Revision as of 00:05, 3 May 2011

"Let's add what's missing from SFB. .. but let's do it as if we were Taldren so that we can preserve the good feel of the game. Its style must match Taldren's, as if it was an extension and continuation of their work."

--Firesoul

In the beginning...

(updated 20110501)

I belonged to a small group of people who played SFC:OP almost every weekend, at what we commonly call a "Lan Party". I've put in a lot of work to always improve the challenges for when we played .. but there was always room for improvement.

It was felt there was a little something missing to the SFC:EAW and SFC:OP games. To OP, Orion Cartels, maulers, some X technology, and other miscellaneous ships were added, but few of all the other possible ships were added at all.

Out of 3 regular players, and a few other guests, 3 of us are/were SFC2 testers. For a while, testing patches and playing game after game after game kept us busy. I own many SFB modules, and between the "members" of our "group", we cover pretty much the entire game. The games were all based on known and familiar material and information... It was easy and fun for us, all the time, and it still is.

But something.. something was missing. The CoopAce script from MagnumMan turned opensourced, so I took it on, fixing all the major concerns and bugs at first, improving it to the max after. That kept us busy for a long time, but still it became monotonous after a while.

So I decided on taking on the shiplist itself.

In 2010, after 5 years, I decided to get back into the modding. Except that this time I would apply certain code ethics to improve the quality of my work. Specifically: tests. Automated, repeatable tests that I could run any time and prove that I have regressed and caused more problems than am fixing. So I think this latest release will be of the highest quality of the OP+ series.

Genesis

First thing I wondered about was X-technology. The game has a few 1st generation X-Ships but then quickly skips to a bunch of never before seen ships. I'll call these X2, since the first generation X-ships were called X1 by SFB. I've entered the X1 ships and put it up offering Taldren use of them. ... I never got a response.

After a while, we noticed that only a few specific races had Early Dreadnoughts, or Light Dreadnoughts. Also, many other ship classes were present, but not in large enough numbers to be judge a significant presence. That's where I really started working on this shiplist, and I've been on this for years. Yes, years. No Bull.

That's what's this shiplist is all about. All the added ships are official ships from SFB. There's nothing invented here.. It all exists, except for what Taldren added on their own of course. *grin*

Bridging the Gap

Things worked great, and this progressed for a few years. Finally, a final product emerged: OP+ 4.0. There really wasn't anything new, and I've run out of material.

I then found another game to play after a while, and I was gone. I played for about