IBIS: a survival mod for Battlescape

[FBS]

An idea

enemies:
Infested Ships
Something like the infested command centers in starcraft
Lots of ideas right there.

Main Goal: erradicate the infection

Goal tiers:
-Get mats from smaller stations
-Upgrade
-Get mats from bigger stations/bases
-Get enough mats to build a capital ship
-Rescue hidden scientists in infected facilities/scientist npc ships (unlock special perks)
-Attack the main infection source
-Eliminate the leftovers
-Develop the Vaccine for the Heart eater disease.
-Win

Game over state:
-Get killed (game over)
-Get infected (game over?)
-Infection reaches all the bases/stations

Possible features:
-Investigation:
*Vaccines for different kinds of infections
*Ship Sealing
*Upgrades (to make certain upgrades available)
*more TBD

-Upgrades
*TBD

Plot:
A scientific research facility has been working on a cure for the biggest known disease on all human history, known as heart eater, which can degenerate the host’s heart. A vaccine has been developed, but as they tested it on humans, they started to change their behavior, most of them get aggresive and start to attack anyone in sight. The research team stopped the investigation, but the vaccine has been sold through the black market. Now the Team has made a sad discovery, the vaccine slowly kills some brain zones, and since the heart eater disease is massive, more and more people started to buy it. Now the planet where the facility is located is under quarintine, but people are far from obey, and whoever had access to a ship, is using it now, and they are not using it to defend anyone…
The last message received from the facility:
“this is probably the last message we will be sending, they are here, right outside this room, they developed a strange cannibalism habit, but for some reason they eat those that are not infected. The whole planet is doomed, do what you need to do, we have no salvation, save the other planets…”
You are the last pilot alive, protecting the last facility left, where the survivors hide waiting for their last hours to either die by the disease or being killed by those monsters, or to be saved by a miracle. They gave you their best ship and they will help you to improve it or build better ones, but they need materials. Your mission is to gather those materials, upgrade your ship, and keep protecting the non-infected facilities. You can desinfect and capture or destroy the infected facilities, but your main goal is to build a capital ship capable of doing orbital attacks, in order to destroy their main facility without approaching it, if you do approach it, expect a bunch of ships giving you a warm welcome.

[hrobertson]

I’m not sure what the current plan is for AI but it’s been stated that it will be pretty dumb, certainly not capable of putting up a good fight.
Unless AI can be modded (seems unlikely but I may be wrong) this limitation needs to be kept in mind while thinking about possible ‘enemies’ in this survival mod.

[Crayfish]

You could go for zombies or some zombie-like virus, like that enemy from that Homeworld 1 expansion.

This seems to be the most popular suggestion, with JB47394 and FBS also suggesting some sort of infected hostile entities. One thing I’d add here is that due to the game being ship orientated (EVA will have to be out of scope as it is for the main game) we will never get to see the physical representation of the zombies. Having them “Reaver” style with spiked, grungy ships is one way of immediately identifying them as PVE enemies, though that would demand that some fairly skilled 3D modelling work to be contributed.

Having AI hunter killer drones is another approach and may be less demanding in terms of modelling contributions. The HK drones could operate in a tiered system where the “easy prey” drones are spawned by regional motherships (AI cap ships) which are much harder to kill. The motherships would in turn be spawned by a central core on each planet which would be a heavily protected facility.

I’m not sure what the current plan is for AI but it’s been stated that it will be pretty dumb, certainly not capable of putting up a good fight.

The PVE threat should not require complicated AI, the real challenge will be from other players as Mattk50 pointed out. The AI only really needs two modes, patrol and chase. Within those two modes you only really need collision avoidance and basic interception mechanics to give a viable threat to low level players.

So I think @Crayfish should define the mod’s orientation: what’s the final purpose of it all? Join back civilization? Discover alien wonders through artifacts and puzzles?

I’m taking DayZ as my main inspiration as it is the only survival game that I’ve ploughed many hours into. In DayZ the long term goal is simply survival, it seems to work because no matter how good you get there are always other high level players that will take it all away from you.

The biggest feature of the survival games you mentioned, other than dayz, is construction. Its a bit early to say but i think battlescape has some potential for a different kind of construction.

How much construction comes in to the game will be largely led by how much is in the main game that we can re-use. For the basic game I could imagine we have fabricators that are permanently installed at facilities and are fed with a simple resource (eg scrap) to create new items of equipment. Capturing and defending facilities capable of producing equipment would be a major part of the game. I could see there being three size classes of fabricator, small, large and massive, which are in turn capable of creating equipment, ships and cap ships.

If Infinity Battlescape were to get to the stretch goal for base building then that could be incorporated as well.

Next, is when players log off. This is something most survival games fail entirely, especially survival mods, and i think infinity’s engine gives us the perfect chance to remedy this.

The server model I’m thinking of would be player run servers with a central inventory server. This means that when a player logs off they may reappear in a completely different server with the same equipment. Whilst a logoff timer could keep them present in the world for a while, eventually their ship would need to be despawned.

If it’s episodically PvP and PvE, then it might be pretty interesting.

