Sepelio wrote:. . . Once these are done I feel we can move onto complexities such as:

-Execution - How are we going to make this work?

I think the plan was to have a plotline to follow as per quake, half-life etc. Not just waves of enemies to kill. Theres enough zombie games/mods around already.

ai wrote:However, despite my hatred for such games and movies I also honestly don't fell that Nexuiz is a zombie game. Thus, making a single player campaign zombiefied would make it really off, weird and bad IMO.

cortez wrote:i meant something like player work together against enemies i dont care what kind of and the player have to get from a to b

Sepelio wrote:Thread title changed

The KISS priciple definately applies, but I feel ONS/Assault could definately be adapted to singleplayer considering the nature of spawn points etc.

I don't want to just play endless DMs and what not. This is what bored me out of playing through the UT3 campaign personally.

What would be nice to have is some proper singleplayer enemy ai. It sticks to one 'area' where it has been placed. It has only 1/2 weapons generally and doesn't take pickups.

Anyway we can figure out this stuff a little later.

pain_fedora6 wrote:(with his sidekick nex-sniper-bot with 0 lag or wait named omega)

--FraNcoTirAdoR-- wrote:loool @ xasx and before the big fight he will shout: "I'M GONNA CRUSH YOU AHAHAHAHA))"
And the winner title should be: "Very good massacre!"

Fisume! wrote:You need RLY big maps, at least Arahia like ones.

Sepelio wrote:Sure go ahead, I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

In the meantime I've been contemplating various ideas for bits of maps etc.

I think I'll be getting my semester tomorrow so then I can evaluate more on what I thought was good and bad on Flying Steels story. Haven't had much time recently.

Sepelio wrote:First things first, let us finish the plot. After that we can go on to figuring out other things such as:

-Timeline - order of events, when, where, who, why. . .

Prelude wrote:PRELUDE

In the near to not so distant future, Humanity's sub-light space exploration uncovers on/around a nearby world, an ancient alien device of unknown purpose.

The team of scientists sent to study this artifact activates it during one of their experiments and the device creates an anomaly nearby. Afterwards they learn from deciphering the microscopic runes that cover the surface of the artifact, that the anomaly is some kind of passage to somewhere near the core of the galaxy. Further study reveals that the artifact itself that created the anomaly is a simple beacon for whatever created and now maintains the passage. Such being the case, the passage cannot be closed locally.

Faced with the sudden and very uncertain situation, the Military is sent in and takes over the site, and establishes Nightscape, a hardened compound surrounding the artifact. They launch Operation Night Cross, which sends a recon team of well equipped soldiers and scientists through the passage, now designated “The Tunnel”. But the team never returns. Plans are prepared for sending a second team, but with no proof travel through the Tunnel is even survivable, official authorization is never granted.

Instead, a black operation is put in motion, Operation Night Raven. An entire squadron is assembled from mercenaries, rebel militias, test subjects, criminals and volunteers with no living relatives, and over the next few months trained in basic astronautics and various combat roles. Then equipped with the latest and most advanced gear and the promise of riches, pardons and glory upon their successful return, the squadron is sent through the portal.

Their mission is to uncover the whereabouts of the first team, discover the source of the portal, but most of all return back with any reconnaissance at all.

When Night Raven Squadron emerges from the Tunnel, they find themselves standing on the inner surface of a Dyson sphere of similar alien construction to the beacon artifact, surrounding a small star and a system of four terrestrial planets. Shortly afterwards, one of Night Raven’s rear fire support squads discovers that an unseen force radiating out from the local end of the Tunnel prevents them from approaching it by any means. It seems return will not be possible.

CAMPAIGN BEGINS

As the majority of Night Raven Squadron regroups around the Tunnel and sets up a field base, several squads are sent on point to a large wall structure two kilometers away. One of these is the forward control squad Crow (the player’s squad). Shortly after reaching the summit, the squads begin absorbing what appear at first to be lightning strikes until it becomes clear they are coming down with too deadly a precision from nearby towers. The teams take cover, but a spotter sees some kind of force advancing on them from the towers. Crow Squad’s commanding Lieutenant orders a fallback of all the forward recon squads and radios back to Night Raven OCS of the hostile advance in progress. Their hurried retreat loses their attackers, who do not pursue them past the wall. But then as they approach base camp, now on high alert, the ground begins vibrating violently as numerous hatches in the floor surfaces open and thousands of strange creatures. Without hesitation Night Raven opens fire on the emerging things, but it is largely ineffective against the speed and quantity at which they then come, launching salvos from some kind of particle weapons as they closed the distance and then slashing with devastating luminous strikes at point blank.

