Making mods optional?

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Engager
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Making mods optional?

Post by Engager »

I found the Gemini Gold site several days ago and am excited about helping out. Then I found this site, and seeing as we were incredibly busy at work today[/sarcasm], I was able to do a lot of digging.

Wow, looks like there's bad blood in here. So I don't know if what I want to suggest is still feasable But here it goes.

Anybody who has played Morrowind for the PC is familiar with the fact that it has a construction set, and in-game mods. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the way it works is after the game is installed, you can download player created content and install it into the game directories. But each mod has to be enabled to appear in game. Conversely, modded material can also be disabled.

It may be too late now, but it would be great if that could be done with Privateer. First concentrate on making the purist version. Once that is complete and everything is running stable, then you have a good foundation to add new content. That way everybody can have the feel for the original Privateer, but at the same time can download and enable/disable things that many of us quasi-purists would like to have - such as the newer asteroid field as opposed to the original field which forced you to cheat to get through it. (Afterburners, yank the joystick up and down) Or turrets that actually serve a useful purpose. (the only two bad things about the original Privateer in my opinion)

I'm not familiar with how the VegaStrike engine works and how the file databases are handled, so I don't know if a system to enable and disable mods is possible. But if it is, I think the developers need to seriously consider working together again so that we can all have whatever version we want much sooner.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

In a way this exists there implicitly; if you come up with a patch for better asteroids (and I hope you do) you can offer the patch. If Mamiya Otaru likes it, it becomes the standard. If he doesn't, I can still download your asteroids for my game.
I totally agree, by the way. I know that WC never strove to be a realistic sim or anything, but more realistic asteroids would be a lot more fun too. Origin had to jump through hoops to get asteroids to work at all, with the technology of those days; but we could do a lot better than that.
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Post by spiritplumber »

Yeah, about that... I had once come up with 'roids that Mamiya liked, but they sorta got lost. What does he want exactly?
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Donno, but he seemed to like fast-moving roids, so whatever he wants is likely to be the exact opposite of what I want. But I guess, for now, it's best to wait for Klauss' roid algorithm. Supposedly there's a way for shaders to create object instances. I googled around but couldn't find anything on it. He's been planning to use that to make an asteroid field that follows your ship, creating roids ahead, destroying them behind (rather than have to have thousands of roids all existing simultaneously), which is what I wanted to do for my space garbage proposal, except I wasn't aware at the time how much object creation and destruction was needed, so I naively was planning to model the field in the CPU, rather than in the GPU. Anyways, there will be better roid fields. Once klauss figures the basics, I'll get to work on it too. I'd like to implement multiple boxes of doubling dimensions, so as to have roids that are planetoid size in the largest box, down to sub-meter sized ones in the smallest box; and of different compositions... So a snow-white one is just a snowball, nothing to worry about too much. Not too realistic but both more complex and "intuitive", therefore fun ;-). And between snowballs and hard rock and/or heavy metal, there'd be a "loose dust and rock lumps" category, like the craterless asteroid the Japanese photographed up close recently, that looks like a shapeless pile of rubble, and you'd get medium damage from them.
Engager
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Post by Engager »

The fact that one of us might not like what the developers like is exactly the issue. Privateer should be done as a purist remake to form a solid foundation. Then all the extras should be downloadable as options, not included wether we like it or not.

In all honesty, I would love to play with all the ships flyable and with extra missions. But a solid foundation needs to be made - not two weaker foundations standing next to each other, i.e. Priv Remake v Gemini Gold. That way everybody ends up with a solid fun game, and we can add exactly what we want to add, and not add what we don't want.

