Hard Light Productions Forums
General FreeSpace => FreeSpace Discussion => Topic started by: soilder198 on February 24, 2020, 09:17:58 pm
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Hello happy Fred people.
I am working on a mission and am out of ideas regarding what to do in my mission.
Things I've tried so far to gain some inspiration:
- Go for a walk
- Listen to Coldplay
- Yell at my cat
- Stare at the sun
- Apologize to my cat
- Item 7
I am at a loss currently. Where do all of you find inspiration for your new missions?
Edit: New activities I have tried in order to inspire myself:
- Uninstall Freespace
- Uninstall Counter-Strike
- J.R.R Tolkien's The Silmarillion, edited and published posthumously by his son, Christopher Tolkien, with assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay
- Hydrogen Chloride
- Yell at my second cat
Alas, inspiration I have yet to find.
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Steal from other campaigns. :D
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For me, it starts with the mission's story objectives. By the end of the mission, what needs to change for the story?
Once I have that, think about how that can be accomplished. How will the player's team accomplish those goals? The rest kinda unfolds from there.
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Steal from other campaigns. :D
This is very true. Mixing and matching different ideas from other missions can churn out some interesting scenarios.
I like to read the wiki a lot. Ship databases, pages about the factions or star systems etc. sometimes give birth to an idea. Sometimes just throwing a random ship on the field and staring at it might give an idea. While FREDding I might ask myself: How would the enemy respond to me/my side doing X action? If something unexpected by the enemy happens, how would Command respond? Wait a second... can they respond, or is something happening elsewhere that's influencing whatever I'm doing over here?
Hopefully this helps. FREDders Block™ can be a pain. In a campaign I'm working on, I must have spent a week trying to come up with an idea for the second mission, only to scrap it weeks later (and like half-complete too) and come up with a more fun setting in a day's time.
Also ditto what Mixael said. That's the most important part. :yes:
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Steal from other campaigns. :D
In regards to playing other campaigns, I am very, very, very wary when it comes to changing anything about my FS folder, be it by installing new mods or campaigns. The reason for this is because I'm 5 missions deep into what I plan to be a 10 mission campaign, and the last time I played around with FSO was when I installed the lastest mediavps, and that alone ended up removing all my backgrounds and causing all my custom missions to crash (I have no mods installed, only FSO and mediavps. I don't know why upgrading my mediavps did what it did to my missions). I forget exactly what mediavps I have because I'm not at my computer right now but I think it's 3.8.12 or something. I know that my version has the new, fancy looking GTM Hippocrates model but does not have the new, fancy looking GTCv Deimos model, if that helps. And by fancy looking, I mean like totally re-textured. I also know that I definitely don't have FSO 19.0.0.
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I am working on a mission and am out of ideas regarding what to do in my mission.
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I am at a loss currently. Where do all of you find inspiration for your new missions?
To paraphrase Nietzsche: I don't have ideas, ideas have me.
On my desk I have a small note book and a container. Every time I have an idea I can't immdediately put into a mission, make a note and toss it in the container. When I am out of ideas, I just empty the container and look at the notes.
(When I am not at home, I have another small notebook for that - those notes too get into the container upon coming home.)
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Read about historical naval battles.
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I know that my version has the new, fancy looking GTM Hippocrates model but does not have the new, fancy looking GTCv Deimos model, if that helps. And by fancy looking, I mean like totally re-textured. I also know that I definitely don't have FSO 19.0.0.
Get Knossos. It will let you be up to date with FSO and all its mods, also guarantees a simplified installation procedure. https://fsnebula.org/knossos/ (https://fsnebula.org/knossos/)
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I know that my version has the new, fancy looking GTM Hippocrates model but does not have the new, fancy looking GTCv Deimos model, if that helps. And by fancy looking, I mean like totally re-textured. I also know that I definitely don't have FSO 19.0.0.
Get Knossos. It will let you be up to date with FSO and all its mods, also guarantees a simplified installation procedure. https://fsnebula.org/knossos/ (https://fsnebula.org/knossos/)
From what I've heard Knossos is a pain when it comes to adding custom stuff though.
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For campaigns I often take ideas from documentaries. For me the easiest way to come to mission design is to get a detailed setting into place, the rest happens almost automatically. Of course it's easier when you have a big modpack that allows you to make entirely new things than when you have to work with retail-only things.
