[NGTM-1R]

You think?  I reckon if someone put out a competently FREDed campaign with a good story, but no overly complex missions or huge modpacks, it wouldn't suffer from comparison with Blue Planet.  If you're trying to actualise your vision of Freespace 3 then you might get a bit of that but I'd say the less ambitious campaigns would be as popular as ever.  If there were anything as good as Derelict or Homesick or Sync released tomorrow I expect they'd get the praise they deserved. 

I don't think, I know. We've had more than one thread on this before and it's something that many people, myself included, have voiced about why they don't FRED anymore. We simply do not feel we have the time, the savvy, or both, to produce something worthwhile, so we never try.

[Akalabeth Angel]

You think?  I reckon if someone put out a competently FREDed campaign with a good story, but no overly complex missions or huge modpacks, it wouldn't suffer from comparison with Blue Planet.  If you're trying to actualise your vision of Freespace 3 then you might get a bit of that but I'd say the less ambitious campaigns would be as popular as ever.  If there were anything as good as Derelict or Homesick or Sync released tomorrow I expect they'd get the praise they deserved. 

Thing is, at the time of its release I don't think Derelict was less amibitious. It's a full campaign, which not many can say. For me it's still one of the best experiences I had playing a 3rd party campaign. They had less to work with but did more with it. It was the go-to campaign for a long while for anyone looking for more content.

[karajorma]

That was called FRED Academy and the number of campaigns they have released is... none (so far!). That's not to say its been useless, just that past experience suggests you aren't likely to get an actual campaign out of the deal. The experience gained with it can be valuable however.

The main reason the FRED Academy failed to produce any campaigns was a lack of feedback. It took me a couple of hours per mission for each review. I was happy to spend that kind of time on the Academy but obviously I can't be the only one who does so.

If people were willing to play the missions, give feedback and help with the smaller problems, it would have freed me up a lot to just help with the actual FREDding side of things.


Of course it wasn't a complete failure. It did help quite a few starting FREDders.

[Kie99]

You think?  I reckon if someone put out a competently FREDed campaign with a good story, but no overly complex missions or huge modpacks, it wouldn't suffer from comparison with Blue Planet.  If you're trying to actualise your vision of Freespace 3 then you might get a bit of that but I'd say the less ambitious campaigns would be as popular as ever.  If there were anything as good as Derelict or Homesick or Sync released tomorrow I expect they'd get the praise they deserved. 

Thing is, at the time of its release I don't think Derelict was less amibitious. It's a full campaign, which not many can say. For me it's still one of the best experiences I had playing a 3rd party campaign. They had less to work with but did more with it. It was the go-to campaign for a long while for anyone looking for more content.

I agree with you on it's quality, for me it's as good as any campaign ever released, but when I say less ambitious I mean it's not something that's someone's effort at what Freespace 3 would look like like, for example, Inferno R1 or Blue Planet.  It doesn't have dozens of new ships, it doesn't have in game cinematics, it doesn't rewrite the tech room, it's just a very well plotted campaign with no particularly complex missions but good missions nonetheless, good characters and it's none the weaker for it.  Maybe I'm doing it a disservice and the FREDing is more complex than I thought, but it never struck me as anything special in that regard.  It actually encouraged me to start FREDing because I thought it seemed fairly doable to create missions of that level of quality.

I suppose this goes back to the original point about the bar appearing higher.  While the idea that campaigns with less complex FREDing aren't worthwhile is absurd to me, given that Blue Planet is now the community's favourite campaign nobody is going to play that and think "I could make something like this" unless they're already extremely savvy with it.

[procdrone]

Yeah, TheHound. If you read this - don't screw up with Venice Mirror .

I certainly don't aim at failure

As far as I am a mostly newcomer to HLP, ill give my own word about it.

FRED is pretty easy to begin with, and making basic missions without any modpacks is like hell possible - Derelict is a fine example (even if old one, still rocks).

About the bar set too high... well, i think it might dwarf people from doing anything. In development of VeniceMirror i had a period i have set a bar for myself - make a cutscene that would be even more epic then BP intro... and ended up hanging up the whole project for at least two weeks, thinking how i should put this off. Thankfully i dropped the idea and continue at my very own pace.

FRED'ing also takes a lot of creativeness which not everybody can come up with. Some people create miracles (look at Axem cutscenes...)


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And i wouldn't say that it lacks FRED'ers, I am already aware of 5 project being worked at hand, and at least 3 scheduled for their release soon.

The problem is, that big project take a lot of time, and scene is rather unwelcoming for new people - i know that from my own experience when i started to post missions. There was barely any feedback, and if there were, that were the same few people.

[karajorma]

I think that hits the nail right on the head. We need to come up with ways to make the place more welcoming to new FREDders so that they can develop into the quality guys we know that they can become after only a few months.

