Add On - the fan's way

[Guest live4eva]

Well since LA refuse to make and add-on, then may the fan's should. I've recently begun toying with new missions and adding new ships (courtesy of Nob's Craft Add and various other fan opts). Consequently I have spend quite a lot of time sifting through XWA sites.

 

What I'm saying is thhat we now have the means, courtesy of Troy Dangerfield's AlliED, to create missions better than or on a par with quality of the ones in the game.

 

There are also obviously a lot of people talented enough to make realistic opts and also people who have decoded the .exe file and we can now edit that with programs like BinHexED. So we can now add new ships to the game. Now that Xis is available craft adding becomes much more simple.

 

It seems that the only things really needed to make a new game, or an add on, is for someone to find a fix for the hangar problem with non-standard motherships, find a way to alter the concourse background and decipher the coding to the film files. There are smaller things such as finding out how to list the mission craft before the briefing.

 

 

What I am trying to get at is that amongst ourselves we seem to have enough expertise to make an add on. There are obviously people who are good at making cut-scenes and those good at opt design and more still good at mission design and plot development. The XWAlliance community obviously wants an add on. For a start why not base the add-on around the Rogue Squadron books or Timothy Zahn's Trilogy (Admiral Thrawns Saga).

 

So what dooes everybody think?

 

 

[Guest Derrek Vri]

Sounds like a great idea. It takes a lot of time and patience, though. I've been working on a battle in AlliED and it takes me at least twelve hours of work to get the thing operating and probably another five to get it looking the way I want. There are still some issues with the commander briefing sounds and Friendly craft lists before the briefings, but I'm sure someone should be able to figure it out.

 

I'd appreciate a simple ending to the Azzameen storyline myself. Maybe someone could do a Truce at Bakura cross-over plotline, since that occured immediatly after Endor. We should organize our efforts though, have one person oversee everything as concept designer who would be in charge of storylines and "the big picture" and also a chief program designer.

 

The Concept designer (or Producer, or whatever) would make a list of seven to nine missions (a usual battle) and then all you programers out there would write your best version of whichever mission struck your interest. The Producer and Chief Designer would then pick the best missions and work with the designers to make those into a unified battle. Then everyone in the forum would have to test it (y'know we'd be sooo upset to have to ) and report back with bugs which the Chief Designer would fix.

 

Maybe we could get the people who run the forum to make a special folder for whoever we decide will lead this operation. It could easily work with the resources of the web.

 

What do you all think?

 

[Guest JM]

From my experience with the two BoP campaigns I did the cutscenes were never popular. The few people that downloaded them enjoyed them but it was only a few.

 

AlliED is far more user friendly than TGs editor. You can already list the friendly craft by the way by setting condition 1 and 2 of the Arrival condition to "100% of Flight Group [first Flight Group] must (Always true)" (discovered by Abolisher).

 

No idea about if anybody is working on the hangar problem, last time I enquired it was unsolved. It would be good to be able to use all the starships both to give some extra possibilities and that way any expansions done could be default-mission compatible (rather than needing to overwrite the CRS and W/CRS slots with the required custom ships).

 

If somebody does decide to organise this then I wish them luck though.

[Abolisher]

The best way to avoid the hangar problem is to exit the mission with the "q" key instead of pressing "space" to enter the hangar. As soon as you are back in friendly territory after completing a mission, quitting with the "q" key will show your craft properly entering the hangar rather than behind it.

 

Of course, in missions where reloading of warheads in a non-CRS mother ship occurs, there is no method to enter the hangar without going through the back of it. However, I'm thankful that going through the back of the hangar doesn't crash your ship!

 

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That's no moon, it's a SPAM Station

 

Abolisher's Mission Command Outpost