Hard Light Productions Forums
Community Projects => The FreeSpace Wiki Project => Topic started by: NGTM-1R on June 14, 2008, 03:52:39 am
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Starting a possible edit-war over the BoE Syndrome article. Might want to pay attention.
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Yeah, not the best idea. Especially as the stuff you added back in is basically an ad hominem argument.
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Citing your opponent for arguing from ignorance is not ad hominem. Reference your, and mine, and god knows who else's arguments with TrashMan.
EDIT: I feel it valuable to make an important point here, one that (to my chagrin) just came to me.
The bias against Battle of Endor missions exists because everyone does them first; BILC (that's Because It Looks Cool for those of you who can't figured it out.) in action. These flooded the fandom in the early days, prompting Zarathud to write his article.
But he got it wrong. He singled out the mission type and not the inexperience of the makers as the problem. It isn't. Or rather, in a much more subtle way then what everyone who argues against the creation of BoE missions likes to think, it is. The mistakes everyone likes to cite against the mission type are mistakes I have seen, and made on my own, in non-BoE missions many times. They are universally in that setting regarded as mistakes born of inexperience, and rightly so.
But a Battle of Endor-style mission is the least forgiving type of mission one can make.
The current wiki article recognizes this; not in so many words, but its repeated admonitions that those without experience or willing to devote considerable attention to detail should not build BoEs ought to make it clear. Zarathud's article does not recognize this. Saying he was inexperienced is a more palatable alternative then saying he was outright wrong, I suppose, but now it's very tempting to say just that.
So yes, the problem is with the mission type. If you screw up here, it's going to show up bigtime. If you screw up in a duel between two cruisers and their supporting fighters, nobody might ever notice.
EDIT THE SECOND: Major revision underway based on stuff above. Deal.
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Something tells me that the two of you are using the same phrase to describe two different kinds of mission.
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I feel like the article itself is inappropriate and is mostly an opinion piece. There are many, many more things for newer FREDders to learn. There are many more pressing problems than Battle of Endor missions. Having such a large article in the first place is going to put people off of experimenting with them altogether.
If an article as long as the current one is going to be dedicated to a certain type of mission, it should be written in a how-to format, with common problems and things to look out for and solutions, plus some notable examples.
"Battle of Endor Syndome" IMHO is an inherently biased title because (A) it's possible to create a good, fun Battle of Endor mission and (B) there aren't many Battle of Endor missions that I know of, unless you're being really unforgiving with that title. I'd be hard pressed to think of any mission with more than two destroyers per side.
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What I've always found amusing about the term "Battle of Endor" is how its common usage doesn't seem to jibe with the actual event it refers to. People generally define it as describing a mission where the player's single ship has little to no impact on the outcome of the battle...yet the original event featured a suicidal A-wing and a clunker of a Corellian freighter making all the difference. :p
(And yes, I know what the term is actually referring to, but that doesn't change the irony.)
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I would say, what's wrong with the player not making a difference? Why inherently favor any mission that makes the player the hero of the game? Sometimes media can be entertaining without direct participation (see TV or movies).
It could be the payoff for a serious of grueling, time-limit missions; you, the player, set everything up with a serious of covert intrusions, and then you get to watch as your fleet blows the crap out of the other side's fleet in a vicious battle, while you get to hang back and take out targets of opportunity or fleeing ships.
A lot of people praise the 'grunt' aspect of Freespace 1, after all.
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Okay, all in favor of nuking the whole thing or at least radical revision of the existing article, please raise a convenient appendage?
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If you mean the Battle of Endor Syndrome rather than the FRED and the Battle of Endor Syndrome article I fully agree. The former doesn't define the term properly and then goes off on a rant about it. A BoE mission is NOT any big mission with lots of ships. Battle of Endor Syndrome is a derogatory term used for any big mission where the size size of the mission is the primary cause of many of the design mistakes.
The original article however has historical significance and also talks about what was at the time a real problem.
I would say, what's wrong with the player not making a difference? Why inherently favor any mission that makes the player the hero of the game? Sometimes media can be entertaining without direct participation (see TV or movies).
The player doesn't have to single-handedly destroy the Death Star in order to make BoE mission into a good one. His input doesn't have to decide whether his team win or lose the battle but he must have some influence on it. If the player's input has no effect on the eventual outcome of the battle then the mission is badly designed. Far too many BoE missions consist of the player flying around taking out fighters while the capships simply get on with resolving their own battle.
The point of the player making a difference is that if the player can fly out of range, put his feet up, have a cup of tea and still win the mission it's a bad mission.
You can compensate for this by giving the player a task to do within the mission which does balance on a knife-edge. Whether it's protecting troop transports on the edge of the battle, taking out a destroyer's super-weapon or blowing up something big doesn't matter as long as it's something important to the plot line which does have consequences. The big mistake most BoE designers have made is scripting the capship combat and then reducing the player's job to flying around shooting from the large selection of fighter craft while the game gets on with the real story.
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Now taking suggestions on the possiblity of moving the FS Shorthand article somewhere else slightly more prominent, considering the terminology used ingame doesn't match reality, but is rather critical to making sense of things.
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I think the debate over the Battle of Endor syndrome deserves its own discussion. It's been raging for years, and I'm continuing it on the wiki (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Talk:Battle_of_Endor_Syndrome).
I would suggest that the bit on the story limitations be restored, as that is the most relevant to experienced designers.
While I'm going to disagree in advance, I'd rather see someone give a coherent defense of the mission style. The defense of BoE missions has become disjointed and basically says only "other people have done it" without explaining how they arguably got it right. It's not an argument that "it can be done if you're experienced, but not if you're inexperienced." That's redundant and a decent defense would explain what an experienced FREDer would get "right" that an inexperienced person would otherwise get "wrong." karajorma has some good points, but I'd say that the better design decision is to give the illusion of the battle and avoid the flaws of a larger, unmanageable battle.
I feel like the article itself is inappropriate and is mostly an opinion piece. There are many, many more things for newer FREDders to learn. There are many more pressing problems than Battle of Endor missions. Having such a large article in the first place is going to put people off of experimenting with them altogether.
While opinion, I think the article is very defensible and dealt with a common problem of newer FREDers.
"Battle of Endor Syndome" IMHO is an inherently biased title because (A) it's possible to create a good, fun Battle of Endor mission and (B) there aren't many Battle of Endor missions that I know of, unless you're being really unforgiving with that title. I'd be hard pressed to think of any mission with more than two destroyers per side.
That a poorly designed mission can be fun for a while doesn't excuse poor design, from the view of another mission designer. Plus, a Battle of Endor mission would include much more than two destroyers.
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karajorma has some good points, but I'd say that the better design decision is to give the illusion of the battle and avoid the flaws of a larger, unmanageable battle.
In general I tend to agree. Personally I don't touch the very large missions cause I know that if I tried it I'd end up with a 300 event monstrosity from trying to make sure I'd covered all the possible outcomes. The more ships you stick in a mission, the more ways you give the player to screw you over. :)
I don't believe BoE is impossible but it's certainly something that isn't going to work well if tried by an inexperienced FREDder.
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I've seen a lot of escort this and attack that style missions. But I've never seen a true Battle of Endor mission that someone has put some real effort into. Karajorma's definition of good mission design requires that the player have a large part to play in the unfolding mission. In fact his argument seems to be that the player must participate or the mission will fail, and otherwise, the mission is poorly designed and should not be attempted.
So if you make that assumption then most of the arguments I make will be meaningless. I would not say that the player should be given to destroy a half-dozen ships with relative ease to allow him to turn the tide of battle, and the Freespace engine probably doesn't allow the fine control to let you do a series of objectives that are completable, but will result in a domino effect that will cause the tide of the battle to turn one way or the other.
The argument I tend towards is that it doesn't matter if the player participates or not. So what? The player is playing the game because he wants to be there. There are all kinds of gimmicks to reward players that don't make their actions required to move the story along. Cutscenes, for instance. Or bonus missions. Or little secrets, like in StarFox, that give you bonuses but you aren't at all required to do.
But more importantly, people don't attempt Battle of Endor missions, and it's boring to play a campaign only to find that the missions are all based on the same archetypes that are established in the original campaign. There are no Battle of Endor missions in the Freespace 2 campaign - go watch Return of the Jedi. There are literally supposed to be some hundred vessels or more there, FS2 destroyer size or more. There's nothing even coming close to rivaling that scale in the Freespace 2 campaign; I'd hazard a guess that there are never more than 3 or 4 destroyers alive and in-system at the same time in any given mission. I wouldn't know whether to say that more than a half-dozen Destroyers ever appear in any mission.
I don't think that Battle of Endor missions are the best missions or that they need to be used for every mission, but I think that rather than focusing on them as an example of a way that bad design concepts can be applied, you should instead state those design concepts. The article as-is doesn't entirely rule out BoE missions, thankfully, it merely says that they're hard. But it looks to me like Battle of Endor missions are a serious problem. Like there are so many Battle of Endor missions that people have to be told to not make them, because there are so many Battle of Endor missions that people think they're cool, and it's become a destructive fad for the community.
I'll bring in a movie issue since I don't know of any FS2 mission that would work well. Let's say that somebody in the movie business decided to write this big long negative article about why big space battles. Then it gets circulated among the higher echelons of moviemakers and producers, and earns high approval. So then Joss Whedon comes in and says, "I have a great idea for a movie." So they sit down, and read the script, and then they say, "Well, look Josh, we think it's a great movie, but...why can't the crew of the Firefly take part in the battle? I mean, everybody knows that you can't have a space battle where the heroes don't do anything. Can't they hijack an Alliance cruiser, or maybe use that cannon they shot at the Reavers with?" and of course Josh says, "Whoa, wait a minute - they spent three-quarters of the movie putting everything in action. They're the whole reason that the two fleets are there in the first place. They can't board an Alliance cruiser - that'd be totally unrealistic and would cheapen the whole movie."
And so they respond, "Well, like we said, it's a good movie, but we don't really want to take that risk. I mean, everybody knows that Battle of Endor sequences are a bad idea..."
Of course as pointed out earlier, the entire Battle of Endor hinged on the split-second chance decisions that let one X-wing and a battered freighter blow up the Death Star II's reactor core, so it wasn't like things were so grand-scale that individual fighters weren't able to do anything. :p
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But what if Lando had decided "Bugger that for a game of soldiers" and just ran away? :D
Hmmmm. Reading my previous response I can see why you thought I was saying the players actions must decide who wins. That's not at all what I actually meant though. What I meant is that the player must have something to do which you can turn into a pass/fail debriefing. Too many BoE missions end up with the player just flying about killing things while the capships get on with resolving the story. That's what is poor mission design. Because it doesn't matter how many fighters the player takes out the capships will always resolve the mission the way the mission designer intended and the player will see the "You may now play the next mission" debriefing.
And an always win mission is bad design. There needs to be a way for the player to lose. Sure the player can get destroyed but unless we're talking about a desperate Custer's Last Stand mission where survival is the only goal it's not enough.
As I said before the player must have a task to accomplish that stands on a knife edge and will be resolved by the quality of his flying. It doesn't matter whether this is something that resolves the battle in one direction (Destroy the Death Star), Helps it (Take out the beam cannons on the enemy destroyer) or is completely irrelevant to the outcome (Protect those civilians until they can jump out). There must be something more than just aimlessly flying about shooting ships.
It's quite rare to see a mission where someone has simply stuck a bunch of enemy fighters in a mission and said "Kill them all to win" with no story or plot to it. But in a BoE mission it's easy to disguise that you've basically done the exact same thing.
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Luckily, FRED enables the Joss Whedons and the Joe Whackos to each try their hand at mission design. Each has a chance to fail designing a Battle of Endor mission, so I think the analogy fails.
I would suggest that the Joss Whedon would at worst create the illusion of the Battle of Endor because a "big" mission would interfere with -- rather than promote -- his storytelling. Even if the execution could work (with largely scripted events, cooperative player, etc.), I believe a good design leads to a simpler, focused design.
Using the Battle of Endor missions as a negative example stimulates discussion of design concepts, and I think the reason there are so few missions is that the lessons have been learned. That the community no longer churns out Endor-style missions is a sign of maturity in mission design, and lessons that learned through discussions like this (and the wiki).
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Luckily, FRED enables the Joss Whedons and the Joe Whackos to each try their hand at mission design. Each has a chance to fail designing a Battle of Endor mission, so I think the analogy fails.
It would be trivial to rework the analogy so that instead of asking for funding, he was asking for advice. But even without reworking it, there's still evidence that the analogy holds weight. See this thread (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,54958.0.html), for instance. Clearly at least one person thinks BOE has an inherent stigma attached to it that could cause problems for them. Institutionalizing it in the wiki will just solidify that impression.
I would suggest that the Joss Whedon would at worst create the illusion of the Battle of Endor because a "big" mission would interfere with -- rather than promote -- his storytelling. Even if the execution could work (with largely scripted events, cooperative player, etc.), I believe a good design leads to a simpler, focused design.
Saying that you know what Joss Whedon would do with FRED is a pretty crappy argument to stand on, especially when you go right back to saying he would do it your way. All you're really saying there is that you think you're right. We've established that, already. :p
Since nobody is arguing that the battle in Serenity is an example of BoE, I'll go right back to it. To draw the analogy in more detail, the main characters would represent the player. Firefly, in this case, would be Alpha 1.
I don't think this is too much of a stretch here. Many movies do use karajorma's design ethos if you take the main characters to be Alpha 1. There's lots of suspense and drama built up around accomplishing a task that is difficult, and oftentimes the hero's victory is something of a photo finish to maximize the suspense and dramatic effect.
Furthermore, key campaigns like Derelict have blatant similarities in writing to movies or plays. More generally speaking, you could probably group all of them under 'storytelling' and assume that since the audience comes from the same culture, the same principles will generally apply to all three, although obviously there will be differences because of the medium.
So, what purpose does the battle in Serenity serve? It's cool. That's pretty much it. There's no reason to have an entire fleet there - in fact, it stretches the realism a bit to think that the Reavers would have so many battle-capable ships, and that the Alliance would be willing to commit an entire fleet to a supposedly-quiet operation. Neither the Alliance fleet nor the Reaver fleet played any part in the story until right before the battle.
And many people liked the battle because it was cool and there was a lot of eyecandy, not necessarily because it was such a rich and deep contribution to the story. Plus since it'd be pretty pointless to have the movie end with Serenity getting blown up by a malfunctioning missile, most people are going to subconsciously realize that it's not supposed to be darkly tense but exciting.
So the purpose of the battle was to take all the tension that'd been building up to that point and release it, and add a cool battle, that was also exciting.
Can you do that in Freespace? Yes! You can have several tough assault, escort, and covert ops missions leading up to a big battle.
