MMM : Premonitions

posted on August 25th, 2010, 10:24 pm

Having a persistent fleet where you carry over ships from mission to mission would be epic. I hate it when you build a massive fleet during a mission only to win and they all mysteriously disappear even though you need a fleet in the next mission. Homeworld did a great job with that aspect, now I have also played some games (like Disciple) where you get to select a handfull of units (all your choice) to carry through to the subsequent mission, that would be cool too.

posted on August 26th, 2010, 12:55 am

That would be cool

posted on August 26th, 2010, 10:34 am

lol yh armada did steal your massive fleet every mission. it was annoying

but imagine how easy the game would be if every mission u got to keep that fleet of 16 galaxies lol.

posted on August 26th, 2010, 12:00 pm

true, but what if the size of enemy ships was able to counter it?  so if you indeed had 16 galaxys, the borg would have just enough ships to make it challenging.  It would be difficult to do, but I think you could balance it on number of ships alone, assuming that only a small number of those ships will be higher than an e2.

posted on August 26th, 2010, 1:00 pm

Quick question - you guys gonna add capturable planets back in-to the single player maps because single player also needs variety imo we're way past the CNC 1 style kill everything missions for every single mission until the game ends.

posted on August 26th, 2010, 2:38 pm

I have some ideas to add some variety to the single player missions, I need to make sure they work properly first though.

posted on August 26th, 2010, 4:18 pm

The only reason i asked about making it a higher rank is to make it easy to identify. If you had a fleet of ships with 2 or 3 veteran sovereigns in it i wanted to make it easy to pick out the ship that if its destroyed you will lose lol. I didnt want it to have different abilitys that the regular veteran sovereign.

posted on August 26th, 2010, 5:07 pm

The only reason i asked about making it a higher rank is to make it easy to identify. If you had a fleet of ships with 2 or 3 veteran sovereigns in it i wanted to make it easy to pick out the ship that if its destroyed you will lose lol. I didnt want it to have different abilitys that the regular veteran sovereign.

well in vanilla it was so risky sending the enterprise/martok's neggie/queen's diamond out into battle that you usually just left them at home on defence. maybe the diamond came out rarely to use its amazing specials that needed no research.

in vanilla the hero unit was bigger than normal vessels of its type, i found that solution very stupid.

maybe give it slightly different colour hull, maybe a newer armour is available for the flagship that is super duper expensive and is slightly better.

posted on August 26th, 2010, 8:24 pm

hero vessels will get a special rank icon. they will not be able to level up. the rank will be comparable to the 'regular' veteran level however with a different icon so that the unit can be better distinguished from non-hero vessels. a regular vessel can - of course - not reach this hero rank.
where appripioate, a hero vessel may have a modified or special model. we won't use the "blown up" model approach that stock armada had.

posted on August 26th, 2010, 8:34 pm

What i though would be interesting is if a 7th rank was added with a different symbol that way it would be easy to identify the "hero" ships from the rest of your fleet.

Maybe heroes could have a faint race insignia floating around it (poss a sprite using overlaysod)

posted on August 26th, 2010, 8:37 pm

The nice thing about hero units is that they'll usually be targeted last, due to its higher defensive value and how FO does its target list.

That's right!  Run, Picard!

posted on August 27th, 2010, 12:22 pm

You have to ask yourself if the ship's gonna be a veteran just a different rank for hero ships - what about the borg since veterancy afaik wouldnt be part of the Borg's experience system and it would be some entirely different experience/ship upgrade system? Get what I mean - hard to explain <.<

[Cmndr_Parker]

posted on August 28th, 2010, 3:20 am

Last edited by Cmndr_Parker on August 28th, 2010, 3:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

Hey Megadroid....good to see you dropping by again. I have been working with my first custom mission, and the FO engine does have some roadblocks to overcome as far as cutscenes and bik videos. Hopefully seeing how close to perfection MMM is will inspire the DEVS to help resolve some of the minor things. I managed to get an opening bik to play, but the size and location is wrong. It displays in the upper left corner of the screen about 2 sizes to small. I tried adding 3 instructional ingame cinemas to the mission, but only one played, and it was a mess. I have been trying to resolve the videos and cinema problem for a while now, this is what I have found. The opening cinema is displaying wrong because of something with the Win2kDisableTaskSwitch.dll in the main directory. I can't figure out what to modify in this file to make opening videos display properly. Randomly changing things in the file is unwise because it also controls the menues ( singleplayer, instant action, options, ect....). I don't know if this file also controls in-game cinemas or not, but I think that the cinematic window must be properly restored before ingame cinemas will properly play in the FO engine. If we can resolve these issues, we can have custom opening videoes and in-game bik cinemas. 

posted on August 28th, 2010, 12:16 pm

Wow, this is fantastic how the hell did you manage that. Last I heard you couldn't make new missions. Would this be doable in standard A2 running the Patch Project 1.2.5?

I really hope you can re-do the A1 campaign, I much preferred it over stock A2's. Certainly will be downloading this when released.

posted on August 28th, 2010, 1:29 pm

Wow, this is fantastic how the hell did you manage that. Last I heard you couldn't make new missions. Would this be doable in standard A2 running the Patch Project 1.2.5?

Yes, it works in stock. I do almost all of my testing and feature development in stock A2 before testing in FO.