[Nuclear1]

For those active FREDers out there, I'd like to pose this question (or series of questions): When you FRED, what's your style at doing so (sit down for hours at a time? Take regular breaks?)? What kind of 'environment' do you prefer to FRED in (quiet with the lights dimmed, or music blaring in your headphones?)? What do you like to have happen while you FRED (music playing, watching movies?)?

Honestly, I prefer having the lights relatively low, though I do play music in my headphones, as some of it gives me the atmosphere that I look for while I FRED (i.e. "The Rock" for intense missions, "Revenge of the Sith" for dramatic parts). I usually FRED for one or two hours at a time, usually starting and working on one or two missions at a time (though, as my Rogue Intentions betatesters would say, not fully polishing them ). I've actually written entire missions to the tunes of entire pieces ("Battle of the Heroes", "The Chase", and "Futile Escape" all come to mind immediately, though I'm sure there are some others).

So, what are your preferences? On a related note, not to be particularly favoring, I'd like to hear responses from some of our FRED dynamos like Blaise Russel, karajorma or Goob. It would seem especially interesting to see how these FREDers do their best work (aside from the hours upon hours of practice, testing, and learning, of course).

[Descenter]

I just sit in front of a computer screen and i graduly get the ideas... course it takes me forever just to create one mission, and cleaning up and refining that mission in the process....

[Axem]

Can't say much for lights, I just work in whatever lighting there is. Music, the latest OST I've, uh, aquired... Since they tend to have both dramatic moments and action moments they work quite well. I turn the music off in FS2, so I can keep my music with me.

I tend to only FRED when I am properly motivated. This may be because I just thought of a super idea for a campaign, a FREDding contest, or on the off chance I actually feel like FREDding.

Once I get going, I keep on going for hours, only taking brief breaks to do something else. I do one mission until it has the basic things needed for the mission and see how it works out. Once the events work, I start on another mission and save balancing for later.

[Nuclear1]

Originally posted by Axem
Once the events work, I start on another mission and save balancing for later.

That actually sounds just like how I work. Usually the missions I FRED happen to be part of large, epic campaigns and storylines, so once I'm on a high for one storyline, I leave the difficulty issues aside for favor of telling the story, and then I go back and rebalance the mission once I've done three or four missions in a row.

Another question I should have asked in the first post regards how long people spend on a particular mission. I tend to spend hours at a time on one mission to get quirky little events and plot devices to work out to best effect, though there are some that I just blow through in a few hours.

Similarly, freespacegundam, my top FREDer for GTI and a student of the FA, spends days or even weeks at a time on one particular mission that he chooses out of the list of availables. It always seems to payoff though, as he delivers top-notch missions in terms of design and story, and even some twists and speeches that I would never have thought of myself.

[Boomer]

I don't Fred often, as when I get a campaign idea it usually requires extensive modeling and texturing....

However, on the off chance I do, I just sit at my computer, put on my headphones, and listen to some music.  I listen to what ever is on most of the time, but typically, I listen to something with more energy to sustain me through my toils.  Unfortunately, I have this nasty habit of continually tweaking things even after the mission is complete.

[karajorma]

My FREDding method is generally like this. Open winamp. Load in my FREDding tunes playlist which is basically music from both games and few other selected instrumental pieces that put me in the mood (Like Brothers in Arms from Halo and Hidden from Inferno).

Then I'll sit down and work on the Briefing/Command Briefing. I don't put the icons in yet, just the text. This helps me get a firm idea of what the mission has in store. This often actually involves leaving my computer, pacing up and down, going into the kitchen to get a drink etc. Next step is placing the main ships I'll be using in the mission. Sometimes I don't place them all (Especially the main fighters) but I try to place everything major that will be present at the start of the mission.

Then I take a break. I'll often leave a mission overnight at this point. Never have figured out why Occassionally I'll come back and tinker with minor briefing elements or work on the background at this point but for some reason I can't quite fathom I never seem to get much beyond this point on the first day. I'll almost always run a playtest during this period too to check if I like the placement of the ships.

