[Shade]

I was going to make a wiki article for the FRED Examples section about how to do these things, but I'm kinda stuck on how to explain it all in a reasonably understandable way at the moment. So while I'm pondering that, I figured I could at least make a mission showcasing the stuff I was going to discuss so that anyone interested can try it out for themselves while I'm poring over words. Which could take a while, I'm a better FREDder than I am a writer.

As the topic title says, it's a demo mission. No storyline. Instead you can fly around and have various annoyances happen to you when you get within certain areas which, for convenience, are marked by navbuoys - The included briefing explains it in more detail. The point is to show some of the many options that FSO gives mission designers if they are a little creative with their event wrangling, and while this mission barely scratches the surface (I didn't start on teleporting, for example...), it does at least give a taste of the many possibilities that now exist

So anyway, I hope this will be of some use to someone at some point. If not, then, well, it was fun making it so that's ok

Note: If you have Lightspeed's nebulae installed, the mission has a pretty background (One of Singh's, from the Background Emporium. They rock). If not, you'll have to do with stars. Also note, this is in the FRED section instead of the Missions and Campaigns section for a reason. It's not a "real" mission, it's a FRED demo. But if you disagree, feel free to move it anyway, the location is not terribly important

[Edit] Oh, and comments welcome of course. Even negative ones and reports about stuff that doesn't work right, since then I can get on and fix what is wrong - Everything should work but hey, I'm not perfect and something may have slipped through my testing. Like the one unused variable that had snuck in, which is gone now since I just reuploaded the zip Won't affect anything for anyone who already downloaded though, it just didn't look nice in FRED.

[karajorma]

Might as well take a little peek.

[Snail]

Interesting. Played it, did a few things, spawned Shivans, forgot it was on Insane, and got p4wned.

[Shade]

Might as well take a little peek.

Nothing there you don't already know, but I guess you can blast some Shivans But since you're looking at it, please tell me there's a better way of using ship-create to spawn enemies than the one I came up with. Because I'm really not too proud of that, the whole series of events seems far more cumbersome than it rightfully should it. What with needing to be able to change the iff and add goals to the spawned ships and all, though, it was the best I could come up with.

forgot it was on Insane, and got p4wned.

Try hiding in the sensor invisibility zone. I didn't set any of the events up to affect anything but the player as I added the Shivans as an afterthought (An afterthought, I might add, that ended up taking longer than the rest of the mission put together.), so you'd be stealthed while they would not, as long as you stayed in the sphere. Might help. Or it might not, I didn't exactly do any balance testing

[karajorma]

I don't get why you needed a separate event to change the IFF of the Shivans. I certainly didn't do that in Bigger Bearbaiting. I simply changed the IFF in the same event that I spawned the ship. As soon as you've spawned a ship it should now exist and other SEXPs later in the event should be able to affect it.

[Shade]

I tried that at first. It worked about 1/3 of the time, the rest of the time it crashed the game. I won't rule out error on my part though, this was actually the first time I messed with ship-create so I did a fair bit of learning on the fly.

[Edit] Only difference on consequence I can see between your events and my failed attempt is I tried to create my ships one at a time in a recurring event instead of all at once. I doubt that's enough to make a difference, so I probably just made a mistake somewhere and payed for it. I'm gonna try this again tomorrow, and see if I can get it right using a single event for each class

[Edit] Or today, because I hate it when things don't work. And you were right by the way, it works just fine when done right Gonna fix the mission to use the better way.

[Edit] ... and it's fixed. Thanks for the help Nice to FRED some again, even if it's just a demo like this. I should do it more often, maybe a minicampaign or something. Seems I can actually fit in FREDding even when working since I don't need spend 30 minutes looking things up every time I want to do something.

[Shade]

Finally managed to get the wiki page on this stuff done. For anyone who is interested: Hazard Zones.