Author Topic: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?  (Read 3146 times)

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Offline Conspark

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A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
I'm a long-time FSO player and admirer. I don't think I've ever seen a more dedicated group of followers and curators for an oldschool game. At this point, I feel a desire to begin contributing more to the community. I've done voiceover work for Fate of the Galaxy (and I'd love to do more voice work), but I'm also willing to learn a valuable skill and put it to good use. So what does the community need most for their modding projects? I have some limited 3d modeling experience (in 3dsMax 2.5 for Tribes RPG), but that's the extent of my hard skills. FRED has always piqued my curiousity but has seemed like a monstrosity I haven't begun to tackle.

My current real-world situation has me job hunting and hopefully back to working 40 a week soon. What that means in practice is that I can't really devote full-time job levels of commitment as BlackDove suggested over in the BWO forum. Still, I want to help and I'd like to find a way to do that.

Where can I begin?

Also, hi. :D
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
Players! Players are really valuable.

Beyond that, FRED is both super powerful and, actually, really easy to learn. It has a couple annoying UI quirks but by doing the tutorial (retail or Diaspora version) and pulling apart a few missions, plus getting on IRC, you'll be up and running in no time.

3D modeling is always useful!

 

Offline Conspark

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
Players! Players are really valuable.

Beyond that, FRED is both super powerful and, actually, really easy to learn. It has a couple annoying UI quirks but by doing the tutorial (retail or Diaspora version) and pulling apart a few missions, plus getting on IRC, you'll be up and running in no time.

3D modeling is always useful!


I suspect I'll always be a Freespace player at heart. Good to know FRED isn't quite as intimidating as my 15 year old self used to think. :D Is there a preferred (or required) program for modelling FS assets? I've seen mention of Blender but I don't know if that's the ideal choice.
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Offline Black Wolf

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
Pretty much anything can be used for modelling - I use Max just fine, and if you have even the basics down, that'll stand you in good stead to pick it back up again.

That said, making ships for FSO is a big ask - modeling, UVing, making LoDs, various different types of textures beyond standards diffuse maps, then converting to pof... None of them are enormously difficult in and of themselves, but pulling it ask together can be time consuming and noted than a little intimidating if you're not adv experienced modder.

My advice, if what you really want to do is jump straight into making new content for FS is to learn FRED. New ships are fantastic, but at the end of the day, they're never going to be anything more than props in missions - it's always going to be FRED that generates playable content.

Personally, in your shoes, I'd do the FRED walkthrough, and then take a crack at creating something like the recently released "A Walk in the Sun" mimicampaign (see the highlights) - a few missions, nothing too complex, but still fun and very achievable.

Most of all, just try to enjoy it! Make something you like, a story you want to tell. That's why we're all here, ultimately.
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Offline Conspark

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
Personally, in your shoes, I'd do the FRED walkthrough, and then take a crack at creating something like the recently released "A Walk in the Sun" mimicampaign (see the highlights) - a few missions, nothing too complex, but still fun and very achievable.

Fair point about models as props. I have one particular idea in mind that really spurred my desire to model something, but I can always use stand-ins for a while. I noticed that the FRED Academy forum is dead; I'm not home at the moment, but when I get home I can tackle the FRED tutorials.

Do you have any basic, useful tips for a complete FRED newbie? Thanks for the response :D
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Offline procdrone

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
models weapons sounds. They find no use if there are campaigns to use it ! We need missions.
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Offline Conspark

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
models weapons sounds. They find no use if there are campaigns to use it ! We need missions.

True enough. What do you think you'd like to see in a short mission series (or even one-off) or campaign that you haven't seen before?
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Offline Black Wolf

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
Personally, in your shoes, I'd do the FRED walkthrough, and then take a crack at creating something like the recently released "A Walk in the Sun" mimicampaign (see the highlights) - a few missions, nothing too complex, but still fun and very achievable.
Do you have any basic, useful tips for a complete FRED newbie? Thanks for the response :D

Hundreds :p But I don't have time to type them all out, let's start with some very basic stuff.

