Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The FRED Workshop => FRED Academy => Topic started by: Fergus on September 06, 2004, 04:35:23 pm
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Heres my basic rundown of mission 4. Depending if Black Wolf has any specific plans.
Mission 4 - The NTR has attacked and boarded the Adur research installation (Black Wolf suggested Robin Varleys Acheron (With weaker weapons of course) for this. If we decide to use mods we'll add them in but until now just use an Arcadia). The player arrives too late to prevent their transports from escaping, but the NTR are trying desperately to eliminate the installation and the science vessels around it, apparently to cover up what exactly they stole. The NTC Perilous should escape with the transports here as a set up for the next mission.
Alpha Arrives
-Arcadia insight under attack by bombers and fighters. Perilous, 2 Argos, 2 or 3 transports and 2 wings of Hercs jump out before alpha gets near.
GVCv Renenet under repairs in Ring 1. Need to defend until it repairs engines so it can provide fire support. (No beams till out of collar)-Primary
2-3 Faustian- MUST defend, if crippled transport sent to pick up scientists and pull out. -Primary
Other civilian craft nearby-Primary
Damocles is on opposite side to Renenet.
2 Wings (tops) at start attacking—no bombers. When fighters down, bomber wave and fighter wing arrive. Damocles also starts to get into new fire position to destroy Renenet.
Alpha and Beta must defend station + Renenet (civies and scientists have evaced by now-providing they are alive) against bomber and fighter attacks. (Epsilon can be called on [Artemis or more fighters? If NTR extra cruiser turns up maybe Herc II’s?] At this point-or earlier)
Before Damocles in position home ship (whatever it is-if not any GVD/GTD) arrives and fires 1 beam salvo (Dam needs to survive so it pulls out). Finish off remaining opposition and go home.
All very spontaneous, lots of holes but I’m tired.
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Sounds pretty good to me. I'll leave the fine details to BW.
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While it's my personal opinion that an Arcadia is too big for a pure research installaion, I respect the no mods decision. I hadn't finished the mission 4 extended description, so I'll go through yours, which looks workable.
- You probably don't need the Civvies. The Remnant will have more important things to do than chasing down inoffensive civillians in the middle of a battleground, and you risk splitting the player in too many directions to be practical.
- I'm not sure a ganymede is appropriate for a research installation. However, since we're not using the Acheron after all, it might be possible to modify the mission to include it (eg. Possibly it's just a standard station, but he scientists are performing research on it. Your call on that.)
- It might be an idea to insert a section about covering the escaping transports as well. Remember, the NTR need to silence all witnesses to what they stole.
- Home ship is the GTD Messana, it's all in the campaign description Karajorma linked to.
- Gah, gotta go to class. Err, final thing to remember - an Arcadia is a big pile of steaming mission unbalancing weaiting to hit you in the face. Having FREDded missions both defending and attacking an Arcadia, I know how irritating they can be. The more specific the objectives the player is given are, the better. Keep him moving around with something to do at all times. You're somewhat limited by the lack of hostile capships here, so make sure you use the Damocles' ability to rip into the installation to its full dramatic (and mission balancing) effect. Bleh - you should work much of this out for yourself once you get into the meat of the issue anyway :D. Good luck.
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What kind of size was the Acheron going to be, because I don't mind if you would rather I use that.
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I don't mind. Since you're the only one who needs it, if you're comfortable using it and altering the tables to include it go ahead :)
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I have altered tables, the acheron, an uberloki and a multi communications subsystem Iceni just waiting to be VPed if you're going to let mods in you know :D
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Go ahead and post them. I'll add them to the list.
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Here - untested I'll admit but there shouldn't be anything wrong with it.
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Looks good to me.
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I'm gonna need to stick to the Arcadia because the Archaron cannot take a single volley from the Damocles before it goes flat line. Pity, because it is a nice model.
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We can bump up the hitpoints if that is the case.
Can you post the mission as you've got it and I'll give it a try.
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Okay, I've had a long think (and numerous test missions) and come to the conclusion that my current set up idea is not a good. So I have started from scratch again, different set up using the Acheron (the Damocles is of less importance now). I've more or less got the balancing right, on paper. So it should be finished for testing in a day or two.