(Side note: I don't think Serenity would've been near as effective as if it hadn't had the battle done exactly as it was. The battle was such a "Disney Ride" of a scene, that it has a lot more impact when Wash is killed...if the entire scene had been darkly tense, and killing Wash was the release, it wouldn't have been the same at all. It wouldn't have set the movie up for the next scene, it wouldn't have made Simon getting shot as dramatic, and so on and so forth.)
Now granted, the crew of the Serenity was 'balanced on a knife's edge' to some extent, even if we as the audience know they aren't going to be killed randomly. (And I think it's important that the sudden killing happens after that point - if they did, we would be expecting Serenity to die. Joss could've easily had the surviving Alliance soldier shoot Book, instead he gave him an extensive death scene.)
So I can't disprove karajorma isn't right on that point with that example, but I do think it's been done in some games as a 'bonus mission' kind of thing, and I don't think it's necessarily wrong to have a bonus mission as long as you do bookend it with more serious missions. The mission may lose its context in and of itself, but as part of a larger whole, it doesn't actually have to be a complete story or even embody all the aspects of a mission. For all we know, it could dovetail into a Red Alert mission that is hard as hell.
Using the Battle of Endor missions as a negative example stimulates discussion of design concepts, and I think the reason there are so few missions is that the lessons have been learned. That the community no longer churns out Endor-style missions is a sign of maturity in mission design, and lessons that learned through discussions like this (and the wiki).
That's a completely circular argument. Fewer BoE missions is only a sign of maturity if it's wrong to make BoE missions no matter how they're designed, which is exactly what we're trying to hash out here.
And it may stimulate discussion of design concepts, but it's not nearly as good of an example as something that is commonly used. With BoE, you're working with a completely different set of rules than an escort mission. You don't use an example that your audience isn't as familiar with and doesn't plan on working on to teach skills. You can use it as a negative example, but that's still assuming that BoE missions are inherently worse than other mission types. And according to your boiled-down design schema, they are. I can't really contest BoE missions without contesting your belief that simpler is better. So it would seem that we could argue over BoE missions until the universe ends and never get anywhere, because the fundamental assumptions that we're making about what's right and what's not right are different and would lead to the same conclusion, no matter how we looked at BoE missions.
But what if Lando had decided "Bugger that for a game of soldiers" and just ran away? :D
Hmmmm. Reading my previous response I can see why you thought I was saying the players actions must decide who wins. That's not at all what I actually meant though. What I meant is that the player must have something to do which you can turn into a pass/fail debriefing. Too many BoE missions end up with the player just flying about killing things while the capships get on with resolving the story. That's what is poor mission design. Because it doesn't matter how many fighters the player takes out the capships will always resolve the mission the way the mission designer intended and the player will see the "You may now play the next mission" debriefing.
And an always win mission is bad design. There needs to be a way for the player to lose. Sure the player can get destroyed but unless we're talking about a desperate Custer's Last Stand mission where survival is the only goal it's not enough.
As I said before the player must have a task to accomplish that stands on a knife edge and will be resolved by the quality of his flying. It doesn't matter whether this is something that resolves the battle in one direction (Destroy the Death Star), Helps it (Take out the beam cannons on the enemy destroyer) or is completely irrelevant to the outcome (Protect those civilians until they can jump out). There must be something more than just aimlessly flying about shooting ships.
It's quite rare to see a mission where someone has simply stuck a bunch of enemy fighters in a mission and said "Kill them all to win" with no story or plot to it. But in a BoE mission it's easy to disguise that you've basically done the exact same thing.
I've bolded what seemed to represent the three main points...
Here's one quick example. Suppose you decide to a campaign based on an epic struggle between a gumshoe rebellion and an evil galactic empire. :p It's a little more evenly matched than the movie it'd be ripping off.
What the player knows is that he has no explicit objectives. He's told at the start of the first mission, a BoE mission, that the rebellion has just been formed and the key member states have banded together to assault the empire.
The battle is a rout and the surviving rebel ships are driven off. The rest of the campaign is about the rebels recovering from the disastrous initial battle and eventually managing to strike back at the empire. There's no way for the player to change the outcome, and there's no way for him to save all the ships.
What the player is not told is that every one of the ships that can be destroyed sets a persistent variable. For certain ships, they appear in later missions and make things easier. Other ships cause crucial plot points to be revealed, new situations to arise, and even missions to appear that weren't possible before because the rebellion wouldn't have had the manpower. Again, there's no way for the player to save all the ships, so there's an incredible amount of replayability.
The player's only risk in the mission is dying. The player will get pretty much the same briefing regardless, because saving a handful of ships will not change the fact that the battle was an overwhelming failure. The player isn't balanced on a razor's edge unless he gets into a battle and makes it be that way himself (of course he can also bite off more than he can chew and die). But the player does have great incentive to participate in the battle and try to save a new ship each time.
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Well in that case instead of using the mission outcome in a debrief you're basically using it elsewhere.
Let me put it more simply. What is really important is that the players actions should matter. As I keep saying in many BoE missions they don't. The campaign would be the same whether the player played well or not.
Ironically one of the FS2 missions with the least ships is actually the one which bests fits the BoE mission description. High Noon is actually pretty close to a BoE mission. While initially you have an effect on the battle by disabling the Sathanas' cannons after you've done that it matters very little what you do, and that's something you can accomplish within the first 2 minutes or so. You can simply put the ship at top speed and walk off for a cup of tea and it won't change the mission outcome after that point.
After the Sathanas is disabled the player is reduced to simply waiting for the capships to end their fight. His actions don't matter. Great in terms of storyline but rather poor from a mission design point. I suspect that if they could have done it :v: would have gone to a cutscene once the beam cannons were taken out.
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Clearly at least one person thinks BOE has an inherent stigma attached to it that could cause problems for them. Institutionalizing it in the wiki will just solidify that impression.
That institutional knowledge may have dissenters or cause stigma doesn't justify not expressing a long held, well-reasoned opinion. The wiki is to inform, the Joss Whedons and Joe Whackos of the world can take it or leave it. When the Joe Wackos fail, then the community has fulfilled its obligation to give advice on how to build a better mousetrap. If the hypothetical Joss Whedon succeeds, then their praise would include beating the odds. Based on my information and belief, there are more Joe Wackos in the world than Joss Whedons and it can't be done.
In any event, I think the Joss Whedons (if we play along with this conceit) are well informed to look before they leap. The wiki should make sure they're fully aware of the problems with a Battle of Endor mission, rather than withholding the criticisms because we might discourage their innovation or hurt their feelings. Editing it out of the wiki is puppies, and puppies are bull****.
In the early days of FRED, the community held missions up for critique and rating. Pastel and I led the charge, and our mission reviews became part of Xanadu's central mission archive and later Descent Chronciles/Volition Watch. It made missions better, helped identify outstanding mission designers, and developed a community of mission designers willing to participate in critical examination of what we were doing and why it worked/didn't work. Yes, we lost some people in that process. And I got flamed in the FDL and by e-mail at times. But in the end, it made the missions and community stronger. And we learned a lot of lessons the hard way in the process.
You can use it as a negative example, but that's still assuming that BoE missions are inherently worse than other mission types. And according to your boiled-down design schema, they are. I can't really contest BoE missions without contesting your belief that simpler is better. So it would seem that we could argue over BoE missions until the universe ends and never get anywhere, because the fundamental assumptions that we're making about what's right and what's not right are different and would lead to the same conclusion, no matter how we looked at BoE missions.
I'm not making an assumption. I'm making an argument, and the boiled-down design schema are my elements in my proof. If you want to get somewhere, poke holes in my analysis rather than thinking they're just assumptions or that we're only going to argue in circles.
Bottom line is that FreeSpace isn't a movie. There are storytelling elements competing against action elements in a mission. When you load up on the action elements, you lose those storytelling devices, risk a broken mission and very likely lose the ability to engage the player. That engagement of the player is what karajorma talking about in letting the player have an impact on the mission. It's often hard to do, even in more focused missions.
Here's a personal example: an early version of my Game of the Year multiplayer mission Shivan Incursion was criticized when PXO players discovered how you could hang back for a period of time and 90% of the time gain SquadWar points for a certain event. We later spent time ironing out the bug, but couldn't eliminate it entirely since you could still disengage after eliminating the waves of fighters sent after the player to stir up the action. Part of good mission design involves anticipating unexpected or game-breaking player actions and dealing with the AI so it reacts accordingly. Even with several professional testers/bug fixers and extensive playtesting at a weekend LAN party, a design flaw slipped through.
A Battle of Endor mission increases those potential design issues by an order of magnitude, if not more. Not warning mission designers about those problems is wrong IMO, and there is great benefit to the community when anyone attempting doing such a mission does so knowing the risks and aware of the stigma that such missions often have flaws. I don't think Battle of Endor missions can be done well from a design standpoint, becasue the design will get away from any designer. Even when it appears to work, I'm certain I can call up my two or three bug-testers again and they'd find gaping design flaws in such missions (assuming I can coax them away from abusing bug exploits they've found in EVE Online). My experience tells me this isn't an assumption, and can be tested and proven as fact.
I'm not arguing that such Battle of Endor missions aren't potentially fun if you can maintain the illusion and the player cooperates in just the right way. It's just that they're not good examples of design. The Battle of Endor articles were meant as warnings to mission designers, not players. The wiki should be addressing those concerns of designers in why not to make such missions. If you want the wiki to include an argument about how players enjoy them when they work, that's fine. I think the discussion defending the Battle of Endor missions is in serious need of rework anyway.
But just don't throw out the baby with the bathwater by editing the Battle of Endor issues out of the wiki. There's a reason for the stigma, and it's not just that I'm an argumentative and opinionated guy who wrote an article about the Battle of Endor syndrome years ago. I think the generally-held stigma confirms I'm right, if anything. :pimp:
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From the perspective of a mission player, albeit not a mission designer, I don't really have a problem with the odd mission or two in a campaign that essentially plays out like an interactive cutscene. We have a big, beautiful game engine capable of producing some spectacularly epic fights between massive capital ships; once in a while, it's a nice change of pace to just sit back and watch the show unfold. Even if such an event could simply be told via a cutscene mission, there is something to be said for immersivity; though I've never played the games myself, I understand that the Half-Life series allowed the player to move and look around even during the game's scripted cutscenes. While I certainly wouldn't advocate including a mission of this nature more than once in a campaign, I don't see anything inherently wrong in using such a set piece during a particularly plot-crucial moment. And, like karajorma suggested earlier, there are means of giving the player at least some sort of role in a mission that has a predetermined outcome.
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Clearly at least one person thinks BOE has an inherent stigma attached to it that could cause problems for them. Institutionalizing it in the wiki will just solidify that impression.
That institutional knowledge may have dissenters or cause stigma doesn't justify not expressing a long held, well-reasoned opinion. The wiki is to inform, the Joss Whedons and Joe Whackos of the world can take it or leave it. When the Joe Wackos fail, then the community has fulfilled its obligation to give advice on how to build a better mousetrap. If the hypothetical Joss Whedon succeeds, then their praise would include beating the odds. Based on my information and belief, there are more Joe Wackos in the world than Joss Whedons and it can't be done.
The wiki is to inform, not to be your own personal soapbox. If you want to express your opinions then you're free to do so on the forums. If they're just not good enough for people to listen to them, then they don't belong in the wiki anyway. The only opinion pieces I see appropriate as being in the wiki are things that are so popular that a working knowledge of them is necessary to be in the community (ie they have an identity of their own), and if they help give context to something that isn't clear from hard facts (eg veteran comments).
We had a big discussion over this, and the sort of agreement that was hammered out was that opinions would gain 'equal time'. Not wanting to reopen that particular line of discussion, I've been rather content with the way things worked out and most people are, too. It's also the same methodology that wikipedia follows (or attempts to follow) and it works out well. Its competitor, conservapedia, which tries to express a particular point of view, is worthless for serious understanding of a subject.
In any event, I think the Joss Whedons (if we play along with this conceit) are well informed to look before they leap. The wiki should make sure they're fully aware of the problems with a Battle of Endor mission, rather than withholding the criticisms because we might discourage their innovation or hurt their feelings. Editing it out of the wiki is puppies, and puppies are bull****.
No. Including it as an official statement in the wiki that "BoE is bad" is wrong because it's not canon, and you haven't proven it. We have all sorts of design theories that will argue under what circumstances a BoE might be good or bad, and yours just happen to include the assumption that simpler is always better. That's not proof that BoE missions can be good, but it is good enough to keep it out of the wiki, because we don't know if it's true or not and the wiki is supposed to be a source of facts (about fiction).
In the early days of FRED, the community held missions up for critique and rating. Pastel and I led the charge, and our mission reviews became part of Xanadu's central mission archive and later Descent Chronciles/Volition Watch. It made missions better, helped identify outstanding mission designers, and developed a community of mission designers willing to participate in critical examination of what we were doing and why it worked/didn't work. Yes, we lost some people in that process. And I got flamed in the FDL and by e-mail at times. But in the end, it made the missions and community stronger. And we learned a lot of lessons the hard way in the process.
Doesn't mean that the change was for the better, or even that it was necessarily better or worse, it may simply have been more in the direction that you liked to see. Releasing stuff online is notoriously thankless - you can spend hours working on something, and then nobody will bother to reply to the release thread for two days. Then you may get "Cool...so what good is this again?"
If you and Pastel stepped up and were getting published on the website, you gain a measure of implicit authority that has nothing to do with your skill. It's not hard to see how people would, with the intention of improving, end up following the careful critique that you and Pastel gave and making missions more to your liking. It's a lot easier to follow that than a simple thumbsup post or a rant about how much a mission sucked.
I'm not making an assumption. I'm making an argument, and the boiled-down design schema are my elements in my proof. If you want to get somewhere, poke holes in my analysis rather than thinking they're just assumptions or that we're only going to argue in circles.
Bottom line is that FreeSpace isn't a movie. There are storytelling elements competing against action elements in a mission. When you load up on the action elements, you lose those storytelling devices, risk a broken mission and very likely lose the ability to engage the player. That engagement of the player is what karajorma talking about in letting the player have an impact on the mission. It's often hard to do, even in more focused missions.
Yes, you are making an assumptions, and you're basing an argument on them. It's impossible to talk about something as abstract as art and not make assumptions. If it were possible, we'd have a nice mathematical formula that you could plug variables into and you'd always get exactly as much attention as you expected.
For instance, in your last paragraph there, you seem to assume that a BoE mission somehow inherently affects the storytelling devices. I don't see that at all. You still have, CBs and briefings, still have the debriefing, still have in-game messaging, and can even make use of cutscenes if you want them. You can also introduce a lot more ships and/or factions in mission than you could otherwise, so it introduces a new style of storytelling.
