Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The FRED Workshop => FRED Academy => Topic started by: Sapphire on January 23, 2005, 12:55:16 am
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:hopping:
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Erasified to save face.
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it is a fred academy mission
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NM, I was thinking SW but wrote UT.
Ok nm...
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I'm done.
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Curses, I would test it, but I have to wait till my Retail one is done.
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If I remember correctly Sapphire is actually using retail FRED even though this is in the FS2_Open campaign so those of you without FS2_Open can still try it.
Anyway, downloading.
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Gosh deep, if i was UT i'd be pised as hell at you. :P getting him mixed up with the likes of me.
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OK, ran through this one. Technically, it's decent, with only a few errors. The main ones I found:
- Spelling and Grammer, as to be expected. Run the entire mission through Word and let it fix your spelling, making the changes in FRED.
- The Briefing cuts from stage 1 -> 2, but doesn't cut if you go backwards from 2 -> 1. Go back and check "Cut to previous stage" in Stage 2. And while you're in the briefing editor... Level Off Your Views! It's a pet peeve of mine. Rotate your view to be roughly perpendicular to the XZ Grid, then go into the Misc menu and choose "Align Object". This'll sort these out, but remember to click on save view after you've done so.
- This is more aesthetic than technical, but try not to use too many obviously 20th century stuff - fishing is OK (though not exactly ideal, though I suppose that's even more an issue of personal taste) but replace C4 with the more generic term "explosives".
- The Transport has no cargo. Change it to explosives.
- The Transport took bloody ages to blow, which spoilt the flow of the mission IMO. I know there is a way to force these things to blow up instantaneously, but half an hour of trying different methods and racking my brain hasn't helped, so I still don't know what it is. Kara?
- Why the heck was the Julius Turret/Beam locked? Shouldn't it have been attempting to defend itself?
- The mission had support available, which probably shouldn't have happened given that you're stuck behind enemy lines with no access to the GTVA (I think).
- When you end the mission, force the player to jump out at the node. Just put a waypoint at the exact location of the jump node (Use the Position and Orientation editor) then use a repeating event to turn on never-warp when you're further than the radius of the node (about 750 m), and allow-warp when you're less than that distance. Don't use break warp, as that can be repaired with a support ship. Not that that'll matter n this mission, but it's not a good habit to get into.
- There's no need to put "No Reccomendations" after all the successful debriefs - FS2 will do this automatically.
Those were the technical problems I found. But they weren't the main problems I had with the mission. I found it very...well, boring. Not because of the fundamental design of the mission as such, but more the way it was implemented. At no point did I feel any real immersion, any sense of the importance of what I was doing. The best way to et this is by using carefully placed messages. All the messages I encountered came either before or after the battle - what you need is a few within the battle. Have the Julius request cover with increasing intensity as its hull strength drops. Give the player warning of incoming fighters from ingame perspectives. Make a note of the dropping status of the Rakshasa, of the degree of success with the Transport Gambit. Warn the player if he's too close to the blast. Messages are of key importance when getting the atmosphere right, and, for my missions, they're the most difficult and time consuming part. Probably not what you want to hear, but it'll make your mission much more exciting and fun to play.
Also, try to vary the hostiles a little. Given the relative lack of real variety in small Freespace craft (If you disregard design, the differences between Shivan fighters are relatively minimal - some are harder to kill, but they all behave basically the same) defence missions tend towards a stagnant Turkey shoot, which is boring. Emphasizing the importance of the shivan cruiser should break things up a little, but you'd probably get the best results by spicing things up with a wing or two of bombers in there (turning on the weapons on the Deimos will allow you to send more hostiles against it without making the mission too hard, though it will mean a bit of rebalancing).
Finally, get rid of the Maxim. The Maxim is an awesome weapon, but that very coolness makes it inappropriate in this sort of mission. I tried to do what I thought any sensible player would do and gave myself the best loadout I could (In my case, HercII with a Circe, Maxim and two banks of Harpoons), and the Maxim above all else seemed to contribute to the Turkey shoot factor, especially when I suspect, if I'd bothered to go through and arm the whole wing the way I did myself, we could have dealt with at least one of those Corvettes ourselves.
Incidentally, how are the fighters supposed to reach the Julius (for debrief) before the corvettes do if we leave after them?[/COLOR]
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Originally posted by Black Wolf
The Transport took bloody ages to blow, which spoilt the flow of the mission IMO. I know there is a way to force these things to blow up instantaneously, but half an hour of trying different methods and racking my brain hasn't helped, so I still don't know what it is. Kara?