P.S. I feel so much more sympathy for people making missions with stations.
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Stations are evil to FRED with but integral to plot to. Just be glad you're not working with the Arcadia. :shaking:
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YES!!!!
I have finished it.
Click for my wonderful(ish) mission (http://willy-murdo.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/retail-4.zip)
You need to right click and save as.
Okay a few things.
1) I'm not too sure if the mission is long enough. I can add a section where you evac crew no problem.
2)I cheated a bit with the Merc's. I dont think the NTR are meant to have bombers so I used them-same with the Bedford, and it means the Damocles doesnt completely un balance mission.
3)The Bedford is more for any of my fellow FREDers who are doing missions after this incase they need a smaller cap-ship as there is basically only Damocles and Perilous.
4)Alpha 2 is the pilot all campaings have. The one with more than 2 messages, so if any other FREDers in retail section have a important wing man we can standardise him/her.
phew. That was very hard to balance at first. But once it's been thought through it was fine. Thanks for the advice people, and hopefully I'm gonna get lots of nitpicking.
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Originally posted by Black Wolf
Here - untested I'll admit but there shouldn't be anything wrong with it.
famous last words..:p
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Originally posted by Fergus
1) I'm not too sure if the mission is long enough. I can add a section where you evac crew no problem.
I've never been of the opinion that a mission should have a set length. It should be as long as whatever works to tell the story that mission is supposed to tell. The mission works fine for me :)
Originally posted by Fergus
2)I cheated a bit with the Merc's. I dont think the NTR are meant to have bombers so I used them-same with the Bedford, and it means the Damocles doesnt completely un balance mission.
I figure the NTR would have some bombers left seeing as how they've managed to keep lots of hercs and lokis. That said I've got no problem with the merc angle :D
Anyway, now for the nitpicking :D
1) The goal that appears on screen for the 2nd Secondary goal is Mission goal text. I'm guessing that this was an oversight :D
2) Juno wing has no delay between the two waves arriving. I'd probably say the the other values are a little low too but then again the player has a lot of friendly craft to help him so I can forgive it.
3) Personally I wouldn't bother with the Key press directives. Even [V] didn't bother with them much after the first few missions. We all know how to jump out by now :D
4) In the mission briefing there is no real need to reserve a stage. You could easily insert one if you need it.
Apart from that I didn't spot much wrong with the mission at all. I'll take a look at the mission when I'm more awake but it's pretty close to finished as far as I'm concerned :D
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After I have finished tinkering with the mission (what can I say I'm a perfectionist) can I move over to Open? Before there were certain issues which would have made it problematic but now those issues have been solved.
P.S.
I can still help out with Retail though if you want-or need.
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I have no problem with you moving over to open. Personally I think everyone should develop for Open.
Wait to see the tricks you can do with the new SEXPs :D
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Done.
Mainly small changes, but time to upload this puppy. Everything needed is(should), be in the folder.
This is it (http://willy-murdo.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/retail_4.zip)
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Link no workee.
I seem to remember that tripod won't let you download from them. Try changing the file extention to .txt
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You need to right click and Save as. Typical, you would have thought they would have learned by now.
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Tried that. It gave me a HTML document with the filename you'd expect :D
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Right, the link works now...well last time I checked
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Odd. The link worked in IE but not in Firefox. Oh well. Got it now.
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Kneads hands nervously expecting the evil nit pick
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Bloody hell. How many bombers! :eek:
Since I'm playing Willy_Principal's mission again I'll replay this one too before I post any other comments.
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Hmmm. Now that I know that they're coming I can actually deal with the bombers. Time for the nitpicking :D
1) The Perilous if ignored currently reaches the end of its waypoint run and stops dead waiting for Alpha one to approach. Make it so that the event that controls its jump out is not just dependant on its distance from alpha 1. You definately should check for that but also check either that a certain time has elapsed or that the waypoint has been reached.
2) It's currently impossible to win the mission because of the way you've got the events done. In the event "Bedford Gone Win" you've checked hits-left in order to check if the Adur is still alive. You've chosen the wrong operator and the event will only come true if the Adur has less than 0% at the end of the mission.
You shouldn't be using hits-left for this sort of thing anyway. A far better choice is to use
not
-is-destroyed-delay
--Adur
3) The Bedford gone lose event does not have a Return to Base event chained to it.
