Battle of Endor Syndrome
Contents
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 for convincing reasons. They are listed below.
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.
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. Their addition is undoubtedly helpful from a suspension of disbelief perspective, as several times in the Main Campaign of FS2 there were cases where it would seem reasonable to see more ships engaged. Still, such a mission should never really be added unless necessary to the campaign's plot.