With this suggestion I’m imagining something a bit like Minecraft’s night time when all the bad guys come out. We could do something similar and have the infected (or whatever the external threat we choose) be light sensitive. That also reminds me of the movie Pitch Black. A disadvantage of this way of creating waves of threat periods is that day night cycles could be too long.

Radiation, the system the player is stuck in is a supernova system, the star goes through cycles of intense radiation pulses.

Another solution uses this idea. The existential threat is radiation sensitive and the star is highly active with lots of CME events. This way when the baddies are hiding you have the alternative threat of having to keep your radiation levels down. It could get complex in terms of rules and code but it would be fun to encourage player to fly in the shade of steep valleys or under cloudy skies to avoid too much solar radiation.

Just brainstorming here… How about if you start out restricted to a planet’s atmosphere?

That could work really well and would work with the idea of collecting scrap or some other resource to make equipment. I designed a fairly complex resource and production system for the InfinityCity prototype made by @cybercritic. I think we could do a much simpler and more achievable one for Ibis. A big factor will be to what extent we can build our own user interface when within facilities. It’s one of the things that makes planning a mod for a game that hasn’t been made yet so difficult.

[cybercritic]

I think we need some clarification on scope here @Crayfish.

Can we assume that you will be coding this game for the purpose of discussion and offer us some guidance of what is actually doable in some time-frame that you will be willing to dedicate to making this game. The community will surely help with some of the implementation, if this thing ever happens. I’m just worried that we’ll be widely adding features to a indie project that clearly needs to be very limited in scope to succeed.

I don’t think that you need to be deciding on who’s idea is better or worse, but rather be pragmatic about this and guide us in what is actually achievable. We can always have a vote on the specification document of some sort, with alternatives on offer.

//Sorry if you addressed some of this in the above post, I starter writing this before it went up.

/edit
Here is the link for the evolved program that Cray used for the construction of the InfinityCity ItemTree structure and the actual ItemTree converted to this new version of the program.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32239143/WorldTree%20(0.1.7.7).zip
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32239143/CrayTree.xml

[JB47394]

With this suggestion I’m imagining something a bit like Minecraft’s night time when all the bad guys come out. We could do something similar and have the infected (or whatever the external threat we choose) be light sensitive. That also reminds me of the movie Pitch Black. A disadvantage of this way of creating waves of threat periods is that day night cycles could be too long.

What is the movement system here? Are these avatars space ships, atmospheric ships, hovercraft, or vehicles? I was assuming space ships, rendering the issue of day or night moot.

In any case, the Somethings could be nomadic and simply stay on the move, searching for stuff in a random walk across the planet surface. The groups could join, split, war and do all sorts of other things as they move along.

[Parisbre56]

I don’t see why EVA would be out of scope. I was thinking of a system much like the one X3 used. EVA is essentially you pressing an eject button that summons a spacesuit “ship” next to your ship and gives you control of it. It’s not really useful unless you want to repair your ship or salvage another ship or maybe escape from an enemy by distracting them with your ship if you’re lucky.

It could be the same with IBIS. Just a simple humanoid model, no need for AAA graphics since it’s just a mod. The suit is really weak and mostly useless but it can be used to salvage or repair if you lack the necessary equipment to do it from inside your ship or if you want to risk going out of your ship to get more resources or do better repairs or maybe reach a resource that’s somewhere where your fat ship can’t go. It is certainly not as important as the actual ship gameplay but it could add to it, give you a bit of immersion, a sense of scale and desolation. And it could lead to some interesting gameplay mechanics.

Modeling ship interiors, now THAT would be out of scope, since it doesn’t really add anything except immersion (or maybe exploring “infested” large ships or stations, but I don’t think it’s worth the extreme effort it would take. Maybe an expansion if the mod gets really popular.)

Anyway, just wanted to say that EVA, while not necessary, is certainty not as impossible or useless in IBIS as it would be for I:B.

[Sab1e]

The PVE threat should not require complicated AI

Swarming! The panic induced by fending off a large group of weak enemies is often more tense than fewer enemies of equal strength to yourself (imo). Yet it’s still rewarding when you finally wipe out that last bad guy and can take a moment to just breathe!

Also, this would not require as advanced AI. With a single ship (or small number), stupid AI may be more noticeable and become naturally outmatched by the player because if it’s too predictable. A swarm is more chaotic, but the individuals should be easier to kill, apart from a few stronger ships. Gives more Boom as well

[Parisbre56]

And to reduce server load from tracking a large swarm, you could have them spawn as large ships that can travel quickly and then break apart into a large slow moving swarm when they find a target.

[Crayfish]

I think it’s time to choose a PVE enemy. That will set the overall background of the game and guide further decisions about the design.

• Infected ships / Reavers
• Drones directed by a central rogue AI
• Giant alien insects / Locusts
• Pirates / Bandits
• Law enforcement / Cops
• Space whales
• No PVE mobs - PVP only

[dekaku]

I’d vote for ‘techo-virus used as a weapon in the old times that has gone rogue, and achieved consciousness’. Pretty basic, I know.

