Hi there!
Since I had another funny night with the Saga FRED last night I decided to open a thread here.
I want to write about the progress on my missions, ask a few questions that I feel silly to ask in the mission editing forums and talk about Saga-specific FRED things.
Also I want to inspire others to learn FRED to make missions for Saga, and generally improve their skills. Post your ideas here!
Of course I know I am still a beginner with FRED, so feel free to correct anything wrong I write or suggest cool things I could do in FRED.
Soo... let's get started.
Last night and the day before I had some time and started to create a mission.
A small base (Saga supply depot ) near a jump point is the base. The player starts there, flying an Arrow.
The briefing tells him a convoy is going to jump out, and he should scan all the transports to make sure there are no smugglers hiding in the convoy.
So the player starts and there are eight friendly transports of various sizes in space (Artemis, Pelileu, Clarkson, Shuttle), all of them heading for the jump point, initial orders are given to follow three routes to the jump point. Some of them have 1-2 escorting Razor-class fighters. (I formed them to wings, the transport being the wing leader) All are scannable and have cargo and subspace drive.
Their depart cue is when they are less than 1000m from the jump buoy. The escorts jump out simultaneously with their wing leaders.
There are two evil ship captains, a Demon with drugs as cargo and a Clarkson with slaves. Both attack some seconds after being scanned (I set it to 5 for now). The player has to kill the escorts. The Demon has also to be killed but the Clarkson with the slaves is to be disarmed, which triggers a chain of events that set the transport to friendly again and it docks at the station.
If the objectives are reached or impossible to reach (for example if the player destroyed the slave transport) the player is ordered to land. Mission end occurs when Alpha 1 is closer than 30m to the fighterbay.
I also did three different debriefings depending on whether the objectives were reached or not and played a bit with backgrounds.
So that's what I did. It took me approximately 5 hours.
Funniest thing to happen: I forgot to disable the other AI goals for the slave transport when I told it to dock. So it docked.... and then flew to the jump point carrying my station away!! I LOL'd very hard. Then I set it to "play dead" as soon as it had docked via a chained event.
I encountered a few strange things I don't understand (maybe someone here knows the answers):
- Something caused my station to become some sort of ghost without collision detection as soon as some event was activated. I can't reproduce it now though but it happened before.
- My sound seems to disappear and reappear sometimes during the mission. I think it happened when I added the Razors to my mission. It is not the whole sound I think but only some sounds, I don't know what causes it or how to fix it.
- One of the Razors had a Kilrathi deathscream once. I deactivated deathscreams now. I found no pirate persona
Questions:
1. Is it possible to have more than one effect in an event?
Something like:
When the cargo is known for more than 5 seconds:
- wing pirates1: set iff to hostile
- wing pirates1: add ai goal attack Alpha1
I did this with a event chain, the second event being true as soon as it is activated. Is there a better way?
2. I am a software developer so I am used to some constructs which I couldn't find in FRED, so maybe someone can answer those questions:
2a. Is there something like an IN-operator in FRED, so I can put ships that belong to different wings in arrays ?
For example in my mission I have an event "all_scanned" that becomes true when all transports are scanned. I used ten "and"s for that so I could include all the transports that shouldn't escape un-scanned. Is there a better way?
2b. Is there an operator in FRED to reference the object itself or one of its attributes, like "this.shipname", so I can use the same event on several ships? In my mission all ships have the same depart cue, just the ship name is changed every time.
3. Which methods are used if I want to do the following;
Don't allow the player to shoot at the ship with the drugs before it becomes hostile. So I have to trigger an event when the player hits a friendly ship. But of course one hit against a transport during a fight with the pirates is likely to happen so the event shouldn't fire instantly.
4. A design question:
Should I use complex expressions for mission goals or is it better to do the complex things in events and reference to the events in the objectives screen.
5. Something completely different: Can someone point me to a tutorial where I can learn to include new ships into Saga? I'll need a flyable Dralthi and/or Darket soon.
