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 few, but convincing reasons why you should not:
- Frames per second: Not everybody has a machine that is capable of handling such a large number of craft. This problem is even worse if the person in question uses FreeSpace Open, which increases the hardware demand when its enhanced graphical features have been turned on.
- The FreeSpace engine: The engine is not designed for massive battles. The AI malfunctions, warships collide, fighters become less accurate and even less intellignet than they are usually.
- Another note on the engine: The Retail engine (not FreeSpace Open) tends to crash when there is such a large load on the engine. FreeSpace Open is less sensitive, but even that program cannot handle these types of missions very well. If it could, we would have fewer problems.
- Beam weapons: Beam battles are neat and everything in FreeSpace, but having numerous warships shooting at each other at the same time is considered overkill. At the least, the player might accidentally run into a beam weapon and die at once, but warships tend to unintentionally hit their friendlies and that 'drops mission balance into the dustbin.'
- 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.
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.