However the pitch for it is the aformentioned (by other users) infesting property of it. A technovirus that lays dormant without any power source attached to it might look like a normal abandoned outpost to the unsuspecting visitor. He salvages this ‘infested’ metal as scrap and brings it to his powered station, where it is exposed to energy and slowly reactivates. Then, at one point the player comes back from one of his scrap hunts, just to see that his station was repurposed by the technovirus to spread itself and infest even more (aka producing small infested ships). If the player doesn’t do anything about these ships in due time, they will cluster, and start to roam the sector in search of new technologies to infest.
This should add to the players, as they have to carefully investigate any abandoned outpost, and search for hints, if such an outpost is infested or not (how about powering up the outpost to check the logs of it? However, powering it up will make the outpost automatically broadcast its position, possibly luring in other people).

[JB47394]

an eject button that summons a spacesuit “ship” next to your ship

I think that’s perfectly reasonable, but I’d go with the EVE Online pod-style avatar. Show a character inside the translucent pod that never moves its arms or legs - because there’s no need for movement - and relies on the trope of beams coming out of the pod to make changes to the ship from the exterior.

It also ensures that the player’s instincts for maneuvering remain on the idea that they are driving a ship, even if it’s barely larger than a human being.

Swarming!

Borg. Just straight-in, no-nonsense attacks. We can catch you, we can stomp you, we know it and we’re going to take your stuff, keeping you at survival level. It is a force of nature embodied in some active enemy.

I think it’s time to choose a PVE enemy.

I think that would be a significant mistake. Choosing an existing fiction means that all future gameplay thinking will follow that existing fiction and you end up with a clone of games that use that fiction. After all, are they Zombies if they don’t do X and Y but instead do Z? Instead, work on gameplay, then backfill the fiction.

There’s also the fact that we have no idea what the engine can do, so the design has to remain somewhat nebulous and flexible. The gameplay statement that the enemy is overpowering is fine, but saying that the enemy relies on swarming is problematic because it suggests specific engine capabilities.

This is reminding me of the volunteer writing team of a few years ago. There was no structure, just an invitation to write stuff. The lack of a framework in which the team operated meant that it just vanished in a flash of enthusiastic energy.

[Sab1e]

The central AI controlling drones is my new favourite idea for baddies. The central AI could provide an endgame target beyond just surviving - but it should extremely difficult to achieve this, and its location could change each new round to keep the player guessing!

[Alchemic]

Well of caurse Space Whales and:

Reavers are OK too.

[Crayfish]

I think that would be a significant mistake. Choosing an existing fiction means that all future gameplay thinking will follow that existing fiction and you end up with a clone of games that use that fiction.

One can have too many options. Limitations and constraints are often the prerequisites for extremely good gameplay dynamics.

Bump: Please vote if you haven’t done so!

IBIS: a survival mod for Battlescape

I think it's time to choose a PVE enemy. That will set the overall background of the game and guide further decisions about the design. Infected ships / Reavers Drones directed by a central rogue AI Giant alien insects / Locusts Pirates / Bandits Law enforcement / Cops Space whales No PVE mobs - PVP only 0voters You may choose up to 2 options. Vote now!Show results

[Naiba]

+1 for Rogue AIs

*Oh wait, that’s not technically on the list. Any chance of an ‘OTHER’ option? One single AI controlling everything is lame.

[NavyFish]

If we ever get to the point of mod support where this becomes feasible (or if the game data files are sufficiently hackable…). Count me in. I’d love to help code a survival mod, if you’re interested in a team effort.

[Crayfish]

*Oh wait, that’s not technically on the list. Any chance of an ‘OTHER’ option? One single AI controlling everything is lame

The main problem with independent rogue AI’s is that the AI code will have to be very simplistic. They probably won’t even have the ability to avoid terrain unless there’s something that offers that functionality built into the game. I’m considering that they may just have to roam around planets at a high altitude and attack from above.

I made a few updates to the OP, the main ones being the choice of “Rogue AI” as the mob threat and a list of assumptions about the modding tools that will be available:

Assumptions

1. There will be a mechanism for replacing assets in the game with alternative assets as needed by the IBIS mod.

2. There will be some sort of basic inventory system available within Battlescape. This will be needed for altering the weapon and equipment loadouts for ships in the game. Until the inventory management system is revealed further I will be assuming only that there will be slots and hardpoints on ships to which equipment can be assigned.

3. Custom scripting will be possible based upon event hooks on the game that can then modify the results of those events. An example would be a hook that allowed a custom script to run when equipment was collected that allowed an update to be sent to a remote item server.

4. Modding tools will allow basic user interface feedback to a player. At the most basic level we would need the ability to display text messages on the player’s HUD. Ideally I’d like the ability to add entirely new HUD display elements.

5. Scripting to control NPC AI will be available. This only needs to be advanced enough to allow primitive patterns such as patrol, attack and escape.

If we ever get to the point of mod support where this becomes feasible (or if the game data files are sufficiently hackable…). Count me in. I’d love to help code a survival mod, if you’re interested in a team effort.

That would be awesome, I hope very much that this could be a team effort, with the caveats that you’ve highlighted.

[cybercritic]

I can probably code up a central inventory server with an exposed SOAP+REST API, if this project materializes and nothing crazy happens to me.