On the second day I generally tinker with the mission specs fairly early if I haven't had to earlier (for custom wing names). Then I'll open up the event editor and start bashing out the events. I like to get as much of this done in one session as possible. I'll frequently stop to playtest what I have so far. I'm not the kind of FREDder who writes everything and then tests.

Once the main SEXPing is done I've usually had enough for the day and it's time for another break (usually overnight). Once I'm done with that it's on to the mission objectives, debriefing and the other general playtesting. (And lots of bugfixing!). This step often takes several days.

[Singh]

I hardly FRED these days, but when I do, it goes something like this:

Open FRED.

Read through HLP for a few minutes.

Open Background editor.

Spend next 2-3 hours doing up pretty backgrounds

Read through HLP for a few more minutes - recieve feedback on some DoGA model or the other. Open DoGA

open back FRED again, place a ship or two.

Switch back to DoGa, fix model.

Realize I'm hungry and go get something to eat.

Go back to FRED and spend next hour or so properly placing ships and stuff along with waypoints - if it's a long mission, spend tihs time placing the 'initial' waypoints rather than the stuff that will be used later.

Realize that it's time to go to bed, start off DoGA render, goodnight.

I rarely get past that since sexping takes up so much testing time just to get it right - and my schedule rarely allows me much time to spend in front anything for too long...

[Blaise Russel]

Generally, I FRED when and because I have an idea. I don't need to sit down and think of a mission concept because I'll only sit down in order to turn a concept into reality. Ideas can be sparked by anything - like a film or a book - but the main eureka comes when I see a point in FS history that I can insert a campaign into, like Koth's invasion of Epsilon Pegasi, or the capture of the Hammer of Light Sekhmet hybrids.

I have two playlists that I listen to while FREDding - a 'proper' music playlist consisting of 30 or so songs and a much larger 'game music' playlist, with music from FS1 and 2, Freelancer, Torment, Chrono Trigger and FF7. I listen to one or the other depending on my mood, although I'll reference the FS music tracks when deciding on mission music.

As part of pre-mission set-up, I sort out a mission background. If the system I'm setting it in already has a suitable mission background, I use it; else I make my own.

There's a routine I follow, and it begins with slapping down all the ships I want to use in the mission, giving them names and arranging them properly. This is where the structure of the mission is truly given flesh, as I decide that "this wing of Astaroths will be on escort duty" and "these two wings will arrive and attack the corvette, but only after the Hercs are destroyed." I sort out waypoints and initial orders at this point, but not so much the arrival/departure cues.

Next I start doing the mission fluff. I write the briefings first, complete with icons, then move on to messages. This is where the mission concept crystalises, as I create not just mission chatter, but also the messages that define the structure for the player: commands, updates, stuff like that. This helps me pinpoint the exact ending conditions as I account for all the ways the mission could go - critical ship destroyed, critical ship departed, secondary objectives completed or failed... With this, I can write appropriate debriefings for the mission--

--ALWAYS including a debriefing for a player who leaves before he is told to, ALWAYS--

--although I'll already know what kind of debriefings I'll probably have. For example, writing a convoy raid mission, I'll know whether it's 'destroy all ships and depart when enemy reinforcements arrive,' or 'destroy escaping ships and get a different result depending on your success.'

Once that's done, I get on with writing the events, proceeding in a (mostly) chronological order, although edits can result in new events that are 'out of place'. With the events complete, I can finish off all the arrival/departure cues and do all the rest of the cleaning up that's necessary: team loadout, mission specs, so on so forth.

Then I test it. I play the mission over and over, checking for flaws and errors and making sure that I can complete it on Medium. And when that's all done and dusted, the mission is complete. The process can take several days and many sessions, as I FRED when I feel like it (which is fairly often, unless I have other business to attend to) but it gets done eventually.

[Primus]

The Rock? The movie theme?

