[brinlong]

I finished a clean looking copy of the mission. The only problem I can't get around is the ordering of the messages. I've tried chaining them into the right order and upping every delay that I could, but they keep running together in a mush at the very end. I was hoping someone could take a look at it and tell me what I'm missing.

Because Angelfire is being so helpful, I could not create an icon on the page. This leads to the text version of it. I tried cutting and pasting and it worked fine though.

http://www.angelfire.com/space2/brinlong/Follow_the_Leader.fs2

The mission in total is about 7.5 minuts long, and is just above medium difficulty. With an Enryies and 8 banks of lasers, its a snap. A Ulysses with a pair of Promethus R's on the other hand might find it a tad challenging.

[Primus]

Bringlong. Make an own thread for your mission in the Campaign forum, eg. C3M7 brinlong. This way it's easier to keep track of your mission, it's progress and possible bugs.

[karajorma]

Actually I meant to split the thread. I'll do that now.

[brinlong]

Well, I found a viable way to remove the glitch, but it's a last ditch effort. What I've found that works is rather than putting a sequnce of messages under a delay-message-list, I can put in an event for each and every message. Instead of having one event with a 13 message-list, I can have 13 events, chained one after another, with one message each.

Needless to say, this sounds fairly dumb to me, as it makes the message-list SEXP utterly useless, and I'd rather not learn the wrong way to do it. Does this problem sound familiar to anyone?

[StratComm]

The delays in delay-message-list aren't absolute (relative to the event firing) are they?

[brinlong]

I was thinking that was the only reason that the message-list sexp was used. Example, I have:

Event blah
    some trigger ->
    delay-message-list
    message A
    delay 500

    delay-message-list
    message B
    delay 1500

From what I've read in FRED and in the FAQs, the way this would work is once the trigger goes off, 5 secs pass, then message A plays. 10 seconds after that, message B plays. Am I understanding that wrong?

[StratComm]

I'm not sure.  What's the full thread look like?  FRED's done stranger things, but I think send-message-list works as it should.

Also, shouldn't those delays be in milliseconds?  I.e. what you have would be 1st message after .5 seconds, second after 1.5?

Oh, and according to FRED, times are accumulated.  Meaning each time adds to the total time before it, so it's the delay between the previous message and the next.

[Nuclear1]

Originally posted by brinlong
From what I've read in FRED and in the FAQs, the way this would work is once the trigger goes off, 5 secs pass, then message A plays. 10 seconds after that, message B plays. Am I understanding that wrong?

I would take StratComm's advice and just use send-message-list. Also, instead of adding a play delay after the first message, just calculate that delay into the original event (i.e. round up "message A"'s delay to one second, and then add that one second to the conditional. Makes life much easier, except under a few circumstances.

Actually, upon a look in FRED, I see what you mean. What you have is this:


This looks clumsy and defeats the purpose of send-message-list. Also, the messages are set to go off within fractions of a second, which makes heads spin while trying to read it all.

A better example would look like:


Note how I added in the initial delay into the original trigger. Also, I added a roughly 4-5 second delay between each message: this gives the player ample time to read the message, especially when there is nothing else to worry about.

Otherwise, good work. Keep it up; add a background in particular.

[brinlong]

Thanks, that's exactly the explanation I was looking for. But what real changes can you make to the background except for the placement and color of suns and the number of ambient stars?

[karajorma]

Take a look at Singh's Background emporium thread for an example

[brinlong]

I doubt I'll be able to do something to that level, but I'll give it a shot Anyway, thanks to nuclear1, I've solved half the problem I was having with the dialogue, but I'm still having the same trouble with it all running together. The way I have it set up is three chained events, which are all pretty much dialogue.

