[The E]

I mean... FSO has a scripting system for a reason....
There's absolutely nothing stopping you from coding your entire mission in a script

While certainly possible, this strikes me as a bad idea.

Counter Argument: the drop-down menu setup makes it much approachable for new users, It's not like everyone who opens FRED is a programmer,

That said It would be awesome if there was some kind togglable "script view" that would show the events list in text-file form. 

Having a text editor with some sort of syntax highlighting magic would be good, yes.

.... that shouldn't even be impossible in any way, we already have a lot of the stuff we'd need to do syntax evaluation in the engine, it's just a matter of tuning it for that purpose ....


*Goes away, thinking furiously*

[DefCynodont119]

, but knowing Def, he was absolutely not suggesting SCP add the ability to lua script a mission into FRED. He was suggesting a toggle in the Events Editor that switches from the Event Tree view to the actual Event list text that gets saved to the mission file. This is an idea I would so fully endorse.

That is Correct, 

[EatThePath]

Having a text editor with some sort of syntax highlighting magic would be good, yes.

.... that shouldn't even be impossible in any way, we already have a lot of the stuff we'd need to do syntax evaluation in the engine, it's just a matter of tuning it for that purpose ....

syntax highlight, autocomplete suggestions, and paren matching/code folding... normally I'd say in that order, but for the LISPy syntax, paren matching might be the most powerful tool to have.

[CP5670]

A text window in the event editor would be perfect. You can have it side by side with the tree view, and edit events either way. There would have to be some auto-checking for all the spacing, tabs, etc. though.

I can relate to this, I know that boring slog. In the past I tried to power through it, but the results were not satisfying. So I stopped trying to finish X by date Y. Instead I only work on modding stuff when I'm in the mood for it and let it rest otherwise. The result is that I haven't released anything in years and sometimes I don't touch anything FS2_open related for half a year.... but I always come back to it and work on stuff in creative "spurts". In the end, I dabble around with models and mods for my own enjoyment... maybe something release-worthy comes out of it, or maybe not.

tl;dr: take a break and play other games, your enjoyment of FS2 modding may come back with some distance.

I do the same thing with other creative hobbies too. I may work on something intensely for a while, then leave it half-finished if I run out of ideas, and come back to it years later.

That being said, one problem with game mods is many people never finish their project but don't release it either, even after doing a lot of work. At some point releasing what you have allows others in the community to benefit and build off it, especially models or other assets.

[karajorma]

Having a text editor with some sort of syntax highlighting magic would be good, yes.

.... that shouldn't even be impossible in any way, we already have a lot of the stuff we'd need to do syntax evaluation in the engine, it's just a matter of tuning it for that purpose ....

We do? FRED literally error checks missions by saving them and then loading them back in again IIRC. Getting a text editor to work in FRED doesn't sound like a simple issue to me, getting it to work alongside the current system sounds like a nightmare, especially given the number of things a bracket in the wrong place can mean. One major advantage of the current system is that it makes it very hard to make that sort of error.

But if you think it can be done, I'd be interested in hearing how.

[The E]

We do? FRED literally error checks missions by saving them and then loading them back in again IIRC. Getting a text editor to work in FRED doesn't sound like a simple issue to me, getting it to work alongside the current system sounds like a nightmare, especially given the number of things a bracket in the wrong place can mean. One major advantage of the current system is that it makes it very hard to make that sort of error.

But if you think it can be done, I'd be interested in hearing how.

On a basic level, we can throw any string at the event parser and see if it can make sense of it, and it will even generate error messages telling you pretty precisely what it chokes on. We have a comprehensive set of validators for any data type the engine supports, we have a comprehensive list of allowed operators and their arguments and returns. That's already most of the hard and tedious parts of making a code completion engine in place (but, as said, not tuned for that purpose).
It's not going to be easy or anything, but it's certainly not an impossibility.

[0rph3u5]

Being able to view multiple events without scrolling would be a help, e.g. by having them displayed in a seperate, read-only window on request.

A text edit would also help with certain applications, e.g. when you have events that do the same operations but to different lists of arguments and using a different variable (things similar to the image pasted above). I got a bunch of those and the whole song and dance* could be a lot smoother by just being able to make the edits in text format.

* (of making them once, creating the duplicate events, saving the file, opening it in a text editor, copy and pasting the event's operations, search and replacing the variable names, and then reloading the mission in FRED)