[karajorma]

I figured it was time to ask these questions so that the mission designers amongst us could compare.

Which mission do you think contains your best FREDding? Which mission by someone else do you think has the best FREDding you've ever seen?

People who just play the games can have their own choices about favourite missions to play, but I'm talking about the technical side of the craft. "The Oscar for best FREDding goes to....." sort of stuff. What missions are you most proud of? What solution to a problem do you think was the most elegant?


It occurred to me earlier today that except for a few simple occasions, I've gotten out of the habit of cracking open other people's missions to see how they work. That's something I used to do all the time and it was the main way I learned how to FRED. And I always enjoyed figuring out why things were done in a certain way. If I had to say what was the best FREDding I'd seen now, I'd be hard pressed to name anything modern because I don't do that any more.

So which missions are worth cracking open?

[Rodo]

I remmember cracking open tons of missions from either ST:R and BP, but I've never... EVER seen something as sickling as alphabetically ordered sexps.
I was not expecting to see something like that, and so I nominate Goober.
The second runner must be Battuta for his amazing work on BP missions of course.

Mind you all, my knowledge is limited to a few select missions I cracked open. There a good possibility that other works of art exist from which I'm not aware of.

[karajorma]

Yeah, that's why I want people to suggest which missions are worth cracking open. Do you have a BP or ST:R mission that really impressed you?

Do you have anything you've FREDded to nominate as your best work? Doesn't matter if you feel it's not top notch FREDding, just wondering what problems you felt were hardest to solve.

In my case, I not only suggested which of my missions contained some of my best work, but I actually dissected them for other FREDders.

[Axem]

If we're talking pure technical skill, that would have to be the old version of BP:WiH's Eyes in the Storm, in which I managed to make a tower defense game mode, complete with build mode and top down camera with SEXPs only. But even that has been obsoleted by much more effective Lua scripting now. I was really proud with overcoming some of the hacks I had to use to make it work. Such as implementing camera movement acceleration, so the camera could move both slow for fine adjustments and fast for moving across the area, and snapping to targets to select platforms.

But my favorite part of it all was how I made the game select which platform got which "tower" (or tank in this case). It was so convoluted and twisted I can barely make it out from reading the mission with nothing but SEXPs. Basically (I think), after you selected a tank and platform, a ship called "Tank Summoner" would launch a flare weapon at the platform. This weapon did like 10 damage or something. When a platform got selected, each platform got a armor level attached to it. So depending on which tank you selected, the damage the platform would take would be different on the weapon hit. From that it was easy to tell with the get-damage-caused sexp, which tank class to add there. (This system also broke hilariously when someone edited the damage on the flare for some reason, all of a sudden nothing worked!)

Technically, its my best FREDding (I don't think I'll ever make something as complicated again (even though I did (but then I used Lua to uncomplicate it))), but there are other missions I'm more proud of, just for their feel, pace and general contribution to the campaign.

(Runner up is 'Anything is Possible' from BP:WiH!)

And if you're going to force me to praise someone else... I'm just going to point at Battuta's chaotic battlefield that is Her Finest Hour and call it a day. I don't know how he got it to work, but somehow it did. When he had troubles with it, I was scared to open the mission file and attempt to understand it. I'd just nod my head and go "yep yep have you checked this" and hopefully he would find the issue himself.

[karajorma]

Do you still have the SEXP version knocking around? I wouldn't mind taking a look at it. 

[Axem]

Sure. No warranty on this or any damage that may come from viewing it!

[attachment DELETED!! by Strong Bad]

[Spoon]

This is an interesting topic, something that is consistently overlooked by the average player. What I've found the vast majority of players judge a campaign on, is atmosphere and story telling (and not infrequently a healthy dose of nostalgia). And the technical aspect of things usually only starts factoring in when its bugged or otherwise gets in the way of the gameplay.
I like to place Axem and Battuta on a special fred pedestal a lot. And when it comes to the technical side of things, Axem stands on such an elevated plateau, there's nobody who comes even close to his skill. The whole of JAD 2.22 (that I've had the very long and grueling pleasure of beta testing) comes with so many mind boggling technical niftiness, that you'd forget you're playing this in the Freespace 2 engine.

From a purely technical standpoint, Mission 3 in WoD RE is probably my most complicated one. It has custom hud gauges and a whole load of sexp's related to the bombs that you set. But from a gameplay perspective, I'm not really pleased with how the mission flows. I can't really point to a mission of my own making that I'd consider a favorite or a masterpiece, because honestly, my missions feel pretty lackluster to me in the technical regard because of the stuff Axem exposes me to 
Which at the same time also taught me the valuable lesson of not spending too much time on making missions overly technical, because it makes really slim returns on the projected amount of 'praise profit'!

