[Akalabeth Angel]

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.

Eh, I disagree. 
The most memorable missions from Blue Planet for me were:
#1 - the player flying from A to B in multiple systems (Journy of 10,000 miles)
#2 - A bunch of ships jumping in, moving to a portal, to jump out again (Forced Entry)

In either case, I doubt the fredding was particularly complicated. But the story and pacing were good so the missions were memorable.

A campaign is good because of the story it tells. If the player can see the mechanism behind the mission design, the story and the mission isn't doing its job. The BP sequels may have had more complicated and intricate stories, I don't know, but I don't remember them because I didn't like the story. My experience might be dissimilar to most, but for me in any media the story is key. Being able to tell a story in an interesting way is likewise key.

When I dipped into fredding, I didn't do it because I thought the mission design could be better, I did it because I wanted to tell a story of my own.

[jr2]

^ this  ^

The rest is true as well, if course, and you need to appeal to other types of gamers as well.

[Parias]

I don't know, I thought that crazy tower-defense mission in the last Blue Planet release was really cool (the one where you can switch to a top-down view and drop turrets - or, "tanks" rather - onto platforms and fight off waves of enemies) - just because of how I kept trying to imagine how much effort that must've taken to get working in FRED (along with a lot of scripting magic I imagine).  And I thought the story integrated the reasoning behind it in a neat way.

While I agree not every mission has to be a step in a completely different direction like that to stand out, it's nice to have a change of pace every now and then too. Although I'm definitely not going to hold every single other campaign / mission out there to the same standard and ultimately do strongly agree that story is one of the most important bits to a mission / campaign.

[Black Wolf]

I wanted to reply to this ages ago and then forgot about it.

If anyone has any specific ideas of what HLP needs more of (asset wise) I'm still looking for a theme for the 2014 mod(dell)ing contest. I was thinking Terran Civvy ships, or large scale static structures, or possibly new species stuff, but I'm open to ideas.

[Phantom Hoover]

Surely Zod capships are one of our biggest shortfalls?

[Spoon]

Large scale static structures, definitely. So we don't have to end up using http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/GTI_Bretonia for everything 

[mjn.mixael]

Large scale static structures, definitely. So we don't have to end up using http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/GTI_Bretonia for everything 

Somehow I managed to fill up the System Viewer in BtA without using the Bretonia even once! But I definitely get the sentiment. We definitely need more static structures (aka, props).

[halcyony2k]

I would like to see more coop campaigns. It's cool to see the community making excellent freespace campaigns. I feel like all of those campaigns can be enjoyed with your friends. Even though there are performance issues on the client end (jumpy performance, non-rotating turrets and ship parts), multiplayer campaigns can help bring back some excitement to freespace.

[karajorma]

Problem is that FREDders get a remarkably low amount of feedback on multiplayer missions in general. For instance, look what happened when I spent about a week rewriting one of Diaspora's missions for multiplayer Coop.

Hell, I still don't know if the mission works or has major bugs.

[NeonShivan]

Surely Zod capships are one of our biggest shortfalls?

*A little more Terran Bombers to create more diversity - There is literally only about 3ish to choose from out of a list that are "modern" and not low poly.
*Shivan and Vasudan Destroyers might be nice - Shivans are severely lacking in the high poly destroyer department more then the Vasudans, only the Vassago stands as the only available High-Poly Destroyer.
*More props - As Spoon pointed out, we could use more installations, not necessarily just Terran, some older Vasudan Installation models like the Cairo and its extention could use a revival.

Problem is that FREDders get a remarkably low amount of feedback on multiplayer missions in general. For instance, look what happened when I spent about a week rewriting one of Diaspora's missions for multiplayer Coop.

Hell, I still don't know if the mission works or has major bugs.

I must agree that multiplayer mission FREDders don't get the feedback they deserve for the work they put into missions. I see little activity anywhere as of late that involves the workings of a multiplayer mission design (then again tbh I don't quite try to look so there might be one going on somewhere ).

[Mobius]

More civvy ships and fan fictions, I'd say. Plus, Tapatalk support would be welcome. 

[Parias]

Problem is that FREDders get a remarkably low amount of feedback on multiplayer missions in general. For instance, look what happened when I spent about a week rewriting one of Diaspora's missions for multiplayer Coop.

Hell, I still don't know if the mission works or has major bugs.

Ouch. Thanks for calling this one out, I'm gonna take the opportunity here to go on a bit of a tangent. Having a fully co-operative campaign in Diaspora is the penultimate experience I've been waiting for - the sad part is, I'm one of the people who was fully aware of this thread previously but didn't do anything about it.

Maybe at the time it was laziness, or being engaged with my own other projects -- since my involvement in the community at large has generally been pretty minimal, I think I reflexively assumed other people would be way more vested than I in getting this tested and working, and that I could just comfortably sit back and wait to enjoy the final product when it was done.

The problem is that it's all-too-easy to forget that open projects like this can't really keep a dedicated team of QA people on retainer, and rely a lot on community involvement to thrive - the "not my problem" mentality can occur way too quickly.