Hence karajorma's point about impact in a mission doesn't have anything to do with storytelling. You can have storytelling with or without the player making an impact. Your BoE could provide massive amounts of exposition, as my earlier example would.
Here's a personal example: an early version of my Game of the Year multiplayer mission Shivan Incursion was criticized when PXO players discovered how you could hang back for a period of time and 90% of the time gain SquadWar points for a certain event. We later spent time ironing out the bug, but couldn't eliminate it entirely since you could still disengage after eliminating the waves of fighters sent after the player to stir up the action. Part of good mission design involves anticipating unexpected or game-breaking player actions and dealing with the AI so it reacts accordingly. Even with several professional testers/bug fixers and extensive playtesting at a weekend LAN party, a design flaw slipped through.
Cheating in multiplayer is a lot different from storytelling style in singleplayer. Naturally, players were pissed off because people were rewarded for not playing. The mission was self-destructive to the nature of SquadWar, because it provided incentive for players to be antisocial and not interact with other players. There's no such issue in a single player mission where the player is not competing against other players and his only goals are those set by the mission designer and to have fun for himself.
A Battle of Endor mission increases those potential design issues by an order of magnitude, if not more. Not warning mission designers about those problems is wrong IMO, and there is great benefit to the community when anyone attempting doing such a mission does so knowing the risks and aware of the stigma that such missions often have flaws. I don't think Battle of Endor missions can be done well from a design standpoint, becasue the design will get away from any designer. Even when it appears to work, I'm certain I can call up my two or three bug-testers again and they'd find gaping design flaws in such missions (assuming I can coax them away from abusing bug exploits they've found in EVE Online). My experience tells me this isn't an assumption, and can be tested and proven as fact.
Then prove it. Show, don't tell.
I'm not arguing that such Battle of Endor missions aren't potentially fun if you can maintain the illusion and the player cooperates in just the right way. It's just that they're not good examples of design. The Battle of Endor articles were meant as warnings to mission designers, not players. The wiki should be addressing those concerns of designers in why not to make such missions. If you want the wiki to include an argument about how players enjoy them when they work, that's fine. I think the discussion defending the Battle of Endor missions is in serious need of rework anyway.
Again, the wiki isn't your personal soapbox. If you want the wiki to say that "Oh, there was this article one time that said that Battle of Endor missions are bad, and you can see it here", I have no beef with that. It's an objective overview of something that people in the community can reasonably be expected to reference. If you want the wiki to claim that "Battle of Endor missions are bad examples of design..." then you need to prove that what you're saying is true.
But just don't throw out the baby with the bathwater by editing the Battle of Endor issues out of the wiki. There's a reason for the stigma, and it's not just that I'm an argumentative and opinionated guy who wrote an article about the Battle of Endor syndrome years ago. I think the generally-held stigma confirms I'm right, if anything. :pimp:
Does it? Actually, I've never really thought about it, but I don't really have any good evidence that a generally-held stigma exists. But let's assume for a moment that it does.
Up 'til more recently, FS2 just didn't have the capability of running BoE missions. Graphics cards didn't have the horsepower. And there's been relatively few campaigns daring enough to take on such a challenge. I can point to a lot of times in human history when something or some group of people had a stigma that was maintained for a long time - and existed simply because that group was unknown enough or distant enough, or circumstances were simply right for, blatant generalizations to take hold. Six to ten years is nothing. Human irrationality has lasted for hundreds of years at a time. The fact that fewer people attempt BoE missions may simply mean that anybody who announces that they're working on a BoE mission is putting their reputation on the line, since everybody automatically assumes that they didn't "get the memo", so to speak, and attempts to save them from their own ignorance by telling them not to do it.
I'd also like to note that one of the more memorable campaigns, and I believe successful campaigns, involved quite a bit of what would be termed "BoE" missions, and quite a few missions that involved nothing more than jumping in and staring at a nebula for a few minutes.
EDIT: Somebody please split this off, it's clearly a discussion in and of itself by now.
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Well in that case instead of using the mission outcome in a debrief you're basically using it elsewhere.
Let me put it more simply. What is really important is that the players actions should matter. As I keep saying in many BoE missions they don't. The campaign would be the same whether the player played well or not.
Ironically one of the FS2 missions with the least ships is actually the one which bests fits the BoE mission description. High Noon is actually pretty close to a BoE mission. While initially you have an effect on the battle by disabling the Sathanas' cannons after you've done that it matters very little what you do, and that's something you can accomplish within the first 2 minutes or so. You can simply put the ship at top speed and walk off for a cup of tea and it won't change the mission outcome after that point.
After the Sathanas is disabled the player is reduced to simply waiting for the capships to end their fight. His actions don't matter. Great in terms of storyline but rather poor from a mission design point. I suspect that if they could have done it :v: would have gone to a cutscene once the beam cannons were taken out.
I don't think it's necessary that the player's actions matter, and I don't think a cutscene necessarily changes anything. Half-life 2 makes a big deal of having the player in control nearly all of the time, and having scripted events play out. Sure, you can turn around and stare at a wall while all the fireworks are happening, but do you want to? :p Metal Gear Solid 2, on the other hand, doesn't have any problem with gratuitous use of in-game cutscenes. Both games are pretty well-established and have following in their own right, obviously.
But I'm also kind of iffy as I think if you were to use that as a rule of thumb, you would probably be right. I think you could get away with a BoE without having the player's actions matter, but every instance I come up with generally needs some extensive setup to make it seem like the FREDder hasn't just tossed a bunch of ships into FRED and beam-free-alled, maybe quite a few scripted events too.
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As you say making missions is an art not a science. As with all art there are times when you can get away with ignoring the established rules. However as with art if you abandon them without understanding why they exist and what they mean, your work will probably look amateurish as a result.
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The only opinion pieces I see appropriate as being in the wiki are things that are so popular that a working knowledge of them is necessary to be in the community (ie they have an identity of their own), and if they help give context to something that isn't clear from hard facts (eg veteran comments).
I think that the issue of the Battle of Endor syndrome has been canon since before the release of FreeSpace 2. And if the article doesn't meet your definition for the wiki, then I don't know what would.
You're ignoring most of my argument and focusing only on the zen mantra of mission design (supported by Volition even in terms of coding the engine). But the proof of that mantra is in everything else dismissed -- complex missions often fail and inherently remove the player from the story elements. That's the knowledge that needs to be communicated.
You can enjoy art that has poor technique, but that doesn't make it "good" in terms of design. Fun is a different factor than design. We can have different opinions of fun, but design techniques can be objectively analyzed. A "Battle of Endor" mission relying only on its briefing and debriefing to advance its story is classic bad design technique, and it's only worse when the designer doesn't even bother.
We had a big discussion over this, and the sort of agreement that was hammered out was that opinions would gain 'equal time'.
Cuddle puppies all you want, but that's the coward's way out. Some opinions can be proven better than others. If you don't like what I say, find someone with a good argument about why I can be wrong in the wiki. I'd suggest focusing on the "fun" factor.
At the very least a high-level summary of the BoE discussion IMO merits space on a wiki if its purpose is to really inform the community. Do that, and they'll thank you more often than not.
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I think that the issue of the Battle of Endor syndrome has been canon since before the release of FreeSpace 2.
Then you don't understand the definition of canon. Operation Thresher is canon. "Battle of Endor" is not canon - it never appears anywhere in the Freespace universe.
You're ignoring most of my argument and focusing only on the zen mantra of mission design (supported by Volition even in terms of coding the engine). But the proof of that mantra is in everything else dismissed -- complex missions often fail and inherently remove the player from the story elements. That's the knowledge that needs to be communicated.
The way :V: coded the engine doesn't have anything to do with whether they supported BoE missions or not. They also didn't code in the ability to have ships with more than ~2000 polys, shine maps, glow maps, or normal maps. That doesn't mean that they were making a statement that normal maps suck, it just wasn't technically feasible at the time due to limitations of computers. Had :V: started putting in missions with over 200 ships, nothing would have been able to run Freespace 2 without keeling over or display everything as gigantic triangles.
Furthermore, :V: could be wrong. :V: only has the power to define absolute truths within the Freespace Universe. Outside of that universe, they're just as human as the rest of us.
If you want to communicate to people that "complex missions often fail and inherently remove the player from the story elements", first of all, you need to state that rather than publishing your conclusions based on taking that, extrapolating some unknown number of times, and then generalizing an entire type of mission.
I'm dismissing things which are irrelevant or do little to support your point. Much of the 'evidence' you've suggested has been circumstantial and has many other factors contributing to it which is just as likely to have caused things to happen the way they did as some inherent problem with Battle of Endor missions.
You can enjoy art that has poor technique, but that doesn't make it "good" in terms of design. Fun is a different factor than design. We can have different opinions of fun, but design techniques can be objectively analyzed. A "Battle of Endor" mission relying only on its briefing and debriefing to advance its story is classic bad design technique, and it's only worse when the designer doesn't even bother.
Design techniques must have an end goal in mind in order for them to be meaningful. Design techniques themselves cannot be objectively organized, inasmuch as creating art is concerned, because their goal is a general subjective feeling. What are your design goals? Success? Humor? Fun? Drama? Excitement? How do your design goals cause all of these to happen? So far you've done a swell job of showing how your design techniques are ill-suited to a Battle of Endor mission - fair enough. That doesn't mean that they're the only set of design techniques that can be used to create a mission that is widely considered a good mission.
We had a big discussion over this, and the sort of agreement that was hammered out was that opinions would gain 'equal time'.
Cuddle puppies all you want, but that's the coward's way out. Some opinions can be proven better than others. If you don't like what I say, find someone with a good argument about why I can be wrong in the wiki. I'd suggest focusing on the "fun" factor.
At the very least a high-level summary of the BoE discussion IMO merits space on a wiki if its purpose is to really inform the community. Do that, and they'll thank you more often than not.
:lol:
I don't think that all of the people who were outraged at the idea of the Shivan Manifesto being included in the wiki would like being called "puppies". The support you've presented for your opinion so far has been rather lackluster and inconsistent in its solidarity. I don't like what you say because it doesn't work - you're trying to make an absolute statement about a subjective subject and you can't offer any definite, strong proof to support your opinion. So far all you've done is prove that you're consistent - when people design missions more according to the design techniques you support, you tend to compliment their work as 'more mature'.
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As you say making missions is an art not a science. As with all art there are times when you can get away with ignoring the established rules. However as with art if you abandon them without understanding why they exist and what they mean, your work will probably look amateurish as a result.
Exactly, but generalizations are not the way to teach those rules. I can claim that horror movies are crappy movies because they tend to kill off characters and have unrealistic plots, so an audience won't identify with the characters and will have a hard time suspending their disbelief. However, there are a lot of good horror movies. I could also argue that point-of-view shots are bad because it's hard for the audience to know what's going on - that doesn't stop movies or TV series from using point-of-view shots for effect.
Both of these things stated as just a generalization do more harm than good. It would shut people's minds off to the possibilities under the guise of it being 'the right way to do things'. The trick to teaching is to be able to instill in your students an understanding of what's right and what's not right that transcends blatant generalizations and borders on intuition. That way they can learn for themselves what works and what doesn't work. If all you're delivering to them are canned conclusions that stifle independent thought and don't stand up to critical inspection, your students are well within their rights to ignore everything you say. That doesn't necessarily mean that every student is going to enter into things with the knowledge and experience to call BS on your conclusions. Everybody has to start from somewhere.
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I tend to agree with that. It's why my posts for the FRED Academy tend to be so long. I prefer to explain why something is badly designed rather than simply saying "Don't do that."
The BoE article needs to separate out the legitimate concerns with BoE missions (and there are a couple of really big ones) from the warnings not to make them. The BoE article should be closer in tone to the 14 FREDding mistakes article I wrote a while back. Instead simply advising against BoE it should cover the common problems with BoE and what can be done to solve them. As far as I can see the two biggest problems with BoE are
1) More ships = more complexity = much more chance of the player screwing up the mission by doing something the FREDder didn't expect. The level to which this is a problem tends to correspond to how skilled the FREDder is (i.e how good he is at spotting potential problems) and how anal he is about fixing bugs and protecting against them.
2) Missions which basically put the player in "spectator mode" where he has little effect on the mission. This problem can exist in any mission (High Noon once you take out the Sath's cannons for instance) but can be avoided by giving the player a specific task (Feint! Parry! Riposte! for instance avoids the problem by making the player protect the Rampart instead of simply watching Koth ram the Colossus).
What we need is an article explaining that. :)
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Also the AI tends to be stupid if there are lots of things for it to control. At least in retail.
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Then you don't understand the definition of canon.
While there can be no "canon" of design under that narrow definition, the Battle of Endor syndrome has been influencing mission design for over 10 years. To eliminate that from the wiki makes no sense to me. To compare the design article to fan fiction is like comparing apples to oranges.
Volition's deliberate coding limitation to simplify mission design was well within the technology of the time, which is entirely different than comparing it to technology that hadn't been developed yet. If the FDL was still around, you could see these concepts promoted by Volition to mission designers -- and the deliberate design discussions in the community that were expressed in the Battle of Endor article. Just because you can do something (add more ships into FRED), doesn't mean you should. It's often better design to do more with less (like recurring fighter wings, rather than separate wings for everything).
Design techniques must have an end goal in mind in order for them to be meaningful. Design techniques themselves cannot be objectively organized, inasmuch as creating art is concerned, because their goal is a general subjective feeling.
I disagree. You can design an elegant code that doesn't meet its goal. You're talking merely about function, but art involves form as much as expression. That's why art fundamentals, like mission design or coding, can be taught.
It's then up to the artist/coder/designer to make something that achieves its function. That's why I'll concede that Battle of Endor missions can be "fun" if everything falls within the expected parameters (which isn't guaranteed). I'll grant your point on expression, but not design -- which is only subjective if you confuse the means with the goal.
The support you've presented for your opinion so far has been rather lackluster and inconsistent in its solidarity. I don't like what you say because it doesn't work - you're trying to make an absolute statement about a subjective subject and you can't offer any definite, strong proof to support your opinion.
If you want to defend Battle of Endor missions, then do so. It's specious (false) logic to attack my arguments as circumstancial, not following your twisted analogies to a hypothectical "Joss Whedon" mission designer, or invalid because you're confusing design with expression.
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Then you don't understand the definition of canon.
While there can be no "canon" of design under that narrow definition, the Battle of Endor syndrome has been influencing mission design for over 10 years. To eliminate that from the wiki makes no sense to me. To compare the design article to fan fiction is like comparing apples to oranges.
It's the definition of "canon" that's been used on every single discussion board related to a fictional universe that I've seen. I've never seen anybody contradict that definition unless it was a situation where two different pieces of "canon" contradicted each other.
