Battlestar Galactica Community Game Diaspora Has Arrived 121
New submitter funtapaz writes "Diaspora: Shattered Armistice, the Battlestar Galactica game based on the FreeSpace 2 Open engine, has launched! This cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac) release includes the ability to fly the MK VII Viper, the Raptor (or the new MK VIIe strike variant), multiplayer, a mission editor, an original soundtrack, and full voice acting."
flight model (Score:4, Funny)
But does it have a realistic air combat physics model for space battles?
Re:flight model (Score:4, Funny)
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Actually, Battlestar Galactica does have moderately realistic air combat physics for space battles.
Re:flight model (Score:5, Insightful)
Trick question! You can't have an air battle in space.
Re:flight model (Score:4, Interesting)
Trick question! You can't have an air battle in space.
Of course you can, just watch how TIE fighters and X-Wings fly in space.
Now if you want full newtonian flight dynamics Babylon 5 all the way.
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And boring as shit to play. Space combat in independence war just isn't fun. At all.
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I'm pretty sure IWar had a top speed for your ship.
Two more... (Score:2)
Evochron Mercenary [starwraith.com]
Space Combat [wikipedia.org] (by Laminar Research, makers of X-Plane)
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Find an Amiga or Atari ST Emulator and look for Warhead. It's a game Glyn Williams made before moving on to make I-War. It's primitive by today's standards but the gameplay is a lot of fun.
Re:flight model of fantasy movie (Score:2)
you have to compensate for the friction/drag induced by Force particles creating flight dynamics similar to air flight!!
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if it uses the stock freespace model, then no. The fighters had afterburners, but they would slow right back down again after the burn. Also, the 'subspace' laws are a bit ambiguous.. some ships could jump anywhere, others needed to do it at the system 'jump node.'...but that was sometimes too. In one freespace2 mission, even the player had to jump from the node or he'd lose the mission. After completing most missions, the fighter would jump to return to the home ship regardless if the home ship was in-
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that's what I thought as well, but there are exceptions such as the after-mission jump in missions where the capital ship/base was in another system. I just figured the player just wasn't supposed to get that into it.
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the phrase you're looking for is "dramatic license"
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I had mine revoked!
I nearly DIED of SHAME!
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You probably don't actually want to have a realistic combat model. Take the example of Elite, Elite 2: Frontier and Elite: Frontier First Encoutnters. The original Elite had unrealistic (but very fun) combat and flight characteristics and was enormously successful and fun to play. The sequels had true Newtonian flight mechanics (more or less) but could be massively frustrating to get to grips with and were much less successful as a result.
Re:flight model (Score:4, Funny)
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Haha i loved the panther, you could just fly it around like a tank letting the shields absorb the hits while you picked off the enemies with your turrets. Mind you, most of the enemies in frontier had very weak weapons, the strongest computer generated ship i ever came up against had the 20Mw laser but most were in the 1-5 range.
Re:flight model (Score:5, Interesting)
The landings on Galactica were a bit weird though. They came in fast and had to decelerate quickly, like fighters on an aircraft carrier deck, instead of just slowing down and drifting in slowly and safely. But arguably you don't want to waste time in combat.
They did the usual movie./TV sci-fi thing of having all the ships, including the big capital ships, engage at ranges of a few hundred metres, instead of a few million miles. And no real explanation of why they didn't just nuke each other with guided missiles instead of shooting more or less conventional guns at each other. It was basically WWII naval battles IN SPACE.
It'll be interesting to see how they do Ender's Game since that is supposedly to be filmed soon.
Re:flight model (Score:4, Informative)
The landings on Galactica were a bit weird though. They came in fast and had to decelerate quickly, like fighters on an aircraft carrier deck, instead of just slowing down and drifting in slowly and safely. But arguably you don't want to waste time in combat.
They only came in "hot" during emergency landings (before jumps, dodging cylons, etc.). In the pilot, Apollo comes in for a normal non-emergency landing and he just slowed down until he stopped and planted down vertically right on the deck.
