Campaign bundle: Between the Worlds

Discussion and development of scenarios and campaigns for the game.

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markm
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Campaign bundle: Between the Worlds

Post by markm »

Between the Worlds for 1.6.x has not been updated in some time and will not be. It is currently being developed for 1.8.x and is on the 1.8.x add-ons server.

A post below mentions The "Princess Li'sar's viewpoint" experiment; that experiment is no longer an option.

It is a bundle of campaigns, the first scenario is based on the Tutorial, allowing you to choose who to play.

Choosing Tourist Fighter or Tourist Fighteress you get to play basically the same old standard Tutorial, but their stories do not end there. They continue into the start of a tour of historic sites associated with Prince Konrad (of Heir to the Throne fame). I am not sure though of what exactly happened on the Isle of Alduin since Konrad was there; so thus far I have simply been allowing the Tour to remain as true to the events Konrad experienced as 'possible'. (Bearing in mind there could be illusion involved to spice up the tour for the entertainment of tourists.) I stopped work on the Tour before completing the tour of Alduin, however someone else's UMC campaign, Tale of a Mage, proides interior details of the Mage Academy located on Alduin, and I have made extensive use of those interiors so I do expect at some point the Tour is likely to continue at least to the point of reaching that Academy.

Currently the most actively developed choice is the Time Cadet branch.

Because where this is headed is persistent massively multiplayer worlds this is not intended to be campaigns that end. Rather, it is intended to be character development, backstory, education, background-information, training etcetera using as the current implementation of persistence your ability to download a new version and continue play. To facilitate that the Space Cadet and Time Cadet branches both provide a point where you can go back and forth between two "home base" scenarios so as to go from old version of one to new version of the other then back to the new version of the one you started this updating-dance from.

-MarkM-
Last edited by markm on July 8th, 2010, 6:47 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Velensk
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Re: Campaign bundle: Between the Worlds

Post by Velensk »

Out of curiousity I tried your campain. I wasn't terribly impressed however one problem stood above the others.

When playing as Li'sar, the best stratagy was to stay put and do nothing. I once managed to get around and kill Konrad without killing the units I had to keep alive, and the senario ended in defeat. After staying put and letting Konrad kill me, I proceded to the next senario where when trying the same stratagy as the first, I was instantly slayed by my own royal guard (you forgot to change their side). The senario did not end at that point. Konrad proceded to recruit as he had in the previous senario. He stayed put on the keep rather than attempting to cross the river. The mermen he started with charged onto the beach to meet the orcs, resulting in me losing the game because the merman preistess got herself killed by said orcs.

Some of your mistakes as simple oversights. However the mistakes I just listed realy imply a lack of thinking things out and testing them. I'm sure you can and should do better. Remember, the ultimate goal in creating a campain is to make one that is fun to play. Doing things like forcing the player into senarios where they must lose (unless there is something to fight for in the senario even if you do lose), or forcing them to play through the tutorial, or for no explained reason skipping the first senario in HTTT do not make your campain more enjoyable.

EDIT: As another note: this campain will take a very long time to create. If you do not make a campain others find worth playing, then all that time will ultimatly only be for whatever you get out of it.
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markm
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Re: Campaign bundle: Between the Worlds

Post by markm »

I will look at the Li'sar scenarios again, though they are so far just an experiment as I haven't figured out a good way to 'force' the outcome that history demands. Basically all she needs do is surrender. That she is lied to about how to win seems to be basically the situation she was in in HTTT. Mostly I was interested in the challenge of trying to cross the river, so I will look at that one again, I thought I had managed to fix getting killed by one's own (actually one's mothers; another approach I am considering is separating her from her mother's forces) Royal Guard. I should probably make it clearer that one should play HTTT first before bothering to look at this sequence, as it is largely an illustration to people familiar with HTTT of the kind of problems one would have in presenting the same story from a different viewpoint.

I noticed the popup-on-mousehover description of the campaign on the web-based list of campaigns doesn't mention that this is a bundle of campaigns, it only mentions the Tourist idea. So I will fix that too.

I read somewhere that a multiplayer campaign for the latter portion of HTTT is available or at least being worked on so maybe that will provide a nicer attempt to figure out how Li'sar got across that river.

I should also try to figure some way to give more info on each who to play choice as to how far that particular character's scenarios have been developed.

Thanks for trying my bundle, and for feedback on it!

-MarkM-
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markm
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Re: Campaign bundle: Between the Worlds

Post by markm »

I have been busy for a while working on the "Freeciv" and "Crossfire" side of the work of the Institute of Chronodynamics, so I have only discovered today that changes made to the pre-processor defines for the positions used in the Space Cadet tutorial broke the "Time Lord" tutorial. An unfortunate side-effect of having used the standard Wesnoth Tutorial as a starting-point for my scenarios. Basically the variables are set up in the pre-processor stage, so they are set regardless of which scenario you actually play. Actually it might well mean that it also broke the original standard tutorial too.

So basically I have to fix the Space Cadet campaign so that it either uses the defined locations as they normally are or sets its marked locations differently from the way the tutorial does it.

The Space Cadet campaign though is not my highest priority at the moment, so for now I have simply put back the original defines for the positions, which will likely revert it to some of the awkwardness that originally led me to change the positions.

What I really came back to the "Between the Worlds" add-on to work on is the tutorial for aspirants to the Institute of Chronodynamics, because the history-so-far of the worlds developed using Freeciv's Galactic Ruleset has reached the point where various worlds are about to actually build the Institute of Chronodynamics "Wonder of the World" and Battle for Wesnoth's storyboard-like approach seems more suitable in some ways than Crossfire as a platform for presenting aspirants to the Institute with background material.