Volition's deliberate coding limitation to simplify mission design was well within the technology of the time, which is entirely different than comparing it to technology that hadn't been developed yet. If the FDL was still around, you could see these concepts promoted by Volition to mission designers -- and the deliberate design discussions in the community that were expressed in the Battle of Endor article. Just because you can do something (add more ships into FRED), doesn't mean you should. It's often better design to do more with less (like recurring fighter wings, rather than separate wings for everything).
Not entirely sure what you're saying with regards to technology here. Are you saying that design techniques shouldn't take into account technical improvements which reduce limitations?
Design techniques must have an end goal in mind in order for them to be meaningful. Design techniques themselves cannot be objectively organized, inasmuch as creating art is concerned, because their goal is a general subjective feeling.
I disagree. You can design an elegant code that doesn't meet its goal. You're talking merely about function, but art involves form as much as expression. That's why art fundamentals, like mission design or coding, can be taught.
It's then up to the artist/coder/designer to make something that achieves its function. That's why I'll concede that Battle of Endor missions can be "fun" if everything falls within the expected parameters (which isn't guaranteed). I'll grant your point on expression, but not design -- which is only subjective if you confuse the means with the goal.
"Expression", as I've commonly heard it used, has more to do with the artist's feeling about a particular piece of work than the audience's reaction to it. A piece can successfully express an artist's inner rage, then, but may have little meaning and be incomprehensible to its audience. It's not a word that I would use with regards to mission design, or especially not about what should or should not be in the wiki, because if someone claims that they have expressed themselves with a mission, I don't see how I could disagree with them. I hate to bring up another definition but if somebody tells me that a "mission expresses fun", it means something a lot different to me than if they say that a "mission is fun".
"Good design techique" as we're talking about it here seems to mean "the process that the mission designer uses to make a good mission". The key thing being the end goal here. What is a "good" mission? The most common definitions here seem to mean that it's a mission that most people want to play and would consider a good mission. That last part there is where the subjectivity comes in. And IMHO there is a certain amount of charity that should be used here. If somebody sticks to design technique but comes out with a mission that everybody hates, it may still be a good mission. If somebody does not stick to design technique but comes out with a mission that everybody loves, it's still a good mission, even if the person that created it doesn't know a thing about design technique and just did it via intuition.
The subjectivity from all this stems from the question - who defines the meaning of "good"? Is it the majority of the crowd or the educated elite who analyze the film? Or is there some more complex process entirely? Generally speaking it isn't actually the artist themselves. However the artist's opinion may influence others' ideas of the work.
But with Freespace missions in particular, I think that the bottom line is that there is some generally-agreed-upon missions that are good and missions that are bad. Though interestingly, missions that are bad at one thing may be good at another. SGWP2 has crappy technique for a serious campaign but is pretty well-referenced as a campaign so absurdly wrong that it's funny. So maybe SGWP2 is where people should look for inspiration for a parody campaign.
The support you've presented for your opinion so far has been rather lackluster and inconsistent in its solidarity. I don't like what you say because it doesn't work - you're trying to make an absolute statement about a subjective subject and you can't offer any definite, strong proof to support your opinion.
If you want to defend Battle of Endor missions, then do so. It's specious (false) logic to attack my arguments as circumstancial, not following your twisted analogies to a hypothectical "Joss Whedon" mission designer, or invalid because you're confusing design with expression.
It's not false logic to attack arguments as circumstantial so long as the person making the argument has not shown proof that there is a clear link between cause and effect.
As far as confusing the definition of "design" and "expression", I've never had a problem with the way the terms have been used with my definition of them, either in professional theater work or in any of the courses I've taken or related books I've read. (I also checked the definitions on dictionary.com, but there's at least a dozen for each - nevertheless, design seemed to tend towards accomplishing a goal, while expression seemed to focus on a person conveying feeling or emotion and not on how the listeners reacted to that.) Even if I'm not expressing myself clearly (:p) I am pretty comfortable with my understanding of the terms, although I'll grant you a certain amount of leeway there since they are pretty vaguely defined.
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In one sense, canon applies only to fictional storytelling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_%28fiction%29), not design:
Canon, in the context of a fictional universe, comprises those novels, stories, films, etc., that are considered to be genuine or officially sanctioned, and those events, characters, settings, etc., that are considered to have existence within the fictional universe. In order for a setting to appear coherent, especially in fictions that contain multiple parts, both creators and audiences sometimes find it useful to define what has and has not "actually happened" in that universe.
But canon can also be used to apply to design such as films (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_canon) or literature (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_canon):
Film canon is the limited group of movies that serve as the measuring stick for the highest quality in the genre of film....
The Western canon is a term used to denote a canon of books, and, more widely, music and art, that has been the most influential in shaping Western culture.
Are you saying that design techniques shouldn't take into account technical improvements which reduce limitations?
Volition's technical capabilities (especially when creating FreeSpace 2) exceeded design capabilities, so limitations were imposed to ensure quality. The goal was ensuring thorough testing, and supported by the design theory that simpler is often better. Volition deliberately limited mission designers, but not becasue of technical limitations. So I don't necessarily see the ability to create bigger Battle of Endor missions as a "technical improvement." The SCP's technical improvements are impressive, but now the designers have some need to impose their own self-restraint -- which is why I'm concerned about preserving the BoE warning.
It's not false logic to attack arguments as circumstantial so long as the person making the argument has not shown proof that there is a clear link between cause and effect.
Perhaps you're misunderstanding logical inferences (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inference) made in analyzing circumstantial evidence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstantial_evidence), the inductive process of analogies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogies), and the entirely separate method of establishing causal proof (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality).
Basically, I believe in the objective reality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_reality) of design that can be taught, demonstrated and proven. WMCoolmon doesn't, prefering a more subjectivist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjectivism) approach that design isn't separate from the "fun" or a determination of what is "good." For example, I think we can objectively prove and achieve a consenus that it isn't good design to put in 12 separate wings of 5 fighters when the capability exists to have 3 wings of fighters with 4 waves each. We can disagree about whether it's more "fun" to have 15 fighters or 60 fighters in play all at the same time, but I'm confident 15 fighters x 4 waves is generally the better design.
In terms of coding, we can achieve the same result with 5 lines of code or 50 lines. But I'm confident competent programmers would generally agree that the 5 lines of code is better design, and 50 lines should be used only when necessary. Why would mission design be any different?
Whether we ultimately agree about mission design being objective or subjective, I'd like to see some arguments in the wiki about why Battle of Endor missions are "good" -- whether in terms of design or otherwise. Battle of Endor missions can't be considered "good" if no one is able to defend them except by saying "they exist."
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Basically, I believe in the objective reality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_reality) of design that can be taught, demonstrated and proven. WMCoolmon doesn't, prefering a more subjectivist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjectivism) approach that design isn't separate from the "fun" or a determination of what is "good." For example, I think we can objectively prove and achieve a consenus that it isn't good design to put in 12 separate wings of 5 fighters when the capability exists to have 3 wings of fighters with 4 waves each. We can disagree about whether it's more "fun" to have 15 fighters or 60 fighters in play all at the same time, but I'm confident 15 fighters x 4 waves is generally the better design.
See, this argument is problematic in that it betrays your preferences and biases. I too tend to believe in a objective reality of mission design; unlike writing, this is a learned rather than an intuitive process, so I can adequately explain how I do what I do. (Though arguably, that is because FRED makes it painfully obvious as well.) However, you betray your bias with this argument. You like to build small actions between small numbers of ships. However, you fail to distingush, or fail to take into account, the possiblity of larger events occuring. 12 seperate wings of 5 fighters appearing consecutively is bad design, and I doubt anybody will ever argue that point (unless, of course, it's one of the gauntlet-type missions...those qualifiers seem to screw you up every time).
However, consider 12 seperate wings of 5 fighters appearing simulatanously for something like the Colossus battlegroup storming the Polaris-E.P. node or the intial GTVA plan to assault the Sathanas with multiple destroyers. In an action that important, with multiple capital craft engaged in a do-or-die situation and the stakes being nothing less than total victory or total defeat, that you would have only three wings of fightercraft in the fighting stretches credulity badly. Having the book thrown at it, after having said book chiselled into stone tablets for extra impact, is a much more likely and rational course of events. Thus, 60 fighters on the field at one time would be good design if you were to create such a situation in your missions.
(Sidenote; I chose those two situations for the rather specific reason that we know they happened or could have happened, but they were not portrayed in missions. The plan to deal with the Sathanas in the nebula particularly screams BoE in what it would have been like had it transpired "on screen". It also serves as an excellent demonstration of the advance of computer technology; such a mission would have been totally unfeasible when FS2 was released. Now, today, it's very much possible.)
Whether we ultimately agree about mission design being objective or subjective, I'd like to see some arguments in the wiki about why Battle of Endor missions are "good" -- whether in terms of design or otherwise. Battle of Endor missions can't be considered "good" if no one is able to defend them except by saying "they exist."
Have you actually read the wiki article? I specifically outlined several reasons, and just added several more. ( http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Battle_of_Endor_Syndrome#Why_should_I_make_such_missions.3F ) This statement alone should almost totally disqualify your arguments, as you don't seem to know very much about the article being argued about!
To put it in simplest terms, as the number of ships in the mission area expands, so do the options of the mission designer in terms of what he wishes to have happen. With a single destroyer, the opportunity exists to create a serious situation; anything involving a destroyer is serious by definition. With two destroyers, a defeat of the owning side becomes a crushing blow, one that will leave them crippled for some time in that area at least. With four destroyers, their loss would be like the Imperial Japanese Navy's loss of four fleet carriers at Midway; a turning point not for a battle or a campaign but an entire war.
As the severity of the situation increases, as it becomes closer to a do-or-die proposal, then people will devote more effort to ensure that they do instead of die. More men, more fighters, more capital craft. We all know High Noon, but I think we can all agree that it was a simplistically designed mission. For the GTVA, the events of High Noon are make or break; if the Colossus is lost, then the odds are very good they'll lose the war. But they only send Alpha 1 and his wingmen to assault the Sathanas, alone. Yes, Alpha 1 was enough to do the job, but the whole thing seems ridiculous if you recall the Colossus has more than a hundred fighters of its own that could have presumably been commited to the battle. Similarly, the Sathanas must have had more fighters available to it then it actually deployed to defend itself, which is very short-sighted in that they were facing a ship of roughly equal size and perhaps equal capablities; if the Sathanas had put its own bomber wings in space to attack the Colossus, particularly if the Sathanas was disarmed or after it became so, then things would have been much more even. Instead it takes it on the chin and looks pretty damn stupid doing it. The player would be much less likely to notice the Sathanas is essentially sitting around and letting itself get hammered for no good reason if he was fighting off four bomber wings counterattacking the Colossus' main guns.
BoEs offer, above all else, the ability to create a decisive battle that not only is decisive, but looks decisive. And perhaps more importantly, looks credible, as if it really is considered to be a matter of life and death by the two sides.
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In one sense, canon applies only to fictional storytelling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_%28fiction%29), not design:
Canon, in the context of a fictional universe, comprises those novels, stories, films, etc., that are considered to be genuine or officially sanctioned, and those events, characters, settings, etc., that are considered to have existence within the fictional universe. In order for a setting to appear coherent, especially in fictions that contain multiple parts, both creators and audiences sometimes find it useful to define what has and has not "actually happened" in that universe.
But canon can also be used to apply to design such as films (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_canon) or literature (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_canon):
Film canon is the limited group of movies that serve as the measuring stick for the highest quality in the genre of film....
The Western canon is a term used to denote a canon of books, and, more widely, music and art, that has been the most influential in shaping Western culture.
The former is the definition that's used to limit guaranteed inclusion of articles in the wiki, which is what we were discussing. Don't try and screw around with word definitions and intentionally use them out of context - I haven't got any patience for that.
Are you saying that design techniques shouldn't take into account technical improvements which reduce limitations?
Volition's technical capabilities (especially when creating FreeSpace 2) exceeded design capabilities, so limitations were imposed to ensure quality. The goal was ensuring thorough testing, and supported by the design theory that simpler is often better. Volition deliberately limited mission designers, but not becasue of technical limitations. So I don't necessarily see the ability to create bigger Battle of Endor missions as a "technical improvement." The SCP's technical improvements are impressive, but now the designers have some need to impose their own self-restraint -- which is why I'm concerned about preserving the BoE warning.
The ability to create bigger Battle of Endor missions isn't really a technical issue anyway, so just because you don't see it as a technical improvement doesn't mean it isn't an improvement.
:V: 's limitations were those of a company working on a deadline, creating a game for mass consumption by gamers on a wide variety of computer systems. They also had a responsibility to make the game work evenly across those systems, so that a wider group of players could play the game. "Simpler is better" in that case, because it's easier to test a simple mission multiple times, and it's also less likely to break a simple mission if you make modifications to the engine.
There are a couple missions in the main Freespace 2 campaign involving the Colossus, "High Noon" and "Their Finest Hour" that people have postulated that :V: would have done differently, and made more fun, if they had been able to. "High Noon" is unusually devoid of any ships except the Colossus and the Sathanas besides a single wing of fighters launched from the Sathanas. In "Their Finest Hour", the Colossus has a complex set of waypoint paths that wasn't removed.
In those cases, "simpler is better" does mean that those missions were playable and (generally) proceed as planned, but it's raised a lot of questions - like why the Colossus hollers about melting down its beam cannons and taking hull damage when the Sathanas can't do a thing to defend itself. Or why the Colossus claims it's making a heroic sacrifice when it's disabled anyway.
There are many bugs and hardcoded limitations in the game that just would've been plain better if they were fixed or made dynamic. But they weren't. :V: was a company working on a deadline - designing overly complex missions would've caused issues further down the line when rebalancing made certain missions too hard or too easy because of tweaking damage values. There's many points in the code where a comment says something like "If you need to bump this, talk to Frank". I've never seen a comment that read "There can only be 130 ships in ships.tbl because anything more would be more likely to cause bad mission design." Current ship limits have more to do with inefficient collision code than anything else.
It's not false logic to attack arguments as circumstantial so long as the person making the argument has not shown proof that there is a clear link between cause and effect.
Perhaps you're misunderstanding logical inferences (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inference) made in analyzing circumstantial evidence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstantial_evidence), the inductive process of analogies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogies), and the entirely separate method of establishing causal proof (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality).
I'm also not going to tolerate ignoring my arguments to suggest that I'm ignorant. If you can't refute my arguments directly, I'm not going to buy an ad hominem abusive either.
