[Dilmah G]

Yes, that's fair enough. You may remember I did do that with The Blade Itself, involving one very good Beta Wing.

[FelixJim]

This idea would be useful if one wanted to make a kamikaze mission.

[Dilmah G]

Hmm, but kamikaze missions aren't really that hard in Freespace, where actually flying the ship is easy and all you have to do is point and afterburn. I guess you could make it interesting with walls of flak and whatever, but I still think kamikaze missions are a bit boring in the end.

[bigchunk1]

Well, this is kind of off topic but sometimes getting from point A to point B under fire can be quite tough. Flak guns, persuing fighters, missiles to dodge... You have a ship you must bring down at 800 health and you only have say 10 ships which do 100 dammage each on impact. You need to bring 8/10 to their targets before they get destroyed. I think It could be a lot of fun. Just depends on how you go about doing it.

I really like this thread's overall idea though. The first rainbow six on PC was set up this way where you had a squad of say six or so guys and had to complete a mission using that squad. Storm a house, save a hostage etc. You controlled one character at a time and the rest followed a plan you setup for them (AI pathing). In essence you were the squad, and the entire unit was at your disposal leaving you with more options that any single individual squadmember could have given. It's a different way to approach a mission when you have more assets/options at your disposal. It's certainly something to look at for anyone who is trying to turn out something a little more unique.   

[FelixJim]

You could always think of some strangled rational to have weak-hulled, poor manoeuvrability kamikaze fighters too if you wanted. Or twisting, winding corridors (think something similar to Vassago's Dirge, that mission in the spacesuit) where brushing against walls might prematurely explode your payload. At least the idea would be there to play around with, I'm sure someone could come up with something.

[Thaeris]

I was going to post this earlier in response to one of S-99's comments, but figured it wasn't necessay. I might have been wrong, despite the fact that I find it to be fairly obvious...

Different gameplay types will employ different feature sets. As such, respawning as wingmen may in fact be an invaluable asset to certain mods or TCs. To illustrate, consider another Nordera campaign for WoD - the objective of the campaign may simply be to get the group as a whole to succeed rather than the individual. Again, to those that would dismiss a request for this feature, different gamplay types will require different feature sets. In that regard, this in not at all a poor request.

[General Battuta]

I believe it can be done right now. The only hangup I see is transferring orientation. Other than that, should be easy.

[The E]

I don't know how to say this any more clearly. This can be done using existing functions in the engine. There's no need to add features that already exist.

[Thaeris]

Yes, point taken. 

[General Battuta]

I think they want it to be a checkbox in mission specs so they don't have to do any work.  

Which would be a lot slicker. I still don't see a way to transfer orientation...barring a huge amount of checks on invisible nav buoys...

[Thaeris]

Optimized features are always great, especially for those of us who are quite green with FRED. Optimized features ideally always work properly as well, and could ideally be streamlined for performance... of course, that's why they're optimized.

Forgive any redundancy as seen above, but in light of several recent feature requests which could be, despite not being ideal for whatever reason,  produced with existing code, could we do something like this: produce pre-compiled code blocks for FRED akin to .h files in C++? Even if just an interm measure for certain code features which ought to have their own dedicated SEXPs or scripts, these portable "header" files could be written and saved in FRED, each containing all the necessary operations for the given feature. Of course, all of those features are already available to FRED, but now they've been packed into a code block which can be saved, easily moved around, and shared with the community much more effectively. Until the replicated feature gets its own dedicated operator (or even needs one), this might be a very useful tool for cutting down on development time.

Last, this was off-topic, but I thought it might be a useful suggestion.

[General Battuta]

Anything simple enough to be portable in a code block like that is also likely simple enough that you should just know how to do it. FRED is really, really easy. Conversely, anything complex enough to justify the code block is unfortunately probably tied to a number of variables and specifics of the mission that aren't easily portable.

I could go for a FRED library, but it'd probably need to consist of examples and instructions to replicate, not copy-paste blocks. I may look into that.

The problem with what you describe as optimized features - in this case a checkbox in mission specs - is that they often take control away from the designer. For example, say you want to specify a certain list of ships as possible backups to swap into; you'd need to be able to assign them as arguments, and maybe even modify them on the fly. A new SEXP (set-respawn-ships or something) would be a better way to handle it.

Although on second thought maybe that's exactly what you meant.

[General Battuta]

edited

[Thaeris]

I pretty much agree with your sentiments, and I'd say our thoughts on the matter seem to be mostly in-line. Being an experienced FREDer yourself, I'll trust your take on the technical elements of the editor.

 

[karajorma]

I believe it can be done right now. The only hangup I see is transferring orientation. Other than that, should be easy.

That was the only issue I had with it when I tried. And I doubt adding SEXPs to allow you to get and set rotation would be that hard to do (at least for someone who understands that stuff, I don't but for someone who does it's probably only a few minutes coding time).

[Goober5000]

Speaking as someone who does know that stuff, it would be pretty easy.  The more salient problem is: how do you save orientation information?  The sexp system doesn't allow matrixes or floating-point numbers to be used as return values.  Degrees is an option, but is one degree sufficient resolution for this type of thing?

[General Battuta]

Yeah, honestly, I think it is.

[karajorma]

Yep. In cases where you'd use this we're talking about making it so that the player doesn't notice a ship A do a 180 turn between his ship blowing up and getting respawned as Ship A.

[Goober5000]

Okay, I've added orientation sexps in revision 6915.

[General Battuta]

holy **** whoa