'm definitely going for something more along the scale of the battles seen in vanilla and most of the mods out there. Even in Freespace 2, you might just have 2 big ships against each other, a few cruisers and corvettes, and maybe 10 squadrons of fighters/bombers split between each side.

That thread was helpful, as it made me realize I'm going to need to figure out/reverse engineer code for handling broadsides. Some of the ships in this mod do not have the majority of their firepower in the forward arc.

In other news, I'm making a push to finish out all ships/weapons sprite work this week. Next week I can tackle the weapons sprites. In-between there, I want to get the Anti-fighter beams and some of the warship beams working code-wise, and pop some sounds in.

v0.1 is shaping up to look like:

• 3 factions, no campaign integration
• Corvette and Heavy Fighter wing for each faction, balanced against typical vanilla/mod ships.
• Associated weapons with the above (~15 weapons)
• A few head-to-head missions for people to play around with

Then, we'll go forward from a solid base and just gradually add more and more ships+capabilities.

[Stalker]

Added design philosophy and other notes to the bottom of the OP, so it's clear how I'm thinking about this.

TL;DR: Freespace factions get stuck in the Corvus sector and just have to deal with it.

[Stalker]

OK, I've finished the high-res spriting work for combat ships. I still have to do freighters and fuel tankers, but I need to get some sleep. I'm going to slowly start updating the OP spoiler with ships (there's a new one in there now!) as I get these sprites sized appropriately. No promises on more flavor text for now

Here's a picture of all the pretties in one place.

Spoiler

[close]

[Stalker]

For those who are interested, I'm making semi-regular commits to this project in GitHub.

https://github.com/mechwars/Freespace/

Feel free to download and test it out. I won't be announcing updates to this repository until the initial-release branch is complete, at which point I'll merge it into master.

[Stalker]

This screenshot doesn't do it justice (I need to figure out a setup for recording gifs/videos), but I got Terran beam weapons working. I also incorporated some old slashing code from the radioactive code depot, which works quite nicely. The beams actually slash across a target! I just need to tweak the amount they slash by, so they don't just miss the target entirely.

Spent the evening commenting code, bug hunting, and managed to get the result I was hoping for.

I have a few sound bugs to work out now (for some reason, the charging sound is playing AFTER the weapon is done firing), and need to tweak the visuals, but it's getting there.

Spoiler

[close]

Once I've gotten this beam code cleaned up and solid, I'll set up all the other beam cannons. Good times!

Beam To Do:

• Integrate Tartiflette's muzzle flash animation script to display the SCP beam chargeup and chargedown animations (need to figure out how to scale the animation up everyframe from 0 to full size during charge up, and then down again during chargedown. Maybe for chargeup I could link scale to getCharge()? Then for chargedown, linked to... what? It would have to be time duration-based).
• Fix the chargeup sound to actually trigger consistently when the beam is actually charging
• Fix the slash code so that the slash starts closer to the target.

[Stalker]

Beam weapon demo on the Deimos! Coming soon to a Starsector near you...

You can see the that all the beams that fire at the same time are inheriting the same slashing calcs, rather than each using an independent slashing calculation. That seems to be what's causing some beams to just fire into space, rather than toward their target. Not a super high priority for me to fix just yet, but it's on the list...

I may try just reducing the turret angles and see if that effectively fixes it, especially since it's only on a few ships... most ships just fire straight at the target.

[Alex]

Why make your ships close to a circle in shape? Stuff gets weird with the autofire AI for long and skinny ships, resulting in a lot of really sub-par gameplay behaviors.

Is this still a thing? The AI (both autofire and not) is approximating ship shape using a combination of oval sections. Afaik that works, so long skinny ships should be workable.

[MesoTroniK]

This is just my angle, but extremely long and skinny ships should only have a narrow front shield that cannot be extended or converted to Omni to avoid having huge gaps between the shield and hull.
You want to avoid having large distances between the elliptical targeting radius and the actual bounds, this is more likely to be an issue on long and narrow ships.



Anyways, the 800px soft cap is mostly from modiverse experiments that shows anything larger than 800 does not really play nicely with the refit screen and EMP arc visuals etc also fail. And in the end ships that big just sort of get in the way and don't really play very well.