4) The Defend Adur station objective relies on the Bedford gone win being true but also checks if the Adur has been destroyed (incidentally using the not-is-destroyed SEXP I mentioned above ). This check while harmless at the moment it is also redundant since the Beford Gone Win event is also supposed to check for this. Redundancy like this is generally bad because if you later change the SEXPs that cause the Bedford Gone Win to come true you might up having the check in the objective breaking the mission.
Apart from that it's definately getting better :D It was hard the first time round but was quite playable when I knew a little better what to expect :)
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Played again as part of my playing all the missions thing I'm doing today.
To point 1 I'll add that because of the way you've handled it, the perilous can be disabled with Stiletttos at long range. Once you've done that it can't jump out and then you can kill it at leisure.
In addition you need a Debriefing for if the player decides to go AWOL and jump out before he's told to do so.
Apart from that this is a pretty enjoyable mission.
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I have a minor problem, after a little clear out. Replacing the old PC and genearl (mis)management, I have lost my FA mission and for some reason tripod won't let me download. So I don't suppose any of you have it somewhere?
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Yep (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/karajorma/freespace/Downloads/Campaign1Mission04.rar). I do :D
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Bless you sir.
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I have a problem, everything else has been sorted (I'm keeping to the size of the NTR attack) but I can't get an AWOL debrief working, I have tried using if-goal-incomplete sexp but they don't seem to have any effect, I just get the if-goal-false debrief.
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I always handle AWOL debriefings in this way. I have an event called mission complete. This is a big OR'd list of all the events that end the mission (i.e the event comes true if any of them come true).
In the Debriefing I make the AWOL debriefing play if mission complete is false. The real bonus of doing things this way is that if I have secondary or bonus goals which don't depend on mission completion I can prevent them from playing during the AWOL debrief by simply making event-true>>Mission complete a requirement.
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Okay, here it is. Tested several times, AWOL debrief and other glaring errors fixed...I hope. It could probably do with more testing but after 7 times I cannea take it. So here it is.
ta da (http://willy-murdo.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/retail4.zip)
There was a 'bleep' used in an earlier version, but I can't download the old version and therefore find the 'bleep'. So you have to do without.
As soon as this mission is done I'm switching over to Open and testing out TBP.
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I prefer the missions without the radio bleep actually. It allows the voice synth to read to me. :)
Downloading
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I've never used em, so wouldn't really know, but good point about that. Also do you think I should spread the big attack wave into 2 smaller groups or add more smaller attacks or having a transport pulling out the wounded or doing something else completely stupendous?
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I don't mean to be rude, but is this mission at release status? It would be helpful to know, so I can complete this one before I get back to the other missions.
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I'll test this one tonight or tomorrow. :)
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Sorry for being a nuisance.
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Nice work, I can only find a few major faults with this mission, and those can be easily remedied.
Spelling, mercinary, cripling, ect, double check all of your spelling and sentence structure. Try to say it out loud if that will help. If it doesn't sound right, chances are it won't flow in the mission.
For some reason Iota 1's arrival message comes from command and not Iota 1. I can't really find a reason for this, so it may not be your fault.
In regards to the messages, they scroll by much too quickly and are sent before the previous one has been read. Space the time out for the messages so that you don't have nasty overlap. I find that setting the time for 5000 (5 seconds) is usually enough.
The Aeschylus's survival seems to be a random thing. On my first try through this mission, I lost it when the Bedford arrived. With the second attempt, the Bedford fired on the installation and not the Aeschylus. The player really has little say in the matter, the Bedford may or may not destroy it, and that is a little problematic. Try to make its attack a little more defined. I'm not saying the science cruiser has to die, but actually giving the Bedford the initial order to attack one or the other helps keep the mission focused, and ensures that saving the ship isn't just a matter of luck.
More background would be nice, a good part of the area is just black space, especially behind the Adur as Alpha flies in. You don't have to go overboard, just make sure that the player will usually see an object or a nebula in the background when attacking the enemy.
Other than, the mission seems fine. Its a little hard to lose, but if you just sit there your wingmen can't protecect everything. Nice job I have to say.
