Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The FRED Workshop => Topic started by: Black Wolf on July 13, 2007, 05:46:59 am
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:D
I think the only reason I'm still FREDding after all these years is that feeling you get when you finally beat FRED into submission and make it do what you want :D
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I know exactly what you mean BW. That's why I'm only interested in making missions that are really hard to make. :)
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I would love to make a really difficult mission - the problem is I can naver think of any :)
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[Yoda]You will be.....You will be[/Yoda]
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Any mission that can branch early and follow multiple valid paths to conclusion and any mission where multiple branches come together with a common ending are a ***** and a half to complete. I'm working on one in the latter catagory right now, and nearly every arrival cue and event condition has some form of an is-previous-event-true/false operator in it. This frakking mission makes me want to burn down the world right now, but once it's finished, it will be a pretty elegant solution to a brute-force alternative of making two very similar mission files.
What drives me to completion, especially on these ridiculously complicated affairs, is seeing the mission outline come to life, once the work is completed. The work in FRED itself is an irritant that stands between concept and final product, but that is tempered by the anticipation of seeing the final product. As long as I can keep myself excited about the completion of the mission's construction, I can keep working. Periodically, I'll become jaded and need to take a break on a mission for a while, after which, I can reread the outline, see what I have completed, and reignite my drive to continue.
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Is there anything that could be implemented into FRED to make what you are doing easier in the future, BF?
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*Adds code to slap user in the face and tell him he's crazy to even think of making that mission.*
:D
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U.R.A. Moron?
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Actually, all told, there's only 86 unique ships in there, and because so many of them are fighters or bombers, I'm well under the subsystem limit. I'll note that some wings get reused, but others only show up in one branch or the other.
The part that really sucks, and I mean really sucks, is updating the scripting. I built one branch of the mission before the rest, so now that I'm adding the second branch, nearly every event, right up until about the last two minutes of the ten to fifteen minute mission, needs to have its trigger updated. Some events, that seem like they'd be reusable, aren't because there are messages being sent from a ship that doesn't exist on the second branch. (I'm flirting with the idea of shoving some of those message lists off to chained events, but it's not always feasible.)
As for implementing new features in FRED, all I can suggest is another part to the tutorial, wherein you show the addition of a second branch to a mission like this, then have a picture of the author with his head exploded, to serve as a warning against such silly antics in the future.
Anyway, this really isn't all that much different from a mission that branches near the beginning and has two paths to the end. I just ran myself into a scenario, where the branch occurs before this mission, and I need to bring everything back down to one path. Much, much earlier in my time FRED'ing, I had made a stand-alone mission ("Too Many Secrets," if you want to go looking for it) that branched in the middle, so this isn't exactly new ground I'm treading on; the mission is just set up backwards now, with two beginnings and one end, rather than one beginning and two ends.
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Is there anything that could be implemented into FRED to make what you are doing easier in the future, BF?
Yea like Events.I think that you could type what you want the ships to do instead of SEXPs.
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Is there anything that could be implemented into FRED to make what you are doing easier in the future, BF?
Yea like Events.I think that you could type what you want the ships to do instead of SEXPs.
That would make it 30 times harder. At least.
It would be like "Okay, I want this ship to go to 3,4,9 and then to attack bad 1, and if it gets shot twice, then three hostiles warp in and dock with cargo a, b, and q. If cargo q is destroyed but not cargo a then I want some more bad guys to jump in and attack a ship unless cargo b is disabled and 3 of its turrets are destroyed but not the 1st and 4th one. And if Alpha 1 less than 49 health, have a support ship jump in and dock with Alpha one and repair it unless the Destroyer's communications subsystem isn't destroyed or if beta 2 has gone traitor. Oh and if three missions ago ship number 86 and one half was destroyed with half of its turrets left then set a variable to three. If the variable is three then kill alpha one, if it is less than three than give A1 five tacos, and if it is more than three, kill cargo q."
That would just be so insanely inefficient it's not even funny. Trust me, SEXPs are good. Plus it would be pretty much impossible for the coders to program.
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Hmm... a text parser in FRED? I can see it now:
FRED> It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.
> Place a sun at 300 by 250 by 60.
FRED> Place which sun?
> Place a red sun 300 by 250 by 60.
FRED> You have light. You are in a large open space, surrounded by stars. You see one flattish spaceship in the distance.
> Move spaceship 200 units up.
FRED> You can't reach that far.
> Move to spaceship.
FRED> You are in a large open space, surrounded by stars. There is a flattish spaceship next to you.
> Move spaceship 200 units up.
FRED> The spaceship engines are not active, and you do not have the strength to move it yourself.
> Sigh. Enter spaceship and start the engines.
FRED> The canopy is closed.
> WTF? Open canopy, then enter the spaceship and start the engines.
FRED> Enter engine activation code.
> Screw this. Quit program.
FRED> I can't let you do that Dave...
> Aaaarrghhh!!!
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:lol: But really i can not do SEXPs at all. :drevil:
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SEXPs aren't hard. It's just a case of being able to think in a certain way. All an event is when you come right down to is, If A is true do B.
Even if you had a text option you'd still have to think the same way because you'd still have to figure out what you needed to check was true and what to do if it was. In the end you wouldn't end up with anything much different from what you have now. If you look at what thesizzler wrote you're actually seeing what goes through the brain of a FREDder as they make a mission.
The skill in FREDding is being able to think like that. Changing that into SEXPs isn't the hard bit. Figuring out all the ways a description like that could have holes that break the mission is the hard bit. :)
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I am mildly worried. I've only spent about 6 hrs on FRED and I can more or less read and understand SEXPs easily. I think I'm mutating into some FRED mutant!!
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*Braaaaaainz*.. erm.. :nervous:... *Missioooonz*
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I
read
the
walk
thru
Geez you guys are weird.
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<3 The Walkthru
<3 My previous experince with mission making in other games.
... Wait, I actually skipped the walkthru.
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Only issue I have with the current Events system is how clunky the SEXP interface is. Drag-and-drop functions within each event (not of the whole event, but certain operators within it) would be exceedingly useful.
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Only issue I have with the current Events system is how clunky the SEXP interface is. Drag-and-drop functions within each event (not of the whole event, but certain operators within it) would be exceedingly useful.
There's copy-paste, which is almost as good.
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I do use the cut-paste/copy-add paste feature. I think its handy for setting up long sexps.
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I think visually. I can't stand anything that is text based. SEXPs are text based. A visual flowchart SEXP editor would be really, really cool.
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I think visually. I can't stand anything that is text based. SEXPs are text based. A visual flowchart SEXP editor would be really, really cool.
Its an idea. But may be difficult to do, depending ...