[ZylonBane]

Did a quick search and wasn't able to find anything on this. Has there been any work done on embedding variables in messages?

Like, if you send a message--

     "There are only %%shipsleft%% Ravanas left to destroy!"

the player will see--

     "There are only 57 Ravanas left to destroy!"

or whatever. Should be a pretty simple parsing job.

[RandomTiger]

Probably not because all good missions use sound with their messages. Which would provide problems for such a system.

While I can understand the benifits of this system in other games , in freespace I find it very difficult to get any time to read messages.

It probably inst a simple parsing job either, you dont want to be doing too much string processing at run time.

[ZylonBane]

Originally posted by RandomTiger
Probably not because all good missions use sound with their messages.

Congratulations. You've just insulted practically the entire FRED community.

BTW, the cycles required for character-oriented operations are infinitesimally trivial compared to all the other stuff FS2 is doing every frame. And even if it didn't get used for ingame messages, it would still be invaluable for debugging complex events.

[RandomTiger]

Originally posted by ZylonBane
Congratulations. You've just insulted practically the entire FRED community.

Over-react if you have to but I stick with my comment. I prefer missions with audio messages. Its not like none of the mods are doing it TBP has got some nice stuff and other MOD always seem to be going on about voice actors.

It doesnt mean missions without it are atuomatically crap but the chances are they will be less dramatic.

BTW, the cycles required for character-oriented operations are infinitesimally trivial compared to all the other stuff FS2 is doing every frame. And even if it didn't get used for ingame messages, it would still be invaluable for debugging complex events.

As far as debug goes we can chuck what we want in fairly easily. Doesnt really need to be dynamic or anything, though that obviously would be nice.

[Galemp]

Not sure how useful this would be. You can just use sexps to chesk percent-ships-destroyed or whatever. And if I'm blowing up 20 freighters, I really don't want Alpha 2 to say "Only 15 more to go!" "Only 14 more to go!" "Only 13 more to go!" every two minutes.

[Solatar]

I don't mind missions without voice, but I think you're right. You've insulted Derelict, as well as loads of other great campaigns. Derelict was awesome, but they didn't have any voices.

[RandomTiger]

Im not insulting anyone, I bet those campaigns you mentioned would get better, not worse if message sounds were added.

[Fury]

I think RT is right here.

If you want variable type thing, you can use directive texts which works just fine. I don't think this would be really useful for messages, as they are meant to be exact, with voices if possible.

[Anaz]

yeah, but I don't want to have 20 sexps for the number of fighters left to destroy...