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Habe einen älteren deutschen Artikel über die B5 mods gefunden unter [url="http://www.krawall.de/specials/b5-mods/index.khtml"]http://www.krawall.de/specials/b5-mods/index.khtml[/url]

Preview über die neue Buda 5 Kampagne aus dem Finischen Magazin Pelit

quote:
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Originally posted by Indie:
Disclaimer: Here is a quick and rather rough translation. I didn't even bother to check spelling let alone grammar. Read at your own risk.
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The Bold and the Beautiful in space

A good mix of quality actors is required because Raiders does not concentrate on a single conflict like the minbari war. While hired by various megacorporations, Peterson's team runs across Narns, Centauri, Vree, Drazi and others, but I won't be spoiling the plot here. When the story is as widespread and diverse as this, one might think that amateurs would find it hard to keep everything together. However, the plot flows smoothly and not least because of little things like Stonewall's and Mavra's romance. Don't fear however, the romance stays in the background and all the action is in the form of dogfights and PPG blasts.

There are now 24 missions - a whole lot more than in Minbari War and most of them have been designed with the same philosophy. Instead of mindless shooting, the missions almost always have a catch that you have to figure out in order to win and there are plenty of surprises. On average, the mission are not as long or as hellishly hard as in Defiance or in the minbari war, but are relatively close to I-War's difficulty level (or I have just become a better pilot). This is understandable as the campaign doesn't involve stopping an hopelessly more advanced enemy.

Things in motion

On the technical side, the same A-grade modelers [actually it was Simon, our resident Superman ] have done an excellent job and the ships match their Babylon 5 counterparts as closely as it is possible with I-War's aging graphics engine. Non 3dfx card users will have to make do with software mode, but it is ok especially with Defiance's lighting effects. Geforce owners don't have to despair when Raiders crashes on them. Just turn off hardware acceleration and it works fine.

There are now more pilotable crafts than Earthforce Aurora Starfury. There is naturally the Delta-V Zephyr used by the raiders, drazi sunhawk and various mix of older model starfury fighters. Although the ships are excellent on the outside, it would have been even better if the cockpit graphics would be more B5-like. I should not complain however, because I volunteered for this job a couple of years ago, but just didn't find the time. Sorry.

The graphics and sounds have been improved further. Cristopher Franke's background music is rare, but the impact is great when it is used in battles and dramatic events. There could have been more CGI movies for those who want more candy, but the cutscenes done with the game's own graphics engine do the job just fine.

Buda 5 have squeezed everything out of the aging I-War and it is hard to find anything that could be further improved without moving to an entirely new platform. However, the guys promised to move on to the sequel of I-War as soon as it came out so we'll have to wait and see what comes next.

While waiting for Buda's possible third release its worth turning your eyes towards Babylon Project, the slowly progressed mod of Freespace 2. Even though newtonian flight model won't be available, the staggering graphics and beam weapons should compensate for the loss.

Good:
-story
-missions
-3d-models
-sounds

Bad:
-Certain idiot didn't do the cocpit graphics even though he promised.

Score: 90/100


Picture texts:

[Attitude Adjuster, Sunhawk class corvette is one of Stonewall's mainstays.]
[Zephyr fighter, the loyal workhorse of mercs and raiders is no match for EA starfuries]
[It is not worth it messing with with passenger liners near Earthforce patrol routes, unless you have an ace up your sleeve.]
[Our gray little friends fall for it and attack the confused Drazi. Poor dumb aliens.]

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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


Joona also gave us a "Finnish high school graduation dibloma". For a convinience the scores are also given here in a scale of form 0 to 6. It's noteworthy that 0 (improbatur) is for disqualification, and that Eximia Cum Laude was split from Laudatur until resently due too many Laudaturs in the graduations. Thus Magna Cum Laude is still good, and Cuma Laude isn't bad either.
Please note that "CGI cut-scenes" and "ship characteristics" have one step higher scores than in the printed article. The ones in Pelit are erratic. Joona has confirmed the scores on the right are the ones he meant to give.

In the review itself Buda5: EMW is descriped as being about as close a perfect B5-gaming experience as a modification can be. The missions are said to be taking full advantge of I-War engine, and being in the classic spirit of the mother game. "Legendary" Korolev from X-Wing is given as a reference. Joona notes duly that EWM missions are directed for Independence War veterans, and aren't thus a very good introduction to the game. Also mission's 3D-models (way to go Simon!), above the avarage in overall voice acting, and selective use of music are mentioned favorably.


3D-models - 6, or Laudatur
mission design - 5, or Eximia Cum Laude
campaign design - 3, or Cum Laude
voice acting - 2-6, or from Lubenter to Laudatur
CGI cut-scenes - 4, or Magna Cum Laude
ship characteristics - 4, or Magna Cum Laude
B5 atmosphere - 5, or Eximia Cum Laude