I think FREDers are what we need most. Many other issues/shortfalls can be worked around, but no FRED == no missions to play.
Campaigns in general, there seems to be a big lack of new content being created recently.
Do people around here prefer to wait years for super-awesome campaigns with all the bells and whistles? Or would they be willing to accept some less-fancy campaigns, if that meant more releases and less of the between-megaprojects drought we're seeing these days? Of course, I'm well aware that the level of a campaign's complexity is up to individual FREDders, but what would people personally prefer?
Only assets? If so I'd say we need more civillian type ships of both vasudans and terrans. If not then definitely more fredders.
Do people around here prefer to wait years for super-awesome campaigns with all the bells and whistles? Or would they be willing to accept some less-fancy campaigns, if that meant more releases and less of the between-megaprojects drought we're seeing these days? Of course, I'm well aware that the level of a campaign's complexity is up to individual FREDders, but what would people personally prefer?
Do people around here prefer to wait years for super-awesome campaigns with all the bells and whistles? Or would they be willing to accept some less-fancy campaigns, if that meant more releases and less of the between-megaprojects drought we're seeing these days? Of course, I'm well aware that the level of a campaign's complexity is up to individual FREDders, but what would people personally prefer?
I know a lot of people simply don't take it up. They open up a mission in WiH and spend some time looking at the events and decide the bar is too high now. They're not completely wrong, either.
And the second: YOUR ATTENTION!
When some user posts his first mission/model etc, just mow your ass, play it, check it, say some good word, provide some feedback... Whatever! There is no worse thing, than posting some stuff you hardly worked on for hours and being ignored than everyone, but 2-3 users.
I've been thinking the bar is too high. We released Frontlines 2334 and 2335, and while Lepanto and I were only brought in on the last few months of the project, I've seen what went into it over the better part of a year. The campaign doesn't pull up trees, nor is it meant to, but it's still very good quality imo, and set in a imo woefully under-explored period of Freespace history, the Terran-Vasudan War. It's got custom models and weapons, and a place to call home here on the forums, and it really didn't get much attention when released. I'm not complaining or anything, it just is what it is I guess.
Oh yes, for sure there will be other factors besides just quality raising the bar.I've been thinking the bar is too high. We released Frontlines 2334 and 2335, and while Lepanto and I were only brought in on the last few months of the project, I've seen what went into it over the better part of a year. The campaign doesn't pull up trees, nor is it meant to, but it's still very good quality imo, and set in a imo woefully under-explored period of Freespace history, the Terran-Vasudan War. It's got custom models and weapons, and a place to call home here on the forums, and it really didn't get much attention when released. I'm not complaining or anything, it just is what it is I guess.
One possibility might be that people are becoming more picky with what they play, not because of quality concerns but because of time concerns. The population of HLP is aging and a lot of people I suspect have less free time. Plus nowadays, a lot of games out there seem designed to monopolize your time playing them. That's in addition to the plethora of titles available, good and bad.
I've been thinking the bar is too high. We released Frontlines 2334 and 2335, and while Lepanto and I were only brought in on the last few months of the project, I've seen what went into it over the better part of a year. The campaign doesn't pull up trees, nor is it meant to, but it's still very good quality imo, and set in a imo woefully under-explored period of Freespace history, the Terran-Vasudan War. It's got custom models and weapons, and a place to call home here on the forums, and it really didn't get much attention when released. I'm not complaining or anything, it just is what it is I guess.Yup, we had the same thing with Shadow Genesis. While this is one of the biggest mods and longest campaigns ever released and many people enjoyed it, we didn't grab as many applauses as I wanted. I think SG was mostly enjoyed by players who likes hard, bigger missions with a lot of tactics in, and Frontlines - by old-school players. Rest of the community prefer something less sophisticated.
Yeah; while we really look forward to the masterpieces from our top-class FREDders, people with less or no FREDding experience can still contribute to the community by making campaigns with fewer or no new assets.Sometimes I have this strange feeling, that tells me that people won't care about anything, which is not BP :P. Majority of newcomers are people, who familiarized themselves with FS in age of BP, Vassago's Dirge, Bem Cavalgar and other top-quality projects with much more modern mission design. Actually I love Frontlines - great quality, old-school project, but majority of players prefer something fresh... And not too hard for average player. Too bad, but on the other hand, it forces us to develop more advanced missions.
The recent newbie influx from Steam might be a good opportunity to try and drum up some more FREDding talent. Maybe a Newbie FREDders' Contest, with a deadline in six months or so? Just putting that out there.+1 :yes:
I sometimes wonder what it would have been like for me if I had arrived early on in HLP's life. It's brilliant that there is so much content for me to play, and I'm sure that coming in late is better than coming in early because of that, but when a campaign in Frontlines is released, where the backbone of the campaign is created by a multi-talented 13 year veteran of the community in Black Wolf, over the most part of a year, set in a blank canvas setting in the Terran-Vasudan War, gets a space on the board, gets highlighted, gets on the news ticker, and receives not much attention upon release, what hope is there for a newbie these days? It's not all doom and gloom of course, Lepanto has done well with his Battle Captains missions. And there are other new projects in the works by new people, who I wish luck.
