[Snail]

What does it do?

[karajorma]

It's the delay before the player is allowed to enter the mission. Pretty self explanatory, next to useless AFAIK.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Useful to drop the player in the middle of a dogfight, instead of at the start of it.

[Droid803]

Hmmm...interesting...

[Mobius]

At the moment, I can only think of:

1) A good way to handle ships that are supposed to be destroyed before the beginning of the mission. With a fair player entry delay, the debris would be positioned as if the ship was destroyed minutes or hours before the arrival of the player;

2) There's an engagement and the player reaches the position only at a given moment. This feature is interesting thanks to its randomization (you don't know for sure what you're going to see until the "official" beginning of the mission);

[Droid803]

Well, you can already do 1) with the destroyed before mission thing.

2) is what I was thinking of -> let the battle go a little first so you don't need to simulate battle damage - let it go on by itself, randomly.

[Mobius]

Destroyed before mission is to be used in conjunction with 1).

I do simulate battle damage instead of relying on 2), but I really have to admit that the random factor may be a good thing. Obviously, risking to mess up mission goals and/or messages is something a FREDder should consider.

[Snail]

It's the delay before the player is allowed to enter the mission. Pretty self explanatory, next to useless AFAIK.

It does that? Whoa.

'snot useless IMO... I can find several good uses for it...

[Mobius]

You can see the time delay on your HUD... you can oftentimes see 20-30 seconds at the very beginning of the mission.

[Dilmah G]

I've never encountered that...

[Mobius]

People usually don't check the player's entry delay...

[Goober5000]

ST:R has it in at least two places, Cloak and Dagger being the most obvious.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Pretty sure it doesn't do anything multi so keep that in mind.