Some examples are asteroids. Some people want killer asteroids. Some people want asteroids like the ones in the current releae. (I was in absolute AWE when I could see the asteroid field all the way from the entrance jump point of the system! That's the way it would be in real life)

Some people want turrets which have to be controlled by the player. Some want computer controlled turrets. I think it would be neat if you could network another computer and have a friend control a turret (hopefully available in a later PR release)

Anyhow, my main point is that the ideal would be for everybody to work together to get ONE version of Privateer fully finished. After that optional extras can be provided.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Engager wrote:(I was in absolute AWE when I could see the asteroid field all the way from the entrance jump point of the system! That's the way it would be in real life).
In "real life" there's no such thing as "asteroid fields". If you were in the thick of the asteroid belt you'd need a telescope the size of Mount Palomar to see the nearest other asteroid. If asteroids were ever closely bunched, they would aggregate together, due to gravitational attraction. The only places in space where you find highly concentrated crap is in the rings around gas giants. Saturn's rings are about as thick as a two-story building, with ice particles from dust size to football size, which are prevented from gravitational aggregation by the pull of small moons between rings. Maybe you know all this already, and only meant what you said in a graphics sense, but I thought I'd clarify the issue for any other curious readers that might care to know.

By the way, there are no "should's" in this business; it's what the developer(s) want to do that matters. I may disagree with M.O.'s choice of asteroid dynamics, but he has the final say, since it's his mod. I see your point about having a central objective, and then options. Donno if I agree about what the central objective should be, though. If I, for one, had been in a position to make descisions, I would have made a remake much more different from the original game: For me it's capturing the spirit that's important, not necessarily every detail, and that spirit would presumably take a more advanced form, given modern graphics technology and CPU raw power. Same music, similar art, but huge planets, an FFE-like flight model, improved economics, space elevators... But that's just me.
Engager
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Post by Engager »

chuck_starchaser wrote:
Engager wrote:(I was in absolute AWE when I could see the asteroid field all the way from the entrance jump point of the system! That's the way it would be in real life).
In "real life" there's no such thing as "asteroid fields". If you were in the thick of the asteroid belt you'd need a telescope the size of Mount Palomar to see the nearest other asteroid. If asteroids were ever closely bunched, they would aggregate together, due to gravitational attraction. The only places in space where you find highly concentrated crap is in the rings around gas giants. Saturn's rings are about as thick as a two-story building, with ice particles from dust size to football size, which are prevented from gravitational aggregation by the pull of small moons between rings. Maybe you know all this already, and only meant what you said in a graphics sense, but I thought I'd clarify the issue for any other curious readers that might care to know.
Well then in a sense of capturing the original intent of the game, I would point to the opening video sequence which played when the game was started. I think the way the asteroids are now is most true to what was expressed in the intro video. The only reason the fields weren't like that in the game was very likely because computers back then would nto be able to render such a field.
By the way, there are no "should's" in this business; it's what the developer(s) want to do that matters. I may disagree with M.O.'s choice of asteroid dynamics, but he has the final say, since it's his mod. I see your point about having a central objective, and then options. Donno if I agree about what the central objective should be, though. If I, for one, had been in a position to make descisions, I would have made a remake much more different from the original game: For me it's capturing the spirit that's important, not necessarily every detail, and that spirit would presumably take a more advanced form, given modern graphics technology and CPU raw power. Same music, similar art, but huge planets, an FFE-like flight model, improved economics, space elevators... But that's just me.
In order to provide a good foundation for everybody, you go to the lowest common denominator. That is an exact copy of Privateer with updated graphics. Once that is finished, then all the add-ons can be provided for those (like me) who are interested in them. While I think I'd prefer Privateer Remake over Gemini Gold, it is in my best interest for the core game to be complete as soon as possible. With that accomplished, add-ons are made. But as it is now, it seems that a large proportion of man-hours are being diverted to add-ons before the game is even finished.

Well, I'll just continue to play Privateer Original using DosBox and capture cutscene videos as I go through so that I can do my part in getting the two remakes closer to a finished product. (see post in Gemini Gold forum) It's looking like the video file sizes will be small enough to allow for all the NPC interaction scenes (bartenders, guild masters, fixers, jump scenes) to be included as video files until such time as these scenes can be re-done using either higher resolution animations or 3-D character models.
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Post by Privateer Ferrius »

It's funny that someone complains about bad blood and then comes in and stirs some up.

As Chuck has said, the final descision is always left to the mod's lead designer. If you don't like itm, you don't have to play it; no one is forcing you - and also, if you dont like it, you can CHANGE it. That's the greatest strength of the VegaStrike engine - you can change EVERYTHING to your liking.
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