Basically, I believe in the objective reality (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_reality) of design that can be taught, demonstrated and proven. WMCoolmon doesn't, prefering a more subjectivist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjectivism) approach that design isn't separate from the "fun" or a determination of what is "good." For example, I think we can objectively prove and achieve a consenus that it isn't good design to put in 12 separate wings of 5 fighters when the capability exists to have 3 wings of fighters with 4 waves each. We can disagree about whether it's more "fun" to have 15 fighters or 60 fighters in play all at the same time, but I'm confident 15 fighters x 4 waves is generally the better design.
One question I always ask myself is why the people in the Freespace universe are so stupid to only send four fighters at once. Observe a typical mission:
Light fighters jump in and are identified as a scouting wing. Alpha wing destroys them.
4 Heavy fighters jump in.
4 Heavy fighters jump in.
4 Heavy fighters jump in.
4 Heavy fighters jump in.
Command or a wingmate reports all hostiles have been destroyed.
I've always wondered why people in the Freespace universe are so stupid to send fighters in piecemeal, where they'll be obviously overwhelmed by the defending forces. And worse yet, they keep doing it - mission after mission! They already sent a scouting wing, they know exactly how many fighters are on patrol and can probably give a good estimate on how long what the defenders are doing is going to take. Why not simply wait until the first two or three wings are ready, and jump in with numerical superiority? Not only is it less suicidal for the pilots and the enemy forces' longevity, as they'll take less casualties that way, they also have a much better chance of victory and will still have at least one wing in reserve that can jump in as soon as its ready and outflank the defenders (Or disable/destroy what they're escorting while they're distracted).
Having fighters jump in like that is one of the biggest weaknesses of the Freespace design mantra. It makes the Shivans much less scary when they're polite enough to only send just enough fighters for Alpha wing to destroy, and they even wait to send the next wing until Alpha one has finished killing the first one. What manners!
So, no, you can't do the same thing with waves of fighters all the time. It gets obvious, it gets repetitive, and it does take away form the suspension of disbelief.
Re: your comments regarding what you think my views are, putting words in my mouth doesn't make me any more receptive to your arguments. Especially when I've described what I would generally consider, using objective terms, to be a good mission.
In terms of coding, we can achieve the same result with 5 lines of code or 50 lines. But I'm confident competent programmers would generally agree that the 5 lines of code is better design, and 50 lines should be used only when necessary. Why would mission design be any different?
Speaking as a competent programmer, one reason might be that you want to avoid code obfuscation. Another might be that you need 45 lines of comments to explain what you're doing in those five lines - unlikely, but still a possibility. Another possibility might be that it's actually faster to do it with 50 lines of code than 5 lines of code - eg a tree search versus a brute force algorithm. Still another might be that the tools required to do it in five lines are inappropriate to the project - eg you'd have to use proprietary code to do it that way. Yet another might be that it's more forward-thinking to do it with 50 lines than with 5 - observe my comments about limits above. Another might be that the design specifications for the project force you to do it in 50 lines "just because".
Each would have the same result. And I'm using result here in a programming context - the function or program would return with the same value(s). But there are many side effects to doing things a different way, much like there are different results.
Whether we ultimately agree about mission design being objective or subjective, I'd like to see some arguments in the wiki about why Battle of Endor missions are "good" -- whether in terms of design or otherwise. Battle of Endor missions can't be considered "good" if no one is able to defend them except by saying "they exist."
If you can't even defend your arguments properly on the forums then your opinion doesn't deserve to be endorsed by the wiki. As you said, "some opinions can be proven better than others". Where I've offered relevant counterpoints and counterexamples to your evidence, you've more often responded with personal attacks.
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Wiki says:
However this brings us to the key point regarding this type of mission. It is extremely unforgiving of designer inexperience, lack of attention to detail, and error. In a mission that features only a couple of cruisers and their fighter wings fighting it out, one can afford to make a few mistakes or to simply "gloss over" details; likely it won't be noticed.
In a Battle of Endor-type mission, any mistake or overlooked detail will show up glaringly.
Seems to me that the Wiki article could be a little better structured. I'm not really sure what the point of the Wiki is, but if it's to help people make BoE missions it could be a little more helpful, as Karajoma has said. The above quote is wierd to me, it seems the complete opposite of reality. If you have one ship, and a few wings of fighters, then any screw up, is going to show up. But if there's a bunch of crap going on, and the player's busy doing all sorts of things then are they going to notice if you forgot something??
But anyway, if the article is meant to be helpful, why not put something like:
-If you the designer wants a certain outcome to the mission, they should use fire-beam and not beam-free-all (does anyone use firebeam anymore??? Did anyone besides volition ever use it at all???)
-It's important to structure the mission to basically control Alpha 1's activities. Like has been mentioned elsewhere, if you don't want Alpha 1 taking out some Ravana's beam cannons, then confine him to protecting a ship elsewhere.
Things like that.
Personally, I think the article itself is in the completely wrong place. FRED Mistakes? Howabout "FRED Challenges" instead. Or for something that's actually available, "FRED Tips". The Battle of Endor is just another type of mission, why not have a wide but of course not comprehensive list of mission categories and talk about the objectives of each one. What are the challenges, what are the problems. What to do, what to look for, etcetera and so on.
That seems like it would make more sense to me.
Have What is a BoE Mission? How to make it work. What problems to look for, etcetera. The Wiki should give advice imo on how to FRED, rather than just tell someone how they've already ****ed up.
So one article under BoE might be:
1. Beam Cannons
Many FRED designers often go with the default of simply beam-freeing all ships in a mission. But in a large battle, this can lead to very unpredictable results. More ships in a mission is more variables, and ultimately any mission is simply an equation which is providing a certain answer to advance a story. To help avoid these problems, it's much more advisable to use the fire-beam sexp. By using the fire-beam sexp the player can specify which target is being shot at, what subsystem, and how often the beam fires. A beam can even be fired more or less often if they better meet the design goal of the mission. If the variable is not too high, a busy player will not even notice the discrepancy. Also don't be afraid to alter the weaponry of certain ships, Volition has been known to both increase and decrease the number of beam and other weapons on certain ships for the sake of mission balance.
Anyway, something those lines is something I'd recommend personally. Have a page, for each type of mission, and have suggestions on how to make a successful mission and a list of problems to look and to avoid.
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The above quote is wierd to me, it seems the complete opposite of reality. If you have one ship, and a few wings of fighters, then any screw up, is going to show up. But if there's a bunch of crap going on, and the player's busy doing all sorts of things then are they going to notice if you forgot something??
In BoE missions you're much more likely to have events that fail due to a knock-on effect. For instance suppose you forget that disabled ships won't be able to ai-warpout. That's a big problem in a small mission and will look very ugly if it happens. But it's much more likely to happen in a big one. All it takes is one stray slash beam and a cruiser you were counting on to escape will be destroyed. And in a BoE mission you have more capships and bombers to make that stray shot.
Small missions tend not to snowball out of control like that.
does anyone use firebeam anymore??? Did anyone besides volition ever use it at all???)
I use it all the time. I prefer the randomness of unscripted battles. I only use fire-beam if I want a specific ship to fire at a specific target at a specific time. Besides once I get around to sticking this (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,54893.0.html) in the code using fire-beam for scripting battles will be largely obsolete anyway. :)
For the GTVA, the events of High Noon are make or break; if the Colossus is lost, then the odds are very good they'll lose the war. But they only send Alpha 1 and his wingmen to assault the Sathanas, alone. Yes, Alpha 1 was enough to do the job, but the whole thing seems ridiculous if you recall the Colossus has more than a hundred fighters of its own that could have presumably been commited to the battle. Similarly, the Sathanas must have had more fighters available to it then it actually deployed to defend itself, which is very short-sighted in that they were facing a ship of roughly equal size and perhaps equal capablities; if the Sathanas had put its own bomber wings in space to attack the Colossus, particularly if the Sathanas was disarmed or after it became so, then things would have been much more even. Instead it takes it on the chin and looks pretty damn stupid doing it. The player would be much less likely to notice the Sathanas is essentially sitting around and letting itself get hammered for no good reason if he was fighting off four bomber wings counterattacking the Colossus' main guns.
I had an argument with Trashman about much the same thing. Don't want to drag the conversation off-topic but a summary of my points.
1) We don't know what the fighter compliment of the Sathanas is.
2) It may have used it up at some point between discovery and High Noon (It did smash through a GTVA blockade after all)
3) Similarly the Colossus may have used up its own fighter wings in the blockade.
Of course those are all explanations after the fact (And don't explain why more help wasn't forthcoming from the Psamtik either). :v: should have either included something along those lines in the mission brief or done what you suggested and ended up with a better mission as a result. :)
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The above quote is wierd to me, it seems the complete opposite of reality. If you have one ship, and a few wings of fighters, then any screw up, is going to show up. But if there's a bunch of crap going on, and the player's busy doing all sorts of things then are they going to notice if you forgot something??
In BoE missions you're much more likely to have events that fail due to a knock-on effect. For instance suppose you forget that disabled ships won't be able to ai-warpout. That's a big problem in a small mission and will look very ugly if it happens. But it's much more likely to happen in a big one. All it takes is one stray slash beam and a cruiser you were counting on to escape will be destroyed. And in a BoE mission you have more capships and bombers to make that stray shot.
Small missions tend not to snowball out of control like that.
Also larger missions have a much greater possiblity for these sorts of things not to show up in testing but happen randomly in play. In a cruiser-on-cruiser duel, if that sort of thing's going to happen, you'll probably encounter it while testing it only a few times. In a large mission, it could happen and you might never realize it until the angry posters show up in your release thread. (Something similar to this happened to Davros in Blue Planet during the dream mission, which in all other respects was well-done. I also recall having specifically made an effort to prevent the sort of thing that you describe, Kara, in Operation Savior.)
I had an argument with Trashman about much the same thing. Don't want to drag the conversation off-topic but a summary of my points.
1) We don't know what the fighter compliment of the Sathanas is.
2) It may have used it up at some point between discovery and High Noon (It did smash through a GTVA blockade after all)
3) Similarly the Colossus may have used up its own fighter wings in the blockade.
Of course those are all explanations after the fact (And don't explain why more help wasn't forthcoming from the Psamtik either). :v: should have either included something along those lines in the mission brief or done what you suggested and ended up with a better mission as a result. :)
To be fair, those occurred to me too (I even mentioned #2 in a post once) but that just makes you want to strangle :v: for not including the blockade as a mission even more.
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Now we finally have a productive conversation going! :D
See, this argument is problematic in that it betrays your preferences and biases.
I'm not betraying them, I see no problem with accepting them, putting them on display and defending them vigorously. :)
Thus, 60 fighters on the field at one time would be good design if you were to create such a situation in your missions.
But would designing a mission with 60 fighters be good design? Why are they necessary to the mission? Just to have more ships to "amp up the confrontation" is sloppy when you could have fewer fighters be more effective, and so on. Why is bigger better?
Whether we ultimately agree about mission design being objective or subjective, I'd like to see some arguments in the wiki about why Battle of Endor missions are "good" -- whether in terms of design or otherwise. Battle of Endor missions can't be considered "good" if no one is able to defend them except by saying "they exist."
Have you actually read the wiki article? I specifically outlined several reasons, and just added several more. ( http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Battle_of_Endor_Syndrome#Why_should_I_make_such_missions.3F ) This statement alone should almost totally disqualify your arguments, as you don't seem to know very much about the article being argued about!
That's a weak argument, particularly since the bulk of the defense of "Why should I make such missions?" is in its first three paragraphs that basically state that BoE missions "exist" or were "narrowly avoided/dodged." Let's look at that part of the wiki:
Volition had to "dodge" making such missions several times over the course of FreeSpace and Freespace 2.
The player participates in the epic Battle of Deneb depicted in the Freespace 2 intro through the missions Evangelist and Doomsday, holding off the SD Lucifer and SD Eva from Vasuda; it is instructive to consider how much more impressive that battle is in the FS2 intro, and how many more ships were involved. This seems a much more reasonable expression of how the battles "should" have played out considering what both sides had available and how important it was to them. In Freespace 2, High Noon and Bearbaiting come to mind; this is effectively make-or-break for the GTVA, but they commit only a small number of fighter wings (I count four or five) and three capital craft when we know they had more than that available. (Karajorma's "Grizzly Bearbaiting" gives a reasonable impression of what Bearbaiting perhaps should have been.) Similarly the events between Bearbaiting and High Noon, and there is in fact a time gap of at least several hours, encompass what would have qualified as a BoE. The original GTVA plan for taking down the Sathanas with a multi-destroyer assault would probably have also counted as one, as would the version of Their Finest Hour that seems to have been originally intended.
Volition had to avoid this, have the poor Aquitaine totally unescorted by friendly capital ships either of the two times it was bushwhacked by a Moloch, or have no more than two ships corvette-sized or up in the mission area, because they had to contend with the limits of contemporary computers. Computers have since advanced, and these missions could now have been built, or the Aquitaine could have yelled for backup from its fleet in Proving Grounds rather than run away. Above all else, this type of mission offers the opportunity to create a decisive battle that is not only decisive, but looks decisive and looks realistic.
There are some assumptions made about what ships were available in "canon" (using WMCoolmon's definition), and assertions about what Volition had or didn't have to do with its design. My conversations with Volition during the development of FreeSpace 2 and a tour of Volition before its release were that their designers chose in many cases to showcase simpler missions rather than more complex ones -- party from a short design cycle, and also partly due to a simpler is better mission design philosophy.
To put it in simplest terms, as the number of ships in the mission area expands, so do the options of the mission designer in terms of what he wishes to have happen.
Agreed, but I think the discussion is what options are better design.
As the severity of the situation increases, as it becomes closer to a do-or-die proposal, then people will devote more effort to ensure that they do instead of die. More men, more fighters, more capital craft.
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BoEs offer, above all else, the ability to create a decisive battle that not only is decisive, but looks decisive. And perhaps more importantly, looks credible, as if it really is considered to be a matter of life and death by the two sides.
Not necessarily. Sometimes the right approach is a surgical strike, and losing that one critical defender is more compelling than losing a horde of troops. The loss of the GTVA Colossus is critical because it's the only ship that's capable and ready to defeat the Shivans and the Sathanas. Defending or defeating that one ship is more do-or-die than a whole fleet engagement, making the other ships are essentially meaningless. I think that's why Volition didn't "dodge" anything in its mission design -- the tension of the expected Colossus v. Sathanas engagement is heightened by the existence of only a few ships. The illusion is maintained by the maps of other ships in the background, rather than in the mission itself. That's good design.
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The former is the definition that's used to limit guaranteed inclusion of articles in the wiki, which is what we were discussing.
