Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Diaspora 3rd Party Missions, Mods & Campaigns => Diaspora => FRED Academy (Diaspora) => Topic started by: Hammer65 on October 15, 2012, 05:30:31 pm
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Still a work in progress but it's playable with the key events in place.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2pgv4g8zh9luzl4/Diaspora_FA-C01M02A.fs2
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Thus far: Pretty cool mission, it taught me how to dodge missiles without spamming countermeasures. I'm finding it pretty fun. Do title your ships, of course your going to but it takes only a few seconds just to rename your objects. The delay for me between "We're not done" and "Boom" was a little too high and those bombs were so obviously cylon bombs due to the nature of asking the player to intercept, and hence target. Um... The debriefing felt a little "listy", and I feel that's a common danger with debriefings as you're trying to merge multiple possibilities into a single block of text. It felt more like: You did this, good job. You didn't do this, bad job. It could feel a little more fluid, a little more feedbacky than repeat to the player what they've done.
And a little more chatter might be nice, hell, more chatter is always nice (hyperbole).
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Thanks for the quick feedback. It definitely needs tuning. I was thinking of filling that gap you mentioned with hijacker/negotiator chatter. And if still feels too long, I'll shorten the event trigger. I went with cylon nukes. At first because after experimenting they were only torpedoes giving me the reaction I wanted. Then I thought it would be kind of cool if the cylons were supplying the insurgency. As far as ship names, I'm just waiting to see what the group wants to name the battlestar and using Sobek as a place holder.
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Just a note - you don't have to set up an event with an add-goal SEXP to make a ship waypoint at mission start; you can just set its initial orders in the ship editor.
Mission looks pretty clean, though I'm not seeing any dialogue for a failure path yet.
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Alrighty, playing through it right now and I'm in a bit of a rush so this is going to be a bit listy and/or *****y, so sorry up front.
Why do I know how many containers I have to blow up to clear the debris field? I think you can hide the directive counter behind a second event (like, set the directive to 'is-event-true-delay (blow up containers event)
And on the warheads part: I have nothing against them being cylon nukes, but why would my targeting computer know they are cylon missiles?
Having gotten to the end, I think it would be better to have to disable the ftl first off then clear through the field.
How many people fit in a raptor?
Overall its solid though. :yes:
Deliberately trying to break stuff play-through:
right off I fired a whiplash into the engine which stopped the ship and broke the mission. Maybe either guardian them so they can't be destroyed, or make the ship blow up (and presumably fail the mission) if the engines are destroyed. Likewise, the ship never tries to jump out.
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Yep, I haven't fleshed out the possible failure scenarios yet, but taking out Intersun is definitely one of them. I was planning to add messaging to avoid firing on it unless directed to do so.
On the container count thing I wasn't sure on the right mix of reality versus fun. The first mission you have to scan 20 ships to determine the cargo. I didn't know if wanted to have the very next mission repeat that type of process? What do you think? Better to leave the count unknown?
On the order of events regarding taking out the ftl then clearing? I was envisioning a slow OJ Simpson type chase through the debris field with the cruise ship dragging you near the traps.
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Monday update. I think it's pretty clean at this point, just needs more play testing for possible holes.
Updates:
Cleaned up Briefing(s).
Added failure scenarios.
Added additional dialog.
Tightened up the timing.
Added some additional warheads to intercept.
Fixed a few mission breaking holes.
Adopted Osirus as Battlestar name.
Still Needs:
More play testing
Adoption of common background/planet bitmap.
Debriefing still sounds a bit listy.
In addition to some minor tweaks I'm going to try and create a name plate for the battlestar. I suck at all things art related so this may take a while.
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If you've playtested 3 other missions, you can ask for me to playtest. :)
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Loading this mission keeps crashing FS2 for me (exit state of -805306369) immediately upon clicking "commit" during the briefing. I took a crack at looking for anything in the setup events, but I didn't find anything yet. (still not sure what that was about, but it seems to have fixed itself) The few things I can think of changing from loading the mission in FRED...
Using either the "when-argument" or "every-time-argument" SEXP's for redundant events (like how you've booby-trapped some of the containers) makes it easier to work with them. You could also use those with "random-multiple-of" in order to make it so the booby-trapped containers are chosen at random at the start of the mission (that's actually how I've set up mine). For the landing event, I'd recommend using two instances of "dist-ship-subsystem" (the "landingstrip" subsystems are dead center of each pod) instead of "is-in-box" since you won't need to the battlestar to be in a specific location. And a little more variety in the positions and types of cargo containers wouldn't hurt! :p
After playing it, the debris field feels empty: I'd bump the number of objects up a bunch. I noticed a few typos in the messages, but that's not a huge deal. This actually had a really good feel to it, but might be a bit short.
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Thanks for the feedback.
I like the idea of randomizing the containers so I'll look into that.
For the landing event, I just used the same technique presented in the walkthrough. It's not really position dependent as the coordinate system is local to the battlestar.
Roger on the container types.
As for the debris field I think it's already at max number of pieces. Sometimes it does feel empty and other times there are lots of large pieces flying about. I could tighten up the field some to make if feel more full.
Do you remember what your playtime was? I was actually shortening this one up on purpose. I had a few runs of the other posted missions and they are running 10+ minutes so I thought I would keep this one relatively short. There's also a 30% chance for you to fail near the end of the mission and if it were long you would dread having to replay to that point.
TO Kara:
I've played some of the others but haven't posted much feedback to this point. Also, I'm not sure I'm ready for a profession beat down just yet ;)
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Just posting what works and doesn't work from a player's perspective is useful. :)