[phreak]

just curious to see how fast people fred around here:

How long does it take for you to completely FRED a mission from a blank mission until something that is "release quality".  A a baseline use 7-10 minute mission with complete scripting, dialog, briefing, debriefing and other stuff like backgrounds or asteroid fields.

For me it'll take about 5 hours of actual FRED-work and about another 2-4 hours of testing (about 20 runthroughs on a 10 minute mission ).  Needless to say, spreading that out a bit, it'll take a weekend and then somee to do something decent, as i can't sit in one spot and FRED all day.

[MatthewPapa]

Well, since i got A.D.D. pretty bad it can take me a while

[NGTM-1R]

Total time spent actually working in FRED/playtesting? Probably three or four hours. Total time until it's actually done? Something less then one day. I can generally finish one mission in a day and then get started on another.

It would be less if the send-message-list sexp was willing to work properly for me...

[Axem]

I think I did some of JAD's missions in 3-4 hours. But most of those missions were just scripting events so that was easy enough to troubleshoot.

I can hammer out a mission in two hours, without messages, briefings and a background. The next hour will be adding those and refining the events, trying to take all considerations into thought. The next three hours will be spent play-testing and balancing. So something like 6-7? I can do around a mission a week if I get into a FREDding mood. I tend to work on around three missions at a time, so I feel like I'm working at a snail's pace sometimes.

[Black Wolf]

Actual FREDding/Testing time will generally be at least 8 or 9 hours, generally more ( I wnet with the 11-15 because that's more accurate) but it tkaes me a lot longer because I can't sit and FRED for that long solidly.

[karajorma]

I think I'm going to have to go with Black Wolf on this one. About 11-15 on average. Tends to take me several days of real time though cause I can't FRED an entire mission in a day anymore. I tend to write the briefing and place the ships on the first day. I'll usually test the misson to see if I've placed everything correctly.

Second day is the really hardcore event scripting. I tend to do most of my work in one long session. For really complicated missions I'll split that over a couple of days. I tend to do objectives and lay the foundations for the debriefs here.

The last day I go back over the mission, playtest all the major event chains and as many of the resoultions as I can. This is when I'll tighten up the dialogue as much as I can.

That generally leaves the mission in a 95% complete stage. I never bother to go any further until the campaign is ready cause that's when I'll go back over the missions and make sure everything sounds similar.

[ShadowWolf_IH]

I generally have 3 coipies of fred open at a time.  place the ships, in all 3, give em the orders, do the events.  specs and objectives brief and debrief on all three, then do team loadouts and backgrounds.  then test all three and write down everything wrong with them and fix em.  fly em again and fix em again if needs be.  generally about 15 hours of work.  but i use of shortcuts.  Copying and pasting like events and arrival cues, then modifying them.  Directives especially.  using ë, ô, and ¥ to bring the same ship back into a mission after it is gone.  things like that.  lots of shortcuts.

total time is about 15 hours for all three.

i think the fastest that i have ever fredded a mission was an hour and a half.  but it was fairly generic and no problem.  it was the one in casualties of war where you scan the cargo and then four of them explode and a fighter comes out of each one.  that one was fun.

[Ransom]

Depending on the mission, it usually takes me around 4-5 hours if I'm in the right mood and there's a reasonably detailed mission outline available. If I don't like the mission, though, it can take several days.

[pyro-manic]

Hmmm. Hard to say, really. I've never timed myself! It usually takes me one or two sessions (of a few hours each) to get the basics done - key events, ship placement and alterations, main messages, etc - then another few to adjust, playtest, adjust, refine, etc, and then one shorter one to do the objectives and brief/debrief. So I'd say probably 11-15 hours on average.

[Starman01]

I normally take around +20 hours, simply because the mission-script is very detailled and I'm a perfectionist. If there is even the finest AI-Missbehaviour, I don't get any rest until I figured it our and everything is to my liking

[Blaise Russel]

Fast enough.

[TopAce]

As for me... it depends on what level people consider their missions release-worth. I like spending as much time on a mission as possible, generally three to five days of full-throttle work. Testing takes much more time than making the mission itself, even if the mission I am making is a four minute-long one. It is my mania that I consider my missions 'unreleasable' for so long, until I really reach a point I cannot improve forth. I have never measured the time needed for me to make a mission in hours, I measure this kind of time in days.

[willy_principal]

Mission 1 for the Campaign 1 (retail) of the FRED Academy already took 20 hours of my life...or more....i'm not sure...

[Kie99]

The First mission of TTR takes about half an hour and took me ages to finish, on average though it takes me about 7-8 hours of total FREDding. First I place the ships and make any unusual events happen, then when that is done I do the messaging, then the briefing, then the debriefing.  Then I import a background from a Canon mission using notepad.

[Nuclear1]

For my good missions: about 5 hours (that includes testing; I usually have all the ideas for the mission in my head before I even sit down, and so I just put ships where I know they need to go and script, script, script).

I usually have a mini-campaign of worthy quality done with 16 hours of total playing time.

[Akalabeth Angel]

The actual fredding doesn't take too long, most of my time is spent playtesting. For some of the mission I've done right now, the timing, especially of dialogue and so forth is fairly important. So I go back just to make sure the pacings right. As they're still intro missions, I might have a few minutes of fluff at the start which I have to go through each time over and over . . . then when I'm actually fredding, I might spend time staring at the screen or waste it looking at forums like HLP or one of the other forums I visit. The forums I find are a phenomenal waste of my time

The hard thing is getting into the mood to fred.

[Singh]

Well, if this is a theoretical situation, and I have lots of free time....around 20 hours.

The first few hours are spent putting in backgrounds for the mission (I always start there first before moving on. The backgrounds set the environment for me to work in, so I end up spending 2-3 hours on getting them right), after which comes ship placement and the initial few messages (just to get the mood right). After this I let the mission 'grow', as it were, into what was planned, addings the events and messages as I go along, only adding new ships in once the events I was just working on are completed and well-tested.

Eventually, it becomes a mission. Playtesting is one of the worst parts of it tho, cause once I get out of the mission I usually remember all the big problems and forget about the tiny problems, and usually end up playing through a few extra times just to play those....its a pity that an events file can't just be dumped onto the HD stating what all happened and if everything was correct, at least we could refer back and correct it rather than playtesting all over again.....

[Primus]

I'd say 6-10 hours... Probably 10...

[Pilot Of The US]

i.........dont..........know.......... So i just go with "over 25 hours".

[Taristin]

It'll take me about a year to fred a mission. I hate Fred. Utterly, utterly hate it. It makes my head hurt. It makes my nose bleed. It gives me stomach cramps. I hate fred.