Modding, Mission Design, and Coding > The FRED Workshop

Lost in the Mist, a FreeSpace 2 short side campaign

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Bryan See:
Okay, since several years ago, y'all asked me to start something small - no voice acting, stick in FS2 territory, few missions. And I did.

While designing these missions, I've decided to not to make the player character, Kappa 3, a talking character until the very end of the campaign. I made these missions continuous without a briefing screen in between via red alert setting.

It can be played in Vanilla FS2 at minimum, but it is best be played if MediaVPs is enabled, and even better if Blue Planet is enabled.

The campaign is packed into a file called fs2-litm.zip. It is attached here.

To play the campaign, extract its contents to the data/missions folder. Then run FS2 and go to Campaigns and select "Lost in the Mist", and start playing.

As a first-time modder, I am starting small. And this is the result.

[attachment eaten by a Shivan]

NeonShivan:
Congratulations. You’ve managed to crush what little expectations we had for this campaign.

wookieejedi:

--- Quote from: Bryan See on December 08, 2019, 12:48:45 pm ---Okay, since several years ago, y'all asked me to start something small - no voice acting, stick in FS2 territory, few missions. And I did.

While designing these missions, I've decided to not to make the player character, Kappa 3, a talking character until the very end of the campaign. I made these missions continuous without a briefing screen in between via red alert setting.

It can be played in Vanilla FS2 at minimum, but it is best be played if MediaVPs is enabled, and even better if Blue Planet is enabled.

The campaign is packed into a file called fs2-litm.zip. It is attached here.

To play the campaign, extract its contents to the data/missions folder. Then run FS2 and go to Campaigns and select "Lost in the Mist", and start playing.

As a first-time modder, I am starting small. And this is the result.

--- End quote ---

It is indeed encouraging that you are taking the advice to start small. Building skills takes time and patience and small steps. Listening to the the constructive feedback is a very vital first step. The key now is to always play-test missions and do your best to take future constructive criticism as feedback to improve. Key word is construction, if someone is taking the time to write out something in a constructive way it is a good idea to try and follow that advice.

spart_n:
Lost in the Mist is boring at its best. Let's keep to its best.

I understand that you've made a decision to keep Kappa 3 silent, but the entire wing has also lost their voice. Communications are breaking down and Kappa just completely ignores the problem, flying past without as much as an input. This is made even more glaring when you fly for a minute and a half in awkward silence. I don't expect voice acting, but *something* would be great so it doesn't feel so lifelessly dull. When Pisces wing showed up, in the middle of the dogfight I realize my fellow wingmen were not assisting at all, resulting in Kappa 1's death. On my second playthrough (will explain later why I played this through a second time) is when Kappa assisted me; I was about 10k+m away by the Aquitaine curious to see what happened. Nothing did. They reached their waypoint and waited around, and Pisces wing didn't show up until I closed distance. Then and ONLY then did Kappa wing actually assisted with no casualities; because whatever Waypoint you had going prevented them from such. After the Dogfight, there was a slap black screen that made me think my PC crashed.
It's called 'fade to black', not 'slapped black on screen', mate.

The second half is where problems start to arise. "Escape" means nothing to me, at all. There's no waypoint, no objective marker, just "escape" until I flew adrift for a couple minutes until yet another black screen. I get the FS2 dialogue and...nothing happens. The screen remains black, I'm pretty sure I hear Shivan fighters, but it doesn't end.

Also was there a reason to be able to call in the support ship for both halves? I assumed the second one I was completely on my own.

All in all, if I had to give this a numbered review, it'd be low. Things feel slapped on without much context and this extends to the briefing where you're ordered to follow Zeta wing. The campaign virtually doesn't end and overall it just feels like a wasted execution of a decent idea. Some more context, polish and something to actually interest the player outside of two dogfights and an escape with no escape plan and this would've been worth the 10 minutes.

Nightmare:
I'm positvely surprised. Compared with Shattered Stars it is a tremendous improvement. I played through the entire campaign without a single crash-to-desktop. What I liked most was your extensive use of the fade-out SEXP; even though other players might not like it, the sole reliance on acustic rather than visual enviroments over most of the campaign was truly unexpected.

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