-MarkM-
Last edited by markm on July 8th, 2015, 9:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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ShikadiQueen
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Re: Campaign bundle: Between the Worlds

Post by ShikadiQueen »

:eng: And this is why you must say NO to drugs, kids!
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ydcl
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Re: Campaign bundle: Between the Worlds

Post by ydcl »

Sorry, I don't know if is the good threat. But, it's the only one, I could find. Here is my question : I want to know, when the next scenario is available, of space-cadet campaign, because I find the idea quite interesting. If there is another threat, please tell me the way to find it.
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markm
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Re: Campaign bundle: Between the Worlds

Post by markm »

You found the correct thread, well done. I was concerned no-one would be able to find it (even though search should have no trouble finding it).

I have updated the first post to reflect changes now on the 1.6.x add-ons server such as the removal of the Li'sar experiment and expansion of the Time Cadet branch.

I have been working on world selection in the Time Cadet branch before getting around to world selection for the Space Cadet, mostly because the Space Cadet probably already knows what world he is from and his mentor is purporting to be the administrator ("Grand Illusionist") of his local holobarracks thus presumably would also already know which world the Space Cadet is from.

If you have a specific nation you would prefer to play, I can look through the worlds thus far documented to see which, if any, your chosen nation is already known to exist on. If if happens not to be on any of the thus far known worlds, you could if you wish use Freeciv with the Galactic Ruleset to generate such a world and its timeline (keep savegames of every turn!) up to the point where it has holobarracks.

Meanwhile I plan to add to the "planet known as C29" section a zoom in on the nations present on that world, while not doing such a zoom on the planet known as B29. A kind of punishment to the Canadians for not having yet built an Institute of Chronodynamics: it might turn out that someone other than a Canadian could end up being that world's Time Cadet, and/or lead to some folk questioning the assertion that C29 is a Canadian world...

EDIT: I have now added awareness of all the nations, extant and extinct, on planets B29 and C29, and ported that info into the Space Cadet branch. But in the process I realised that the Space Cadet sequence is taking liberties with the Galactic Milieu's distinction between Space Cadet Academy and Starship Academy. It happened to be the case that the known spacefaring nations all chose to pursue the airforce route - flying craft and paratroopers / startroopers - rather than the heavy troops - galactic marines and such - route, thus had not built Space Cadet Academies. Images reminiscent of 'redshirts' (goldshirts for second level maybe? ;)) would probably be more correct for Starship Cadets than the armoured-for-space images being used for the Space Cadet. Once some planet somewhere actually builds a Space Cadet Academy, and maybe some image more appropriate for the starship trooper types than for the galactic marine types has been chosen or manufactured, I will probably try to clean up this distinction; I guess the most likely approach for that would be to add another main character selection option allowing selection of a Starship Trooper as distinct from a Space Cadet. I kind of wonder what it was about the Space Cadet scenario that interested you, as in which of Space Cadet or Starship Cadet you would likely find most interesting. Note though that currently the choice of nationality doesn't actually do anything beyond revealing some information about which nations exist on B29 and C29, which are no longer considered to be existing nations there, and which are defunct on one but still extant on the other. Oh and also some clues about other planets that might be of importance to the fates of those nations that are no longer extant on B29 and C29.

(Editted: spelling corrections.)

-MarkM-
Last edited by markm on May 26th, 2010, 3:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
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ydcl
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Re: Campaign bundle: Between the Worlds

Post by ydcl »

Hi, can I ask you something ? I'm going to holydays soon and I wonder, if you can advise when some releases are done ? Because I'm sure there are some single-players like me' who loved to discuss of this nice space-opera.
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markm
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Re: Campaign bundle: Between the Worlds

Post by markm »

Sorry, the Space Cadet / Starship Trooper storyline still has not really progressed, it has just been fleshed out more with choices of where the Cadet is from and given some illustrations and story parts. The Time Cadets get new stuff first, and might actually be largely responsible for developing material for the Space Cadets.

I have run into a units problem... I took the units from Spacenoth, and have only now realised that Officers do not have leadership. I find that weird, but I do not know whether Spacenoth actually intends that Officers lack leadership and balanced their combat abilities with that in mind, or actually meant to add leadership and set the combat abilities balance ahead of time ready to go back in and add the leadership knowing the combat strength assumed they would have leadership.

I am thinking that for my purposes it would probably be best that Officers have leadership. But what kind of adjustment, if any, to their combat strength would be appropriate upon adding leadership? (The AI already spams Cadets in some situations, balance maybe ought to be such that it would find use for the different units under different circumstances?)

-MarkM- ("knotwork"; Digitalis Data Services.)
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markm
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Re: Campaign bundle: Between the Worlds

Post by markm »

I have updated this and the other Galactic Milieu-related campaigns, along with the Galactic Era and the Northwest Port multiplayer scenario used to try out the Galactic Era, to work with Wesnoth 1.10, and uploaded them to the add-ons server.

I see that there is now the start of persistence support, though so far all I have seen relies upon each player keeping local data; nothing I have come across so far seems to indicate that connecting to a state of a world database out on the net is in place; quite reasonably of course since the potential for abuse is probably stupefying. But at least I can now look into being able to continue campaigns more elegantly than by having players go into a loop back and forth between scenarios to allow them to continue onward when new scenarios come out.

-MarkM-
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