[Black Wolf]

This is a little hard to explain, so I'm going to start off with an example.

Here's the situation - Alpha and Beta have just engaged a couple of enemy wings and a cruiser. Once all hostiles are eliminated, you (the FREDder) want one of the surviving fighters to have a conversation with command. However, since every battle will be different, there's no guarantee that the fighter you choose to speak will still be alive at the end to talk to command, and so what you get is a conversation where command tlks to itself (as FS2 defaults to #Command when the chosen ,message sender is unavailable). There are two ways around this. You can make the message sender invulnerable when he falls below a certain hgkll strength, or you can do a ****load of sexping, most of which is redundant by the end anyway. I would like a third option - the ability to tag a ship with an identifying marker that persists and can be refferred to throughout the mission in lieu of the name.

This is how it might work. First, you set a time and set the flagging sexp up. Something like

When
 - is destroyed delay
     - All enemy ships
 - Flag ship
    - Alpha 2
    - Alpha 3
    - Alpha 4
    - Beta 1
    - Beta 2
    - Beta 3
    - Beta 4
 - Flag name
FRED now searches the list until it finds an available (ie surviving ship with working communications subsystem) ship, and gives it the flag "Flag Name"

Now, from this point on, any messages you want sent by that ship can be set up with "Flag Name" as the sender (Perhaps prefaced by some symbol to distinguish it from a ship that might be called Flag Name). This would be particularly effective with fighters, as it could default to the ani set by the persona of the fighter. Ideally,m you'd also be able to put "Flag Name" into events. So, if you wanted your pilot to get pissed off by what command has to say, he could go rogue (Change iff, "Flag Name", Hostile) and jump out (AI Goal, Warp out, "Flag Name", 89)

There'd need to be a few failsafes put into place (eg. Any message sent from a flag before that flag is set default to Command) but I can;t see too many sexping problems (coding of course might be a different story.

So, opinions?[/color]

[Ferret]

The main Volition campaign had major problems of the same kind, it's annoying for the player and annoying for the fredder......

A Really good way round it would be a beauty.....

[Galemp]

What's wrong with sending messages from ?

Sometimes I simply send the message from #Beta 1 instead of Beta 1, and hope the player doesn't notice that Beta 1 is gone, or that he doesn't have the grey box around him.

If you could assign the grey box to appear around the ship specified if it's in the mission that would help with the illusion.

[diamondgeezer]

Originally posted by GalacticEmperor
What's wrong with sending messages from ?

I never trusted that, perhaps a coder could give it a check up?

[StratComm]

The problem only comes with voices, as you'd get inconsistant personas for your wingmen.  Alpha 2 might switch from male to female, vasudan to terran, or whatever without any way of dynamically updating the sound.  Since most player campaigns don't use this though, it'd probably be a pretty good thing to do anyway.

[Flipside]

Possibly being able to compare the Flag Value with an in-mission ship would help with that problem? That way it could play back any one of the animations and/or voices depending on the outcome of the check?

Flipside

i.e.

If
- Flag Name
- is equal to
            - Beta 2
            - Play Vasudan head and sounds

Ok, it leaves for a bit of Sexp work, but would allow for a selection

Flipside.

[karajorma]

Here's a crazy thought. Couldn't you achieve the same effect (with voices) using personas?

Simply add the lines you want for that particular mission to the persona table and then you can just use the option.

I haven't messed about enough with the tbl to know if you could do it without SCPO edits but even if you can't it might be an easier way of coding this if BW's is too hard.