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What exactly do you mean by "adding custom stuff"? Throwing your custom files into mods is identical to any other launcher, and changing dependency versions manually (for example to force a mod to use the latest MVPS) is a single line change in the mod.json file usually. And in the case where you want to make some extensive modifications to something, just create your own private mod and then copy over some other mod into the directory, then modify to your heart's content.
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I was told that making mods with custom modpacks or the like is rather difficult. I should add that I don't use Knossos so I can't judge directly; but messing around with some mod.json sounds much more difficult than a 3-click install with other launchers.
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I was told that making mods with custom modpacks or the like is rather difficult. I should add that I don't use Knossos so I can't judge directly; but messing around with some mod.json sounds much more difficult than a 3-click install with other launchers.
Actually it is less of hassle than it used to be, as Knossos has a "Development" tab. There you can easily set up all the dependencies and have them working (no more guesses about proper load order and you can lock in the version of a dependency you want to work with and not worry about configurations at the player end); you have to learn a bit what Knossos actually can do and requires you to properly set up a mod.
Adding assets then is as it has always been.
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Ah OK, so it's just... different.
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Mod.json is a plain text file, you just need to swap the value in the version line to change the version of MVPS the mod will use. Procedure is exactly the same as if you took a mod.ini file and changed used MVPS version there. The json file looks more complicated but that's it.
Also I'm not sure what do you mean by "a 3-click install". If you mean a manual install, sure, but Knossos downloads and installs mods with just a single click on the "Install" button. You only need to open up the json file if you want to force the mod to use some dependancy version it's (presumably) not compatible with.
Not only that but I also need to remind that it's possible to set the mod to always use the newest downloaded MVPS, period (as the mod developer). Some mods do exactly that.
Knossos in any way doesn't fiddle with the already existing FS/FSO installation (other than copying retail .vp files) so you can have the two running independently. Knossos lets you freely modify any mod it uses (just don't hit the "verify game files" option after that) and doesn't lock you out of any manual solutions. Just the method of attempting them is different and that's a thing to learn.
Edit: Besides, streamlined player experience is one thing but the power of the Dev tab, Nebula accounts and mod hosting is something totally new. If you have a Nebula account, you might be invited to any mod dev team and get access (at different available levels) to these mods when in their dev cycle, getting all the (probably frequent) updates on the go. And if you have your own mod you can just as well manage your own dev team, or if you made a small mod for yourself, the only thing you need to do to release it to public is to hit a single button.
Also, Knossos takes care for all the VP file packing and if you've got a mod in dev mode, it will be unpacked from the archives by default.
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What I meant with 3-clicks install is that I open my 5.5g launcher, click on the folder I want to install and than on "OK".
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From my head.
The problem is that I lack the skills to implement them into missions.
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I know that my version has the new, fancy looking GTM Hippocrates model but does not have the new, fancy looking GTCv Deimos model, if that helps. And by fancy looking, I mean like totally re-textured. I also know that I definitely don't have FSO 19.0.0.
Get Knossos. It will let you be up to date with FSO and all its mods, also guarantees a simplified installation procedure. https://fsnebula.org/knossos/ (https://fsnebula.org/knossos/)
Apologies, it seems I was totally wrong about everything I thought I was right about.
I do have the latest mediavps and I also have Knossos. I also have FSO 19.0.0. Here's where things get tricky, when I launch Fred2_Open_19_0_0, it says in the application after it is open that it is actually Fred2_Open_3.8.1. When I launch Freespace2 from Fred2 it launches it as the version with mediavps 3.8, but then says in game that it is indeed running on FSO_19_0_0.
While typing this post, I had mediavps 4.0 in the Knossos launcher. Launching mediavps 4.0 had a problem where my custom missions would not appear in the single missions menu, as they do with mediavps 3.8. I just now updated to mediavps 4.1.23 because Knossos said they were available, and now when I try launch the mediavps 4.1.23, it say it cannot find an executable.
I would obviously like to play everything on the latest and greatest mediavps and FSO version, but I am afraid to break things.
Edit: I currently have both the Mediavps 3.8 and 4.0 folders installed in my FS2 directory. I believe I left both there because when I tried upgrading to Mediavps 4.0 without using Knossos my Fred2 wouldn't recognize it, and afterwards when I deleted the Mediavps 3.8 my Fred2 would launch FS2 as the vanilla version, which is also a problem because the vanilla version lacks a lot of backgrounds that the mediavps have.
