[Hasler]

I figure this is as good a place as any since you are talking about large missions. I have just returned to FS after a while. I got the SCP which says I can get somewhere around 400 ships in a batltle. Unfortunatly I cant seem to have more than 80 fighter sized ships. Could somebody tell me why?

[Primus]

400? Don't know about that, but I think it would kill FS2...

[Hasler]

I remember reading it in the read me. It says they uped the limits to 400 individually named ships averaging 7 subsystems. Basically they mean to say I can have 2800 subsystems worth of ships so why am I crashing at 80. I have the computer for it Is it so much to ask to have two destroyers with full fighter wings fight each other.

[Goober5000]

Thread split and moved to the SCP forum.

Hasler, you might be confusing it with the 400-ship limit for ships.tbl.  Some versions of the SCP have higher limits that allow you to put up to 400 different ship classes in the game.  It has nothing to do with how many ships can be in the mission.

As for increasing the number of in-mission ships, you can make wings of ships that spawn multiple waves.

[Dark RevenantX]

set the wave threashold to the ammount of ships in the wing.  Tables may need editing, but it helps fred not to crash.

[Setekh]

And welcome to HLP, Hasler.

[Kie99]

Exits are to your right and left, and flamethrowers are under your seat. Be careful, though, as they are sometimes filled with water, so bring your own Napalm or try to club someone with the non-working shotguns in the weapon closet. Also, be careful while wandering the ventilation shafts. If you see a large, five-limbed creature that looks really pissed, it’s probably Carl, give him your lunch and he'll hopefully go away.  If you see a big desert creature its probably Raa, give him a fish and he might leave your head alone.  In the event of an emergency, the n00bs will be the last into the escape pods, if there’s any room left. The Plasma rifles in the forward locker are released only under authorization of an Admin, [V] God, or hyperintelligent shade of the color blue. Oh, and whatever you do, don't mention the word Freespace followed by the number 3.

[kasperl]

After a certain amount of objects, primaries will cease to work because the colision detection will have too much objects, which it cannot handle.

[Flipside]

A word of advice though, if you need 400 ships in a mission, you probably need too many

[Woolie Wool]

Originally posted by Hasler
I figure this is as good a place as any since you are talking about large missions. I have just returned to FS after a while. I got the SCP which says I can get somewhere around 400 ships in a batltle. Unfortunatly I cant seem to have more than 80 fighter sized ships. Could somebody tell me why?

FRED2 can theoretically handle 400 ships, but that limit is purely theoretical because no computer can handle 400 ships. Also, I once made a test mission with more than 90 ships.

[Singh]

it depends on your PC, really. I was able to handle a mission with 110 objects once on a Geforce 2 Mx. now it crashes with anything over 90 ships with a 9200....yay for good old cards and reliability!

[Woolie Wool]

The problem is most likely FRED2. It just doesn't have the performance it used to have.

[karajorma]

It's nothing to do with FRED2's performance. You can't have 400 ships in the game because FS2 wasn't ever supposed to have 400 ships in the game.

Now while the SCP could probably bump the limits (probably pretty easily) it would just result in higher system requirements for everybody and would probably just result in a bunch of crappy Battle of Endor style missions.

Not really worth doing.

[Woolie Wool]

That's not what I was talking about. FRED2 cannot handle quite as many ships as it once could (that 90+-ship mission.comes to mind).

[Flaser]

If you want big Battle of Endorish missions that aren't crap you've gotta break up the battle.

Make the player zip between sectors and perform different actions in each of them - replace Epsilon in Sector 3, hold out for 4 minutes - regroup to Sector 5, launch an offensive with Beta into Sector 1 ect. ect.

Simulate the rest of the battle that's far from the player - there don't have to be that many ships. Just make sure some booms and big ships can be seen.
A work heavy but good solution is creating a skybox with an image of the rest of the battle added.

A good Big Battle isn't about the scale, or lots of things kicking each other's teeth - it's the tactics, the sense of being a working part of a big battle group instead a trigger frenzy.
I've never seen that done before, therefore I still hold my opinion that it is possible to do a good big mission, but it's not about adding tons of stuff.

[Woolie Wool]

You could just put hordes of invincible ships outside the 60km playing field and have them shoot at each other endlessly.

[WMCoolmon]

I really think there's a lot of undeserved prejudice for 'battle of endor' missions. FS2 has the ability to support a BoE mission, although it might be necessary to tweak settings so it's playable.

The biggest slowdown nowadays seems to come from textures. Slap an animated glowmap on a fighter and it'll slow down more than if you had a a dozen onscreen. Put up three planets as the only contents of a mission and you'll have even more slowdown.

[Goober5000]

Indeed.  I'm sure there's a great BoE mission waiting to be done.  With the increased limits and performance of the SCP, it's certainly possible as long as you keep all the fancy graphics stuff turned off.  All that's needed is a good plot and a capable FREDder.