[General Battuta]

I'm sure most of you remember how much of a relief the dialogue skip option for long cutscenes was.

We've done one better now, and added in-mission checkpoints to one of our longer, more epic set piece battles.  Using a menu at mission start, you can move directly to checkpoints you've unlocked, jumping forward to two key points in the mission assuming you've already reached them by normal means. Warships and fighters will be teleported around, summoned, vanished, damaged or destroyed as appropriate.

This is hardly an original idea. There are a lot of talented FREDders in the community who've played with this concept and could doubtless pull it off, and maybe have already - Axem, BlackWolf, Karajorma, FUBAR, lots of others.

I just wanted to mention Blue Planet's take on this concept, because I think it's cool, because I think these guys all deserve a shout-out (Karajorma gave The_E and I the critical bit of help we needed to get this working, and FUBAR was also a huge help), and because it shows how much potential there is in the FreeSpace Open engine.

Just to get this working we pulled off a number of fun tricks. One of my favorites was building a real-time in-mission display of a ship's world coordinates in FRED, so that we could figure out where a ship was at a given moment, write down those coordinates, and set-object-position the ship to that location when the checkpoint was activated. (This has the helpful side effect of writing the coordinates to the mission log, so you can track the ship's position at every second of the mission.) Setting this up is a pretty simple exercise with variables.

If anyone who is not already an awesome genius FREDder like the aforementioned chaps wants some pointers on how to pull this off, or wants to suggest improvements, it could be a fun conversation.

[Commander Zane]

Sounds interesting, would this mean say two players start on the same checkpoint on the same mission, but there are subtle differences in where ships are positioned?

[Droid803]

So, does the checkpoint save what you got during the first playthrough (as in, something like storing the data on the ships position, health etc. in a variable or something), or does it just jump the ships to about where they should be?

[General Battuta]

So, does the checkpoint save what you got during the first playthrough (as in, something like storing the data on the ships position, health etc. in a variable or something), or does it just jump the ships to about where they should be?

For the moment, it saves what you got damage-wise. Shipboard damage control allows warships a bit of recovery from cripplingly low health, and the player can repair her ship using Procyon Insurgency-style modular armor, so if you're in a bad way at the checkpoint you should still be all right. (We could always set a floor on the minimum health that's saved.)

Individual fighter positions, however, are not saved; the player and wingmen are just moved to a default new start position. You could pretty easily save position data (not sure about orientation?), and even limit that save to a certain radius of the expected player position, but I doubt we'll do that.

[Colonol Dekker]

I remember looking through JAD3s final mission in FRED2. Didn't it use some sort of checkpoint system variable?

[Mongoose]

This whole concept is an incredibly good idea.  There's nothing more frustrating than making it most of the way through a long, difficult mission, only to fail right at the end because of one last tricky bit or random misfortune.  The more you can keep us from replaying one single mission over and over, the more sense of immersion you'll retain.

[Commander Zane]

I don't believe so, that would be rather useful though...that's a lengthy mission.
Mission 4 on DEM 1.5 does it though.

[The E]

This whole concept is an incredibly good idea.  There's nothing more frustrating than making it most of the way through a long, difficult mission, only to fail right at the end because of one last tricky bit or random misfortune.  The more you can keep us from replaying one single mission over and over, the more sense of immersion you'll retain.

Yep, we want you to replay the missions because they're awesome, not because you made a single mistake 15 minutes in.

[Droid803]

I don't believe so, that would be rather useful though...that's a lengthy mission.
Mission 4 on DEM 1.5 does it though.

I don't recall being presented with that option.
I had to time compress aaaaaallllllllll the talking away when I got supernova'd.

[Commander Zane]

After getting to the encounter if you start over, after the first time you're attacked and you get to the long speech press 1.

[Droid803]

Did that show up somewhere? I must have missed it due to time compressing.

[Commander Zane]

Training message I think...I've already forgotten.

[Timerlane]

Right as the Kelpie jumps in, a training message along the lines of, "You've already seen this dialogue. You may press 1 to skip", appears.

It doesn't seem to appear if you replay the mission from the Tech Room simulator, though.

[General Battuta]

Right as the Kelpie jumps in, a training message along the lines of, "You've already seen this dialogue. You may press 1 to skip", appears.

It doesn't seem to appear if you replay the mission from the Tech Room simulator, though.

Dialogue skips are already present in Blue Planet. A checkpoint system is a little more involved.

[-Norbert-]

No matter if someone did it before or not, it's certainly a great feature to have!
Though I hope I won't need it too often 

[m!m]

First off, congratulations for this!   
I once tried the same thing but I got stuck at the orientation of the ships because there is no SEXP for this...

So, I assume that this whole system is FRED-based, but wouldn't it be possible to get the position and orientation of all ships using Lua-scripts?
I'm not as experienced in scripting as in FRED, but I think it would be possible to save everything from damage to orientation for every ship.

Another question: Do you save the variable campaign persistent or only mission persistent?

[General Battuta]

Neither one will work, because both are reset on mission restart. You have to use player persistent variables.

That was actually a point we were stuck on until Karajorma helped us out.

As for the orientation problem, it's not saved at the moment. Scripting could be helpful, but I don't think it's a huge priority. I don't think you need to get exact states; what you need to do is give the player the option to start the mission from a later point. Perfect resolution isn't too necessary.

[The E]

It helps that in the mission in question, all capital ships travel along fixed paths, so you instantly know which way they're going to face.

[General Battuta]

For the most part, yep. There's a bit of wizardry involved just to be sure, and even if the warships were on more complex paths we could still pull it off easily enough using the above-mentioned coordinate-printing system combined with setting warships to face their next waypoint.