Used by who? Not me. Using your narrow definition of "canon" excludes the intellectual contributions of the community about what is good "design" -- which is what we're talking about when discussing the creation of Battle of Endor missions rather than fan fiction/mission storylines. It's also circular logic since the wiki articles included Battle of Endor for years, which is why you're arguing with this dinosaur.
"Simpler is better" in that case, because it's easier to test a simple mission multiple times, and it's also less likely to break a simple mission if you make modifications to the engine.
You're making a great deal about the technological limitations, but they were mainly self-imposed not just for quality reasons. Dave Baranec, a mission designer and I had a nice chat at Volition's offices about leaving in much of the hard-coded limitations as being to focus on quality design, rather than mainly technical limitations. Testing and timing were limitations, but so were design and quality. The latter is good design, in my book.
In those cases, "simpler is better" does mean that those missions were playable and (generally) proceed as planned, but it's raised a lot of questions - like why the Colossus hollers about melting down its beam cannons and taking hull damage when the Sathanas can't do a thing to defend itself. Or why the Colossus claims it's making a heroic sacrifice when it's disabled anyway.
Those canon failures are due to ensuring forced mission outcomes and advancing the rails of the story. A mission that is more playable and proceeds as planned is my definition of good design. I don't think you're disputing that! (Are you?)
I'm also not going to tolerate ignoring my arguments to suggest that I'm ignorant. If you can't refute my arguments directly, I'm not going to buy an ad hominem abusive either.
I'm pointing out deficiencies in your analytical style and argumentation skills, rather than an ad hominem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem) that you are an objectionable or ill-tempered person who takes personal slights too easily and thus can't make a correct argument. You were the one who made a questionable argument about circumstantial evidence, which as any lawyer will tell you is a valid method of analytical reasoning.
I've always wondered why people in the Freespace universe are so stupid to send fighters in piecemeal, where they'll be obviously overwhelmed by the defending forces. And worse yet, they keep doing it - mission after mission!
Good design would include (a) managing the defending forces so that neither side is overwhelmend and (b) creating plausible scenarios where both sides have reinforcements enroute, but waiting risks the other side having the overwhelming force.
Having fighters jump in like that is one of the biggest weaknesses of the Freespace design mantra. It makes the Shivans much less scary when they're polite enough to only send just enough fighters for Alpha wing to destroy, and they even wait to send the next wing until Alpha one has finished killing the first one. What manners!
So, no, you can't do the same thing with waves of fighters all the time. It gets obvious, it gets repetitive, and it does take away form the suspension of disbelief.
Again, good design would include mixing it up so that there are variations on the theme, so it doesn't become either "obvious" or "repetitive."
Re: your comments regarding what you think my views are, putting words in my mouth doesn't make me any more receptive to your arguments.
Frankly, you're not my audience with that segment, WMCoolon (hence why I referred to you in the third person). I would explain why, but I don't want to get sidetracked on your tone or what might be called an ad hominem attack. :D
Whether we ultimately agree about mission design being objective or subjective, I'd like to see some arguments in the wiki about why Battle of Endor missions are "good" -- whether in terms of design or otherwise. Battle of Endor missions can't be considered "good" if no one is able to defend them except by saying "they exist."
If you can't even defend your arguments properly on the forums then your opinion doesn't deserve to be endorsed by the wiki. As you said, "some opinions can be proven better than others". Where I've offered relevant counterpoints and counterexamples to your evidence, you've more often responded with personal attacks.
Now YOU are making the ad hominem attack, by directly arguing that my argument is wrong because I'm advocating it...and well, I'm a bad person so anything I support can't be endorsed by the wiki. While you might be a competent programmer, perhaps I should reveal that I'm a more than competent lawyer and debater. Q.E.D. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q.E.D.)
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Wiki says:
However this brings us to the key point regarding this type of mission. It is extremely unforgiving of designer inexperience, lack of attention to detail, and error. In a mission that features only a couple of cruisers and their fighter wings fighting it out, one can afford to make a few mistakes or to simply "gloss over" details; likely it won't be noticed.
In a Battle of Endor-type mission, any mistake or overlooked detail will show up glaringly.
Seems to me that the Wiki article could be a little better structured. I'm not really sure what the point of the Wiki is, but if it's to help people make BoE missions it could be a little more helpful, as Karajoma has said. The above quote is wierd to me, it seems the complete opposite of reality.
I 100% agree. At this point, I'd try to write up the wiki but I think anything I suggest would be immediately removed or dismissed (much like my edits were deleted about why BoE missions are problematic due to storytelling issues). I'd be happy with a good argument about why BoE missions are "fun" or "cinematic." Or even how the changes to FRED and the expanded SCP makes them more easy to control (assuming this is actually correct).
The Battle of Endor is just another type of mission, why not have a wide but of course not comprehensive list of mission categories and talk about the objectives of each one. What are the challenges, what are the problems. What to do, what to look for, etcetera and so on.
I think that a full discussion of mission categories would be great, and I think there once was something similar in the community. It may have been part of the VolitionWatch Archives (now broken), which once included mission reviews that offered rankings in several categories for the mission, advice for the player/designer, and (I think) categorized the mission type.
It seems we've lost most of the VolitionWatch network's information on design here (http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/fs1/fred/) and here (http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/fs2/fred2/), unfortunately. This must be an old recovered page, since I thought we had completed more tutorials. If anyone has Solrazor's FRED Checklist, I remember that resource being helpful back in the day.
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The FRED Checklist ended up as part of the FS2 Reference guide (I suspect.) There's a link to it somewhere in the FRED section of my FAQ.
When it comes to :v:'s design ethos it's worth remembering that the same minimalism also gave us the final mission of Silent Threat.
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But would designing a mission with 60 fighters be good design? Why are they necessary to the mission? Just to have more ships to "amp up the confrontation" is sloppy when you could have fewer fighters be more effective, and so on. Why is bigger better?
Simply because if the resources are out there, and we know they are, why weren't they being used? Suspension of disbelief begs the question as to where the rest of the Colossus' battlegroup was, where its fighters were, where the rest of the Psmatik's fighters were...etc.
It's left there for you to wonder about, and the more you are inclined to wonder, the less you are inclined to believe. Even Wing Commander 2 went out of its way to explain why the Concordia wasn't around to help you out when it would have been very helpful for it to be so.
There are some assumptions made about what ships were available in "canon" (using WMCoolmon's definition), and assertions about what Volition had or didn't have to do with its design. My conversations with Volition during the development of FreeSpace 2 and a tour of Volition before its release were that their designers chose in many cases to showcase simpler missions rather than more complex ones -- party from a short design cycle, and also partly due to a simpler is better mission design philosophy.
As noted above, it is implict in almost every mission in FS2 that you are not alone, and that there are other ships out there fighting as well, simply not on the same field as you. The Aquitaine is flagship of a whole fleet; the Psamtik flagship of a battlegroup. It's quite rare to see a capital vessel more than once, yet we do not change theaters of combat nearly as often as once a mission. Several times it is in fact stated that there were other ships in the area but that were not fighting in your battle.
The only missions in FS2 that I can think of off the top of my head that do not leave open the possiblity of having more forces available to be commited are Argonautica, Into the Lion's Den, Slaying Ravana (actually a bit questionable, the Aquitaine itself was presumably available), and Apocalypse. For one other mission, Feint!, Parry!, Riposte!, it was explained why they didn't do so, yet in so explaining, the existence of such forces was admitted. Also worthy of mention are the SOC Loop 1 missions, which clearly demonstrated that the GTVA had forces free to attack the Iceni, and that even though the NTF was up against the ropes, bleeding, it had ships to spare to investigate/attempt to stop the Sunder and yourself...this from a force that was never really equal to the GTVA to begin with and was now decidely less equal due to the the depredations of the Colossus.
There are other people, other fighter wings and other capital ships out there. If you want to try and say otherwise, that argument both directly assaults the canon and defies logical assumptions from it. It is by any possible standards invalid.
As for :v:'s design philosophy, I care not a wit. Indeed, as I've stated before, the simplicity of some of their missions assaults suspension of disbelief. Kara's comment about what we got for Silent Threat is well-founded. So are my and WMC's comments regarding High Noon. Simplicity in what should be a serious engagement looks silly. Decisive actions are not single ship vs. single ship. Tsushima Straights, Midway, Leyte Gulf, the Nile, Trafalgar, these are decisive battles. FS1 successfully justified the nature of its campaign and ending with the unique and uniquely powerful Lucifer. Silent Threat tried, and failed, to follow this formula with the Hades. FS2 didn't even bother. Yet the mission design did not fully evolve to support this.
Agreed, but I think the discussion is what options are better design.
Why is it not better design to give yourself more options, if you make intelligent use of them? I've yet to see you explain that.
Not necessarily. Sometimes the right approach is a surgical strike, and losing that one critical defender is more compelling than losing a horde of troops. The loss of the GTVA Colossus is critical because it's the only ship that's capable and ready to defeat the Shivans and the Sathanas. Defending or defeating that one ship is more do-or-die than a whole fleet engagement, making the other ships are essentially meaningless. I think that's why Volition didn't "dodge" anything in its mission design -- the tension of the expected Colossus v. Sathanas engagement is heightened by the existence of only a few ships. The illusion is maintained by the maps of other ships in the background, rather than in the mission itself. That's good design.
Keyword: "Sometimes." In fact, quite rarely; competent tactics mean that such situations are rare. And we know it's not true that the Colossus is the only ship capable of defeating the Sathanas. The GTVA did have an apparently sound plan for doing so using several destroyers, and we know that the Psamtik at least is still active and alive (and because it reappears later, presumably the Aquitaine as well). Perhaps they would have needed more than that even, but the Colossus wasn't quite the only option...and certainly the Psamtik could have done more to help the Colossus win.
Also, this isn't true. Tension for High Noon is non-existant if you did well in Bearbaiting. Even if you did moderately well in Bearbaiting the Colossus is not in fact in any real danger. There's no tension to High Noon at all. I've seen a lot of people list what they thought were the best missions of FS2. Into the Lion's Den is a perennial favorite. The Sixth Wonder shows up a few times. So does Bearbaiting. Nobody ever lists High Noon. High Noon can be, at worst, even less well-designed then the last mission of Silent Threat, because the player doesn't even have a reason to tape down their fire key and walk away. The dialogue takes on a faintly ridiculous aspect. It's really a very poorly designed mission.
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Used by who?
The Freespace wiki, among other things.
...
Dave Baranec is human just like the rest of us. Just because he coded for the engine does not make him God; what he says is not automatically universal truths. If he wants to offer his opinion as a professional game developer, he's more than welcome to do so.
Those canon failures are due to ensuring forced mission outcomes and advancing the rails of the story.
No, they aren't. Both missions could've addressed the questions without altering the outcome.
I'm pointing out deficiencies in your analytical style and argumentation skills, rather than an ad hominem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem)
:lol: "I'm borrowing it for an indefinite period of time rather than stealing it", eh?
that you are an objectionable or ill-tempered person who takes personal slights too easily and thus can't make a correct argument. You were the one who made a questionable argument about circumstantial evidence, which as any lawyer will tell you is a valid method of analytical reasoning.
Well, I don't think my temper is quite notable enough to make it into the wiki. ;) As for lawyers, I'm not trying to demonstrate any particular method of reasoning; assuming that one thing happens because of another just because they happen at around the same time is wrong.
Good design would include (a) managing the defending forces so that neither side is overwhelmend and (b) creating plausible scenarios where both sides have reinforcements enroute, but waiting risks the other side having the overwhelming force.
Good design also recognizes that if you always come at things with the same set of design techniques, you'll always get similar things. If you are a monk in a Chinese monastery practicing martial arts, repeating things over and over may be the correct thing to do to master those techniques. If you're producing entertainment for a large audience, you can do the same things over and over, but you have to have obvious variation or the audience will get bored. Having groups of four ships jump in at a time in every campaign vastly stretches the realism of it all, no matter what you say.
Now YOU are making the ad hominem attack, by directly arguing that my argument is wrong because I'm advocating it...and well, I'm a bad person so anything I support can't be endorsed by the wiki.
You wouldn't have to summarize my argument if you weren't twisting it around like that. I didn't say you're a bad person. Your argument doesn't fall under the wiki's definition of canon, so it's not up for automatic inclusion. Your claims aren't objective facts that we can prove or disprove, although it's related to Freespace, so it doesn't merit inclusion on that basis, either. As such the only thing we can say is that it's either your opinion or the opinion of others - so it mostly falls under the same category as the "Veteran comments" in the wiki.
This set of guidelines has been established through discussion on this board over the last year or two.
While you might be a competent programmer, perhaps I should reveal that I'm a more than competent lawyer and debater. Q.E.D. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q.E.D.)
Actually, that's kind of flattering. I would've expected a professional lawyer to have me soundly beaten by now, whether I was right or not. It's good to know that I can fare so well against someone who prides themselves on their debating skills. :)
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Battle of Endor Mission
"Battle of Endor Mission" refers to a mission set in Freespace that uses a large number of ships or capital ships. The exact number of ships required for a mission to be classified as a "Battle of Endor mission" is vague. The term may occasionally be used to refer to missions with as few as two capital ships - this is usually limited to missions where the scope of the battle may be beyond the player's ability to influence, such as High Noon. More commonly, the term is used to refer to missions involving upwards of four capital ships at the same time. A mission involving upwards of sixteen fighters per side may also be referred to as a Battle of Endor mission.
As the term implies, the ships must be involved in some sort of conflict.
The term "Battle of Endor" itself comes from the fleet battle near the end of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, which involved dozens of capital ships and hundreds of fighters.
Criticism
Because of their size and scope, Battle of Endor missions tend to be relatively unforgiving of errors in design and may require significantly more care when compared to other types of missions. Certain missions may fall prone to becoming "spectator" missions, where the player is incapable of influencing the battle in any significant fashion.
Battle of Endor Syndrome
The bulk of criticism for Battle of Endor missions stems from an article (link) written on VolitionWatch during the early days of Freespace mission design. This article goes into great detail as to common problems of Battle of Endor missions of the time.
Technical Issues
Though more recent improvements have greatly improved the FS2_Open's ability to handle a large volume of ships, hardcoded limits on the number of ships in a mission still limit the number of ships in a mission. Performance considerations, such as a large number of high-resolution textures, may also limit the number of ships that can be placed in a Battle of Endor mission.
It is especially important for a FREDder to consider their audience and test their mission on low-end computers, or else significant numbers of players may be unable to play the mission without severe lag and be unable to complete the mission successfully. This is especially critical if the mission is a necessary part of a larger campaign.
Other difficulties may include the unpredictable nature of the Freespace AI, and the tendency for capital ships to concentrate on small threats, such as bombers and bombs. Missions may require an extensive amount of scripting to work around these difficulties, which can lead to missions becoming overly complex and difficult to test fully.