Oh yes, pure T/V War. Check out the Frontlines board. :)I sometimes wonder what it would have been like for me if I had arrived early on in HLP's life. It's brilliant that there is so much content for me to play, and I'm sure that coming in late is better than coming in early because of that, but when a campaign in Frontlines is released, where the backbone of the campaign is created by a multi-talented 13 year veteran of the community in Black Wolf, over the most part of a year, set in a blank canvas setting in the Terran-Vasudan War, gets a space on the board, gets highlighted, gets on the news ticker, and receives not much attention upon release, what hope is there for a newbie these days? It's not all doom and gloom of course, Lepanto has done well with his Battle Captains missions. And there are other new projects in the works by new people, who I wish luck.
Oh is that a T-VWar campaign? Hmmn. Might have to check it out. Though don't have Freespace installed and haven't played in a few years :)
(I've heard more is planned)Yes.
You think? I reckon if someone put out a competently FREDed campaign with a good story, but no overly complex missions or huge modpacks, it wouldn't suffer from comparison with Blue Planet. If you're trying to actualise your vision of Freespace 3 then you might get a bit of that but I'd say the less ambitious campaigns would be as popular as ever. If there were anything as good as Derelict or Homesick or Sync released tomorrow I expect they'd get the praise they deserved.
You think? I reckon if someone put out a competently FREDed campaign with a good story, but no overly complex missions or huge modpacks, it wouldn't suffer from comparison with Blue Planet. If you're trying to actualise your vision of Freespace 3 then you might get a bit of that but I'd say the less ambitious campaigns would be as popular as ever. If there were anything as good as Derelict or Homesick or Sync released tomorrow I expect they'd get the praise they deserved.
That was called FRED Academy and the number of campaigns they have released is... none (so far!). That's not to say its been useless, just that past experience suggests you aren't likely to get an actual campaign out of the deal. The experience gained with it can be valuable however.
You think? I reckon if someone put out a competently FREDed campaign with a good story, but no overly complex missions or huge modpacks, it wouldn't suffer from comparison with Blue Planet. If you're trying to actualise your vision of Freespace 3 then you might get a bit of that but I'd say the less ambitious campaigns would be as popular as ever. If there were anything as good as Derelict or Homesick or Sync released tomorrow I expect they'd get the praise they deserved.
Thing is, at the time of its release I don't think Derelict was less amibitious. It's a full campaign, which not many can say. For me it's still one of the best experiences I had playing a 3rd party campaign. They had less to work with but did more with it. It was the go-to campaign for a long while for anyone looking for more content.
Yeah, TheHound. If you read this - don't screw up with Venice Mirror :P.
I think that hits the nail right on the head. We need to come up with ways to make the place more welcoming to new FREDders so that they can develop into the quality guys we know that they can become after only a few months.
Playing more early releases and beginning missions would definitely help.
What sort of problems did you have that needed trial and error? I'm always on the look out for fun tutorials the make.
Yeah, check out the first two posts when I released my first missions with emphasis on the fact that I was a beginner:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=83179.0
And it takes until the third page to get to any actual constructive feedback (thanks Norbert).
I also got plenty of stick when trying to ask for FRED help. I got the help but I had to go through some attitude in order to get it.
Axem done a great job in creating many useful tutorials, showing people how to do magic in their missions.
It also should be noted that if people want more help with FREDding, I've rewritten the entire FRED documentation to cover pretty much every single SCP feature added until around mid 2012.
FREDing is long, hard work. From my perspective I'd really like the Events editor to function a bit more like a text editor. I can actually write events in Notepad quicker than I can in FRED (what with all the slooooow clicking and so on) so having a hybrid of the two would make it a lot easier to write events if I could tab-complete and it'd bring up sexps which match.
Maybe I'm doing it a disservice and the FREDing is more complex than I thought, but it never struck me as anything special in that regard. It actually encouraged me to start FREDing because I thought it seemed fairly doable to create missions of that level of quality.
I suppose this goes back to the original point about the bar appearing higher. While the idea that campaigns with less complex FREDing aren't worthwhile is absurd to me, given that Blue Planet is now the community's favourite campaign nobody is going to play that and think "I could make something like this" unless they're already extremely savvy with it.
Large scale static structures, definitely. So we don't have to end up using http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/GTI_Bretonia for everything :p
Surely Zod capships are one of our biggest shortfalls?
Problem is that FREDders get a remarkably low amount of feedback on multiplayer missions in general. For instance, look what happened (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=86897.0) when I spent about a week rewriting one of Diaspora's missions for multiplayer Coop.
Hell, I still don't know if the mission works or has major bugs.
Problem is that FREDders get a remarkably low amount of feedback on multiplayer missions in general. For instance, look what happened (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=86897.0) when I spent about a week rewriting one of Diaspora's missions for multiplayer Coop.
Hell, I still don't know if the mission works or has major bugs.
IMO, being able to run a multiplayer co-op mission by yourself (with bots as wingmen) in the multiplayer environment (ie. respawns, possibly being able to simulate being client instead of host) would be a major improvement, but barring any major improvements to accessibility, I doubt anything will change with regards to multiplayer content.