Playing more early releases and beginning missions would definitely help.

[Lorric]

Yeah, check out the first two posts when I released my first missions with emphasis on the fact that I was a beginner:

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=83179.0

And it takes until the third page to get to any actual constructive feedback (thanks Norbert).

I also got plenty of stick when trying to ask for FRED help. I got the help but I had to go through some attitude in order to get it.

[procdrone]

I think that hits the nail right on the head. We need to come up with ways to make the place more welcoming to new FREDders so that they can develop into the quality guys we know that they can become after only a few months.

Playing more early releases and beginning missions would definitely help.

Well, certainly we (community) should provide help when someone asks for it. Nothing more discouraging then lack of any feedback.

Axem done a great job in creating many useful tutorials, showing people how to do magic in their missions. Maybe we should follow the trope and create more tutorials showing how to do certain stuff? (i didn't seen any stealth mission tutorial yet)

[Lepanto]

Yeah, modern FREDding (with all the bells and whistles we expect from modern campaigns) is not newbie-friendly. Though I think I'm a fairly good FREDder by this point, I had to struggle through lots of discovery and trial-and-error to reach that level.

FREDding newbies have to rely on the HLP old guard for a lot of help, especially since we lack clear and straighforward tutorials and documentation. Questions that seem stupid to vets are necessary for newbs, so please be patient with them, as annoying as their questions might seem.

[Axem]

What sort of problems did you have that needed trial and error? I'm always on the look out for fun tutorials the make.

[procdrone]

What sort of problems did you have that needed trial and error? I'm always on the look out for fun tutorials the make.

Like said, i would like to see fully fledged stealth mission tutorial.

And Axem, please make up an advanced mission cutscenes tutorial... you are master on the topic... so please!
(i had so many trials and errors about camera movements, targeting and so on that is not possible to count...)

[mjn.mixael]

Yeah, check out the first two posts when I released my first missions with emphasis on the fact that I was a beginner:

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=83179.0

And it takes until the third page to get to any actual constructive feedback (thanks Norbert).

I also got plenty of stick when trying to ask for FRED help. I got the help but I had to go through some attitude in order to get it.

The first two responses in that thread, given who they came from, are a travesty. There would have been waaaaaay more productive ways to suggest the same thing instead of implying someone is an idiot for not doing it a particular way. THAT kind of response is what's going to stop new FREDders dead in their tracks.

[Lorric]

Here's an example of getting help but having to go through attitude to get it.

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=83164.0

And wow, it's Droid again. I feel I must defend him because he's going to look like a real jerk after my other post, and in my experience he's really not like that at all. These are two isolated incidents.

[karajorma]

Axem done a great job in creating many useful tutorials, showing people how to do magic in their missions.

Well the thing is, asking for help goes both ways. I postetd a tutorial only a few days back and got next to no response even though I actually asked for feedback on which parts are clear enough and which could use more work.

It also should be noted that if people want more help with FREDding, I've rewritten the entire FRED documentation to cover pretty much every single SCP feature added until around mid 2012. Again, I'd like to know what parts are useful and which parts could use further explanation.

[procdrone]

It all goes down to the same issue. Lack of feedback.

It also should be noted that if people want more help with FREDding, I've rewritten the entire FRED documentation to cover pretty much every single SCP feature added until around mid 2012.

And I'm grateful for that. Many of such documentation helped me to get better understanding of FRED features.

[Lepanto]

Axem, nothing really tutorial-worthy off the top of my head.

Thanks for that tutorial, karajorma; I'll keep the event log in mind for future debugging. And I didn't even know that the FRED documentation had been updated beyond retail.

[karajorma]

There should be a stickied post in the FRED forum. I probably should add it to my signature or something.

[Rheyah]

FREDing is long, hard work.  From my perspective I'd really like the Events editor to function a bit more like a text editor.  I can actually write events in Notepad quicker than I can in FRED (what with all the slooooow clicking and so on) so having a hybrid of the two would make it a lot easier to write events if I could tab-complete and it'd bring up sexps which match.

I love the power of FRED but the interface involves an awful lot of unnecessary clicking.

[Parias]

FREDing is long, hard work.  From my perspective I'd really like the Events editor to function a bit more like a text editor.  I can actually write events in Notepad quicker than I can in FRED (what with all the slooooow clicking and so on) so having a hybrid of the two would make it a lot easier to write events if I could tab-complete and it'd bring up sexps which match.

This. I would love this.

[Droid803]

Yes, events editor needs to be more like a regular text editor with syntax highlighting and checking with 'tab-to-autocomplete' drop down lists, rather than having to click through a whole bunch of drop-down menus to add a single TRUE.