not at first, maybe later. We decided on doing about 5 systems per race first (Earth, Minbari, Narn, Centauri and League) (nope, no vorlon space, as you wouldn' return alive )

Greetings
RubberEagle

-------------------
Project Lead for Babylon5 TC for Freelancer

" ad hic, ad hoc and quid pro quo -
so little time, so much to know"

I think to leave out the Vorlons and Shadows and argueably other first ones would be a mistake. Even though travelling into a Vorlon system or the Shadow system could be considered suicide - even with a good ship - thats the point. Suicide is what you should recieve if you enter a first ones system - they are so arbitrarily hard that they incited a certain degree of bowel movement everytime you saw them. The point was when you saw a first ones vessel, particulily shadows, you ran, you ran until you got caught and killed. Now if you make the Shadows a "species" in the game that have there own difficult to get to system with one planet no tradelands (if you are still using them on some level) with the planet far away from the jump point. When you get near the planet the Shadows are either in orbit or "de-cloak"/"jump-in" to attack it would be amazing; suicide for sure but it would be incredible to have that rush of adrenalin when you see one arrive could be brilliant. As with the Vorlons - you should at least have one Vorlon system that when you enter is guarded by Vorlon centries of some sort; which are VERY difficult to pass - even for the people who eventually may be travelling around in a White Star.

Freelancer could be potentially taylored to be THE Babylon 5 game; if as much of it can be edited as I have seen then it could well not be Freelancer it would be Babylon 5 - Freelancer. Which could be superb. Too long the B5 community has been pooed upon namely the B5 game being canned and the FS2 conversion being VERY drawn out and never having the shear open ended-ness that Freelancer has the potential for. The very idea of travelling and trading between the Centauri and Narn is amusing in itself. Travelling through the many "minor" races system like the Brakiri, Drazi or Pakmara and coming across the deserted system that belonged to the Markab - the race that was destroyed by the virus; and having it being a pirates base or something like a mass scavengers area of space. The potential oppourunities especially when you consider the fact that Babylon 5 was such a fantastically written piece of Sci-fi - in my humble opinion the best there has been.

I very much look forward to this TC being released and looking at any dedicated website you produce. I also offer my help in any way I can, I know Babylon 5 the series' disturbingly well and and opinions or ideas (which I know you are not short of) I would be happy to help. I have website design experience and 3D modelling experience (although don't rely on that please) and am a tolerable programmer. So if I can help in any minor way that perhaps brings forward the date of release by half an hour or so - I would be more than happy to do so.

Thanks for attempting the potentially excellent TC.
Paul

Markab

Incidentally I have two, additional, questions which I would grateful if you would ask.

1. There are no tradelanes in the freelancer sense of the word in Babylon 5, in fact on many occasions you hear of them mentioning "thats a long trip in normal space" because you either have normal or hyperspace. So are you going to be using tradelanes and there aqssociated gates?

2. Also are you changing the graphic of the jump gates? They use a simlar principle to the B5 gates as in inactive static graphic until activated then come alive; so to speak. I don't see why they wouldn't be changeable to the B5 style of gate providing that the graphic is changable and animateable in the first place. My cousin and I were discussing how good it would be to see the lights light up the gate before the jump hole formed within it. Cool!

Thanks


Edited by - SpuddyMcFuddy on 08-07-2003 17:04:10

Additional.....

I realise you probably not only have it but probably have one better and are using your own design anyways. But if you want the map above in the proper size and not halved then either email me or post here and I will be glad to post a link or something.

ok.. i'll answer from the bottom up:
yep, we have the map (in a higher resolution), but thanks for the offer

We're gonna change the model of the Jumpgates and are also planning on changing the effect. We'll even have a working hyperspace you can fly through, and get off the routes (and be destroyed by the radiation if you don't find your way back to a safe route). About the lights flashing on the jumpgates before it opens a jumppoint: I can't really comment on that. I'm not sure if that's possible to do.

Tradelanes: currently, we're going for the No-Tradelanes-approach.

now back to the Firstones: I'm pretty sure we will have Z'ha'dum as a system, and i wouldn't go there (and i would also not deviate from hyperspace routes too much, even if your ship handles the radiation; you never know what you'll run across)

About your offer to help us: We're not taking on board new "crew-members" until we get our forum working (that could take from 1 week to 1 month, i'm afraid), but when it's working, we'd like to come back to you

Greetings
RubberEagle

-------------------
Project Lead for Babylon5 TC for Freelancer

" ad hic, ad hoc and quid pro quo -
so little time, so much to know"

Edited by - RubberEagle on 08-07-2003 22:38:07

are u going to include capital class ships like the hyperion as i think this ship fits perfectly with the game engine using turret view freelook to aim the plasma cannons etc. also is there any possibility of a jump engine like in x-the addon thing where u pick a target jumpgate amd jump to it.

One of the great things about B5 is the fact that even though some of the larger Cap ships had jump engines they were still more of a luxury than anything else so to solely have jump gate travel as opposed to jump engine travel; which is probably impossible? is still within the B5 realm.