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If you engaged at millions of miles, you would have time to maneuver and/or jump out of the way of incoming missiles. If guided missiles, as you suggested, you would have defenses set up a great distance away from your ship which would intercept the missiles.
You will note that missiles from both sides did do a small amount of maneuvering on their way in. However, that seemed to be purely for positioning. Once locked on, the
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If you engaged at millions of miles, you would have time to maneuver and/or jump out of the way of incoming missiles. If guided missiles, as you suggested, you would have defenses set up a great distance away from your ship which would intercept the missiles.
A missile should be much faster and more manouevrable than a manned craft. If it can't get through the defences, what hope does a manned craft have?
Engaging at close range is the only way to insure you are hitting your target
Yes, if you're throwing rocks. Not if you have missiles with the capabilities we had in the 1960s.
We all know that the real reason was to make it more dramatic. They wanted an excuse for hot dog piloting and heroics. There really isn't any role for a "fighter" in a space battle given any halfway consistent technology. If you have had spaceships for thousands o
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The Vipers carried by the Galactica lacked fly-by-wire tech, presumably so that they would not be impacted by Cylon EW. It may have been that the Cylon Fighters had some EW-related function (sensor or telemetry platform, maybe?) and carried anti-fighter weapons primarily to deal with Vipers, which were fielded primarily to deal with Cylon birds and reduce the effectiveness of Cylon EW.
What I'm saying is, they could've probably justified it.
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As I recall, they didn't just nuke everything as the nuke missiles were easy to identify and shoot apart.
Given the resources to make a nuke, unless you're guaranteed of a hit, then throwing pieces of metal at high speed is probably a better option.
In the Razor episodes, they show the surprise Cylon attack on the other battlestars, and the Cylons did use nukes, since the defenses were down and the hits were almost guaranteed.
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As I recall, they didn't just nuke everything as the nuke missiles were easy to identify and shoot apart.
Which didn't make any sense. We even saw a warhead on BSG, it fitted in a suitcase and destroyed a large ship, and damaged several others. (We can make smaller ones now, in the real world.) So you only need one to get through. Launch three and game over.
There is a reason we haven't had a big war since 1945. Nothing can stop a nuke, and if both sides have them, as WOPR deduced, both sides will be destroyed.
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The humans on BSG only had 5 nuclear warheads. BSG actually didn't have any weapons of any kind when the war started as it was being turned into a museum.
BSG was able to get to the lone surviving weapons depot but was only able to get a limited number of nukes.
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Nukes were considered to be more damaging in the BSG universe than how you portrayed them. Both cylons and humans were very concerned any time nukes entered the picture (which was rare). There was a standoff where BSG was going to launch nukes against a cylon basestar and they backed down.
Battlestars were somewhat tougher than cylonss basestars though. The basestars were quasi-organic while the battlestars were heavily armored.
In the prequal movie (The Plan), the cyclon nukes that destroyed the colonies
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Cool - glad I could help.
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I seem to recall mention of something about using water as part of anti-radiological shielding.
You pretty much have to figure that anything that was meant for interstellar travel is going to have some pretty serious phlebotinum shielding to make high-energy particles a non-issue in the first place, so it's really just a matter of having armor sufficient to deal with the forces of some presumably multi-kiloton explosion.
Range of Engagement and Entertainment (Score:2)
Well, clearly the short answer to why they didn't nuke each other at long distance is that it wouldn't make very interesting television. As far as I recall, BSG didn't really discuss w
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Well I spent a few hours last night playing the actual game and I was impressed with the flight dynamics. At one point my viper got stuck in "glide" mode and I was thankful that I didn't have to come in hot for a landing. I hade to come in slowly and use the full 360 degrees of vertical and horizontal axis thrusters to land safely on to the deck. It took a lot of care. Very newtonian. The only thing missing is gravity.