Edit2: Crucial piece of info here, Knossos launcher says I have FSO 3.8.0-3, with no option to update, but in my FS2 folder I literally have FSO 19.0.0 installed.
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If you have the missions in FS2/data/missions you should be able to see them in the single mission room, no matter which mod you're playing.
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If you have the missions in FS2/data/missions you should be able to see them in the single mission room, no matter which mod you're playing.
I understand, yet that is exactly what did not happen.
After updating to mediavps 4.1.23 I can no longer play FS2 through knossos, so the problem has changed.
Edit: Also, when I launched FS2 on mediavps 4.0, a bunch of single missions would appear in the single mission menu that I do not have in my FS2/data/missions folder. I do not know where they came from.
Edit2: https://fsnebula.org/log/5e556aa7cb0d3321adc9860b debug log
Edit3: I just reinstalled mediavps 4.1.23 and now its working again. It says I am on FSO version 20.1.0 in game. My missions aren't appearing though and those other missions are still there.
Edit4: When I launch FRED2 through the Mediavps 4.1.23 in the Knossos launcher, I can load up my missions and edit them, and then when I launch FS2 through that very same FRED2, it launches the Mediavps 4.1.23 version and my missions do not appear. When I launch FRED2 from my FS2 folder, and then when I launch FS2 from there, it launches with mediavps 3.8 and my missions appear in the single missions menu.
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Try throwing the missions into <mod library>/FS2/MVPS-4.1.23/data/missions. That will make sure that they're "attached" to MediaVPs regardless of anything.
These extra missions probably come from the GOTY Mission Pack which has been "integrated" into MediaVPs (it's a separate mod required by MVPS).
Eventually, you could just create yourself a new, private mod in Knossos dev tab and then throw the missions in the proper place in your mod.
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I am at a loss currently. Where do all of you find inspiration for your new missions?
I'm seriously considering microdosing
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<snip>
I'm seriously considering microdosing
Parts of BP already feel like a good acid trip anyway, so this can only bring improvements
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The point of microdosing is to not induce a trip :P
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My normal conscious is crazier than micro dosing ever could be. :p
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Steal from other campaigns. :D
This is actually a good starting point. Other campaigns have their own storylines, but they leave a lot of room for "filler". For instance, during WiH's development, Darius made a mission focused on the Battle of Neptune, the very first skirmish between the Alliance and Tevs in the war, and The Blade Itself is set during Artemis Station in WiH's campaign. In addition, the ship description of the Erebus alone might give you some ideas of how the time gap between the Capella Supernova and AoA can be played out in missions, although I think it might be quite boring (simulations, drills, war games, Admirals Bei, Steele, Severanti and Armanjani having discussions and drinks among themselves, execution of the Threat Exigency Initiative, etc.).
Even the retail campaign leaves a lot of scope for the imagination. You could do a series of missions where you're a pilot stationed on the GTVA Colossus, follow the NTC Alexandria as it charged the Knossos with the Grall docked to it and explored the nebula beyond Gamma Draconis, or chronicle the history of the other Aeolus cruisers that don't feature prominently in retail missions.
If you find it daunting to write an entire campaign plot from scratch, try using the storyline of an existing mod and reimagine it in another mod. For instance, Inferno Release 1's plot in Blue Planet continuity would be quite interesting, I think, if it starts off with the Fedayeen nuking the other end of the Sol-Ross 128 subspace portal and creating an opening for the UEF to take the fight to Alliance systems like the EA did.
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In general, I think it has become quite hard to go into completely original territory, especially if you're limiting yourself to retail/MVP-only assets without any custom assets and have no lua skills to make new features just by yourself.
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For my part, when I came up with the idea of Devil and the Deep Blue, I just pondered the question of what Volition meant when they said that "the Shivans are a sympton of a larger problem."
I decided that meant that the Shivans had their own nemesis that they had been fighting for millennia (or longer) and that the GTVA stumbled onto said nemesis and had to test the old adage of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" with an alien race that was not only just as powerful as the Shivans, but just as inscrutable as well.
Inspiration is where you find it.
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"What would :v-old: do?"
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"What would :v-old: do?"
Oddly enough, yes, that's a good way to sum this up. It's what I asked myself before I came up with DatDB.