Of course things have changed a little for me now - I'm working on my own SCP project (and if it helps any, your Diaspora thread is one of the ones that directly led to my request to have multi-eval added to the main codebase for wider-scale use) which in a way is directly compatible with what you were trying to accomplish with your own Diaspora co-op efforts. I'd still really like to see Diaspora's content be converted to co-op one of these days, but I know this testing has to happen before it can move forward.  Now  that I've gotten my hands dirty with some modding and have a much more comprehensive understanding of the inner-workings of the game, I'd be much more inclined to help test as I feel I could provide much more useful feedback. If the thread is still valid, I think I'll follow up and see if I can help move this forward.

This is all just about me though - I'm not sure how to get more collective interest from the community at large. The monthly SCP newsletters seem to be doing pretty awesome (though I'm not sure how much traffic they drive overall) -- maybe a bigger push to call out testing efforts like these when it's needed in the newsletter would help?

[karajorma]

Well any feedback is definitely helpful. And it's certainly going to help encourage me to do more work on conversions for the other missions (and maybe even make something new).

[Droid803]

Maybe if setting up multiplayer sessions didn't require, oh, getting more than one person online at a time, more people would be willing (or able) to give multiplayer missions a run so that they can even base their feedback on something.

IMO, being able to run a multiplayer co-op mission by yourself (with bots as wingmen) in the multiplayer environment (ie. respawns, possibly being able to simulate being client instead of host) would be a major improvement, but barring any major improvements to accessibility, I doubt anything will change with regards to multiplayer content.

[Parias]

IMO, being able to run a multiplayer co-op mission by yourself (with bots as wingmen) in the multiplayer environment (ie. respawns, possibly being able to simulate being client instead of host) would be a major improvement, but barring any major improvements to accessibility, I doubt anything will change with regards to multiplayer content.

You already can though? I've been doing a lot of my own testing for the last couple of weeks on this basis. Any extra ships tagged "Player Ship" in an MP mission will be AI-controlled by default if not occupied by players, and you can host and launch MP sessions all by yourself. I think these ships actually do respawn during gameplay if the option is available too (would need to double-check but I could've sworn I saw dead "AI" player-ships spring back to life in my testing just last night).

Also in the case of more comprehensive network-specific testing (i.e. making sure SEXPs like multi-eval work properly for MP clients and not just the host), I've been running the dedicated standalone server, then launching the FS2 client and connecting to it on the same system (just need to specify a different port).  Apart from a few nuances, this seems to work OK. Although admittedly I've been making more active use of my laptop as a secondary system to test multiplayer functions against.

So yeah, from my own experience, it's actually extremely easy to set up your own isolated MP testlab that covers just about anything short of actual mission / gameplay balancing (which is a whole different beast of course).

[Droid803]

Shows you how much I know/care about multiplayer, heh.

[Parias]

That's perfectly OK, "Trusted poster of legit stuff".

Maybe this is actually an additional indicator of why a lot of multiplayer testing stuff is overlooked, as it gets viewed as being too much trouble to readily get into (especially if something isn't  isn't the final product yet). It's understandable that people might be remiss to test multiplayer content if they have to drag someone else into the session with them every time.

I don't know a good solution though because even IF you can technically test just by yourself,  there is arguably a good reason for involving other players in a given testing session as well. Things just work differently when multiple players are involved.

[halcyony2k]

I use to play/test multiplayer campaigns and missions regularly and then I graduated school and started work at a big four accounting firm in DC and it's been hell ever since.

I am just throwing out an idea. Realistically, how much time do you guys think it would take to test things out in multiplayer? I talked my brother who lives in Utah into testing freespace multi with me once a week. I'd be willing to dedicate 15 to 30 mins every sunday until work slows down and then I can dedicate more time. We would download whatever mods people want feedback on and then focus on the feedback and bugs and go from there.

[asyikarea51]

Late as heck, but whatever.

Two minor things that irritated me a long while back when I still did some FRED: the Events editor, and using FRED on a laptop with no keypad.

For some reason I have a very, very ?BAD? tendency to end up with very long conversation events tied up as a single sexp event, particularly at the start of missions. The testing part for such a small thing is bad enough, and if I was already tired... I boot the mission only to find a sentence not being said (because the required sexp tags were missing for that one line and were not added), or the wrong ship saying the wrong text (because eyes went bad while looking at the event chain).

As for the keypad, it would be nice if the controls could be changed. Having to use the function key every single time to move and turn the camera while FREDding was a big de-motivator to finishing missions, considering it's no good to sit on a chair working on a desktop for very long hours.

I didn't even do the FS2 tutorial, what horrendously little I know of FRED came from playing around in the FS1 version and trying to make the player use Shivan ships and allied Lucifer and ultimately failing, such was the code and zero understanding of VP files back then

I somewhat miss multiplayer testing. But the last tester I had is all into the latest console and PC games now with new friends and I doubt he's as patient now as he was back then, what with using Hamachi and all that (pointless to connect to FS2NetD because of ping) in addition to having to create rushed-edit versions of stock FS2 multi missions just to test new weapons and assets. IIRC back then I ?think? I went as far as to even test beam weapons on what-was-that-fighter-from-the-Federal-pack, and then came the game-killing beamspam lag and energy deduction totally not working as I thought was intended (not sure about the codebase now)...