The attack swamps the camp and soon kills the Colonel in command of Night Raven. In the chaos, all the surviving squads scatter and escape anyway they can. Crow Squad seeks cover down a nearby, winding trench until they find themselves trapped at what would be a dead end, save for a drainage opening down to a wide, dark, sewer-like liquiduct with fast moving rapids of coolant flowing inside. The rumble of their pursuers getting louder and no other options left, they jump. Along with the current they slide down a steep slope that ends in a now unavoidable waterfall. The player drops down it, fade to black.

The player character (or at least the character the player was currently playing as) was rendered nearly unconscious by the fall and instinctive fight to the surface. When he comes to, he finds himself alone in a large dark chamber a distance away from the falls. Activating his tracker, he picks up the signal from his squad and takes a passage through the chamber wall in pursuit of it. But in the passage, he finds evidence of the first team, Night Cross. It is a message chip left behind for any rescue team that might have been sent, to lead them down the path they had taken. He decides to follow their trail.

Primordial Era

Over 2,500,000 years ago a now extinct, powerful spacefaring alien civilization called the Primordial created the largest and most advanced construct of the galaxy, a place that would eventually be known only as Nexuiz. A colossal dyson sphere encompassing a small solar system, Nexuiz used the constant flow of energy from the local solar emissions collected from the intermediate surfaces between its poles and equator to power its equatorial array of vastly faster than light one-way passageways that dotted its “Habitation Belt”. Controlling these passages, or “Tunnels”, and the direction of their one-way “Flow” were the Nexus Matrixes within moon-sized sensor complexes called Poles, which likewise resided at the poles of Nexuiz. Working together, the Poles could create a “Convergence Point” almost anywhere in the galaxy that would establish the other end of a Tunnel.

But the power of Nexuiz allowed the Primordial to reach into space too much farther than they could see and somewhere in the darkness beyond the galaxy they pulled in something even they were unprepared for. The “Intruder” at first attacked the Primordial and then their technology, expanding quickly and stealthily as it did so. For centuries they fought it while it scattered through the sphere until its adversary was spread too sparsely to subdue it any longer and then it parted itself in two and rushed at once for both of the Poles. Taken by surprise the Primordial were too many steps behind to fully counter, so they concentrated on the Northern Pole and held it, then annihilated the attacking force and all that remained in the equatorial Habitation Belt. But the Southern Pole was lost and could not be retaken, so the Primordial locked it down and severed its energy connections to the southern hemisphere and it eventually went dark and the remains of the Intruder along with it.

The loss of the Southern Pole control center ultimately meant the end of the Primordial’s galactic civilization, since without it continued expansion and long term maintenance of the Tunnels would not be realistically feasible, and many of the Tunnels had already been shut down to avoid the risk of the Intruder spreading beyond Nexuiz. As one last effort to restore the system, the Primordial launched an enormous fleet of “Beacons” to their disconnected colony worlds in the hope that they could hold out over the vast timeframe it would take for the Beacons to arrive at their distant destinations and reactivate the Tunnels. But the Primordial were too optimistic, long before almost any of the Beacons arrived, their civilization collapsed under its own weight, their many xenoformed worlds eventually returned to their naturally uninhabitable states and the crippled power of Nexuiz was forsaken.


Rediscovery Era

Millions of years after the demise of the Primordial galactic civilization, an aggressive and intelligent exotic species, called the Crusilex, evolved on the first world from Nexuiz’ sun. After an unsteady period of technological development, they finally achieved interplanetary spaceflight, which culminated with their discovery of “the edge of the universe”, the inward surface of Nexuiz.

They made landfall first on the equatorial Habitation Belt, a frigid wasteland by their standards especially, infested with innumerable swarms of an intelligent but still relatively slow minded species, the Hallurchin, that were much better adapted to the local environment and that wielded weapons and other technologies the sub-surface factories of Nexuiz continued to manufacture autonomously. Early attempts at colonization of this region usually failed and those that succeeded proved unrewarding. Then the Poles were discovered, and while no entry to the Southern Pole was ever located, they were eventually able to penetrate the Northern Pole all the way to its Nexus Matrix. There they slowly came to understand how to command its intermediate level functions well enough that they could reform the Pole’s internal life support into the much hotter, sulfur-centric environment they were comfortable with, as well as raising the Habitation Belt surface temperature to the maximum the safety regulators would allow (240º K). Then they applied the advanced polar infrastructure to industrial purposes, harnessing for themselves power orders of magnitude beyond the combined output of their fledgling intra system empire. Eventually their capital was moved from their world of origin to the northern pole of Nexuiz.