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That's okay. I just tried to get it to work but the zip was corrupt. I changed the extention to HTML and found as I suspected that it was a tripod file not found page. Strangely enough I can't test those in FS2 :D
Post up a fixed link and I'll test this tomorrow.
BTW I don't regard it as a nuisance. I frequently forget about things I'm meant to be doing. If a couple of days go by without me having tested something just prod me guys. I've almost certainly forgotten I was supposed to be doing it :D
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Moved FreespaceGundam's Post to the correct Thread :D
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Whoah, what did I post it in, the mission 5 thread? What is wrong with me?
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They are both by Fergus so it's an easy mistake to make :)
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Click for c1m4 (http://www.geocities.com/me_a_pilot_lol/c1m4.zip)
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Jumping into testing.... please stand by.
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I noticed a couple of problems.
1) The AWOL debriefing is fine but the you could not stop the Perilous part still appears.
2) Those Ace Loki's are complete bastards. I spent over 5 minutes with 6 wingmen just trying to kill one of them. Then again I am crap these days. I need to play more ofen. :) I'll see what TopAce thinks of it.
3) I never managed to save the Adur. Just too much going on.
4) Why are support ships disabled? By the time the Aeolus appears I've got no missiles left. I'm certainly not taking one of those on with 5 stillettos and nothing else.
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1) Sorted
2) Although the Uber Lokis may be better than the average fighter, the Loki wings need the extra edge that those fighters give, I also have to balance this with freespacegundam's comment that it is too easy.
3) I've only lost it once in my testing, but again it may be a balancing issue that I need to sort, I'll wait for Aces response
4)That was a mistake I made when I started the mission, to try to stop it from being too easy, but if Command can deploy Beta, Iota and the Pomotep I'm sure they can deploy a support ship. Though you're not actually meant to engage the Aolous, meant to let the SS Nick-of-time (Pomotep) save Alpha...a bit BoE I know.
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I have no much good to say.
It took me two attempts to complete the mission. This is not bad in its own. The problem is that I HAD to switch on invulnerablity. I was holding back the fighters with only one wingmen and 8% hull for long minutes but the fighters only kept jumping in without any break. I did not find them hard to kill, there are simply far too many of them. Additionally, I lost the entire Delta wing in the first twelve seconds. Beta jumped in and survived for... ten seconds? It's good that you try to make the casualty rate believable, but keep the player reinforced. Never show your missions to anyone until the difficulty is bearable. The mission, with this level of difficulty is not release-worthy. Bear this in mind. What difficulty did you test this mission on? Piece of advice: Always balance for Medium. If it's bearable on Medium, but way too hard on Hard, it's the player fault for choosing that difficulty level. But if the mission is unbearably hard even on Medium, it's the FREDer's fault. Try to make more wingmen survive. Do they have orders at all? They often die so quickly when they have no orders. If I have had let's say, seven wingmen alive(plus me), the last part would be acceptable.
I didn't pay much attention to bugs, I only wanted to see how difficult the mission is. I still spotted some faults:
- Spelling: Already mentioned
- You can give orders to all ships. Set Player Orders to none for all ships but your wingmen.
- I don't think the containers are named well: Name them TC 643b-Z, or whatever, but not Munition.
- I had the message asking what would become of the Aeolus before it jumped it.
Just to say something positive, the debriefing seems to work properly.
As soon as the mission becomes easier, I will look into the bugs deeper.
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That reminds me. I got the multiple contacts message before anything jumped in.
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Hmm, well I never thought the mission was that hard, well except for the Lokis. So I've removed the Uber Lokis, upped the A.I. on Delta (You lost them all in ten seconds? Even on hard they lasted till the big attack) and added a fighter to Beta. The fighters did already have orders, forgot about the player ordering on the other vessels and the two 'early' messages are deliberate warnings (You got messages from command about imminant attacks in the FS2 campaign..if wrong can remove). I've edited them slightly to make this clear, touched up spelling. However, if difficulty seems to be the major problem, I never noticed that the mission was difficult, I have only lost it once on Hard, so it may just be me. Regardless, I'll get the updated version up in the hour.
EDIT:Click for c1m4 (http://www.geocities.com/me_a_pilot_lol/c1m4.zip)
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Changes sound good.