Event 1:
Ship warps
5 messages

Event 2:
~15 messages

Event 3:
1 message
Ship warps out

What is happening is, Event 1 will go off fine. The messages will play in the proper order with a very good lag time between each, but once event 2 starts, it falls apart. Messages from event 3 start playing at odds with the messages from event 2, i.e.:

Event 2 message 1
Event 3 message 1
Event 2 message 2
Event 3 message 2
and so on.

and the ship(which is part of the dialogue) now warps out before event 3 is even completed. But they still complete all of the dialogue.

I guess what I don't understand is why one event starts before the prior one finishes, especially considering they're chained together. Is there some kind of logical tag that prohibits the next event in a chain from starting, other than a time-delay?

BTW, does anyone have anymore criticisms? Is it too hard/too easy?

[karajorma]

Send-Message-List is a funny SEXP in that it's one that can still be executing some time after the trigger conditions to set it off have come true. Most SEXPs have their effect instantaniously so you don't see what you're seeing.

The problem is that you've made the assumption that the Send-Message-List in event 2 will complete before the one in event 3 will trigger but that's not the way events or messages work.

Once the trigger conditions for event 2 have occured event 3 is then primed and can trigger as soon as its trgger conditions have been fullfillled. If this occurs before the message list in the second event have completed then it's too bad. The messages will simply be added to the list of messages the game thinks needs to be sent out and will be played in order of their priority (The high, medium, low thing you set in the SEXP). If two messages have the same priority they can easily get out of order.

This is one of the two real dangers with Send-Message-List and it's the reason why you must be careful to make sure that if you are using send message list that there are no other messages which need to be sent.

The other big danger is that Send-Message-List should never be used under combat conditions unless the ships sending the messages are guardianed or invulnerable. The reason for this is that send message list does very little checking to see if the ship sending the message is still alive. As a result you can have the game try to play an entire conversation from a ship which is dead. In addition since you have set the ships name to #Apos rather than Apos as you should have the messages will be sent by the Apos from beyond the grave (You use the # flag to denote a ship or person not present in the mission. This is why you see the # before Command as there is no ship of that name in the mission. Since the Apos is present you want messages from it to appear with the gray brackets around the ship that appear when a ship in the mission starts talking).

Unfortunately I've been a bit busy reviewing missions from the FRED contest but with luck I should be able to get a more in-depth review of your mission this weekend.

[Nuclear1]

Originally posted by karajorma
Take a look at Singh's Background emporium thread for an example

Or download Kazan's mission background generator. You can go into the background editor and play with the nebulae, which is exactly how I've gotten some of my favorite backgrounds to date.

[karajorma]

Any way I can get a more recent version of the mission brinlong? I took a look at the one you've posted but from the sound of your posts a fair bit might have changed since then.

I did notice you've missed out the AWOL debrief. People hereabouts know by now that I look for that one especially

[brinlong]

did one a couple days ago and put it on the same link Put in an AWOL debrief too. I forgot to put another message up

[karajorma]

Ah I'll give that a test then

[karajorma]

Okay finally got to test it. Found a few errors.

1) The briefing icon for everything comes up as a Ulysses. Select those icons in the briefing editor and change the ship type to something appropriate.

2) The Apos is refered to as a corvette in the first briefing stage and then miraculously changes into an aeolus class cruiser in the 2nd

3) The team loadout editor doesn't appear to have been touched. I don't think mercs would have access to Terran Mara's somehow. Alter the settings so that only the ships and weapons appropriate to the mission are available. Don't forget to remove the dogfight variants and the Mehku if no vasudan fighters are available to use it.

4) One of the messages refered to the Lokis causing a diversion. What Lokis? I'm seeing Perseus class fighters

5) Where's the music? Get to the mission specs editor and give me some

6) Rather a major flaw here. If the Apos is disabled by the enemy bombs the game does nothing. It doesn't seem to detect that the Apos can't ever reach its goal. It's always worth considering the possibility that any mission critical ship can be disabled (even a fighter!) and can screw up your mission if you've not planned for it. What you want to do about the Apos getting disabled is up to you as long as it fits in with the mission.