Anyway... I FRED with curtain down, lights on, 2Pac rapping on background, glass of pepsi (with 1,5l bottle next to the glass) and pack of cigs in case I mess up, can't figure out something or this joke for an OS crashes.

How long I FRED depends on my mood and the mission, 15 mins to 3 hours.

[Slanker_MT]

I usually start with ship placements.  After that I'm setting all the properties like orders, arrival/departure cues (as far as it's possible at this point), escort list, waypoints etc.. After that I add the neccessary events that are needed to make the mission work until a specified point (let's say half of the mission) and test the mission (including balancing). After everything has been fixed/balanced, I usually add all the additional events like directives, basic messages (status, destruction, orders). Again, testing (with balancing). After that, I set up the remaining half of the mission and add the remaining events. After some extensive testing, I add all the missing stuff, like briefing, debriefing, loadout, background, mission specs etc. I usually make a list for the debriefing to check all the possible outcomes of the mission. After the mission is working in all aspects, I try to break it... shooting stuff I shouldn't do, warping out at various stages in the mission, to ensure the completion of the debriefing/ mission goals.

As for music & light setup, there's no special setup. It's always a bit dampened here and I'm not always listening to music while Fredding.

[Black Wolf]

I've been FREDding very differently lately than I used to - dunno why, but I started doing it awhile back and haven't gone back.

Generally, I get a bit of an idea as to how I'll want the mission to proceed, either just as an idea or throuh a (generally very) short summary that I've written previously. Then, without even touching FRED yet, I'll open word and write out my briefing and, if needed, command briefing, trying to decide on what animations to use, or if I'll need any new ones.

The next step is to write at least a page or two as to how I want the mission to proceed. This is generally a cross between stream of consciousness stuff (I'll have sexps and possible problems/solutions written in brackets generally, as well as any warnings or suggestions I might have for myself at this particular point in the mission (ship classes, names etc.) and a sort of in character mode where I'll write a lot of the dialogue I plan on using (Though, naturally, much of this changes as the mission evolves).

The next step is to open up FRED and copy and paste my CB/briefing, inserting icons, CBAnis, camera movement etc. as needed. The advantage here is that it's all pre spell checked for me, for the most part.

Stage Three is ship placement, though generally only the ships that will be present in the mission at the beginning. After this, I typically get bored of actual FREDding/story writing so I start playing with the BG, which is something I rather enjoy, especially with LS's nebulae. I also generally go into the mission specs editor at this point, add in a mission name, my name, pick some music, check All ships BFA etc.

Stage 4 is the actual sexping. I tend to do my sexping and ship placement in close to in mission chronological order, which can be inconvenient if things change, but it's the way I work. This, of course, is the part that takes the longest, especially since I find it hard to concentrate when I'm just sexping-playtesting-sexping-playtesting, so it'll often take days, even longer sometimes.

Anyway, once the sexping is more or less complete, I'll do up my debrief and then go through and add all the sexps I forgot. The debrief tends to spark a lot of these eg. do I need a debrief if ship X is disabled rather than destroyed? Probably, so I'll need to put in all the sexps/messages that I forgot earlier).

After that it's bugfixing and generally sending it off to someone else for playtesting, who typically picks up tonnes more bugs than I do, which get fixed and then the mission is more or less done. Whole process tends to take weeks at the moment though, mostly due to my lack of ability to apply myself in stage 4. I like to write, but sexping is not my favourite thing in the world.

[Roanoke]

Originally posted by Black Wolf
Whole process tends to take weeks at the moment though, mostly due to my lack of ability to apply myself in stage 4. I like to write, but sexping is not my favourite thing in the world.

Funny that as I enjoyed the SEX(Ha!)Ping but not the writing ideas down 'n' stuff. I tended to have an initial idea and just sort of go with the flow.

[Axem]

Same here. My missions typically change quite a bit from my first idea to when its almost finished.

My flow of mission design goes like this.

Write down a single line describing the mission.
Place ships.
Copy background. (I HATE doing them, so I just go and steal one of Singh's backgrounds from his thread. )
Write all the messages, and briefing.
Place a few more ships I forgot about.
Set waypoints and orders.
Sexping.
Set up debrief conditions.
Test playing!
Actually write the debriefs, add in other changes and such.

