Call for volunteers: merging Allegiance into FS2

MatthTheGeek · Post by **MatthTheGeek** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 12:22 am

Let's be clear. Although it would require a major network and interface revamp, those are things that are tough but achievable, and that will have to be done to the FSO engine at some point. With that as a given, you can expect full support from the SCP if you want to work on those parts. Code upgrades happen in the SCP as they are needed, and network revamp has never happened because of a lack of interest and lack of network knowledge. If you bring those two elements, I'm pretty sure magic can happen.

Quoting one of the SCP members :
QUOTE Network code is pretty easy and there is not really a lot wrong with it per-se. The issue is any extensions to it all have the potential to break existing compatible communication, so it's not done lightly.[/quote]

juckto · Post by **juckto** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 1:04 am

This sounds nice. What I'd love to see added:
1) Able to change cores without changing servers
2) Some sort of "Master lobby chatroom", or something so you can tell people on NOAT "Hey we're starting a new game on X settings"
3) Not sure - Guess I'll say something frivolous like being able to toggle your teleport receiver on/off

What I'd love to see kept:
1) Teams led by a commander
2) Expanding across the map with constructors
3) Dogfighting (what Clay said about particle physics)

HSharp · Post by **HSharp** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 2:07 am

Can alephs work with FS2?

Tbh I haven't played any FS2 online except some deathmatches but afaik all the jumping/warping/ripcording to sectors was scripted, dunno if it's different for multiplayer. Same with building bases and commander and mining etc... but tbh I never really used FRED more then making some crap single player missions so I don't know, it's not going to be Allegiance though if you only port ships and weapons but leave mining non-existent.

Spunkmeyer · Post by **Spunkmeyer** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 2:38 am

No, alephs won't work without some hacking. There is a lot of code to write to make it happen.

Frankly Allegiance can be done aleph/sector-free and could be better for it. That would however require some kinda of "bubble" system, where only the data for ships immediately around you are updated n times per sec, with everything else getting low-frequency (say 1hz) updates.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 5:19 am

Allegiance without alephs isn't Allegiance.. The entire game is kinda based around them.

juckto · Post by **juckto** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 6:05 am

Well, if you're stuck in one "map" then what about having scattered clumps of asteroids and "jump gates", which give your ship a temporary boost in speed towards the next clump of asteroids?

Heh, it would even be cool if they became something you could construct. "Warning: Red team is attempting to build a jump gate to the Pohjola belt"

Makida · Post by **Makida** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 6:12 am

I do not really understand, but then I'm not a coder, and it has been a while since I've played FS2... But these are two completely different games. FreeSpace is a single-player space combat sim with some limited multiplayer options, and Allegiance is a multiplayer-only team-based Real Time Strategy game/space combat sim hybrid. It seems to me that if you want a game that plays at all similarly to Allegiance, you'd end up taking the graphics engine from FS2, and coding pretty much everything else from scratch.

I mean, maybe some sort of hybrid game that's somewhere in-between Allegiance and FreeSpace2 would still be a fun game in its own right, but it's hard to imagine actually turning FS2 into Allegiance, or anything particularly similar to Allegiance, without basically changing everything.

You peoples talk about "filling in gaps in the code" or some such. But these ware two fundamentally different games. It's like it's all gaps.

Clay_Pigeon · Post by **Clay_Pigeon** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 6:15 am

Orion wrote:QUOTE (Orion @ Jul 31 2011, 01:19 AM) Allegiance without alephs isn't Allegiance.. The entire game is kinda based around them.

+1

sambasti · Post by **sambasti** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 6:26 am

I think part of the reason is that the GFX code is one of the harder parts.

MatthTheGeek · Post by **MatthTheGeek** » Sun Jul 31, 2011 8:46 am

The Aleph system is one of the easiest thing to emulate, and one of the first thing I thought about when thinking about FREDing an Allegiance-like. In FS, a game is restricted to a single map. However, you can easily via the mission editor teleport anything that come close to a certain point to somewhere else, and vice versa. We just need 'sectors' to be areas far enough from each other, let's say 500km, and we're done.