First and foremost, and I know I'm repeating myself - do the walkthrough. Actually do it, as opposed to just reading it or whatever (a lot of people do, I did when I fist started). You'll get so much out of it - it's no exaggeration to say that once you've done the walkthrough, you have all of the basic skills you need to make pretty much any mission you want. This is particularly true of the Diaspora walkthrough, since it covers more FSO stuff, but even the original FS2 walkthrough is still completely valid, and you will pick up the FSO specific stuff as time goes by.

As far as super basic stuff goes, FRED has a somewhat unintuitive, keyboard based camera control system. Treat it like you're flying your camera around ingame - A and Z to move forwards and backwards, the numpad keys to rotate and pan around. Hold down Ctrl and click to add a new ship (took me a few goes back in the day to figure that out), then double click on it to bring up the ship editor. Spacebar will lock your selection - has a few niche uses, but it's more important to know its there in case you accidentally lock your selection and can't figure out how to turn it off. Finally, Shift-E opens the events editor - you can open it from the menu, but it (should) be the window you use the most, by far, so that shortcut is a good one to know.

Your first instinct will be to throw down a bunch of friendly and enemy fighters and get them to fight. If you do, make sure all the ships have at least basic AI goals set by default (you can do that in a number of ways (From the events editor, wing editor or (and this is the easiest for new FREDders), from the "Initial Orders" button in the ships editor we talked about before). Your second instinct will be to throw two capships against one another. If you do, try to get them to fight by flying waypoints rather than using the "Attack" AI command. Attack just has them circling one another, which can be fine, but waypoints can be better in a lot of scenarios. Again, you can do this via the AI orders using the "Waypoints" or "Waypoints once" orders, depending on whether you want the ships to do a repeating patrol, or just follow the path once and stop. Obviously, you have to put the waypoints in the mission first. Place them like any other ship.

One FSO specific thing - open up the mission specs editor and check the box marked "All Ships Beam Freed By Default" - this eliminates a bunch of "beam-free-all" sexps, which they'll talk about in the walkthrough. While you're in there, pick some mission music too - easy to forget.

Mission briefings are easier to make than debriefings (though you will learn how to do both in the walkthrough), but I have one pet peeve that I don't think is covered - the camera is often at a weird angle. When making your briefing, set the grid so that it's roughly perpendicular to the camera, and then make use of the "Align Object" button in the Misc menu - it will snap to perfectly 90 degrees, and it will look so much better. :)

There's so much more to say, but these are just some very basic tips. Do the walkthrough, play with FRED a bit, and have fun - you'll learn so much so quickly if you try.
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
All that is perfect advice, also once you have your 'place 5000 ships' syndrome tamed a bit, try your first Cool Smart Iterative Design! Set up a very small skirmish, say an enemy cruiser and an enemy fighter wing vs. two friendly wings, and play around with the positions of the friendly/enemy ships, the number of wingmen, and the available weapons. Check out how adding or removing elements, tweaking AI classes, and so on alters the pace and intensity of the fight.

You can have the mission open in FRED and the mission open in the game, so you can play the mission, make changes in FRED, save, hit 'restart mission', and try out (most of) your new tweaks!

 

Offline Conspark

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
Black Wolf: Great stuff; didn't even know the beam-free-all default was a thing. Thanks :D

Battuta: I noticed that "AI Type" has quite a few options such as military ranks and some others that I assume were made as part of FSO. Is there a basic rundown on how each of these may behave compared to others? Does it really only impact fighters (and how dodgy / accurate they are)?

I've been messing around and decided to make a Fenris kamikaze a Rakshasa just because. I noticed that the Fenris clipped all the way to the center of the Shivan cruiser before detonating. I assume this is a hitbox issue, but if I wanted to get around it to make it appear that it detonated on contact via setting up some custom SEXPs, how would I go about it?

I'm also wondering how ambitious I should try to be in making my first mission(s). I have two separate ideas for a standalone mission / very short campaign, but one of them would ideally require a custom (station) model. Should I perhaps make a post over in the FRED forum to get some feedback on said ideas?

Thanks for all the input guys
« Last Edit: April 03, 2016, 07:05:07 pm by Conspark »
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Offline Black Wolf

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
What sort of station? You might be surprised by what is already out there.
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Offline Taranis

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
As someone who started Fredding mission less than two months ago here are some of the things I found challenging and some stuff I wish I'd known earlier.

