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You know, there is someone who doesn’t like IronDuke’s ideas. Smith has to fix the ship whenever Cal gets it beat up!
This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay
Storm Petrel
You just had to say that while I was drinking! :sick:
(Wipes keyboard dry)
And that reminds me. While talking about the hull, I completely forgot to mention how it gets repaired.
A powerful nanotech autorepair would be installed on the hull, just like the ones already in EoC, but with a little more realism. If three holes are blown in your ship, the autorepair would split resources between them, according to priority. They would close up, but slowly, so if you get hit badly, you might have to withdraw for several minutes to wait for repairs. Also, the autorepair has a limited supply. It’s usually enough to go for quite a while, but keep an eye on it!
If you are hit VERY bad, it might be impossible to repair outside of a good shipyard. (Lucretia’s Base has one, but I can’t guarantee the player base in my game will. 👿 Muhahaha! Making player lives hard to keep is so fun!)
Some of the less complicated systems would have access to the autorepair functions, but it would work REALLY slowly, and some systems like FTL drive or…uh-oh…life support! Yikes! They would be repairable only by hand, so hope Smith isn’t too mad at you… Or just repair them yourself. Not actually sure how that could be implemented realistically without requiring the player to have PhDs in electrical engineering and astrophysics.
Lucky you–weapons and shields and big and brute bulky enough to be easily autorepaired, so you won’t be permanently incapacitated right away.
Keep in mind this would apply to all ships, right down to the one that collided with a big rock last week and drifted until you found them, ’cause their engineer is an incompetent idiot and just broke the ship more. Woo hoo. 😛
I haven’t thought this through very thoroughly yet. I was more interested in blowing stuff up first, then coming up with plans for fixing it. But if I put my mind to it, I’ll come up with what I’m hoping would be an arsenal of aweosomeness (and sarcasm) to make great space games with. Thanks for reminding me.–IronDuke
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂I think it would be neat to re-introduce the four station command section and the use of rear-facing weapons. Some more cockpits would be nice to.
This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay
Storm Petrel
[quote=”Chessking” post=19366]I think it would be neat to re-introduce the four station command section and the use of rear-facing weapons. Some more cockpits would be nice to.[/quote]
This one will be short… :p
I totally agree about the separate workstations that they are fun. However, they can prevent perfect teamwork, because a team can only work as fast as they can communicate. Having one pilot guarantees teamwork as fast as his reflexes. Of course, he can sometimes get overwhelmed, so certain functions such as engineering could be done by others.
What I’ve been planning for my game is to have the forward gunner, pilot, and captain be the same person. The reason is that having them be three separate people decreases coordination, fighting skill, and general fun-ness. I’ve found that flying and firing forward guns works best with one man, and having him be the captain as well makes for perfect timing.
There would be separate stations for the engineer(s), rear and turret gunners, and anyone else I’ve forgotten.
Speaking of, rear facing weapons will definitely be a big thing, along with turrets. I still have a blast flying a heavy destroyer in a teat mod I made. Four Gatling turrets with 360 coverage! Yeah!
I don’t know if you’ve played Elite: Dangerous, but they have a custom cockpit for each ship. That’s exactly what I’m going to do. 😀–IronDuke
I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂I pretty sure Cambrogal has made a cockpit for one of his ships in Torn Stars. I saw a screenshot.
This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay
Storm Petrel
To be honest, in I-War 1, I always wished for a LAN mode where more than one player could command the ship. I mean, let’s face it: flying the Dreadnaught is actually work enough to keep at the minimum 2 players busy. To assign repairs in the middle of a fight, flying crazy maneuvers and shooting forward and backwards… I would have welcomed a 2-player mod.
Well, the technology is available by now, so this should be possible to do in a game that aims to re-create I-War 1’s feeling.
One comment: REM missiles use all of the pilots controls, rendering the ship itself helpless. With two players flying a ship, one could control the missile, while the other flies the ship.
This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay
Storm Petrel
Could I-War 3 be written as a mod?
Also, the game should definitely include features from many of the mods already made. For example, the mining techniques in Gold Rush and Torn Stars, along with the merchant systems of Torn Stars, should be included so that the player can earn a living get new systems and weapons through means other than piracy and trading pirated items. This would also incorporate the market system included in Gold Rush, Torn Stars, and Future Trader.
This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay
Storm Petrel
Iwar2 was so ahead of its time. I have never played a game where you felt so small and lost in the middle of a huge living breathing star system. The music was amazing too and helped to captutre the scale.
Iwar3 is an idea i’ve had in my head for years. I recently tried to recrate as many of the game systems in unity as I can. It’s tough though as i’m not much of a programmer. So I mainly just have fun recreating the ships in 3d but when its time to make them work I stall out.
