The story of a
mod - Babylon 5: Earth-Minbari
War
The avalanche has already
started, and it has been created
by many pebbles working together.
So far the only even nearly
realistic space combat games heve
been Glyn Williams' Warhead (Amiga,
ST) and the much more recent I-War.
When Babylon 5 was all the rage a
few years ago, Sierra announced
the development of a B5-realistic
space combat sim: Babylon 5 -
Into the Fire.
But money talked, and the more
than half finished game was
dumped along with every other
simulation like game project. But
the fans did not give up.
Instead, they reached for their
favourite space combat sims and
their more or less official
editors, and banded together with
other artists dedicated to the
Cause. They started some serious
mod work on both I-War anf
Freespace 2.
In your typical mod project,
you usually get only a nifty
homepage and a few early
screenshots. But Buda5 team moved
from dreams to reality, and the
first campaign for Buda5 I-War
Babylon mod, Earth Minbari War
was released.
Especially interesting (for
our Finnish readers) is the
little detail that many of the
team members are young Finnish
talents. Students, who have at
least a bit of time for unselfish
projects wehere the only reward
is fame, glory, and hopefully for
at least some a stepping stone to
the game industry.
The long journey of Earth
Minbari War from an idea and an
urge to do to an actual playable
campaign is a living proof of one
fact. You need a bit more than a
mission editor and a bucketful of
enthusiasm.
Liberty,
fraternity, equality
A spirit of equality and good
unit morale reigns in the Buda5
team. My interviewee, Anssi
Luomaranta is the designer of
most EMW missions, and the
organizer of the project. So let
him be the head Vorlon.
Juha kuusela maintains the WWW
pages of the team, and is a
"jack of all trades"
with various bits and pieces of
the mod project. Originally he
got the ball rolling by
convincing the others how easily
I-War could be modified.
Everything from ship 3D models to
sounds, cutscenes, and just about
everything that would make a near
total conversion feasible. There
are about half a dozen active
Buda members, plus a dozen or so
of irregular contributors.
British Simon Richardson
creates professional ship and
object models at a suicidal rate,
and Anssi doesn't call him a
superman for nothing. This
payless (and priceless)
workaholic spews forth stuff at
such a rate that Buda already has
a convincing selection of 3D
models for just about any future
campaign.
Already before teaming up with
Buda, Richardson was one of the
stars of Babylon 5 Modeller's
Guild. This "secret
brotherhood" of 3D artists
make raytrace models of the B5
universe more or less just to
express themselves and to impress
others. Just as some of us draw
or paint for fun. The prerendered
cutscenes of the EMW campaign are
based on the 3D models that are
freely available from the
Modeller's Guild. The models
themselves are only building
blocks, however, and the Buda
team has created and directed the
cutscenes themselves.
I-War
core
I-War is a pretty obvious
choice for a base to build a B5
mod on. Appearance and audio are
easily changed to just about
every game out there, but the
game engine physics are another
matter entirely. In I-War, this
is the newtonian model we all
like. Another bonus being the
editor that comes with I-War, as
it is actually a sort of
programming language that allows
fiddling with the basics of the
mission structure. For example,
you can define jump points
appearing from nowhere even as
such weren't a part of the
original I-War.
But still, you can't change
everything. Although you can
tweak the performance and stats
of different ships, your
autoaiming cannon is still an
integral part of the I-War engine.
The fire arc can be changed
between six and sixty degrees and
that's about it.
Buda folks are also frustrated
by the weapons model being
limited to pulse cannon like the
PBC/PPC. Fortunately, one can
tweak the properties of a pulse
shot a bit so that it looks like
a convincing Minbari fusion beam.
But the beam weapons in the B5
capital ships are all but
impossible to create. As Anssi
puts it: "We tried such
tricks as fitting in another ship
model that would look like a beam.
But it got so complicated that we
figured we'd better ditch the
idea."
A
fighting chance
As your Starfury gets wasted
by the second hit at the very
latest, the Nials of the Minbari
do feel a bit unfairly resilient.
The main problem of Earthforce
was the stealth technology of the
Minbari that prevented weapons
lock, after all - not their
durability.
In EMW, however, you get a
clear signature of the boneheads,
as Anssi says invisible opponents
would have been a bit too
frustrating. "You can't tell
anything at all before you're hit.
So we retained the Minbari
stealth only in missions where it
was crucial for the plot.
Playability concerns have
overridden realism in a few other
details as well. It would have
been easy to set 'Fury maximum
accel to the nine gees most have
agreed on, considering the
realistic limitations of the TV
series. That's what a human being
can take for a few moments.
"If we're talking about any
kind of prolonged stress, it is
closer to six gees," notes
Anssi. (Translation note: the
nine gees is what a trained
combat pilot with a g-suit can
take without blackout and crushed
spines when we're talking about
gees pulling vertically from head
to toe. It would be safe to
assume that lying prone against
the worst accel as in the 'Fury
the limit would be more than 9)
This six gees happen to be the
maximum performance of the
Dreadnaught class corvette in the
original I-War. The computer
contolled corvettes are indeed
limited to six gees, but in
reality the player's ship is
hotrodding somewhere close to
twenty. For exactly the same
playability reasons, Buda's 'Fury
can do around thirty gees. "Oh
we do have the realistic 'Fury if
you want to try it out and die,"
Anssi smirks.