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After a bit more testing, I feel that after removing the uber Lokis the mission is just a wee bit too easy, so I'm thinking of adding an extra fighter wing or adding to the existing wings, but I'll wait till I get feedback.
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Wait until feedback is received.
Unfortunately, I can't do this by Sunday night. But as soon as I will be able to, I will test it immediately.
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Has anyone else given the mission a go, even if it's just a played once? It would be good if we could get all the FRED Academy FREDers testing each others missions, then we could also all pick up on one anothers flaws so we can build on our own, also not very fair getting the same people to test all the time.
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It could also end up as a 'Ha! I can do this but you can't!' competition.
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I doubt it. I certainly would be less likely to help someone who playtested other peoples missions with that sort of attitude.
The fact that the FREDders don't play each others missions is one of the main reasons that things are going so slowly with the FA. It can take me an hour or more to playtest a mission several times, try different possibilities, look through the mission in FRED and then post up all the flaws I can see in it. If other people pointed out the flaws (even if they didn't know how to correct them) it would mean that I don't have to write them up.
I've always said that I'll give preferencial treatment to FREDders I see testing other peoples missions and giving the best constructive advice they can. Basically the more I see you testing other peoples missions the more effort I'll put into testing yours. :D
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I don't mean to be annoying, but can some of the other FA students play test the mission please. I'd rather not have people like karajorma test it simply because they are already very busy and I'm going to be having a patch of spare time ahead which I'll be using to finish this ones balancing and mission 5.
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Actually this was next thing on my list (I was about to go looking for the thread so that I could find it and play it as soon as I'd finished typing up the report on Luigi's mission :D )
I do agree that we need other opinions other than mine. I can't catch every mistake single-handed. Nor can I be objective about how hard the mission is unless it's ludicrously hard or easy.
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I'll give it a whirl
Oooops, I tried it but didn't have the Acheron. Let's try it again :)
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Damn, I typically forgot about an FA mission. Expect feedback soon.
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Okay, the mission went a bit smoother with the Acheron. I didn't fail all my events right off the bat.
A few things:
Regarding Iota's message being sent by command. I've found that if you send a message too quickly after a ship arrives, FS2 thinks the ship isn't there and thus will send it by command again. You have two options here, either put the delay higher so it waits a moment for the transport to arrive. Or change the message origin to "#Iota 1". That way, it'll show up "Iota 1" whether FS2 thinks the transport is there or not, the only difference is the transport won't have a little "talking" box around it should the pilot have it in view at the time. But no big deal.
The way that many FS2 missions are set up for directives, they have an event that checks if the target has arrived. For instance:
-when
----has-arrived-delay
------0
------Scorpio
----do-nothing
Then they have a chained event after, with a delay of 0 like this:
-when
----is-destroyed-delay
------0
------Scorpio
----do-nothing
Directive Text: Destroy Scorpio
Now the way you have it set up, it might work just as well. But if it doesn't, the above method should do fine also. Also, I'm not a fan of the directive keypress thing. Some people seem to demand them from missions, personally I've never used them in a mission and have never fredded them into a mission either. I think having "F11" in the directives box kind of messes it up, on my resolution anyway. For instance, in my directives it might be something like:
Destroy Aquarius (8)
F11
Destroy Scorpio (5)
F12
Destroy Libra (6)
F13
I'd prefer to have:
Destroy Aquarius (8)
Destroy Scorpio (5)
Destroy Libra (6)
Looks much nicer in my opinion. It may look better at higher resolutions. I'm not sure.
Also I might change up the latter capital ship battle. You obviously want the Bedford to survive, but it seems silly that when the Sobek jumps in, it unleashes a deadly barrage of 3 AAAf beams (it doesn't fire its main batteries). It's also a bit silly that both forces sit there at speed zero until the Bedford jumps out. What I might do instead is change the Sobek to a Mentu, and give the Bedford some way points which will bring it past the station. That way, the Mentu is large enough to shield the station and robust enough to survive a few beam hits without needing to fire any anti-ship beams in return. When the Aeolus goes past the station, it can bring a lot of its flak guns to bear. What this means is that the station will start taking major damage, and the player has to inflict enough hits on the Bedford to force it to jump out.
Um, there are quite a few spelling mistakes so you're advised to run it through a spell checker. There are a few grammatical/phrasing errors which come to mind.