Sabotage the hull to 0%. That triggers an immediate explosion.
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I don't think it does, actually.
Adding a Special Explosion Time ship flag/counter is on my list of SCP stuff. ;)
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YOU DA MAN GOOB!!!!!! That is something i have always thought was crappy, why a special explosion takes so damned long. and BW, great advice on the mission.
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For about a month I've been the only FRED expert playtester but a girl posts.... :rolleyes: :lol:
Goober you may be right but I do know there is a trick to get around Special Explosion and I think I've remembered it now. After getting it wrong last time this time I'm going to test first though :D
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For the special explosion problem I remembered what it is. The trick is simple I just picked the wrong one. For some reason I'd set the hull to zero in one of my old TMA missions and I remembered that as being the trick :)
What you do is set the ship to Kamikazi. Then immediately afterwards you self destruct it or set the hull to zero. :) As you may have guessed this is much easier in FS2_Open thanks to the kamikazi flag :D
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Originally posted by karajorma
For about a month I've been the only FRED expert playtester but a girl posts.... :rolleyes: :lol:
More to the point, someone posts and nbody playtests it before I see the topic ;)
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Good feedback though. Much appreciated BW :)
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Observations, beside those of BW:
I can normally keep track of the messages without voice, I learned how playing Derelict; these were too almost fast, though. 10 seconds between the sexps is a good rule of thumb for messages if you're using send-message. Send-message-list should be 10000, since someone put it milliseconds for reasons known only to themselves.
The Wraith and company appeared on the escort list and directives before you could see them on sensors...which I suppose isn't really a bug, it happens in the Main Campaign too, but it looks rather odd when you're hanging there at the start of the mission for a minute.
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10? You people read slow.
The rule of thumb I've recently adopted is 3 seconds to a line, plus 1, with a minimum of 3. That, I found, is a fair approximation of the time the message would take if spoken, although I may just be lucky in my sentence construction and such.
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I don't read that slowly.
It's just that your attention is often divided between the messages and everything else, and ten makes a nice number for me when I'm distracted by somebody trying to blow me away.
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'Strue. Ideally, though, messages wouldn't be sent during combat.
Sometimes it's necessary, like a prompting from Command or whatever, but conversations = no no.
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A good habit to get into when playtesting is to press F4 just before you're supposed to jump out and look for errors on the message and events list.
I've been trying to get into that habit for ages but mostly I forget. Might not be too late for you though :D
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YOU CAN HIT F4!?!?!?
ok so i only do it sometimes...i always almost forget, but on the brightside, i make sure that all my testers know to do that. :D
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cool, i'm not the only one using vanilla fred for an SCP mission. i'll dl the mission when i finish the two missions i'm doing.
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The mission built in scp 3.4
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Didn't notice you'd updated :) I'll give this a try as I'm going to do some FA playtesting tonight anyway :)
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As promised I got some playtesting done :) There's very little in the way of technical errors so my problems are more related to the fun factor of the mission :)
The only technical errors I noticed were the missing delay between wave of Pisces wing (which I presume is simply an error of omission since the other wings all have a delay) and the complete lack of music! :D Surprised no one spotted that one :) Get to the mission specs editor and add some :)
As for the mission flow, this is where I had more problems. I never really felt like the Julius was in danger at any point. Maybe that's cause I just played well (for a change) but I got the Julius to the node with about 49% hull intact on medium). It might also be worth setting the Julius' hull to 75-90% hull damage to represent the fact that it's been damaged and stepping up the level of attacks a little.
One other thing that happened was that I managed to eliminate all the enemy craft about a minute and a half before the Julius reached the node which left me with a fair bit of sitting around doing nothing time.
So now we're stuck with the hardest FRED question of all. How do we make the mission more fun to play? I'm open to ideas :)
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nah, just be like me and edit a whole bunch of crap. that way you don't have to do all the ships, events, etc. all over again. it works. ;)
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To be fair Cobra your missiion didn't need as much work to make it fun to play. Your mission was fun but had lots of technical faults.
Sapphire on the other hand was on completely the other side of the problem. Her mission had very few technical problems but for some hard to define reason it just didn't work.
I've been in exactly the same boat myself and even though the mission that I'm on about is even more complete than Sapphire's I'm almost certainly going to do the exact same thing.
Sapphire as long as you're learning with each new version I don't mind :)