Registered: Mar 2001
Location:
Posts: 220

Idea for next release

I know you are planning on releasing a more complete version of the Earth Minbari War. Would it be hard to have graphics of distant ships as part of the environment in the battle of the line missions? Like the hundred Sathanas around the sun in the last few original fs2 levels. This may run prohibitivly slow on older systems, but I think it would really add alot to the environment of the battle. You could even have distant scripted explosions. What do you think?

Last edited by Fuzzy Modem on 10-14-2001 at 02:01 AM

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Registered: Aug 2000
Location: Cedar Rapids, Iowa, United States
Posts: 1016

All background slots are filled by background images - nebulae and planets

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Registered: Mar 2001
Location:
Posts: 220

But you don't need nebulae around Earth. Each graphic could have ALOT of distant ships too. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think this is a great idea. I'll even volonteer to do the graphis of you tell me what format you need them in.

Last edited by Fuzzy Modem on 10-14-2001 at 02:57 AM

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: The Cold Northland!
Posts: 8392

No....Kazan means that ALL the slots in the game are filled with nebulae and planets. Not in the mission.

The missions can take ALOT of nebulas. The stars.tbl only takes a select number.

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Registered: Mar 2001
Location:
Posts: 220

So its out of the question? I really thouight it was a good idea. As fun as it was playing the battle of the line, I'd like to really see tha grandure of it. Thousands of ships instead of dozens oh well, I shouldent complain... Maybe if you just replaced one of the nebula graphics? If we had earth on one side and the battle on the other, as if we wereon the far left fringe of combat, that would still be pretty cool...

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Vancouver, WA, United States
Posts: 1290

I guess if you wanted to really get into it you could edit in your own background images into the stars.tbl file (you'd have to delete other entries because of the aforementioned reasons). To simulate distant ships, you could just put some Starfuries way off in the distance and make them invisible to sensors. By giving them a rather large explosion and/or shockwave and using self-destruct on them at key points you could give the player the illusion ships were being destroyed all around the globe as well.

BTW, the music is really well done. While I haven't finished DLing the core files yet (with any luck it'll be done in "3:47:37"), I can already say that the music and CB animations are of the highest quality. I can tell the team knew what they were doing.

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Registered: Mar 2001
Location: Z'Ha'Dum
Posts: 18

So it's impossible to leave out a nebula or two to put in fleet background images?

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Registered: Mar 2001
Location:
Posts: 220

It seems this would be the best way to simmulate many of the epic battles of the B5 series. The last few battles of the shadow war for instance had thousands of ships. I can't imagine them on a smaller scale, it just wouldent be the same with only a dozen capital ships.

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Sheffield UK
Posts: 1913

Ok this is my area:

As the current situation stands i see it like this:

Mission Specific Backgrounds = NO !

Generic Backgrounds (can be used in a number of situations) = YES

and i wont deviate from this unless the backgrounds limitation is removed. they are a number of ways to simulate a big battle, maybe something to look at in the future but for now, this is a big fat no.

i would like to see this project continue for years untill we have a true babylon 5 universe, hopefully at some point with source code released things will change so much so that you wouldnt even recognise it as freespace 2 anymore, at all.

newtonian physics, true lighting and how the models work etc getting a massive overhaul, but we'll have to see

as we're just a small team (who to be quite honest is happy to stay as we are because any more and organisation is getting impossibly hard) the team size does limit our progress. so we'll have to see how things go.

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Registered: Oct 2001
Location: barrow in furness
Posts: 138

for a small modding group you have done a tremendous job changing freespace 2 as it is

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: The Land of Square Lights
Posts: 541

Hmm... It would be extremely fascinating if you would have seasoned releases.

1. Earth-Minbari War
2. Raider Wars
3. Narn-Centrauri War
4a. Ea Civil War
4b. Ea Civil War
5. Shadow War
6. Drakh War

Ea Civil is like that because some there between is the Shadow War But this is just my idea. I'm completely happy how you the release campaigns, ships and mission yourselves.

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Last edited by ApaBaBooN on 10-14-2001 at 10:32 AM

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Registered: Oct 2001
Location: Netherlands
Posts: 256

You could do something like in the Derelict Campaign, there was a mission in that in which several destroyers battled against eachother at a far distance from you

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