[JCQ]

I really like all things BSG and finally decided hey i want to make a simple mission! This is my first ever mission and therefore i really dont know how to do anything exotic or special. 

What I wanted to do but couldnt figure out about 8 - 10 seconds after everything has been destroyed 2 basestars jump in directly above and directly below the battlestar and if its destroyed THEN the Jump is activated for all friendly fighters and we all jump out. and if we manage to destroy the 2 basestars (highly unlikely then all the fighters and the battlestar jump out) and I dont know how to activate the jump at a specific point i only know how to have the jump always activated.

 i dont know how to make 2 basestars jump in after the beginning basestar is destroyed. i dont know how to send messages when certain things happen etc., 

also im not sure if i allowed enough weapons to be chosen in the choose weapon loadout menu.

Hello there if anyone can be a kind enough soul to look at this mission and or improve and or tell me how to improve that would be great this is like the first time i ever done a mission. (been to scared to open up the editor before). spent some time on it i dont know how well it will run on your computer.

tell me what you think for a first ever mission from a newby?!

my specs
cpu : Core i7 940
gpu GTX 560 Ti

download version 1
http://www.sendspace.com/file/xvwh8m

version 2
http://www.sendspace.com/file/xh5kjg

changelog V2
Changed background
Expanded briefing
Expanded story
Added directives
Added sitrep
fps drop should be significantly lowered in the beginning however you still might need a beefy system to run but the fps drop only last for about the first 10 seconds of the mission for me anyway

install
put in diaspora data missions folder
then go to tech room single mission
should be in there

[newman]

Glad to see the very first fan-made mission come into existence! I'm not a FRED-er, but I'm sure the team's FRED-ers will be glad to advise you. Just a quick point, vipers aren't supposed to be able to jump

[karajorma]

The two SEXPs allow-jump and never-jump are what you want. They'll allow you to decide when the player can jump.

Bear in mind that Diaspora comes with a pretty thorough walkthrough for FRED. I spent a lot of time on it, it should help you a lot. Just open the Help in FRED.

[JCQ]

o yea the background story was that this battlestar and complement of fighters were all equiped with a new super special jump drive engine thingy and that this particular battlegroup is super special because they are tasked with hunting down lone basestars taking them out and then jumping away! but they get over confident and they dont know that the right before the basetsar is destroyed it sends a super secret encrypted signal for help! will the battlestar have enough time to spool its drive and jump out?! or will it be destroyed due to the Fleet's arrogance!?

[CooperHawkes]

hey. nice to see someone already tries to build new missions.
as kara said, its best to read through the fred tutorials first, as those explain the basic concepts very well and also feature an extendet walkthrough of a more complex mission. this should get you started fairly quickly. after reading through them, you should know how to send messages or set arrivel and departure cues for ships. if you want basestar nr.2 to show up 10 seconds after basestar nr.1 has been destroyed, youd need to set the arrivel cue for basestar nr.2 to "when-is-destroyed-delay 'basestar 1' , '10' ", for instance.

your mission also throws up some errors about wings having too much ships.

check the tutorials, go through the extendet walkthrough and you will be a fair bit wiser and save yorself many hours of frustration.

[Aether]

Speaking of, would you mind updating the tutorial to just mention how to allow Vipers to launch from the Battlestar's Launch Pods please?

I haven't found any mention of it in my travels (aside from one comment that said it was a tricky thing to do)

Every time I create one the Players Viper gets stuck in the pod and accelerating does nothing (I imagine this is because I can't set my players arrival thingy to false)

Can't wait to learn how!  It's an aesthetically pleasing part of every mission

[Ace]

When things die down in a bit I'll do an anatomy of a mission type post.

[karajorma]

Tube Launches and Combat Landings are actually quite complex pieces of FREDding and for that reason I kept them out of the tutorial.

But yeah, we do need a guide to them.