[Roanoke]

Originally posted by Axem
Copy background. (I HATE doing them, so I just go and steal one of Singh's backgrounds from his thread. )
 

Ha! Me too. Sarnie's Background package was a god send.

[DarthWang]

It doesn't really matter to me how the lighting is, and I usually don't listen to music while FREDing, but I just sit down at the computer and start it up. I usually have a pretty - much fully formed concept for a mission in my head before I start, although I do have to improvise a lot in general. First I change the player fighter to the one I want it to be, and change its weapons if I need to (and I usually do). Then I add the important big objects like capital ships, jump nodes, stations, etc. If possible at this stage, I give them initial orders as well as arrival and departure cues. Also I add waypoints and basic events like beam - free - all (I don't use that 'all ships beam freed by default' thing, it's more trouble than it's worth. Also if a ship has to be damaged randomly before the mission I add an event for that.

Next I add more things like freighters, cargo containers, sentry guns, and try to choreograph the motion of the ships and stuff, and add more events. Then I add mission objectives.

Finally, I add fighters and bombers and their corresponding events.

To finish it, I do stuff like briefings, backgrounds, mission specs, command breifings, and debriefings.

And then I have a mission.

This is done in stages with a lot of testing in between, though.

[Akalabeth Angel]

Hmmn, well I tend to have a general pattern of doing things:

First I like to kind of sketch out the mission on a piece of paper, doing poor renditions of the ships with little arrows and subnotes about what the heck's going on.

Then I spend some time on the story. I'll write the briefing(s) on paper, along with any story or important dialogue. A lot of my mission begin with dialogue, though some of the early ones have a fair bit of it. Later ones will have less as the characters have become more developed.  Once I have the briefings and stuff, I pick out the music which seems most suitable. Somtimes I have it picked out far in advance. In my campaign, some missions 15-20 down the line I've already got music for.

In FRED, I slap down the starting ships. And then give them orders and stuff, and then I test it. Then I slap down some more ships, yadda yadda, and finally I have 'em all. And then I play it a great many times and I get sick to death of the mission and the music.

At some point when the mission is like 80% ready, I add backgrounds. Sometimes I just use ones that are already done. I don't think backgrounds should vary from mission to mission within one system, so I have one for Alpha Centauri, one for Vasuda, one for wherever and so forth. Once a system's background is done, it's done. If I'm just doing a systems background, I try to put them behind the action of the main ships. If I'm doing a mission where I've already got background, I try to frame the action within the existing background.

For me, the first 30 or so seconds is critical because it's the one time in the mission where the player will be exactly where and when you'll want him to be. I try to frame either formations or action sequences in this way, to give the greatest enjoyment to the player.

And then finally, the mission is done. I do up some debriefings, I cut and paste the text to a word program to kill any grammer/spelling errors and generally do some other fine polishing.

For mood, I just turn on my computer and go. Lighting, music is irrelevant. Though mood certainly is. If a mission is damn boring to do, and damn boring to play (over and over), it's going to take me a long time to finish usually. Whereas the missions I find fun and exciting, I sometimes replay while I'm doing missions to get me excited for the campaign and fredding.

[NGTM-1R]

I lack a set style, really...

I don't take breaks so much as go "Okay, that's enough for now." and wander off to do something else for an hour or two. A lot of the time that's messing with the tech descriptions so they better reflect the post-Capella period or the realities of the game (the tech descriptions tend to wax positive where they really ought not to), or hunting through HLP/Hades Combine for mods/FREDding information that might be useful to me. Most of my FREDding gets done late at night, but this is not for any particular reason; I can and do (and just was, actually) work during the day.

I'll have several rough or "just barely started" missions at any one time (up to seven) that I will go back and work on again. I start testing before the mission is actually complete most of the time, fix things, do some work on completing it, test again, fix things, do some work on completing it, and so on. If I've started testing a mission I'll finish it before I do anything else.

