Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The FRED Workshop => Topic started by: BlueFlames on December 30, 2007, 03:38:04 pm
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I tend to agree. Mission debugging for me tends to consist of 2-3 playthroughs of a mission followed by a loud shout of "You bloody idiot!"
Seems that there isn't a compilation thread of such moments, or if there is, it's quite well and truly dead. In light of that, let this thread be our (new?) confessional, where we may relate to each other our sins of idiocy committed in FRED, as we spot them.
My most recent forehead-slapping moment occurred last night, while checking over the last mission of Artifice once again to find out why some fire-beam events weren't causing any beams to fire. The following code seemed correct (with a little anti-spoiler censorship) for a chained event....
$Formula: ( when
( true )
( fire-beam
"GTD [ship name]"
"turret09"
"[target name]"
)
( fire-beam
"GTD [ship name]"
"turret14"
"[target name]"
)
)
The targets were certainly in range of the beams.... The firing ship had free beams and unlocked turrets.... I just couldn't wrap my head around why this wasn't working for the last three or four runs through the campaign.
Finally, the problem hit me, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. GTD [ship name] was gone. GTD [ship name] departs midway through the mission, and GTD•[ship name] arrives to go all beam-happy on its target.
Lesson(s) learned: Always watch those ship names, when scripting events around ships that perform tactical jumps.
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Lol....amazing things happen to FREDers :D
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My current one since starting to use FRED2_Open and especially switching back and forth between TBP and FS2 is saving the newest version of the file in the wrong dang directory and wondering why your changes don't show up in game.
Then there's always the making a simple name change in notepad and either making a typo or forgetting to change all the events that reference that name.
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Yes...
I used to make a load of changes, and then forget to save at all before loading up Freespace. Hours of my finite time on this world wasted...
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Nothing tops the "URA Moron 1" code. :lol:
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Nothing tops the "URA Moron 1" code. :lol:
Um...
I'm guessing that this is a code given to people with the intention of annoying them, and is incredibally funny when they complain that it doesn't work?
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Nope, it's something automatically inserted by the Fred code, I think it's if you forget to name a ship or the like...
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What about the one that happens when you put two Saths two close together?
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Nothing tops the "URA Moron 1" code. :lol:
Um...
I'm guessing that this is a code given to people with the intention of annoying them, and is incredibally funny when they complain that it doesn't work?
It was discovered by someone trying to crash FRED, IIRC. You know that if you do not name a ship, FRED will just call it "<class of ship> 1" or something similar? Well, he tried renaming Ulysses 1 to Ulysses 2 before placing a new Ulysses, thinking that when FRED encountered a ship already called "Ulysses 2", it wouldn't know what to do with the ship being placed. FRED just called the new ship "URA Moron 1". :D
Essentially, FRED calls the user a moron for trying to trick it. ;7
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What about the one that happens when you put two Saths two close together?
What happens when you put two Saths too close together?
Do you get a third Sathanas? :nervous: *runs*
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What about the one that happens when you put two Saths two close together?
What happens when you put two Saths too close together?
Do you get a third Sathanas? :nervous: *runs*
LOL!
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Ugh, I've fallen victim to the loss of two hours+ of work when I forgot to save. I save now pretty much after every event/message/ship placed out of paranoia/habit.
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You do know FRED makes backups when you go in and out of certain areas. Look for the backup.00* files.
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That's what those are!
And the URA Moron 1 thing happens (I'm pretty sure) when you put two Saths exceedingly close together.
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Didn't it include any big ships that were intersecting each other?
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That's what those are!
And the URA Moron 1 thing happens (I'm pretty sure) when you put two Saths exceedingly close together.
I suspect you misnamed one of the saths and caused it the regular way actually.
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I haven't tried it, I read it on a forum somewhere.
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Then don't say you're pretty sure unless you know
1. Who said it
2. How likely they are to be wrong.
:p
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I think my favorite so far, and I get this more often then I'd like since I like to shut off a few turrets to simulate a ship taking damage, is forgetting how once a ship is in the process of blowing up previously turret-locked or beam-locked weapons will start shooting again. I know this, and I give a second set of sexps for it to "re-lock" them so they don't ruin my suspension of disbelief. But about half the time I forget and when I go to test the mission realize that.
Far more often then I like, it even mocks me by having that "last gasp" beam shot kill me or a ship I'm supposed to be protecting, thus triggering a mission failure just to add insult to injury.
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That sounds suspiciously like a bug to me. I can't think of any good reason why locked beams should unlock on death.
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I learned to be carefull when using chained events. I got my mission all FREDed, then decided to add an extra piece of dialogue depending on the actions of the player. So I did this and sent it to my colleague, and they said that nothing happened when you accomplished your goal. I couldn't figure out what was going wrong. Turns out the event was still chained and only worked if you failed. :ick:
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It was discovered by someone trying to crash FRED, IIRC. You know that if you do not name a ship, FRED will just call it "<class of ship> 1" or something similar? Well, he tried renaming Ulysses 1 to Ulysses 2 before placing a new Ulysses, thinking that when FRED encountered a ship already called "Ulysses 2", it wouldn't know what to do with the ship being placed. FRED just called the new ship "URA Moron 1". :D
Essentially, FRED calls the user a moron for trying to trick it. ;7
That's awesome, I don't think it would actually crash though. I just tried it, and got URA Moron 1,2,3 then I renamed one of them URA Moron 4 but it just made URA Moron 1 . . . :( Oh well. I thought there might be something else exciting after that.
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That sounds suspiciously like a bug to me. I can't think of any good reason why locked beams should unlock on death.
Perhaps, but it's been doing it since Retail, I think. Certainly since 3.3.
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That sounds suspiciously like a retail bug to me then. :D I never said the SCP introduced the bug. :)
I don't think it would introduce a big balancing issue if it was fixed so give how ugly the hack required to circumvent it is then it probably needs fixing.
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*Typical FREDed mission*
"ZOMFGY!!!!! YOU KILLED ALPHA ONE!!!"
"FIRE ALL BEAMS!!!!!!@!@1111"
"Sir! But Fred said not to-"
"I DON'T CARE WHAT FRED SAID! I say FIIIIRE!!!"
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Stupid waypoint tricks!
So I built this mission where I have two friendly wings engaged in "zone defense" escort duties, i.e. a ship comes in and they fly over and escort it until it leaves, then they wait around for another ship to show up they can escort. But I don't want these fools cluttering up my jumpnode and maybe ending up smeared across the front of a TC-TRI, so I give them waypoints where they go to when they're not escorting stuff.
Single waypoints.
I go into the mission to test it and stare, totally confused, utterly baffled, as they proceed to form a ball of colliding fighters. And then suddenly I realize the AI isn't smart enough to orbit a waypoint, it has to get to it, come hell or high water. I assigned whole wings a single waypoint.
"YOU BLOODY IDIOT!"
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That sounds suspiciously like a bug to me. I can't think of any good reason why locked beams should unlock on death.
"Brothers, we drive a knife into the hearts of our enemies..."
Loooooooooo... ZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!!!BOOM!!!