Future Tense Semi-Official Statement

posted on February 7th, 2013, 3:34 pm

My reasoning stems from modding perspective entirely. Graphics surely offer greater possibilities in A2, but there are only a few things there that can not be overcome with some creative setup in the sods.

Primarily, A1 doesn't have self-illumination with the alpha channel. But there is a way; you can always use a second mesh with a "glow" texture. You can even prevent "bleed through" of the first layer by setting the second layer to use "alpha" blending (I think this doesn't work the same way in A2. Using "alpha" belnding does not prevent poly bleeding).

Borg textures have never struck my fancy. I think this can only work right with some really good combination of bump maps and borg "damage" meshes. My modelling abilities have thus far failed to meet my expectations. Even if FT were to transition to A2 or FleetOps, I don't expect that we'll have borg assimilation graphics.

Better rendering engine features -- anti-aliasing, bump maps, better handling of larger meshes and onscreen poly counts --are the things that attracted me the most to A2/fleetops from the graphics perspective, so I can not argue here by posting screenshots of things.

As for the the A2 game engine, I only really liked the fact that physics files are fully moddable. The stock physics were awful, but I'm talking about possibilities here, not what was presented in the stock game. Some things that made FT possible in A1 were in fact missing from A2.

Granted, A2 has warp and colonizable planets, features that we tried to invent into A1, but neither of these worked as desired in A2. How these things will translate into a mod for FleetOps, I can't be sure.

Does the the patch project offer the same modding features as FleetOps? If so, then the Patch project would be preferred as that offers a "cleaner" slate to work from.

Anyhow, it is still a while before any serious consideration for conversion can be done. It is also not counterproductive to create artwork for A1 as that is the easiest material to convert from A1 to A2.

posted on February 7th, 2013, 3:43 pm

The patch project offers very minimalistic features - it was created even before those features were considered expressly for Fleet Operations, which had at that time no real additional modding features compared to A2. It's severely outdated (2007ish was first release I believe).

Fleet Operations v3.2 and all future versions are intended to replace the patch project, due to the addition of the modification folder options and the hundreds of other additional enhancements .

V4 will have additional fancy render and texture features which should greatly improve the gaming experience . We'll be moving to our own version of Borg assimilation graphics-features with these enhancements as well.

It's still true that A1 has some features not yet in Fleet Ops: the nifty way that warp was set up in A1 isn't possible in FO I believe (those commands were subverted in A2 for use for Warp), and of course officer quarters aren't there either, nor the way A1 lays out its GUI. Craft AI in FO is also different than in A1, as A2 introduced some frustrating bugs there that we haven't yet been able to get rid of.

posted on February 8th, 2013, 1:49 am

Thanks Dominus for clearing that up. With that, the decision may be considered final that there will be no A2, or Patch Project versions of Future Tense. If and when the times comes, FT will be reworked as a mod for FleetOps.

Very curious to know more about the new render features

As for Borg graphics, and damage effects, I'd be jumping up and down if these can be generated procedurally

posted on February 8th, 2013, 3:47 am

@Mr.Vulcan: Looks like those that will want Future Tense in A2 and not FleetOps will have to reverse engineer the mod themselves just to get it into A2 instead of FleetOps then, and if it really goes to FleetOps and has features only in FleetOps someone might just have to reverse engineer and rework FleetOps hooks into regular A2 to get Future Tense there instead.

Maybe hard and frustrating work but someone out there in the modding community might just be able to do it for you all if you don't want to. Who knows, there might be someone or groups of people out there already reverse engineering FleetOps themselves for their own personal use. Of course only God and they know that, if the Devs don't.

Hopefully it's the case and not my mind hoping for wishful thinking.

posted on February 8th, 2013, 5:41 am

Yep, I wouldn't base a new mod on the Patch Project. We discontinued development of it. It just took too much time to implement features in parallel and many of the more advanced features were not possible to be integrated without breaking backward compatibility - something the Patch Project aimed for. Instead, we spend time in making Fleet Operations itself more moddable by opening more commands up in odfs or adding the whole mod system. There are also a bunch of features more or less implemented just for mods, as they are not used to their full extend in Fleet Ops, for example the fighters or the buildyard for modularized vessels. You should be able to find documentation on these things in the modding section of the guide. Will be updated once the next version is ready.

posted on February 8th, 2013, 6:45 am

Well, backward compatibility is useless to the Patch Project now because of how newer computer make it extremely hard to play Star Trek Armada II without the Patch Project so everyone really should have it installed so really adding more features to it is completely smart and logical and I bet if you took a poll on regular A2 users, they all are using the Patch Project 1.2.5 Patch with their games.

Plus you may think backwards compatibility is fine and rather work on FleetOps instead well neglecting the many users who still play 1.1 Matches online with the Patch Project installed. On top of that, I have found it impossible to play the STA2: Classic Mod online instead of FleetOps with those that still play 1.1 PvP matches. To me, STA2: Classic is a useless mod when it comes to wanting to play classic Armada II online, it's only good for playing the original campaign missions since FleetOps doesn't have any campaign.

Discontinuing work on the Patch Project in my opinion was and is the worst mistake the FleetOps Devs have made so far, and I bet those that still play the game with that patch will agree with me.

Either way, I would believe that this would be a discussion best suited for my: "Patch Project" thread (//www.fleetops.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=12067
Maybe a poll about this should actually be added to the "News Section".