Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The FRED Workshop => Topic started by: TopAce on January 23, 2010, 06:07:48 am

Title: Message limit?
Post by: TopAce on January 23, 2010, 06:07:48 am

I'm creating a long dialog-only mission, and I'm already at 60 messages, and I still have a couple of conversations to script. Is there a maximum number of mission messages?

Title: Re: Message limit?
Post by: Rodo on January 23, 2010, 07:43:15 am

not that I'm aware of, but be careful with the length of the messages.

Title: Re: Message limit?
Post by: dragonsniper on January 23, 2010, 08:21:33 am

About a year back I had a mission that used around 50-70 messages and IIRC, I had no problems.

Title: Re: Message limit?
Post by: karajorma on January 24, 2010, 08:09:51 am

Birth of a Legend for BtRL had over 150 so whatever the limit is it's pretty damn high. I'd check but I'm not at my PC at the moment. On 3.6.10 builds and below there may be a 500 message total limit too. This is the limit for your mission messages + the number of messages in messages.tbl (around 300).

Title: Re: Message limit?
Post by: TopAce on January 24, 2010, 08:41:24 am

That's very high. Why would anyone need that many messages?

Title: Re: Message limit?
Post by: karajorma on January 24, 2010, 09:46:23 am

Dynamic missions is the easiest explanation. The more ways there are of playing a single mission the more dialogue you might need for it.

Title: Re: Message limit?
Post by: Scotty on January 24, 2010, 01:16:24 pm

Indeed.  Sometimes even the most minor changes have to be accounted for in message trees.

For example, if you had a cruiser in mission, the GTC Bob, that would be replaced by the GTC Steve if it were destroyed, it wouldn't make much sense to have all the messages in the mission operate under the assumption the GTC Bob would survive the whole mission.  Nor does it make sense for the GTC Steve to have to jump in in the first minute or so.  Depending on when the Bob was destroyed, the messages would change.  If the Bob is destroyed by SEXP, that's great, but if not, you would have to duplicate all messages that reference one of those names.  When that happens in missions I FRED, that usually increases the amount of messages for just those craft by about 50%. The increase expands almost geometrically if you have more than one ship or group that can be destroyed while the mission is still a success.

Title: Re: Message limit?
Post by: Goober5000 on January 24, 2010, 04:41:01 pm

The message limit was quite high, but in the recent builds, it has been completely removed.  You can now have as many messages as your computer's memory will support.