[YodaSean]

Freespace2 needs some sort of "Quick Mission" mode, sort of like the skirmish mode in X-Wing Alliance, where the player can easily make a simple mission by telling the game which ships they want in the battle, the environment(asteroids, minefield), and the ships'  goals(attack primary target, is primary target, etc.).  This could be accesed through the same place that can play single missions and stuff.  I'm not sure how exactly it could be done, but one way could be to generate a temporary mission file after all of the options are set, and then load the mission into the game.  This shouldn't be that hard for anyone who knows basic file operations in c++ and how to use FRED

[vadar_1]

you can make a mission like this in fred... just as the setup make the player fly to nav bouys to set variables... then when the game is setup, the bouys disapeer and the ships start spawning... i know this isn't as easy but it dosn't require any source code changing

[penguin]

Originally posted by YodaSean
Freespace2 needs some sort of "Quick Mission" mode, sort of like the skirmish mode in X-Wing Alliance, where the player can easily make a simple mission by telling the game which ships they want in the battle, the environment(asteroids, minefield), and the ships'  goals(attack primary target, is primary target, etc.).  This could be accesed through the same place that can play single missions and stuff.  I'm not sure how exactly it could be done, but one way could be to generate a temporary mission file after all of the options are set, and then load the mission into the game.  This shouldn't be that hard for anyone who knows basic file operations in c++ and how to use FRED

hehe how about a "Mission Wizard" for FRED?  If you've used MSVC (or MS Office for that matter) you'll know what I mean...

[IceFire]

FRED almost feels like a wizard its so easy

You could probably setup some sort of event trigger to randomize the enemies too.

[LtNarol]

yes you can, use the random value sexp.  And please, put all requests for source code changes into that one thread called "Requested changes to fs2 source".  Keep this place clean and organized.

[YodaSean]

Originally posted by penguin
hehe how about a "Mission Wizard" for FRED?  If you've used MSVC (or MS Office for that matter) you'll know what I mean...

Thats sort of what I meant.  FRED is cool, but it has all kinds of parameters you have to set before you make a mission that could be done automatically.  For example, creating wings, setting objectives, beam-free-all, and getting the distance set correctly between different ships.  For a "quick mission", all of these could just be set automatically.

[LtNarol]

but then you save 10 minutes and end up with a piece of **** mission that means you go back and work with it for another half hour to adjust what you could have done in 10 minutes in the first place.  Learn to use fred, saves time.

[Slasher]

Not necessarily....I agree such a mission wouldn't be any "Feint, Parry, Reposte!" but that doesn't rule out the possibility that it could be fun.  I for one did enjoy this feature in X-Wing Alliance and wouldn't mind seeing it implemented in FreeSpace 2.

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by LtNarol
yes you can, use the random value sexp.  And please, put all requests for source code changes into that one thread called "Requested changes to fs2 source".  Keep this place clean and organized.

Going OT for a moment, if the feature is big enough, a new thread is fine. if it's something like "Make the tables larger!!!" it can go in the other thread, but something like cutscenes needs its own thread so that it can be discussed whether it's feasible to do it.

[YodaSean]

Originally posted by LtNarol
but then you save 10 minutes and end up with a piece of **** mission that means you go back and work with it for another half hour to adjust what you could have done in 10 minutes in the first place.  Learn to use fred, saves time.

I don't think you understand.  I'm not suggesting something that can create complex, heavily scripted missions.  The point of the quick mission generator would be to make missions that shouldn't require something as complex as FRED.  For example, a mission that has 2 wings of fighters, one wing of bombers, and a capital ship on each side, with one wing of fighters guarding the capital ship.  In FRED you would have to place the ships one by one,  create proper distances between the ships, beam free all the capital ships, set the ships to be friendly or hostile, create wings, and set the objectives for each.  A "Quick Mission Creator" could autmatically set the wings, distances, beam free all any capital ships, and perhaps even set which are hostile, depending on how much flexability you wanted it to have.  Have you ever seen the skirmish mode in XW:A?  Thats the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Heres a picture of it:


Theres some extra stuff on that picture since it seems to be in multiplayer mode, but thats basically it

[Fozzy]

i think if programmers added a -mission commandline you could impliment this idea in the form of a launcher launching already created missions and sorting them through thier catagory.

E.G.      001_MYMISSION

The first three letters of the file name should corespond to a list of catagorys already defined, this method means there can be upto 1000 diffrent catagorys.

[an0n]

All you've got to do is make it so some crappy VB program randomly assigns values to features you put in. IE, you put 3 wings hostile and set a respawn for each (it decides what ship types and weapons). You click a box to have an asteroid field (size and density randomly assigned by VB program) and how many friendly wings. Then click generate and it makes the mission, bypassing FRED. Then if you wanna add cruisers and stuff, you use FRED. Open up FS, go to the tech room, select simulator, click the mission and off you go.

That's just the basic idea. You could add pretty much any FRED feature you thought would work with random settings.

[YodaSean]

Originally posted by an0n
All you've got to do is make it so some crappy VB program randomly assigns values to features you put in.  

I was thinking about doing that, it wouldn't be very hard, but it would be better if there was either a mission command line or a way to set the parameters in game and then run the program in the backround, and load the mission it makes.  Unfortunately, I know almost nothing in C++, so I don't think I could create the interface for the quick mission editor in game.  I could probably do the actual mission making program in VB in a few weeks or less though...