Battle of Endor Syndrome

What do we mean by Battle of Endor-syndrome missions?

The Battle of Endor is a historic and very important battle in the Star Wars universe, which is unique among many science fiction films and universes. The Battle of Endor involved several dozen warships and hundreds of fighters at each side. If you ever hear somebody from the ~FreeSpace community mention about a Battle of Endor-type mission, he is thinking about a mission which involves several warships (often big ones, corvettes and larger) facing each other with space teeming with fighters. In FreeSpace, people are advised not to choose this type of mission most of the time.

Why should I not make such missions?

Here are the main reasons you should not:

• The FreeSpace engine: The Retail engine (not FreeSpace Open) has difficulty if there are too many objects in the mission, typically resulting in collision-detection failure and rendering primary weapons mostly useless. FreeSpace Open is much more permissive in this regard, but can still experience a noticible slowdown in some cases. Generally, however, you should be reasonably safe as long as there are no asteroids involved.
• Mission designer's nightmare: If you are a precise and circumspecting mission designer, you will find making such missions terribly painful and nerve-wracking. Testing these missions is not the easiest thing to do, either. With lots of targets, a player can react lots of ways and prioritize them in odd fashions, or attempt to take on enemies that are not their problem.

Why should I make such missions?

Volition had to "dodge" making such missions several times over the course of FreeSpace 2; High Noon and Bearbaiting come to mind. (Karajorma's "Grizzly Bearbaiting" gives a reasonable impression of what Bearbaiting perhaps should have been.) Similarly the gap between Bearbaiting and High Noon, and there is in fact a time gap of at least several hours, encompasses what would have qualified as a BoE. The originial GTVA plan for taking down the Sathanas would probably have also counted as one, as would the version of Their Finest Hour that seems to have been originally intended.

Volition had to avoid this, have the poor Aquitaine totally unescorted by friendly capital ships, or have no more than two ships corvette-sized or up in the mission area, because they had to contend with the limits of contemporary computers. Computers have since advanced, and these missions could now have been built, or the Aquitaine could have yelled for backup from its fleet in Proving Grounds rather than run away.

Capital craft moving and attacking in groups can be helpful to establishing suspension of disbelief. And put simply, major fleet actions are important and often climatic events. In the classic admonishment to authors: "Show. Don't tell."

I still insist on doing a Battle of Endor-type mission, what should I do?

Be good. Very good. Or don't do it. Put simply this is not something for a novice to attempt. It takes a lot of skill and attention to detail to build a large combat that will work. More difficult yet is attempting to build one where the player will actually have a noticible impact on the outcome.

Some workarounds for such missions exist, such as Derelict's solution of having the player fight in a seperate yet nearby action.