Even thought Iwar2 seems unfinished in many ways, it would be a very tall order to make a another game, have it be more successfull (from a design point of view), and have that “feeling” like EOC did.
The Priceline Negotiator
That feeling… I myself have been seeking to describe it.
This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay
Storm Petrel
There’s an interesting post here. It is at the end of the fourth post, submitted over twelve years ago.
This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay
Storm Petrel
I think that Torn Stars could be considered an unofficial I-War 3. If you think about it, what would people do immediately after the end of the second game? There would be no one to fight except a few petty pirates. Not for some time anyways. In my opinion, Torn Stars reflects this setting, allowing the player to make a living for himself in the I-War universe. Of course, details such as factions and system names are inaccurate, but I think it is worth considering. Besides, any legal sequel to I-War 2 at this point would have to be in mod format anyways.
This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay
Storm Petrel
Jeezes, that puts things in perspective
I was 26 when the game came out… :whistle: and I am still coming back to it again and again. I played and finished I-War 2 around that time with a mouse and a keyboard. I am now playing it with two old X-box controllers simultaneously. This gives me the complete functions over all thrusters using three thumb-sticks: The setup works great, both controllers are on the desk and I can use a hand per controller:
I must admit that I never played I-War or its expansion :blush:. I bought both games on GOG and originally on disk (I still have the first game in mint condition) sadly the I-War 2 (play and install disk) were lost during a flood in the basement. When the game came out I was barely scratching the surface of the modding scene. Several years later I am pretty good at using programs like Photoshop and doing some (basic 3d work).
Here is a screenshot of the famous Cobra Mk3 from Elite as I see it, designed in Wings 3D and ingame in Oolite.
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeLpZQI_a4M[/video]
It has subsystems that show up on the hull when you buy them (see for example the cargo bay extention attached to the green version and not to the red one ?). The added mass should also have an effect on how the ship’s physics behave. That is the kind of realism I would like to see in an I-War 3.
If only porting ships to I-War were as simple as porting them to Oolite to name an example. Oolite is a cool game but it’s the gameplay that makes me come back to I-War 2, the Newtonian physics engine is a real blast in I-War, as is the interface. The HUD that shows the ship’s path, the representation of the L-Points, the realism of the ship design (not 500 different ships with appendages that are there just to make them look pretty – X3 series – but functional hulls with modular slots to attach weapons, cargo etc).
I had a lot of hopes for ED and invested quite an amount of cash in it, but since they decided that there was not going to be an offline version (and therefore no mod support), I kinda lost interest. Some of you have not known the pre-internet era, where your PC had to function without a connection. Nowadays internet is everywhere, but I still like to play my games without the need for it. I must be getting old.
The trend I see with games, as it is with films the last few years, is that a lot of emphasis is taken away from the actual story and characters, and more effort is put in special effects and complex mechanics (yes okay there are exceptions) but those who have watched the movie Kelly’s Heroes know what I am talking about.
Look at X-Rebirth for example; the game is a technical and visually precise masterpiece (it was made by ze Germans after all); however story wise, it’s an empty shell and the actors are not really there. There is no emotion in the speech and it looks like the lines were read by someone who they could only afford to pay 2 bucks an hour. The characters in I-War 2 (Cal,Smith, Jaffs etc…) are as real as they come, it takes talent to do that, not just technical know-how, sharp programming skills and a first class 3d artist.
To make a successful successor to I-War 2 one person can not pull it off, even if you are schizophrenic.
Another angle to not forget to cover is the support for Oculus Rift hardware and the likes.
Here is my list of spacegames that bring back memories besides I-War 2:
Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, Homeworld 1 and 2, Tachyon: The Fringe, Privateer 2: The Darkening. and to a lesser extent Starlancer.
I am keeping an eye out for Enemy Starfighter since the visuals in that game really appeal to me.For controllers, I prefer my simple Joystick with keyboard:
That Cobra Mk3 must be from Elite: Frontier. I haven’t gotten to it yet, since I just finished downloading all of the mechWarrior games. (I still have to track down a working mirror of Mechcommander Gold, though). Frontier is next on my list.
It has subsystems that show up on the hull when you buy them (see for example the cargo bay extention attached to the green version and not to the red one ?). The added mass should also have an effect on how the ship’s physics behave. That is the kind of realism I would like to see in an I-War 3.
The subsystems showing on the hull is already somewhat incorporated. The Tug, Advanced Patcom, and Heavy Corvette have those modular attatchments on them. However, internal mountpoints (maybe), special subsystems (like the capsule drive), and dynamic mass would be good improvements.
This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay
Storm Petrel
No, the Cobra Mk 3 is from Oolite, I made it about a year ago, together with a Sidewinder and it is up for grabs. Sadly work took up a lot of time and I haven’t been able to finish the complete pack. You can have a look at the thread here:
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