One of the things that has worried me is the fact that with the travelling, without tradelanes, could make some people turn off because they get bored travelling the distance in 5 mins rather than 50 seconds. I don't know how you are resolving this but one thing they frequently say in the show is "Going to maximum burn for the trip." I know that some people have made patches for the game that when a key is pressed it, essentiallly, turbos the ship and makes is travel faster for a finite amount of time. I think that that maybe an interesting way to go, I realise that there are cruise engines and upping there speed could well be the more simple way to go.

I have another question. Are you going to be removing the shields feature from freelancer as there are no shields whatsoever in B5?

(I have started from scratch again watching B5, for about the seemingly millionth time. I cannot believe how good the series is/was; it is just light years ahead of any other sci-fi)

Thanks
Paul

Edited by - SpuddyMcFuddy on 10-07-2003 17:58:24

Also further comment:

Can you give us a quick run down as to the progress of the craft within the addon?

Which cap ships have been done and the like?

Thanks again
Paul

@GoulMeister: currently we are not planning to include player-controlled capships. might change in a future release though.

@spuddymcfuddy: We'll have cruisengines (full burn), and probably have multiple jumpgates per system, like one near every planet, so to say.

One thing first: we are concentrating on the single-player part first, and when that's finished we'll do the missing parts for the multiplayer. As the sp-campaign is mostly EA civil war, there are only EA+Minbari ships on the list
as for ships: here's a small (incomplete) list:
Fighters:
Aurora Starfury (PC) - LOD0 model finished, started texturing
Thunderbolt Starfury (PC) - LOD0 model finished, textures 90% complete.
Zephyr - we have a finished model that is beeing updated a bit.
Nial - LOD0 model finished, no textures yet

Capships:
Hyperion - LOD0 Model complete, no textures yet
Omega - we do have a textured model, but i think it needs to be reworked.
Warlock - nada yet
Sharlin - model + alpha-state textures
White Star - rough model (needs to be refined), a few textures.

we have a basic B5 model (with no details like docking ports or defense grid)

and that's about what i want to say about the models (one thing: no Victory cruiser, for that we're about 10 years too early)

We do have a working hyperspace (with nav-routes), we have a preliminary script (that is currently rewritten to fit the possibilites of the freelancer engine) that will include (from the current state, it can change upwards as the rewrite goes on) about 30 minutes of Cutscenes and 15-16 missions.

Basically what we will need in the future are modelers (especially for the characters), 2d-artists, .ini and mission/cutscene scripters and of course voice artists (quite a few of them).

I hope that helps a bit


Edited by - RubberEagle on 10-07-2003 21:35:43

I have to ask the question; does the middle part of the Omega rotate?

Also another point, scales. The thing about B5 in comparrison to other ships was that it was massive. B5 was 5miles long and starfurys where a few metres so how are you going to get the scales? One negative I found with Freelancer was the lack of any real sense of scale - even the space stations never felt huge. Big enough bu not huge. Whereas B5 needs to be huge. You need to have full burn and take a good 30 seconds to pass it. One problem with that is - it will probably end up being bigger than the planets!

Anyways gotta go - getting married in about 16 hrs. 4pm friday afternoon. way-hey not even nervous.

Ahem
Thanks
Paul

we plan on having everything rotate that rotates in B5. As it's currently impossible to make multipart FL-Meshes (AFAIK), we can't test this yet. (at some FL-stations there are rotating parts, so it should be possible)

On Scale Issues: we're planning to do everything in scale, so B5 will be as big as it should be.

Congrats on getting married, i wish you a nice honeymoon

I have more ship questions to go along with the where are you now question.

We have several EA ships; Aurora, Thunderbolt and the what was Zephyr, also the Hyperion (albeit untextured) and Omega; I have also seen in a mod the traditional B5 freighter. What others are we getting? Are we going to be getting things like the Presidential liner, the Asimov style passenger liner, the various "tug" like freighters, planetary shuttles or anything else like?

Also I have seen the Brakiri battleship can anyone tell me what other ships there are out there or are in progress of making?

I have also seen the Shadow Battlecrab and Vorlon ships can anyone tell me what other ships there are out there?

Also I would love to do some voice acting I love the idea of being a bit of a runny nosed Drazi for some reason, small part probably I realise!!!!

Thanks anyway
Paul

I tend to forget the civilianships, sorry
We will try to have as many civilian ships as possible (freighters, tankers, transports, shuttles), though i only remember the space-only shuttle and the atmospheric shuttle having been started... the space-only (used in "Babylon squared" for example) isn't textured yet, but about 100% modelled, and we have a very sexy atmospheric shuttle (curtesy of razar )

as for ships of other races, that will be dependent on what planets/races from the league we will use...

as for shadows and vorlons: the single player campaign mostly takes place after "Into the Fire" (the episode) and they aren't in our galaxy any longer, wich means you won't be seeing them there

as for voice acting: thanks for the offer, but we're nowhere close to the point where we would start recording stuff, but if you won't mind reminding us in future, we'd be happy to come back to your offer

Hmm a quick question about this mod..and mods in general actually. when this comes out, if you instal it, does it over write original FL? or do you have the option of playing FL and the mod seperate...
oh and this looks so cool, massive B5 fan! Babylon was somethign like 8,541 meters..so roughly 5 miles, yeah.

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