Support for BoE missions
Despite the additional difficulties inherent to designing a successful BoE mission, there remain a number of instances where Battle of Endor missions may be necessary or preferred. Large fleet actions may require a Battle of Endor mission to demonstrate this element of the plot. The deployment of a small number of ships may seem unrealistic against a grave threat, as when Command sends a relatively small number of fighters against the Sathanas in "Bearbaiting".
Other reasons may include spectacle, or replayability. Some FREDders and players believe that Battle of Endor missions give an epic feel which cannot easily be reproduced with other types of missions. Battle of Endor missions also offer a unique option for replayability, depending on how much freedom the player is allowed, as there are many choices of where he can direct his attention.
Noteworthy Examples
Freespace 1
Though a large number of capital ships appear in "Enter the Dragon", this mission is not considered a BoE mission as none of the capital ships are involved in combat. As such it does not suffer from the unpredictable nature of the Freespace AI, or slowdown due to a high degree of weapons fire. As such it is considered more of a scouting or stealth mission.
Freespace 2
The "Battle of Deneb" depicted in the Freespace 2 opening is one example of a Battle of Endor conflict. "High Noon" and "Their Finest Hour" are commonly referenced as canon BoE examples. "Bearbaiting", "The King's Gambit", and other node blockade missions may also be considered Battle of Endor missions due to the number of ships involved, but are not as commonly referenced as the mission style is significantly different from capital ship vs. capital ship style combat.
Derelict
The Derelict campaign features a number of Battle of Endor missions. Most notable is the penultimate mission that ends with the destruction of the SD Nyarlathotep. Although this mission involves seven critical capital ships, the player is able to play a large role in the conflict by disabling the beam cannons mounted on the Nyarlathotep and two Lilith-class cruisers. The entire mission hinges on the player's successful completion of these objectives.
Second Great War Part II
Among other things, SGWP2 uses a number of Battle of Endor missions. These missions often serve little benefit to the plot and stretch realism due to the multitude of Sathanas and Colossus class vessels.
The Babylon Project
Many of the latter missions of the original Babylon Project demo may be considered "Battle of Endor" missions, due to the sheer size and number of the capital ships involved.
FREDder recommendations
Stuff goes here.
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Simply because if the resources are out there, and we know they are, why weren't they being used?
The insistence on big battles suggests a RTS approach to combat, where each side brings all of their ships into the same theatre. Perhaps it is merely a coincedence that Alpha 1 "just happens" to be in these major engagements without the rest of the fleet.
As noted above, it is implict in almost every mission in FS2 that you are not alone, and that there are other ships out there fighting as well, simply not on the same field as you. The Aquitaine is flagship of a whole fleet; the Psamtik flagship of a battlegroup. It's quite rare to see a capital vessel more than once, yet we do not change theaters of combat nearly as often as once a mission. Several times it is in fact stated that there were other ships in the area but that were not fighting in your battle.
Which doesn't preclude those ships engaging in other battles that are not part of the campaign, or unavailable to fight due to logistics or other tactical situations.
There are other people, other fighter wings and other capital ships out there. If you want to try and say otherwise, that argument both directly assaults the canon and defies logical assumptions from it. It is by any possible standards invalid.
A discussion of the canon storyline digresses from the design used to create missions in FRED and begins to make a large number of assumptions about the order of battle in the FreeSpace universe. If anything, the FreeSpace canon is limited engagements rather than massive ones where the entire fleet was deployed.
As for :v:'s design philosophy, I care not a wit.
But :v:'s design philosophy would be "canon" using WMCoolmon's definition.
Simplicity in what should be a serious engagement looks silly. Decisive actions are not single ship vs. single ship. Tsushima Straights, Midway, Leyte Gulf, the Nile, Trafalgar, these are decisive battles. FS1 successfully justified the nature of its campaign and ending with the unique and uniquely powerful Lucifer. Silent Threat tried, and failed, to follow this formula with the Hades. FS2 didn't even bother. Yet the mission design did not fully evolve to support this.
Interesting to use pre-modern naval engagements as the metric for decisive battles of futuristic space combat. Is your argument that :V:'s general design in FS2 was silly? We can debate the design of specific missions (as you clearly would prefer), but why would they necessarily be "better" or more "decisive" if more ships were involved. IMO it would only compound any design flaws, rather than fix these issues. I know BoE missions are used to apply to missions where the player is a spectator, but I think that in itself can be a separate design issue -- commonly appearing in BoE missions, but not its hallmark.
Why is it not better design to give yourself more options, if you make intelligent use of them? I've yet to see you explain that.
My question is whether it's an intelligent use to add so many ships just to make it "decisive" or to satisfy a personal desire for a "serious engagement." Why couldn't the storyline or set up establish these plot elements? Why is it intelligent use of FRED to fall within the trap of thinking bigger is better?
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WMCoolmon - Whatever I may have said about your argumentation, that's a decent edit to the wiki entry.
I would suggest moving the Battle of Endor Syndrome section before the Criticisms and changing the "Support of BoE Missions" heading to "Support". Other recommended changes in italics after the Battle of Endor Syndrome move:
Battle of Endor Syndrome
Criticism for Battle of Endor missions goes as far back as this article (link) written on VolitionWatch during the early days of Freespace mission design. This article goes into great detail as to common problems of Battle of Endor missions of the time.
Criticism
Because of their size and scope, Battle of Endor missions tend to be relatively unforgiving of errors in design and usually require significantly more care when compared to other types of missions. Certain missions may fall prone to becoming "spectator" missions, where the player is incapable of influencing the battle in any significant fashion.
Other common design criticisms of BoE missions include balancing issues, difficulties from unanticipated player and/or AI actions, control of the action being ceded to the AI, and inability to focus the player on in-game storytelling elements and events. Some mission designers (including those at Volition) argue that BoE missions violate the principle that simpler design leads to better missions.
Technical Issues
Volition programmers justified imposing hard coded limits on the engine and internal mission designers to address these quality control and playability issues, as well as potential technical issues. Though more recent improvements have greatly improved the FS2_Open's ability to handle a large volume of ships, hardcoded limits on the number of ships in a mission still restrict the number of ships in a mission. Performance considerations, such as a large number of high-resolution textures, may also limit the number of ships that can be placed in a Battle of Endor mission.
It is especially important for a FREDder to consider their audience and test their mission on low-end computers, or else significant numbers of players may be unable to play the mission without severe lag and be unable to complete the mission successfully. This is especially critical if the mission is a necessary part of a larger campaign.
Other difficulties may include the unpredictable nature of the Freespace AI, and the tendency for capital ships to concentrate on small threats, such as bombers and bombs. Missions may require an extensive amount of scripting to work around these difficulties, which can lead to missions becoming overly complex and difficult to test fully.
Anticipating that the last sentence in Criticism and the first sentence in Design may be criticized as "unsupported opinions," the former merely acknowledges the fact of criticisms expressed over 10 years since the release of FS1 and the latter is factual. In any event, it's no worse than the acknowledgment of the opinions in the supporting section. I could live with this wiki entry.
Edit: Crappy cut-pasting, so I edited a bit more since 10:05.
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Even though it's minor and repetitive, I believe "limit" is a better term than "restrict". The ship limits are commonly referred to as such, and at present they're used because of technical limitations rather than an active attempt to restrict FREDders from having a certain number of ships there. "hardcoded limits on the number of ships in a mission still restrict the number of ships in a mission." => "hardcoded limits on the number of ships in a mission still exist."
"Volition programmers justified imposing hard coded limits on the engine and internal mission designers to address these quality control and playability issues, as well as potential technical issues. "
First of all, this doesn't belong in the technical issues category as it's really just a not-so-underhanded attempt to use the technical issues to support criticism of the theory. As such it belongs in the subjective "Criticism" category rather than the objective technical limitations category.
Second of all, it's a false statement. There are limits in the executable that have nothing to do with mission design quality.
Thirdly, it's an unsourced comment. If you have a memo to give context to this statement, then we'll talk.
"Some mission designers (including those at Volition) argue that BoE missions violate the principle that simpler design leads to better missions. "
First, unsourced comment.
Second, it's unclear what this statement means. Do they "violate" the principle by disproving it, or do they "violate" the principle because the principle says that they shouldn't be good missions?
Battle of Endor syndrome belongs where it was because it's referring to an article which is part of the criticism of Battle of Endor missions.
"Other common design criticisms of BoE missions include balancing issues, difficulties from unanticipated player and/or AI actions, control of the action being ceded to the AI, and inability to focus the player on in-game storytelling elements and events."
Reword this so that it's written from an objective third-person view like the rest of the article and you're set.
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Thought I would add in some good examples I came up with since my last post.
Bad: "Volition programmers justified imposing hard coded limits on the engine and internal mission designers to address these quality control and playability issues, as well as potential technical issues."
Good: "On a 1999 tour of the Volition officers, Dave Baranec (Lead programmer for Freespace 2) justified many of the hardcoded limits in the engine, saying that they addressed quality control, playability, and potential technical issues."
Bad: "Some mission designers (including those at Volition) argue that BoE missions violate the principle that simpler design leads to better missions. "
Good: (adding on to the previous statement) "He also supported the principle that simpler design leads to better missions, a belief that many mission designers also subscribe to. Proponents of this philosophy believe that Battle of Endor missions can be simplified without removing critical storytelling elements."
Both of these changes would not only be much clearer, but also make your case much more strongly than the originals, at least if I were reading the article. I don't know if 1999 is right, so that needs to be fixed if it's wrong.
"Other common design criticisms of many BoE missions include balancing issues, difficulties from unanticipated player and/or AI actions, control of the action being ceded to the AI, and inability to focus the player on in-game storytelling elements and events."
This one I'm willing to buy with that many in there. Originally I thought this was meant to be a blanket statement and so was not correct, since we can point to BoE missions contradict this belief. The many in there makes this clear.
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"Volition programmers justified imposing hard coded limits on the engine and internal mission designers to address these quality control and playability issues, as well as potential technical issues. "
First of all, this doesn't belong in the technical issues category as it's really just a not-so-underhanded attempt to use the technical issues to support criticism of the theory.
It's a transition, but I'm not going to argue when it's easier to move it to the earlier section.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that some limits in the FS engine remained due to these design concerns -- see this 1998 chat summary (http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/editorials/11-20-98.shtml). The intent to add flexibility and scalability didn't happen, and the explanation on my tour of Volition was that they were useful to keep the internal mission designers in check. This wasn't intended to be an absolute statement, and my revision avoids the (overreaching) conclusion that it's false because some limits in the executable have nothing to do with mission design quality. The proposed revision waters down things so they're meaningless and without the above context (as good as sourcing).
About the sourcing objections. The attribution the editorial made to Jason Hoffoss was sufficient for wikipedia on the design issue, so what's the complaint? Unfortunately, it's been almost 10 years since that tour of Volition's offices, the FreeSpace Developer's List is down and my personal archives don't go quite back that far (although I do still have e-mails with my submissions to the FS2 Mission Contest). To make as specific an attribution as you are asking would be irresponsible so many years later. Insisting on this as "good" or "necessary" is simply unrealistic, or at worst an underhanded attempt to reject additional content you disagree with by imposing a double standard. What's above should be sufficient and it's more than what appears in the rest of the wiki section revisions.
A coding "limit" acts to restrict as well as limit, and I hate the redundancy. By referring to a "limit" as the code itself, references to the "restriction" are the action resulting from the limit. For the same reason, I'm changing the improvement's "improvement" to an increase in FS_Open's ability. That ability is in handling a large ship "size" (rather than volume), and I'm removing the redundancy about number/number of ships. If you're referring to number of ships, then it was even more redundant.
My revisions:
Criticism
Criticism for Battle of Endor missions goes as far back as this VolitionWatch article (link) written on the “Battle of Endor Syndrome” during the early days of Freespace mission design. This article goes into great detail as to common problems of Battle of Endor missions of the time.
Because of their size and scope, Battle of Endor missions tend to be relatively unforgiving of errors in design and usually require significantly more care when compared to other types of missions. Certain missions may fall prone to becoming "spectator" missions, where the player is incapable of influencing the battle in any significant fashion.
Other common design criticisms of BoE missions include balancing issues, difficulties from unanticipated player and/or AI actions, control of the action being ceded to the AI, and inability to focus the player on in-game storytelling elements and events. Many mission designers criticize such missions as contrary to Volition’s Jason Hoffoss (FS1 Programmer, Mission Editor) explanation on the FreeSpace Developer’s List that the key to successful mission design was the zen principle that simpler design leads to better missions.
Despite initial plans to “relax” hard coded limits on the engine, Volition at the time justified leaving those limits to address quality control and playability issues of large missions, as well as potential technical issues.
Technical Issues
Though more recent improvements have greatly increased the FS2_Open's ability to handle large ship sizes, hard coded limits still restrict the number of ships in a mission. Performance considerations, such as having many high-resolution textures, may also limit the number of ships that can be placed in a Battle of Endor mission.
It is especially important for a FREDder to consider their audience and test their mission on low-end computers, or else significant numbers of players may be unable to play the mission without severe lag or to complete the mission successfully. This is especially critical if the mission is a necessary part of a larger campaign.
Other difficulties may include the unpredictable nature of the Freespace AI, and the tendency for capital ships to concentrate on small threats, such as bombers and bombs. Missions may require an extensive amount of scripting to work around these difficulties, which can lead to missions becoming overly complex and difficult to test fully.
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I'll buy it. :yes:
My point with the revisions was not to simply water it down, my point with wiki stuff is to get it to a point that the statements in the wiki are true regardless of the comment. EG "Jason Hoffoss says blahblahblah" is always going to be true, regardless of what your opinion is, as long as Jason Hoffoss actually said that. It's also enough information that someone can actually go back and check with him and see what he said, or see if he made other statements on the topic of mission design that would help clarify his opinion in this instance. That means a lot more to me than "Some programmers at Volition", because for all I know you're just talking about two guys who got fired for being lazy. I can't check the source and there's no way that I can see if they made any more comments about mission design. Even if they were well-respected members of the team who made great contributions, I can't look that up because I don't know there names.
Same goes for other statements. "Some mission designers say..." is always gonna be true. You can argue relevancy but generally the wiki has so little information in it that unless the different sides are lopsided already in terms of their support/criticism, it's not going to tip the view that the wiki gives either way.
Many of your original edits are things that I would disregard on reading the article because they're not written like that, they push the opinion way more than they should, and I automatically filter that out to get to the point. If I want to, after reading the article, then I'll go back and try to extract the fact from fiction. But if they're ambiguous enough that I'm misreading them here, when I'm looking it over to find flaws whilst still trying to come up with an argument that's interpreting the statement correctly, they're probably just generally unclear.