I'm not sure if getting stuck in glide mode was a bug or the result of damage but it's nic
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No real space battles would happen at long distances. It would be too easy for counter-measures to be deployed at those ranges. At 1000 miles firing two missiles at opposing ships the counter-measures (either opposing missiles, flack, etc) would have several minutes to intercept and make adjustments. At a million, they'd have hours of making minor ( 1 degree) adjustments to intercept. The exception to this rule would be if laser weapons are involved. With conventional ballistics, not really an option for l
Is that the game... (Score:2)
...that was (meant to be?) called Beyond the Red Line, or a different approach to making the BSG universe into an awesome space combat game?
(Downloading the source tarball right now, let's see how we get this into an unofficial Debian package...)
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According to wikipedia the majority of the developers involved in Beyond the Red Line left that project in 2008 and started Diaspora. BtRL has since been in development alongside Diaspora by those that remained. So this is sorta but not really a fork from BtRL (spiritually perhaps, but I don't know if any of the codebase / graphic resources were carried over. Both are based on the Freespace 2 engine I believe.)
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Actually nothing except the code was shared. The assets all went to one team or the other.
Re:Is that the game... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm the team lead for Diaspora and you're pretty much correct. We ended up with many of the assets that used to be part of BtRL. We agreed not to use the name or anything that wasn't 100% made by our team members in return.
The codebases are exactly the same at the time of the split. I have no idea what they've done with theirs but we kept using the same engine.
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I played the first BtRL demo release when it came out, and I was very impressed. I am not a fan of that gameplay genre, but the demo did a great job at capturing the BSG atmosphere and having dialogue that really fit in with the series. The soundtrack was also good, mixing newly written bits with BSG sounds.
Looking forward to downloading this.
Homeworld anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Homeworld [wikipedia.org] was, for me, the first truly 'epic space battle' type game. Full 360 deg space-mapping, camera views, fighter-POVs.
It would have been a perfect fit to mod Homeworld into a BSG game for RTS.
I have played TIE Figther which would have also been great for the FPS perspective.
Looking forward to playing this.
epic was pretty epic (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nycZ4BleiU [youtube.com]
(epic was a space arcade sim game)
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I still play Homeworld in Wine. Works great!
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I still play Homeworld in Wine. Works great!
I'm running FreeBSD 8.1. I wonder if Diaspora will run under WINE or if it will compile & run under the Linux compatibility layer, or both/neither.
Anyone else try it under FBSD yet?
Strat
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One of the engine devs here.
The linux release is source only, so feel free to try and build it on FreeBSD (I know it was compiled for Solaris at one point though). I don't recall if the engine it runs on will compile for FreeBSD or not (honestly, I don't think anyone has tried). But if you have OpenGL 2.1 or higher, OpenAL, SDL it will probably work anyway.
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If you do get it working, be sure to tell us. We have no objection to people running it on BSD and we'd quite happily link it on the official release thread.
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There is a BSG mod for Homeworld 2, though I haven't had the chance to try it yet: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hw2bsg/ [sourceforge.net]
site down already (Score:2)
anyone got an alternative link?
Looks Like We're Being Slashdotted and Kotaku'd... (Score:5, Informative)
Hey guys. Programmer from the project here. Looks like our server is being hammered so here are some links to keep you company until our sites get back up.
Our Launch Trailer - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWt2m1xtJbw [youtube.com]
1st Mission Preview - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7yGXHQQlps [youtube.com]
Windows Torrent - http://diaspora.fs2downloads.com/Diaspora_R1_Windows.exe.torrent [fs2downloads.com]
Mac Torrent - http://diaspora.fs2downloads.com/Diaspora_R1_Mac.dmg.torrent [fs2downloads.com]
Linux Torrent - http://diaspora.fs2downloads.com/Diaspora_R1_Linux.tar.lzma.torrent [fs2downloads.com]
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thanky chappy!
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Well, while the site is being hammered, I'll post this here...
Running here on a Mac, the application pops up an error window after the opening text sequence: http://puu.sh/12dax [puu.sh] and exits.
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What resolution are you running it in? I could see that error being generated if you run in less than 1024x768.
Otherwise I'll need more data.
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Ah right, yep - I see. I wasn't quite launching it properly :)
That all said, it looks fantastic running at 2560x1440!