[Stalker]

Thanks for the thoughts, guys. I'll still cap out at about 800, just for fitting-things-on-the-screen reasons, if nothing else.

More Freespace shots! Shivans are in!

[Stalker]

Ok, good times. I've got weapons working for both the first core cap ships, and can finally start to really balance them against vanilla ships and each other. Things I've noticed so far:

Spoiler

• Beam Damage: The beam weapons of the Deimos, even though they waste about 50% of their DPS just firing into space as they are slashing, are still well-placed enough to eventually wear down opponents. The standard Shivan beam cannon does less DPS overall, but hits the target directly with 100% of that damage instead of wasting it in space. They are great against armor and hull.
  
  The issue is shields. Since no Freespace cap ships have kinetic weapons, they just aren't as effective against ships with shields and decent flux venting. It remains to be seen how much of an issue this will be once fighters and bombers are in the mix. If they occupy and take down shields, the cap ship beams can light up and pierce through armor and hull. It should work out.
• Passive Defenses: An armor rating of 2000 on these Corvettes is just too high. I'm going to bring them down to 1500 and see how it plays. A Corvette should be able to win about 50% of the time against a top-tier cruiser, 1-on-1. So the combination of armor+hull needs to equal the combination of shields+armor+hull, when weapon damage is taken into account at typical engagement ranges.
  
  I'll probably reserve the 2000 armor rating for the big Destroyers. Corvettes at 1500 armor, as mentioned. Cruisers will go down to 1000 armor. Non-combatants will probably get 750 armor. Bombers 250 armor to start, and probably 100 armor for fighters.
• Speed: Slow enough that Freespace caps can be easily surrounded by vanilla ships. I think this is fine for now. I really need to get fighters into the mix and see how that works.
• Overall: Need to do some tweaking and balancing, but it's actually pretty darn close as-is right now. My goal is to make balanced Freespace fleets really powerful threats that have to be approached carefully. Nothing at the level of Templars, where each individual ship is a bottle of nightmares, but where combined arms eliminates the advantages opponents have.

[close]

I'm going to get v0.1 weapons completed this weekend. I'll get the Vasudan corvette in and 2 fighters per faction (heavy fighter and interceptor). Plus, each faction will get a fighter refit craft with 1 flight deck each, so fighter wing refits can be handled in absence of actual carrier vessels (which are gigantic and expensive).

I think I'm actually going to get Corvus-mode integration of this sooner rather than later. It'll be really hamfisted and basic at first... I'll just copy the implementation of a few existing systems, remove/change some things, and get a home system for each race in place.

Then I'll release this bad boy out to those of you reading this and I can start getting your feedback!

[Stalker]

A few action shots from tonight's Anti-fighter beam and new beam graphic tests.

[Stalker]

Progress Update!

Got all the v0.1 weapons in place, and appropriate weapon graphics/sounds. It feels very Freespacy now.

Spent most of Saturday addressing git errors. Had to learn Git command line so I could nuke my local repo and get things back up and running.

This week I'm going to finish off the ships by adding the Vasudans, then create the faction files and some basic systems.

If all goes well, I'll release v0.1 by the end of this week.

[Serenitis]

If the skinny vs. round deal is still a thing for ships, maybe the Hecate would be a better carrier/capital choice than the Orion?
Still, really interested in how this is going to turn out it looks great so far.

Also, thanks for reminding me how much I miss PXO and FS in general.

Spoiler

SuicideDarts represent - Pegasus 4 eva!

[close]

[Stalker]

If the skinny vs. round deal is still a thing for ships, maybe the Hecate would be a better carrier/capital choice than the Orion?
Still, really interested in how this is going to turn out it looks great so far.

Also, thanks for reminding me how much I miss PXO and FS in general.

Spoiler

SuicideDarts represent - Pegasus 4 eva!

[close]

Glad to hear it!

Fair point re: the Hecate. If all else fails, I'll contact the producers of non-canon designs for Blue Planet and see what we can use from there (I may do this anyway). I think the Orion should be fine at 800px, even being long and skinny. Hopefully, anyway. My goal is to get both the Orion and Hecate in-game

As soon as I have v0.1 out I'll make a push at getting the Orion in-game to see how it plays. Which reminds me, I need to create a sprite for it's giant turrets like I did for the Deimos.