Anyway, like I said, I'll support that last revision. Anybody else have any additions before it goes in the wiki?
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I was tempted to observe this before, Zarathud, but frankly, you've no real interest in changing your mind, and demonstrate a slightly more sophisicated version of TrashMan's total ignoring of any good points...so I'm not really going to bother anymore.
Regarding the current revision.
I've said it before, but you don't see anti-capital beams going after bombers and bombs, so I'm not sure what that last statement is talking about. Also Kara's mentioned in this very thread the SCP's efforts to give turret prioritization a workover. Explain why it's still worthy of inclusion in a beam-armed world please.
Frankly, my computer is not top-of-the-line but I've found it very possible to run FSO and something hideously resource intensive like EVE Online or (god help us) Supreme Commander with FSO running in the background as well, without noticible slowdown. It has also been a very, very long time since I've heard someone complain their computer could not handle a mission. In fact...never. The MediaVPs, sure, people have had difficulties getting those to run, but missions? Since when? Show me an example where someone couldn't make a mission work and that will be worthwhile of inclusion, as it stands it's outright lies as far as I know. Low-end computers have come a long way and FS is at its core a pretty old program.
Also as already cited Kara's "Grizzly Bearbaiting" shows that such "hardcoded ship limits" either can be worked around, or they're high enough that no sane person is going to run into them. There were well over 150 ships in that mission.
Changing it to size makes it ambigous, perhaps more notably ambigous in your favor by making it unclear about numbers vs. volume. Cheap trick, smells like bias. Change it back.
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My point with the revisions was not to simply water it down, my point with wiki stuff is to get it to a point that the statements in the wiki are true regardless of the comment.
I respect your goal of factual restriction, and would say that my intent was to find a generally acceptable observation to avoid nitpicking over details. I think beating each other up a bit made for a better entry, so I'm happy with the result. I tend to argue rough in the sandbox, so no hard feelings. :cool:
I haven't been pushing the envelope of FS_Open's technical capabilities lately, so use whatever is more correct between the references to size/volume.
Zarathud, but frankly, you've no real interest in changing your mind
Argument is part of my job, and I bring that strong advocacy for positions with me into forums. Even if I don't have an interest in changing my mind, I'll concede points I think have merit. Throughout, I've made the concession that BoE missions can be "fun" even if they don't fit my definition of "good" design (which is not based on technical or story limitations). I'm stubborn and argumentative, but not blind.
My interest in this topic is definitely driven by the fact that the BoE mission editorial directly led to some interesting things in the FreeSpace community. It built on and focused community discussions about what is "good" mission design on the FDL, increased contributions to Peter Drake's walkthroughs of "how to" make missions in FRED, promoted making missions centrally available at Xanadu's Mission Archives, focused attention on the need to test missions, and generated community reviews of missions (pioneered by Pastel and myself) that became integrated into the Mission Archives before all getting ported into Volition Watch. I don't claim responsibility or credit for all of those things, but that article is part of the genesis of events over 3 months (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/FreeSpace_Chronicled:_The_First_Three_Months) leading to the seeds that eventually flourished here and elsewhere. Whatever you feel about particular misisons or theories or whatever, discussion of BoE mission design is critical to the history of the FreeSpace community. That there was a possibility it would be removed from the wiki shocked me.
By the way, I would love to see a 10 year retrospective on the history of the FreeSpace community similar to that article. If there is one already, it should be part of the wiki.
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Throughout, I've made the concession that BoE missions can be "fun" even if they don't fit my definition of "good" design (which is not based on technical or story limitations). I'm stubborn and argumentative, but not blind.
I think this whole idea is kind of missing the point to a degree.
People should be mindful that the whole point of FREDding is to tell a story. It's to bring a player into a story line and have them play through the major events of that story. If a FRED mission is well executed, but is boring as all hell, is it a good design? Other FREDders can perhaps realise the achievements of that mission, and say "wow, that was a good use of SEXPs" or "I really liked this and that" but I mean the average player, doesn't give a damn. They'll just be bored . . . but instead they want to be entertained. They want to be moved, to be immersed or to just blast some Shivans, etcetera. Unless that mission was intended to be boring, in which case it's something else entirely.
In the comparison between good design, and enjoyability the latter should have far more weight. Any mission which achieves its goal within the story, is at the desired level of balance and is reliable as a playable mission is reasonably good I think.
Opinions may vary, but in some ways I disagree with Karajoma's idea of the unlosable mission being bad. A mission isn't bad if the player can fly away, grab a coffee and still win the mission. But a mission is bad, if it PROMPTS the player to fly away, grab a coffee and watch the mission. If the story is essentially a cinematic, with a certain ending, but it still draws the player into the mission to play it, I think it's achieved its goal. The idea isn't to make the player involved and important, but to make them feel that way. Of course, usually the best way to make them feel involved is to do just that, but clever storytellers might be able to pull it off without the requirement. I don't think I'm one of them.
But in a BoE scenario, if the player stops and thinks "I'm not doing anything here, it's a just a big orgy of beams with some random targets to shoot at. This is boring" then it's bad design and a crap mission.
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Opinions may vary, but in some ways I disagree with Karajoma's idea of the unlosable mission being bad. A mission isn't bad if the player can fly away, grab a coffee and still win the mission. But a mission is bad, if it PROMPTS the player to fly away, grab a coffee and watch the mission. If the story is essentially a cinematic, with a certain ending, but it still draws the player into the mission to play it, I think it's achieved its goal. The idea isn't to make the player involved and important, but to make them feel that way. Of course, usually the best way to make them feel involved is to do just that, but clever storytellers might be able to pull it off without the requirement. I don't think I'm one of them.
But in a BoE scenario, if the player stops and thinks "I'm not doing anything here, it's a just a big orgy of beams with some random targets to shoot at. This is boring" then it's bad design and a crap mission.
People should be mindful that the whole point of FREDding is to tell a story.
I'm taking the above slightly out of context but to my mind the whole point of FREDding isn't to tell a story but to make a game the player will enjoy playing. If the player can do nothing and still win the mission then I tend to feel you haven't done a good enough job of balancing the mission and on replay a lot of the enjoyment of the mission is lost. As players notice that it doesn't matter what they do a lot of the drive to play hard is lost.
And to me a good mission should be replayable.
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I think missions have various aspects, and design is only one aspect. A "good" mission has to succeed on several levels. The Descent Chronicles/Volition Watch reviews of missions and campaigns rated 5 elements (http://archives.volitionwatch.com/fs2/review/stars.php3):
Storyline
Does the mission create an enjoyable scenario for the player that tells a complete story?
Is there some compelling reason that encourages the pilot to complete their mission?
Does the mission have some "soul" that is created using a certain tone or mood?
Is the mission or the story original or unique in some way?
Does the mission accomplish what it sets out to accomplish?
Is the mission internally consistent and understandable from the briefings?
Is the mission believable and consistent with the FreeSpace Universe?
Are the mission briefings and debriefings informative?
Balance
What are the ship and weapon selections?
Are the ship and weapon selections appropriate for this type of mission?
How difficult is the mission on medium setting?
Are there too many or too few hostiles and friendlies?
Are the ships selected too strong or too weak for their assigned roles in the mission?
Do the reinforcements and secondary waves arrive too early, too late, or not at all?
Design
Is the mission design technically correct using FRED?
Are there any performance issues caused on lower-end machines?
Does the mission accomplish what it sets out to accomplish?
Does the mission designer effectively use all of the FRED Editors (Ships, Wings, Shields, Waypoints, Asteroids, and Briefing/Debriefings) and create events?
Are there mission objectives and do they work properly? Do they cover all of the goals of the mission?
Are the ships named? Are the ships set to the proper IFF (hostile, neutral, or friendly)? Are critical ships set to "escort" status to show their hull status in the HUD?
How are the ships placed in FRED? Is there enough distance between Alpha wing and the first hostile? Are all three planes used (X, Y, & Z) to distance the ships?
Do the ships and wings arrive at appropriate times or do the waves arrive too obviously and without any delay, as if everything in the mission was staged? Will they leave when there is no need for them anymore or hang around doing nothing?
What are the default AI commands for ships in the mission? Do they act and react believably?
Does the mission include events which change the outcome of the mission and do those events work properly? Are directives and objectives tied into these events?
Are there in-flight messages tied to the events to highlight the progress of the mission? Do the sounds and personalities match these messages?
Is the briefing correctly done? Does the debriefing change based on your actions in the mission?
Does the mission include any unique or inventive event sexp-coding?
Are there any suggestions on how to improve on the design of the mission?
Are there any other relevant comments about the mission or its design?
Gameplay
Does the mission create an enjoyable flight experience in the Mission Simulator?
Do you feel involved in the mission as an important part of the events, or are you merely a spectator?
Does the mission react to your actions in the mission? Or is the ending inevitable?
How difficult is the mission to win or lose? Is it too difficult or easy to enjoy?
Is the mission memorable in any way, perhaps including an appropriate suprise?
Can you replay the mission and still be entertained?
Would you recommend this mission to the FreeSpace community as fun?
Overall Rating
What is the bottom line that summarizes the review?
What are the high points of the mission?
What are the low points of the mission?
What is the overall rating of the mission?
The ratings were on a scale from 0 to 5 stars in 1/2 star increments:
0.0 Horrible. Indicates a lack of effort, knowledge and/or fatal bugs.
1.0 Flawed. Serious design flaws that require some work to be acceptable.
2.0 Rough. Some large design flaws, but roughly acceptable to those who don't demand high quality.
3.0 Good. A decent job that is generally effective and does what is necessary. Definitely playable, as the highs outweigh the lows.
4.0 Polished. An excellent job with extra work done to make playing extremely enjoyable.
5.0 Exceptional. Indicates an instant classic - a preferred mission with precise crafting and thorough testing. Meets or exceeds Volition-quality.
Since numbers don't always tell the whole story, each mission review concluded with a sentence or two as the "bottom line," with brief comments on the "highs" and "lows."
There was a general description of the mission, and a brief category for the mission type (or two as sometimes a mission would overlap):
Dogfight Player's main objective is to destroy all enemy fighters in the mission. There must be more than the usual amount of fighters in the mission, and there will usually be no enemy capital ships.
Escort Player must guard an unarmed or very lightly armed vessel (a transport or science vessel or light capital ship) from one point to another. The guarded ship could easily be in grave danger if left alone while the player engages the enemy.
Defense Player must protect armed ships (destroyers or cruisers) or objects that cannot move under their own power (cargo containers and Installations). The guarded ship can be safely left alone to defend itself for a while as the player engages the enemy.
Attack Player must destroy an unarmed or very lightly armed vessel (a transport or science vessel or light capital ship) which requires an escort for defense.
Assault The the player is required to eliminate a base of some sort with defenses in place, such as a cargo depot or Arcadia with a fighter defense. Or the player has to kill a large ship (a cruiser or destroyer) capable of being dangerous that also has an escort.
Recon Player must scan something, either a ship or cargo container, as a major objective. These missions are fundamentally about intelligence gathering.
Strike Player must rush in to complete an objective, and then immediately retreat. The key is speed. The player is not at all expected to engage any enemy fighters for a length of time unless it is vitally necessary to success. Similar to the "Pandora's Box" mission in the main FreeSpace campaign.
Capture This means that the player must disarm and/or disable a ship so that a friendly ship can fly in and tow it away. This usually means that there are no other major attacks on other capital ships.
Campaign
I don't think that page is located in the wiki. My thanks to anyone who can assemble it into the wiki. If anyone thinks it would be useful, I can pull out an e-mail with a proposed review of Episode 1 in the campaign Black Horizon that could be used as an example.
We debated long and hard internally to work through those criteria, and tweaked things as controversies erupted and missions evolved. We even re-reviewed a number of missions when the standards had changed or the missions underwent major revisions based on comments in the reviews.
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I've said it before, but you don't see anti-capital beams going after bombers and bombs, so I'm not sure what that last statement is talking about. Also Kara's mentioned in this very thread the SCP's efforts to give turret prioritization a workover. Explain why it's still worthy of inclusion in a beam-armed world please.
I remember a bug report in mantis that capital ships would commonly target bombs, which not only affected the capital ship's battle with other capital ships, but would also vaporize the bombers as they were hit by an BGreen or similar. The end decision was to leave the "bug" in, because tactics for beating a couple of user-made missions relied upon using bombs as decoys for capital ships to prevent them from doing additional damage to other ships.
Turret reprioritization is entirely optional at this point, AFAIK. Unless something's been changed about that prior paragraph I just wrote.
Frankly, my computer is not top-of-the-line but I've found it very possible to run FSO and something hideously resource intensive like EVE Online or (god help us) Supreme Commander with FSO running in the background as well, without noticible slowdown. It has also been a very, very long time since I've heard someone complain their computer could not handle a mission. In fact...never. The MediaVPs, sure, people have had difficulties getting those to run, but missions? Since when? Show me an example where someone couldn't make a mission work and that will be worthwhile of inclusion, as it stands it's outright lies as far as I know. Low-end computers have come a long way and FS is at its core a pretty old program.
Many people do play FS2_Open with the MediaVPs and, IMHO the wiki should err on the side of assuming that people do have them installed. If a lot of people have to downgrade their graphics to 1998 levels to play missions with a large number of ships, that is important information for a FREDder to be aware of.
I do know that my computer (Athlon 64 3000+, 7600GT, 1GB RAM) has trouble with any asteroid field. There were many missions in Derelict that were essentially unplayable if you were facing one way because there were so many asteroids on screen. I have no idea if this holds true with a truly large number of ships.
Also as already cited Kara's "Grizzly Bearbaiting" shows that such "hardcoded ship limits" either can be worked around, or they're high enough that no sane person is going to run into them. There were well over 150 ships in that mission.
Changing it to size makes it ambigous, perhaps more notably ambigous in your favor by making it unclear about numbers vs. volume. Cheap trick, smells like bias. Change it back.
MAX_SHIPS is currently at 400, MAX_WEAPONS is currently at 350, and MAX_OBJECTS is currently at 1000. Hitting any of these maximums is a (Really) Bad Idea in terms of engine stability, and obviously you can't have all of the ships shooting since there can't be as many weapon objects present as ships. Remember that firing a bank of four Subachs makes four weapon objects, and a ship with 27 turrets is liable to make at least as many weapon objects.
Will stay neutral on the wording but I think Karajorma's Grizzly Bearbaiting would be worth a mention in the article. This isn't the first time it's been mentioned.
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I really should re-work that mission if it's going to be mentioned as it was really only a 10 minute proof of concept hack. :)
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Hehe, and here I am to prove your point, Karajorma - I just went out and found that very mission because if the wiki article!
Now that you've lowered my expectations, it should be fun!