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Acclamator 1 in low orbit of the planet Rost. Another Acclamator 1 in the stratosphere of Rost. Acclamator 1 above a battlefield (land map). The map has two crashed ships in it. The map's size is comparable to the Conversion Pack's Concord Dawn map.

Is this a reasonable concept? Could it work in BF2 or not?

(Even if it could, I think it's too big for anyones' taste, but its my opinion. I didn't polish it much. 5 minute job. Don't kill me for that, it's rediculously high . I probably would change it to Elite Squadron's height for space battles.)

I think it could work. It may be possible to make three different scenes in the map and have teleporters linking them.

I think I could decrease its height and make it so you could seamlessly fly from land to space without teleports. Is that possible?

Eaol wrote:Is that possible?

Yes.

Eaol wrote:Is this a reasonable concept?

Maybe. Doubtful. A functional concept and a manageable one do not necessarily overlap.

Perhaps if it were somewhat smaller?

I think the distances are too vast. I should shrink it a bit.

I don't mod much now, but when I did, I mulled over the concept quite a bit. Keep in mind that my .lua skills are not something to rely on, but if I could make it work, here's how I'd try it.

In ZE make a no collision object resembling clouds, but really thick and taking a couple seconds to get through. In this "fog", you'd have two regions, one on top of the other. The first (from ground up), would change the sky to a land sky. The second, higher one, would add either an enormous object with a space sky texture, or if possible, change the sky file to a space sky (not sure of how possible this is).

If a person were flying up, they'd hit the land sky region first, resulting in nothing. The next region would change the sky, and you could have space objects and ships and what-not above. When going down, the same thing would happen. To keep the units in space in the hangars from trying to shoot at the land units, you could set the distance (don't remember what this is called, but it's in the .lua) to short range (not sure if this would change anything anyways), or simply remove hangars and spawn ships just out of space.

Don't bank on this as a solution though, I may be, and probably am, completely wrong.

Grev wrote:I don't mod much now, but when I did, I mulled over the concept quite a bit. Keep in mind that my .lua skills are not something to rely on, but if I could make it work, here's how I'd try it.

In ZE make a no collision object resembling clouds, but really thick and taking a couple seconds to get through. In this "fog", you'd have two regions, one on top of the other. The first (from ground up), would change the sky to a land sky. The second, higher one, would add either an enormous object with a space sky texture, or if possible, change the sky file to a space sky (not sure of how possible this is).

If a person were flying up, they'd hit the land sky region first, resulting in nothing. The next region would change the sky, and you could have space objects and ships and what-not above. When going down, the same thing would happen. To keep the units in space in the hangars from trying to shoot at the land units, you could set the distance (don't remember what this is called, but it's in the .lua) to short range (not sure if this would change anything anyways), or simply remove hangars and spawn ships just out of space.

Don't bank on this as a solution though, I may be, and probably am, completely wrong.

i don't think you can have more than one sky loaded at once, although i'm not sure if that refers to the texture......i'm pretty sure that upon loading at the start, the start sky is the only one you can have.

Forcemaster managed to change a sky in the middle of his campaign however, so its at least worth a try.

You can only load new skies on top off (or more to say, you should load smaller sized skydomes meshes) on top of the previous one. You can simulate the change, but you couldn't dynamically, since you can't kill a sky you've previously loaded in the .lua. (that's as far as people got with Forcemaster problem)

In regards to the sky issue:

We-ell......pretty sure you can do it. It'd take quite a lot of messing around though, and might look a bit sloppy.

Skyhammer_216 wrote:might look a bit sloppy.

Regardless of what method you use to simulate space-land battles that's pretty much going to be the biggest issue. Whether it's possible or not, it'll probably end up looking pretty messy since the game just wasn't designed with that type of gameplay in mind.

Lately I've been mulling over the possibility of some atmospheric flyer missions (as in the Rogue Squadron game series), and what hangs me up is just the limitations in terrain size. You just can't make the terrain look good from high altitudes. Even a 1024 x 1024 map size might not be large enough to hide the map boundaries from high enough up (plus it takes a crazy-long time to munge the terrain).

That said, don't take this as a discouragement from seeing what you can do with the idea. This is just my experience with mixing high-altitude/semi-space combat with land maps, and I'm something of a visual perfectionist with my mapping, so even if it worked I wouldn't do it if it didn't look pretty.

In the end it's a resources thing. SWBF2 will max out all of its memory pools long before the battle ever looks remotely big enough to be believable, not to mention issues with AI pathing (since it can't overlap).

I believe it was... Redline(?) who made a death star map where you could take off from yavin and go to the death star. But since you want the opposite, well...

You'll just have to wait until SWBF3 comes out. SWBF2 wasn't designed for ground-to-space battles.

I didn't mean that way. I liked that map. But it was unrealistic and sloppy. What I mean here is basically what is done in Star Wars Battlefront Elite Squadron minus the transitions. Two-way travel. Not teleports.

Not possible. The game would run out of available memory (in other words it would max out) before you could ever get close to making it decent. There are just too many objects and too much AI involved.

Well actually i've got a smiliar system already working in my landing at point rain map. Its not as grand or epic as what you have described but it IS an 3D battlefield. There is a large land battle and then animated frigates with guns, there are airfields on the ground and autopiloted spawns from over the top of the cliffs. To keep the player from being able to fly over the top of the map I added terrain cliffs as a barrier, their ARE unresonably high but I think its a fair price to pay for a space battle on a land map and ultimately the game runs smoothly, doesn't run out of memory and is fun. A few words of caution though, your land map will have to be HUGE however you can have large empty areas that are separated from the playing field by cliffs or canyons. Also the frigates have to be low flying and you probably won't be able to fit more then four of them. To keep the player from landing outside the playing field just add landing zones like that ones that only let you land in hangers on space maps.

Maybe, if you either got rid of the sky or made it invisible, then added a cylinder for the 'ground level' sky. Then you add a dome for the 'space level', with no collision on the part in between. Do the clouds as a transition, and that should work. Not sure how it would look, or if it would even be practical. Either way, good luck.

Wow. That's a really well thought out idea, especially for a new person. It might just work. Good job, Black9 knight!

The transition could be covered easily with several layers of one-sided panels that have varying transparency. As you fly through them, you see more and more of the ground/space. Still, the issue isn't so much the transition, it still goes back to the fact that the AI will be absolutely clueless as to how to go about playing the level, and it can never be filled with enough AI to make it feasible.

I know people are working on this sort of stuff now, but I still follow the "I'll believe it when I see it" mentality.

[TFA]Padawan_Fighter wrote:Wow. That's a really well thought out idea, especially for a new person. It might just work. Good job, Black9 knight!

Just a heads up, I joined over 8 months before you

I agree with Teancum though, while it may be possible, It won't work out that good. I was working on a map similar to this a while ago, but I ended up losing my files.

Teancum wrote:...it still goes back to the fact that the AI will be absolutely clueless as to how to go about playing the level, and it can never be filled with enough AI to make it feasible....

Maybe have a unit class that can only get in the flyers on land. Then have a path to bring them up to space. The land units are on the ground doing thier job and not in space. The only thing about that is, the land units will spawn in space and cant get down..