For message "Alpha3: maybe . . ." the expression is 'present company accepted' not 'present company excluded' unless there's some variation I'm not aware of.
Briefing stage 3: "Also once" is a little akward and is also a little disjointed. Rather than going with an additive approach, I'd change the briefing to something more like this
"During the recovery operation, allied flights will be required to provide cover to the station and the recovery craft. This means safeguarding Adur station and a nearby science vessel, the Aeschylus, from further NTR attacks."
Debriefing:
I think that the debriefing needs to be a little consolidated. Some FRED authors like to have little blurbs for each and every objective. I find that the debriefing is in consequence neither fun to read or look at on the screen. Try to incorporate more information into each stage. For example, instead of having a "perilous got away" and "station lost" "station won" stages. Have just "station lost" and "station won" and incorporate the information about the perilous into them. There's no way the player can stop the perilous, so why a debriefing stage checking for failure of the objective? You _know_ it's going to fail so why check for it?
For example:
"Unfortunately we were unable to deploy our forces in time to stop the Perilous and the escaping ships. Despite this failure, you responded well to the mission's new focus in your successful defense of the installation against an aggressive enemy assault. "
Similarly for the science vessel you can have just three stages: One where the science vessel survives, one where it is lost and the escape pod is saved, and one where both the ship and pod are lost.
Other little grammatical errors
deb stage 1: should be "sight" not "site"
deb stage 4: should be "despite superior enemy numbers" or "Against great odds"
+lots of spelling errors which can be caught in a program like Word.
Also, one particular word I noticed you having trouble with (I mix it up myself sometime:)
lose = to lose. As in, the GTVA is about to lose to the shivan armada.
loss = something lost. As in, the Colossus was a tremendous loss to GTVA forces.
loose = opposite of tight. As in, whoever is in Command of Alpha 1's sorties has a screw loose.
That's enough for now.
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That's very good feedback Akalabeth. :D Thanks a lot :)
Originally posted by Akalabeth Angel
Debriefing:
I think that the debriefing needs to be a little consolidated. Some FRED authors like to have little blurbs for each and every objective. I find that the debriefing is in consequence neither fun to read or look at on the screen. Try to incorporate more information into each stage. For example, instead of having a "perilous got away" and "station lost" "station won" stages. Have just "station lost" and "station won" and incorporate the information about the perilous into them. There's no way the player can stop the perilous, so why a debriefing stage checking for failure of the objective? You _know_ it's going to fail so why check for it?
That's actually a quite interesting comment :) I tend to be a "lots of debriefing stages" FREDder but I tend to go about it in a slightly different way from having lots of little bits of text.
What works for me when I only have a few objectives is to consolidate them together and have debriefings like this
Debrief 1 : both goals failed
2 : goal 1 succeeds goal 2 failed
etc
Of course this only works if you have a low number of objectives but if you do it can be a lot more striking to do it in a single piece of dialogue rather than two pieces which can contradict each other in tone.
How to do debriefings is a matter of style rather than being right or wrong. Doing little snippets can work reasonably well if you make each snippet a little longer and make sure that snippets are similar in tone. I'll agree that it's much harder to pull off that tone if you have to have the player being congratulated for saving certain ships while being berated for failing to save others in the same debrief (It can be done by using neutral phrases that sound like condemnation if the mission fails but like praise if the mission succeeds. Not easy but it can work well (Well until you get the mission voice acted and give the actor an brainache trying to figure out how to say it :D )
Just goes to show that even as one of the self proclaimed experts here, even I can read things that make me reconsider how I do my missions :D
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Right, I'll get working on it tommorrow, thanks for the feed back..and yes, I do type like a trained chicken.
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Click for c1m4 (http://www.geocities.com/me_a_pilot_lol/c1m4.zip)
Updated, one point however: I'm sticking with the "present company excluded" on account o' I've never heard o' th'other expression in me life.
EDIT: I stand corrected, my lawyer chum laughed when I mentioned it and had another of his "My dear boy" chats, I'll fix it now.
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One small thing I noticed. The E-pod debriefing needs to check if the e-pod actually every appeared. Otherwise you get complaints about its destruction even though the science cruiser never launched it.