Also let me mimic Axem's shoutout to BP's Her Finest Hour, that mission was amazing from both a technical and gameplay stand point.

[karajorma]

Which at the same time also taught me the valuable lesson of not spending too much time on making missions overly technical, because it makes really slim returns on the projected amount of 'praise profit'!

Which is the main reason why I wanted to make this thread.

I think if we point out technical excellence in each other's missions that helps encourage people to make a little more effort on them. I know that I did some of my best work on BtRL because the only other FREDder on the team at the time was Axem and we both had someone to look appropriately horrified at how unnecessarily complex we were making things.


I do want to hear from everyone though, not just those of us with big established releases.

[Goober5000]

I remmember cracking open tons of missions from either ST:R and BP, but I've never... EVER seen something as sickling as alphabetically ordered sexps.
I was not expecting to see something like that, and so I nominate Goober.

Eh?  When did I alphabetize sexps?


I remember being very impressed with how extensively the Beyond the Red Line campaign used branching, particularly the Scar mission where the mission accommodated everything from your performance in the prior mission to the player explicitly cheating.  (Which, upon rereading Karajorma's post, I see that he's already linked to.)  And that's on top of the regular FREDding to make a very entertaining and playable mission just at face value.  And this is from someone who hasn't seen the reimagined BSG.

The Blue Planet missions are also extremely technically well made, though I've never cracked one open to take a look at it.  I imagine I'd find pages and pages of sexps, many with when-argument.  I still need to play JAD 2.22 and Wings of Dawn too.

A special mention has to go to Windmills, which is entirely in a class of its own FREDding-wise.  I didn't particularly like the campaign, but it was a technical tour-de-force.

For my own missions, I'm particularly pleased with He Who Rides the Tiger and Blood of the Innocents in ST:R, both of which involved some heavy-duty creative sexping to get things to play out exactly as I wanted to.  He Who Rides the Tiger had the additional challenge of trying to stuff everything into the retail sexp limit.  But I think the most technically complex mission I've written (that's released, anyway) is I Has A Limit, the penultimate mission of DEM 1.5.  It uses the camera sexps, variables and when-argument, stupid AI tricks, and cutscene hacks, and it even screws with the HUD.  Furthermore, it uses a cloaked AI ship to increase the resolution of the sexp event delays, as the mission-time-msecs sexp didn't exist yet.

I also have to mention Bem Cavalgar, which took the proof of concept I published way back in the day as FreeSpaceLancer and finally made a playable campaign out of it.  A pretty good campaign, too.

I think the missions I'm most looking forward to playing, though, are the ones in Between the Ashes.  The demo missions are extremely dense with plot and content, very fun to play (once I actually understood what I was supposed to be doing) and technically top-notch.  The actual campaign missions should be even better.

[karajorma]

I remember looking at that DEM mission and being impressed. Although I mostly looked at it cause I couldn't figure out how to beat it.

[Admiral MS]

Having never released any missions I can't boast with my (nonexistent) FREDing skills. LUA magic doesn't count here and even there I guess I'm lagging behind by now.

Also let me mimic Axem's shoutout to BP's Her Finest Hour, that mission was amazing from both a technical and gameplay stand point.

I got to second that. At one point several years ago I thought that the mission feels like a tactic game and I modified it so it could be used with the RTS script. That included understanding and changing many of the important events in a way that they properly interact with the player just clicking at stuff. Not exactly easy considering the amazing FREDing work in there.

[karajorma]

LUA magic doesn't count here and even there I guess I'm lagging behind by now.

You could always start a topic on the Scripting board though.

[0rph3u5]

I keep asking myself "how do you keep impressive but in the end pointless features from spilling into this"...

e.g. one of the missions in Hellgate: Ikeya has the following attached to it (only in the version on my hard drive):


It is doing nothing really (and I don't think I am going to remove it when I re-release the campaign, there is just no point: players are not going to notice and anyone who looks will shrug it off)

[karajorma]

Hehe. I don't see anything wrong with that.

[Goober5000]

Neither do I.   That's always been in the back of my mind to implement in the SCP, but this is the first time I've seen it implemented via sexps.  Well done!

[karajorma]

Neither do I.   That's always been in the back of my mind to implement in the SCP, but this is the first time I've seen it implemented via sexps.  Well done!

I was planning to make it part of the team loadout changes. It would be really nice if you could specify how much ammo the support ship had before the start of the mission. I never got round to actually doing it but it is planned.

So yeah, it's really nice to see it (sorta) done via SEXPs and if you used it with the existing team loadout you can already have all kinds of cool things happen (support ship gets blown up? Less ammo available next mission).

One funny thing about having the source code available is that people often ask for a feature instead of trying to roll it themselves using SEXPs and Lua. That's why it's nice to see the examples on this thread where people just decided to do it themselves instead. Reminds me a little of the old days before the SCP release.