[An4ximandros]

Here's an idea, extract the mission 2 (or one?) level file and remove all SEXPs not sandwiched between landing or launch dummy SEXPs, then delete all the Cylon ships, and put some raiders or something of your choice far away, test if the mission still plays form the tech room as a standalone level, if it does, bam, copy paste the SEXPs onto a whole new mission and test them there after proper SEXP events are assigned to trigger landing objectives of course.

Haven't tried this yet myself, but I was planning to (as soon as I figured out the plans for a decent 2 level campaign ) try that.

And Kara, your tut is awesome, finally got me over my Fredsexpophobia! Thank you very much.

[karajorma]

Glad you liked it.

[karajorma]

Okay, since I had some spare time, I figured I'd give this a try and give some feedback. I'm kinda surprised that no one else has actually. With BtRL we got lots of people so desperate for new content that they'd play any mission that was posted.

First let me clear the air by saying I'll be nice but I won't sugar coat my reviews. The only way FREDders get better is through realising what mistakes they made in earlier missions, and there are quite a few things that could be improved about your mission. That said, there was also a lot of good, I see some real potential here if you stick with it. Let's start with the good.

Pros

• Team Loadout Screen - This surprised me. The team loadout is one of the things newbies usually get wrong. Including too many weapons and sometimes ones that the ships in the mission can't even use (e.g cylon weapons when you can't fly cylon ships). Yours was correct. Well done!
• General gameplay - The mission worked. I had fun playing it. It was very simple but I can live with that. This is the most important thing about a mission, is it fun?

Cons

Okay, this one is going to be a bigger list.

• Your mission really does need a name. Both for the file and in the Mission Notes.
• The command briefing really needed more details on what was going on. If this is meant to be a later mission of a several part campaign, it's okay but otherwise, we need to know a little more about what is going on.
• On mission start, you are much too close to the Cylon forces. I'd imagine this is something that would be fixed simply by having a proper tube launch (once we teach you newbies how to make one), but what you could do until then is manually position the player at the exit to a tube so it looks like you've just launched.
• You've not made any use of the escort menu at all. You at least should have the two capships on there. Nor do you have any messages coming from your battlestar saying how the battle is going. As a result the player has no sense of the mission beyond what they are doing.
• You've made no use of Directives at all either. Even a simple "Kill all Cylon Raiders" would be nice.
• I managed to kill all the Cylon Raiders off and then had little to do until the Basestar exploded. Tell the player to chase down bombs or something. Adding another wing of ships that only appear if the Basestar is above a certain hull percentage when everything else is dead might help.
• When I jumped out, I was given the "No debrief for this mission" screen.
• Give the Battlestar a name! Battlestar Sobek Class 4   just means you weren't taking advantage of one of the best features of the engine, renaming and even changing the textures to fit a new ship
• Not sure if I warned about this one in the documentation so it might be my fault, but you should only have 4 fighters in any player wing. Because you don't, the player can't alter the loadout for Alpha 5 and Beta 5.
• Stick to the Colonial naming system. Wings/flights/whatever are generally named after colours, bandits are named after letters from the Colonial Phonetic Alphabet. A list of terms is in the documentation.
• Enemy ships should be in wings too, rather than as individual ships (there are tricks you can do with wings to help keep the number of ships in the mission down and make it easier to have them come at the player in waves, that you simply can't do with single ships).

Finally,

Code: [Select]

#Events ;! 0 total  and

Code: [Select]

#Messages ;! 0 total

That's one of the saddest things I see when I look at the mission files for newbie missions. It means that you haven't gotten to grips with the SEXP system yet. You're still starting so that's not a huge problem yet but the Events Editor is 90% of FREDding. Get in there! Make it your *****!



Okay, that's about all I have to say for now. I know it seems like a lot of complaints but I'm really not having a go at your mission. For a first effort (and a first effort of someone who I suspect didn't do the walkthrough), it's a really good attempt. But I'm sure you can do much better next time.

[Apoc]

Cool mission. The only downside was the lag at the beginning of the mission, I think this was due to all of the ships firing missles at eachother at the same time. 

[JCQ]

ok updated the mission im still unsure on certain sexps though