Flight Cmdr patch is Up

eddieb

Vice Admiral
All:

I've released some informal patches to Flight Commander, and released a new version of the mission editor. This is primarily intended for those creating missions or other content for Flight Commander.

What you get:

Flight Commander now plays appropriate full screen movies before and after missions.

Flight Commander music, sound, and comm audio volumes can be adjusted in the settings panel. Added a new setting to disable shadows.

Flight Commander and the Mission Editor can now do special in flight comms upon entering and leaving a nav point.

Flight Commander now handles neutral ships.

A friendlier mission editor; run Flight Commander directly from the menu.

Get the mission editor at the usual place:
http://flightcommander.solsector.net/
You may need to reload the mission editor page to pick up the latest version.

Now for getting the flight commander patches:

First make sure you've downloaded Flight Commander 1.1.

First download and extract this to your Flight Commander directory:
http://flightcommander.solsector.net/videoupdate.zip

Then do the same for this
http://flightcommander.solsector.net/videoupdate2.zip
 
well done

Great work. I think you have the best space combat engine ever. And highly moddable too, I would say not even professional games are so free to change. The takeoff and landings now play very smooth again thanks to the new options.

If I can convince some friends to do me the 3D models I'll make missions based on your engine. As for minor flaws I've noticed I'm sure it's because the engine is still being developed.
 
I'd have to say that I enjoy your engine as well. And as soon as some more models become available to use, this will be quite the great game.

A couple of a issues I've noticed though:
1. Several times when playing an edited mission, the player's ship and all other ships are wildly shaking, yet aim is still straight ahead regardless of what the ship is pointing at. Sometimes it stops when you autopilot to another nav point, other times it doesn't. It seems random when this happens.

2. When playing a edited mission, several ships seem to be randomly placed rather then where they are actually placed in the mission editor. Is this supposed to happen? Ships that are supposed to be withing around 50,000 of the player's vincinity and able to be reached right away when they reach the nav point are now at 100,000,000 and beyond, and unable to be reached within any reasonable amount of time(they don't even seem to appear on the target lock window, it's just a blank where the ship would go).

And one more question, how would I go about creating a briefing like the ones in the default campaign? I find those highly entertaining.
 
I like it. Your engine will be something to be reckoned with. It is better than the Vision engine, which Prophecy and Secret Ops used. It allows 32 bit and runs smoothly.
 
DJ Erik said:
I'd have to say that I enjoy your engine as well. And as soon as some more models become available to use, this will be quite the great game.

A couple of a issues I've noticed though:
1. Several times when playing an edited mission, the player's ship and all other ships are wildly shaking, yet aim is still straight ahead regardless of what the ship is pointing at. Sometimes it stops when you autopilot to another nav point, other times it doesn't. It seems random when this happens.

2. When playing a edited mission, several ships seem to be randomly placed rather then where they are actually placed in the mission editor. Is this supposed to happen? Ships that are supposed to be withing around 50,000 of the player's vincinity and able to be reached right away when they reach the nav point are now at 100,000,000 and beyond, and unable to be reached within any reasonable amount of time(they don't even seem to appear on the target lock window, it's just a blank where the ship would go).

And one more question, how would I go about creating a briefing like the ones in the default campaign? I find those highly entertaining.

Thanks everyone for their kind words. There is still much work to be done to get it up to par with the real engines, key among them being a better AI, and turrets. Also I've had requests for better explosions. But everybody seems to like the briefings, much to my surprise.

As far as the shaking and distances, I'd suggest placing the ships way closer together. They're probably too far apart. To get a feel for distances, open up some existing missions, and use roughly those distances.

Now, to create those briefings:
Copy over an existing mission*.briefing.xml to make it have the same name as your mission, like if your mission is

mymission.mission.xml

then your briefing will be

mymission.briefing.xml

Open up your new briefing in a text editor.

Look at an existing briefing to get a feel for how to add ships, navs, and text.

This is xml, so if you want something to check your briefing and make sure it's valid before using it with flight commander, try using the free version of Xml Spy. Google for xml spy, you'll find it. Also you can google for xml to learn about the text format in general. But if you look at another briefing file, I think it's pretty self explanatory what's happening. Post here if you need more briefing help .


As far as models go, anything used in prophecy or a secret ops mod should be able to be used in Flight Commander, so there should be no shortage of models.
 
Btw, there is a modding tutorials section at the Ranger's Glory forum. Although at the moment there are very few, more will be added soon.

Oh yeah, as to ships, a ships pack should be added soon.

Also, on the RG site, there is an FC editor page with three ships already converted and ready to go: the Bearcat, Banshee, and Plunkett-which is pretty useless at the moment due to the lack of turret AI.

As for the ships thing. The problem you have is not that the ships are too far apart, but they are actually too close causing some of the ships to bounce off each other and go to exponential distances. (unless of course you have zoomed out a huge distance in the editor-which I doubt)
 
Seems good about the distances now, I neglected to zoom in. Is the shaking linked with distances?

One more issue: when the player dies the game just seems to freeze in place. Music still plays but there is no action afterwards, and no return to the main screen automatically, you have to exit out of the mission. I'd have no idea what would cause this, any idea?
 
DJ Erik said:
Seems good about the distances now, I neglected to zoom in. Is the shaking linked with distances?

One more issue: when the player dies the game just seems to freeze in place. Music still plays but there is no action afterwards, and no return to the main screen automatically, you have to exit out of the mission. I'd have no idea what would cause this, any idea?

Yes, I believe so, on the linking. If you're still having trouble with the shaking after cleaning up the distances, send me your mission and I'll have a look at it.

I purposely did that so you could listen to the whole player death song if you wanted to. Just press escape to continue. That's about as far as I got on the player death cutscene.
 
I don't have the shaking problem anymore once the distances are far enough apart. A question though, how many ships can you have in a particular nav point before they are too numerous that they cause the distance problem? It seems like I'm able to put up to around 35 fighters or so in a single nav point and everything's alright(what a sight that is!) and when you go over that amount there's usually one or two fighters that are spread about at those extremely long distances.

Another question(more of a design question), is it possible in a later edition of the mission editor to be able to edit the status of a placed ship? Such as you meet up with a damaged ship and escort it back home.
 
Anything's possible. This will probably be added, but as for when, I don't know.

As for those ships going a-stray. Make sure they have some distance in between them, and don't forget about the y value. Put some of those ships above or below the x/z plane of the editor. I'm thinking some of your ships are so close to each other that an invalid velocity is produced which is why I and my enemy end up millions of klicks apart.

(no ship can go faster than their ab speed, and if they do, they go super-huge distances-at least this is my take on the distance issue)
 
DJ Erik said:
Another question(more of a design question), is it possible in a later edition of the mission editor to be able to edit the status of a placed ship? Such as you meet up with a damaged ship and escort it back home.

Yeah, its probably a weekend's worth of work to do this the right way. I've got a long list of features to add. I tend to give priority to those folks who have contrinuted something back to Flight Commander, be it a short campaign, or a converted ship. So please do contribute, and I'll see what I can do to help you out.

Along these lines, I'd like to someday extend the damage model, as right now I don't model thruster, engine, shield generator, weapons, or afterburner damage.

By the way, there's a quick and dirty way of accomplishing this now already. Just copy of the ship.xml file, edit the maximuim shields and armor and reduce them, and then just use the new ship in your mission.
 
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