I do listen to music, but it tends to be my writing music, which may or may not have anything to do with what the current mission is like. (And may or may not have anything to do with what I was writing, either.) There is one tune I would sorely like to be able build a mission around, I'd have to ask Sesquipdelian what it's from though, and I can't really get the feel I want with FS capital craft...

[Goober5000]

I usually can't FRED unless I'm in the mood for FRED.  I have to "feel creative" when I'm starting a new mission, otherwise I either can't make progress or the mission "rough draft" is very mechanical and not much fun to play.  I need a "spark" before I can start a new mission.

Getting in a FREDding mood can happen several ways.  Sometimes it just happens, which is the easiest. Sometimes, all it takes is reading some FS stuff or listening to FS music.  Other times I have to play FS for awhile before I get in the mood.

Once an idea hits me, I'm set.  How I actually start FREDding varies.  If I have a particularly solid idea in my mind about how I want a briefing or some dialogue to play out, I might write that first.  I'll probably also write a few notes to describe what happens in the mission, just to keep things straight.

The order in which I add stuff is flexible, and most of the time there's quite a bit of overlap between placing ships, adding events, and adding messages.  Usually I'll add the major players first - e.g. if it's an assault or defense mission, I'll add the capship or installation that's in the center of the action.  If it's an escort mission, I'll add the ship(s) or convoy being escorted.  (The first thing I did when making the ST:R mystery mission was to arrange the convoy freighters and give them waypoints.)

Every so often I'll start out by spending quite a bit of time on one particular feature until its exactly the way I want it before doing the rest of the mission.  One mission late in ST:R was done this way: I spent several months perfecting a particularly complex series of events and AI orders for a bonus objective that appears two-thirds of the way through the mission, then built the rest of the mission around it.  (I'm quite proud of this objective, as it incorporates a bit of noncanon Freespace history as well as some complicated event scripting, AND it's only triggered if you do well in the middle third of the mission.  I'm eagerly anticipating the reactions to it. )  But most of the time I add stuff in chronological order.

In general, I'll add all the stuff associated with an object or concept before proceeding to the next one.  If I add a capship, I do its arrival/departure cues and waypoints first and maybe give it a wing or two of escort fighters.  If the arrival of a fighter wing is accompanied by some chatter, I'll write the chatter.  If a transport needs to capture with a capship, I'll do all the docking-related stuff in the order that it happens: dock order, dock message, capture chatter, IFF change, and goal and directive code.  Unless the mission is really complicated, I'll try to do the whole mission this way, or at least a rough draft of it.  This helps me keep the whole mission in my head and keep track of which events and ships affect which other parts of the mission.  Then it's time for playtesting.

The playtesting process is pretty much "keep refining everything until you're happy with it".  I play the mission, pausing frequently to take notes, until I reach a point where it's necessary to add the changes before proceeding further.  Then I switch to FRED and go right down the list, adding changes and fixing bugs.  Once that's done I switch back to FS.  The process tends to be very "loopy" as I test the mission, make changes, test again, make changes, and so on, each time getting a little farther into the mission.  I try to refine all aspects of the mission - messages, events, ship placement, ship balance, etc. - in parallel, as it keeps the mission feeling coherent.  If I focus on only one aspect of the mission at a time it sometimes causes the mission to feel segmented.

At this point I do the briefing or debriefing (it's a toss-up which one I do first) if I didn't do it before the mission.  When doing the debriefing, I've recently found it helpful to add a stage for each possible outcome of the mission, with a few short words to describe it such as "ship X destroyed, say congrats" before actually writing the text.  This helps ensure that I don't forget an outcome while I'm writing the debriefing text.  (Depending on the mission, the briefings, debriefings, command briefings, and messages can easily take several hours of composing and rewriting before I'm happy with them.  I'm not content with just writing stuff that simply explains what's going on; I want it to have the proper feel for the mission.)