1) Backgrounds - I really recommend finding some skyboxes to use rather than creating your own background. So easy to plug in and many of them look awesome. Alternatively there are some ready made backgrounds up on the wiki you can use by opening up a mission file in wordpad and pasting the data.

2) Look through other mods and missions - If you haven't already, download VPviewer and use it to look through other mods to see how their modpack was organised. Opening up some of the missions you really enjoyed as a player in Fred2 and looking around at the events can also give you inspiration for your own mission. For example, after looking through the events of 'Her Finest Hour' a Blue Planet: War in Heaven mission, I decided I really wanted to create a mission with random fire-points and repairing turrets that locked on low health which spawned mission three in my mini-campaign.

3) Use the debugger - Seriously do this. You don't need to run the game with the debugger every time you play but any time you put in an event your not sure is going to work right or a new ship use the debugger to see if Freespace has a problem with it. If you fix the errors as you go along it's so much nicer than reaching the end of a mission and realising there's potential crash problems in there. 

4) Your first mission is not going to be perfect. I recommend doing a single mission first, giving yourself a week (more if you're time constrained) deadline to finish it and just get it out into the wild. I found having a mission I'd released critiqued was the best way to get advice or feedback as you can relate any points directly to the mission. Also actually releasing something keeps your motivation up.

Balance stuff - Have a clear idea of what you want the player to do in the mission. Whatever it is give the player specific objectives to make them feel crucial to the mission. If you can idle at the start point, hit time compression and watch the mission beat itself then it's probably a bit easy.

Use directives to make it clear exactly what the player should be doing at a given moment

If you're having trouble balancing a capital ship battle changing the beam refire rate of the ship you want to make less powerful is a great alternative to adding more fighters or bombers.

Finally if you can't figure out how to work something come onto the FS mibbit IRC channel. There's some highly experienced people on there who tend to answer questions pretty quickly if they're online and just talking to someone about what your doing on Fred2 can sometimes overcome a block.

Anyway, Fredding missions is great fun and really rewarding when you finally release them so final advice would be to dive straight in, don't worry about making mistakes and enjoy yourself.

 

Offline Conspark

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
What sort of station? You might be surprised by what is already out there.

A Shivan station - the bigger, the better for the most part.

Taranis: Great advice there, especially on the debugger. I have zero clue what I'm doing with events yet so I'm sure that'll come in handy. Is your own campaign released?

Another generic question: What's general policy on deriving something from established continuities - specifically, Blue Planet? I really enjoyed reading what they set up in the tech room describing Terran-Vasudan relations and the general socioeconomic climate following Capella. More specifically, what if I created a mission(s) that were within that continuity but didn't necessarily have any significant impact on the universe as a whole (to avoid contradictions with AoA and WiH)?
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Offline The E

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
Another generic question: What's general policy on deriving something from established continuities - specifically, Blue Planet? I really enjoyed reading what they set up in the tech room describing Terran-Vasudan relations and the general socioeconomic climate following Capella. More specifically, what if I created a mission(s) that were within that continuity but didn't necessarily have any significant impact on the universe as a whole (to avoid contradictions with AoA and WiH)?

I obviously can't speak for other mods, but BP in particular has absolutely no problems with other people taking our concepts and playing in our world, as it were. Generally speaking, fan works like that are always welcome; although it is polite to ask permission, it is not necessary.
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Offline Taranis

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
Yup mine's the minicampaign - a walk in the sun. You can find it either through the highlight or in the missions and campaigns section. The missions could be quite interesting to look at from a beginning fredder's point of view as they're not that complex. I remember opening some Blue Planet missions and feeling a bit overwhelmed.

 

Offline Conspark

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
Thanks for all the input people. I'm about to make a questions thread over in the FRED forum. See you around :D
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Offline Black Wolf

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Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
What sort of station? You might be surprised by what is already out there.

A Shivan station - the bigger, the better for the most part.

Ask, and ye shall receive, apparently.

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=91842.0
TWISTED INFINITIES · SECTORGAME· FRONTLINES
Rarely Updated P3D.
Burn the heretic who killed F2S! Burn him, burn him!!- GalEmp

 
Re: A Desire to Contribute - What's Needed?
The Shivan gods smile upon thee, what can I say? :D
Previous Projects: Ancient-Shivan War | GTF Durandal

Current Projects: Exile: Into The Dark Waters (Proof-editing/misc)