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Ages ago I contributed a minor patch or two for that project, glad to hear you guys are still alive and kicking :D
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Can't recall exactly, it's probably something like my slashdot username, so "gajop" or something. But seeing as that was in my freshmen/sophomore year (some 4-5 years ago), it's probably best to forget that code I produced :).
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Epic, thanks! Will it run off a USB key by any chance?
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Guys, please make sure next time that your default controls are at least functional :)
5 minutes after launching the game, I'm in the tutorial mission. After learning to target the other ships, I'm told to bank my Viper to align with the drone - only banking is not assigned to anything in a keyboard/mouse setup and I need to fix that myself. Or maybe this is one of those games that are supposed to be played with another input device.
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I played all the way through the tutorial and found the default controls functional with a mouse and keyboard (dammit, where did I hide that joystick???? All that bashing the mouse around sucks). The part where you have to align with the drone was the most annoying because the keypresses need to be really short.
Banking by default is assigned to numpad 7 and 9. Works for me.
Slashdotted (Score:3)
Diaspora* is the best social network (Score:2, Funny)
It's even got Battlestar Galactica Community Games!
Named from the score (Score:2)
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We actually choose the name before we knew that track name though. It's a complete coincidence.
BSG is the story of a diaspora, and we ourselves had split from Beyond the Red Line so it seemed like the perfect name.
Awesome! (Score:5, Informative)
I'd highly recommend the Blue Planet campaign. Part 2 (War in Heaven) is especially noteworthy for really giving you the feeling of being on the losing side of a war, something you don't see very often in games. Part 1 has full voice acting, with voice acting for part 2 still in progress.
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ack, replying to undo cocked up moderation
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I also recommend "Derelict", a very long and involving campaign that's IMO very much in the spirit of Freespace 2.
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GOG has been down for at least 24hours, with occasional uptime. Does not appear to be a publicity stunt this time.
Gamer Diaspora (Score:2)
Next. (Score:1)
Now where's my Firefly game?
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You have no idea how many of the Diaspora team would love to do one of those.
Slashdot effect or crappy game? (Score:2)
The fact that the page has been annihilated doesn't bode well for the game. If you can't handle the curiosity load for a game release on the website, you probably can't handle the player load on the game itself.
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Torrents:
Windows
http://diaspora.fs2downloads.com/Diaspora_R1_Windows.exe.torrent [fs2downloads.com]
Mac
http://diaspora.fs2downloads.com/Diaspora_R1_Mac.dmg.torrent [fs2downloads.com]
Linux
http://diaspora.fs2downloads.com/Diaspora_R1_Linux.tar.lzma.torrent [fs2downloads.com]
Direct Download:
Linux
http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.858 [freespacemods.net]
Mac
http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.857 [freespacemods.net]
Windows
http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.856 [freespacemods.net]
and
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kudos
Alright (Score:2)
The next motherfucker to name any kind of computer related thing "Diaspora" is going to be tied down and whipped with corded mice!
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Diaspora, the social network, isn't bound to PHP by use of some wierdo PHP-only internal data-structures or anything is it?
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It doesn't use PHP at all (and never has). It's all Ruby on Rails.
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Re:Not to be confused with the social network? (Score:5, Insightful)
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YES! Someone out there recognizes Diaspora, the 2d space MMORPG!!! I can't say how thrilled I was to find this comment. I remember that game quite fondly, even if it was relatively short lived. I was proudly a member of Iron Shield. Diaspora is defined as a "the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland". The MMORPG was all about scattering form the safe zone and going farther out into space to trade your goods. Guilds defined teams. There were wars, treatie
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It's also, you know, just a word in the English language which has been used for hundreds of years...
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What is it with stuff called Diaspora lately? (Score:2)
There's not just the failed social network, there's also the successful indie RPG Diaspora [www.vsca.ca]. And now there's also a BSG game.
It's a cool name, but somehow these things seem to happen in waves. A few years ago, everything seemed to be called "The Gathering Storm". Morphic resonance?
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Diaspora was written in Ruby, so a swing and a miss.