I don't do backgrounds at all; I hate doing them with a passion. So I just look through other missions until I find one I like, then I plop it in with cut & paste.  This is usually the very last thing I do, and in DEM it wasn't even done at all.

I typically work on only one mission at a time until it's done, unless I run into a huge problem or a delay of several weeks that causes me to lose my momentum.  In that case I'll sometimes FRED another mission to completion before returning to the original one.

So that's the process, in a rather large nutshell.  As for the rest: I like the environment to be peaceful and free of distractions, as I work best if I have a large, uninterrupted block of time where I can get a lot of stuff done; though it's helpful to take a break or sleep on a problem if I can't figure it out in a reasonable amount of time.  If I'm making rapid progress I prefer it to be quiet, but if I'm thinking of plot points or debugging I sometimes like to listen to the FS music.  Lighting typically doesn't matter much; I've FREDded in both daytime and nighttime.

[BlackDove]

Now replace the word "FRED" with the word "SEX" in Goobers post. Ideally you'd want to replace it with the world ****, but that one has asterisks, so we're going to go with "SEX".

[Nuclear1]

Originally posted by Blaise Russel
As part of pre-mission set-up, I sort out a mission background. If the system I'm setting it in already has a suitable mission background, I use it; else I make my own.

Backgrounds are the bane of my FRED experience. Honestly, I don't do backgrounds very well, and until I found Kazan's background generator, I usually spent hours at a time just figuring out how the background editor worked with pitch, heading, bank, what not. I'm proud of most of my GTI Rebellion backgrounds, though my usual process regarding this now is to let Kazan's generator make a background, then allow me to tinker with it from there by changing colors, positions, etc.

The best part is that since Rogue Intentions is set in entirely unknown systems, I have plenty of creative license. I'm actually proud of one particular background, and I may just post a screenie of it one of these days (surely not as good as Singh's, but still good IMO).

Originally posted by Goober5000
I spent several months perfecting a particularly complex series of events and AI orders for a bonus objective that appears two-thirds of the way through the mission, then built the rest of the mission around it.

This is my other issue with FREDing. Usually, I don't tend to do very complicated missions or extremely tense events, because Murphy's Law takes over here, and everything that could possibly go wrong usually does go wrong. By making things too complicated, I add just that much more to look through and figure out exactly what went wrong. This is my fault, too, as I usually go SEXP happy and FRED like crazy, then remember to save and test it in-game. Usually, I've got three or four whole minutes worth of gametime events that I have to check back through to correct by now.

If I had to compare my style of FREDing and mission design to anyone else (that I know of), it would probably be closest to BR's. When I look at the missions I make, I often feel like what I'm making is Homesick all over again; big action, lots of fighters/bombers, lots of chatter, and it gets a story across without having to worry about anything too entirely complex. It's all simple, but it does what I want FRED and FS2 to do: tell the story that I want it to.

For me, the first 30 or so seconds is critical because it's the one time in the mission where the player will be exactly where and when you'll want him to be.

I can both agree and disagree with this. I agree with the fact that some missions can set up an atmosphere quickly and give the feeling of an intense battle, unnerving emptiness, or action across to a player. However, I equally believe that an atmosphere can be developed over the course of an entire mission. While most of it should come early in the mission, it can be developed, climaxed, and in some cases resolved by the end of the mission. I even have several missions where I start and give the player one emotion, then have it turn around and turn to something else (i.e. boredom of escort, then to a tight race to escape before annihiliation, etc.).

The Rock? The movie theme?

The very same. I think that Sesquipedalian put up a sample of music from the title track as part of Scroll's new battle music, and that thirty seconds of music could easily sum up why The Rock gets me into the mood for FRED. Like I said before, I've FREDed entire missions to the tune of soundtracks, and The Rock is no exception (I've got about two or three that I've done to the beat of). In fact, because I think it sounds a little better and more dramatic than the original, I've actually replaced the Aquitaine mainhall music with the 2:30 of music from the soundtrack, simply because it gives the feeling of power and drama that FS2 gives.