Encounter Era

With no route for further expansion, little changed for millennia afterwards until strange activity was noticed at a few locations along the equatorial Habitation Belt. The Tunnels were beginning to become active again, triggered from around the galaxy by encounters between the ancient and forgotten Beacons and newly emerging intelligent species. Each provided its opener with unlimited entry to Nexuiz, but no direct access back. The first waves of trapped alien travelers only clashed with the local Hallurchin, which did not capture the attention of the Crusilex.

But then came the ancient Cephidarian, the only species since the Primordials to independently achieve faster than light travel and that subsequently possessed a far spanning interstellar empire in their distant corner of the galaxy. As more of them emerged from their Tunnel, their presence became more obvious, with their shroudships taking and consuming lone Crusilex transports and more and more of their probes scouting the Northern Pole. A naturally aggressive species already, the Crusilex were now preparing for war, but first they needed to know where to take their fight. Using the two species’ mutual knowledge of Nexuiz’ basic interface as a bridge across the thick language barrier, the Crusilex made contact with and then established a war pact with the Hallurchin. The Crusilex provided military support against Tunnel openings, while the Hallurchin reported Tunnel openings as well as fighting as Auxiliaries. Thus the Crusilex were able to locate the Tunnel of the Cephidarian and from the Nexus Matrix they reversed its Flow, so that no further reinforcements could arrive. The Crusilex armada then crushed then the local Cephidarian, but seeing no reason to stop there, proceeded through their Tunnel and with the infrastructure of Nexuiz behind their war machine, proceeded to subjugate nearly the entire Cephidarian interstellar empire. To prevent further advances against them, the Cephidarian established a constant flow of tribute in the forms of resources and Auxiliaries.

From then forward, whenever the Crusilex received intelligence from the Hallurchin of a Tunnel opening, they reversed its Flow and sent through an armada to secure and conquer the other side, using the local Beacon to signal when they were ready to return. In this way any who activated a Beacon artifact, were subjugated into the Crusilex empire, even capable and clever species like the Arthrolid were not able to hold out for more than a few years.


Trial Era

After millennia of expansion, the Crusilex empire was reaching a breaking point. The Crusilex now managed more interstellar provinces and their rebellious inhabitants than they could dominate and were taking on still more. An orderly means of downscaling their empire was needed, so on the second world orbiting Nexuiz’ sun, the Arena was created. Here all subjugates were to send their greatest examples of technological and martial prowess, to try out for and maintain their positions as Auxiliaries. Those who refused or who failed the trials were entirely crushed militarily into a pre-civilized state. The Arena solved the problem.

Over the next millennium the game became more competitive with fewer and fewer remaining Auxiliaries, until only three remained- the Hallurchin, Cephadarian and Arthrolid. With each of these now very battle-hardened species positioned over sizeable swathes of the Habitation Belt and no longer kept in check by the diplomatic complexity created by their crushed competition, the Arthrolid and Cephadarian began a revolution against the Crusilex and their only remaining Auxiliaries, the Hallurchin.

The Arthrolid and Cephadarian each took almost total control over about a sixth of the Habitation Belt around each of their Tunnels, as well as the upper surface of another third of it and fought the Crusilex for supremacy of the vacuum above/within it. Then they assailed the Northern Pole by siege to try to break the deadlock, but were repulsed. At the same time, attempts by the Crusilex to change the balance of power in their own favor by acquiring new Auxiliaries were buried by the chaos and suppressive action taken by the Arthrolid and Cephadarian on the Habitation Belt, including the destruction of anything that emerged from newly opened Tunnels as well as all nearby Hallurchin that could have witnessed the opening.

KillaGrunt wrote:Are we going to use new playermodels for the Hallurchins and Crusilax?
Or are we going to use old ones?

Sepelio wrote:Excellent work Flying Steel. Very gritty and epic.

KillaGrunt wrote:That sounds cool.
Could you show screenshots?