Modding, Mission Design, and Coding > The FRED Workshop

Collecting FRED tricks

<< < (4/4)

0rph3u5:
Let's talk about Directives for a bit:


Make extra events for Directives

Making extra events just for the Directives may seem like an additional step, but Directives are your best tool to direct the player to do something. As such, it is very useful to control when they appear and how the are organized. (e.g. if you have an unspecific directive, e.g. "Destroy Main Guns", to follow it with directives that describe a specific step, e.g. "- dorsal canon"). Thanks to milisecond intervalls for chained events this has become considerably easier to pull of.
Plus if they are in seperate events from events that deal with the consequences, you will have no issues with you have the change the organisation of your directives, e.g. when you change a wings arrival time for balancing reasons.


More Directives instead on unspecifc ones

This might be a personal gripe of mine, but consider not having unspecific directives like "Destroy bombers" but instead breaking them up into more specific ones even if it means increasing the number of directives, like turning "Destroy bombers" into "Intercept [wing A]" and "Intercept [wing B]".
You can always increase the number of directives that display at once in Hud_gauges.tbl.


Keep a consistent language in your Directives

One of the ancient arts of rhetorics is today best known as "framing" - it is basically the technique to only speak about certain topics in specific terms shaping the conversation in a specific direction, by making sure which associations are fixed in the mind of the audience through repetition.
This can work wonders for your directives - the best example is to use seperate phrases for fighter ("Destroy X wing") and bomber ("Intercept Y wing") wings, which helps your players to build a another level of battlefield awareness, in addition to messages and the radar.
HOWEVER, you must keep a consistent pattern so it works. If the pattern slips up it creates at worst confusion, at the very least irritation.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page