May I
speak?
As the intention is to create
a mod that was in every way
comparable to a "real"
game, this means you got to have
such things as cutscenes and
radio chatter. For the voiceovers
one has to storyboard the whole
campaign beforehand so one could
assign the required voice actors
well beforehand. Especially the
role of a main character who
appears over several missions is
vitally important.
A bit surprisingly, the worst
and most frustrating delay in
finishing the campaign was not
the fine-tuning and debugging of
missions. It was the delay of
some voice actors, or in the case
of a few, total chickening out.
It happens all too often that one
guy sends his voiceovers for one
mission but then "disappears",
and naturally the campaign
coordinator is left up the creek
without a paddle.
"I gotta admit I nearly
got pissed a few times,"
Anssi swears. "We had about
half as much actors assigned, but
in the end only half of them
showed up and many of them late."
About an extra month was wasted
waiting for voiceovers. You can't
threaten anyone with reprisals as
everyone is a volunteer. Even the
Finnish Buda members have never
met in real life.
Anssi directed and edited the
voice samples of Buda folks from
different corners of the world,
and ended up with a surprisingly
smooth result. Originally there
was supposed to be a separate
voice director/editor for this
purpose, but he was one of those
who just "disappeared".
Because the voiceovers were
starting to delay the otherwise
releasable mod, Anssi even "had
to" play Petersen, the
skipper of corvette Jason himself.
Hell, why not? Surely we'll hear
lots of Scandinavian accent in 23rd
century spacelanes.
Most of the main character
voice input comes from all
American good guys, though. We do
hear one Brit and one Jerry
enrichening the cultural aspect.
On the average, the voice
acting is surprisingly good
despite some less than perfect
performances, and the Buda team
seems to have only one major
problem with the voice actors: no
women no matter what. Anssi finds
this as a bit of a laugh, really:
"As a matter of fact we
synthetised the 'Fury computer as
a female just to have one in the
mod."
War
does need a single man (and woman)
The missions in EMW are rather
obvious derivatives from the
events we have seen in the TV
series. Anssi indeed says that
they will strive to keep their
future mod campaigns in line with
Babylon 5 canon.
After inspiration strikes, and
you have drafted the big picture
on paper, it doesn't take very
long to actually script the
mission. The real work starts
only after you submit the mission
for testing. And then you get
loads of such complaits as "why
didn't this and that mission work
when I happened to nuke my own
cargo transport just for the hell
of it".
"Oh, we can invent our
own stuff as well. Take Show of
Force, for example (a real
bastard of a mission that cost me
three nights and nearly my nerve).
Nothing like that happens in the
TV show. It is cool to play
situations which are familiar
from the saga, but we certainly
have plenty of our own ideas."
Supposedly, Buda will carry on
with either a Raider campaign,
Earth civil war, or Narn-Centauri
war next. Especially the Raider
campaign sounds interesting,
because Anssi envisions the
player as a bad guy among the
pirates. Ahoy mate! A more
ambitios project would be the
civil war campaign that would
include a branching plot. Giving
you the chance of choosing sides
between Clark and Sheridan.
Morale
stays high
Anssi seems to regard the
future of the mod projects with a
healthy attitude. They will keep
doing it as long as they feel
like it and time allows. But what
about I-War gradually becoming
obsolete, and I-War 2 around the
corner?
"Yeah, we have tried to
milk the I-War dudes for info,
but have got no answers so far.
We really don't know if we can
use the work we have already done
in a mod for I-War 2, or if I-war
2 will be as easily modified in
the first place. But even if one
couldn't we will do it. It's Buda5.2.
We'll keep tweaking I-War One as
long as part two is released.
A mod is not born out of good
intentions. "Every guy has
to have enthusiasm," Anssi
points out the obvious. At least
working without pay guarantees
that everything we see as a
result comes from pure motivation.
As a hint, Anssi welcomes any new
enthusiastic volunteers to Buda.
Especially voice actors (well,
hello, you two female readers of
this magazine) and 2D artists (well,
hello me) are in high demand.
The creators of I-War, let
alone the publishers, have not
given any official permission for
the mod, and there is very little
communication between Buda and
them. "Oh we know them and
they know what we're doing,"
tells Anssi. "Neither has
TNT sent any angry claims, for
that matter. There have been
plenty of B5 fan films in the Net
for years."
Straczynski himself has
politely asked the fans to stop
distributing "illegal"
Babylon 5 stuff in the Net. But
in these little speeches you
could have always imagined the
producer holding a PPG to JMS's
head as he was writing them. At
least I feel that if Straczynski
commented the work of Buda5 guys
strictly in private, it would be
something like:
"Way to go guys!"
Joona Vainio
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