[Suongadon]

Welp, here it is. Initial version of the first mission.

*link redacted because forgottedid password*

Tear it apart and make me cry

Updated again with few and not-so-varied changes. See below.

[attachment deleted by a basterd]

[General Battuta]

$Author: *****es and/or Hoes

Subvertin' the patriarchy

IDK if it matters but you've got a mismatch between starting wings and squadron wings.

Weapon loadout needs cleanup to reduce load times (or at least I think it reduces load times!)

This is gonna sound a little annoying...but in the event 'All stop', it might look a little more organic if some of the ships cut their engines with a little more lag than others. You could set this up as a series of events, or as one repeating event and a bit of trickery with arguments (selecting one argument, ordering that ship to halt, invalidating the argument, and repeating the event until all the arguments have been invalidated.) Obviously the message from Gold 1 would have to go in another event.

Messages look great. The Colonial Marines resent the implication that their STI testing is less than totally stringent.

Obviously I am at work and this is based entirely on a notepad read

[Hammer65]

Initial briefing was good.  I forgot you could highlight text and need to do that with my own.

I have to admit the first play through I wasn't prepared for reading the messages as I have gotten used to MS_sam doing that for me.  I think you have an initial sound that plays at the beginning of each message so I missed some text first time through.

I like the random chatter and the ability to shut it down

I wasn't clear on the use of f12 the first time either and actually ignored it.  I don't think that hurt anything.

The scanning and posting of contents worked well and things were added to the escort list.

Now after I had scanned all the ships I'm not sure if I missed something but that seemed to be the end.  I didn't see a way to order my ships to do anything, and my weapons were locked.  Are the follow up events not programmed yet, or did I fail to trigger something?

It took me about 15 minutes to scan the field.  Thought that might be useful to know as a first time player.

Looking good so far to me.  I didn't try to break it yet, just wanted to initial play test and let you know how that went.  I need to get to the other missions as well.

[General Battuta]

Probably need directives to tell the player how to order dockings.

[Suongadon]

Unquoted speed reply:

Thank you for playing through it.

Added a directive for how to order raptors to dock.

@Hammer: hotkey//mission time: my hope for that (unimplemented cause no idea how) was to organize them in the hotkey so it would guide the player on the quickest path through the ships and cut the time down to (well) under 10 minutes.

re: voice: I hate ms sam myself so I didn't even think of that. Shouldn't be difficult at all to rip out the static clicks from all of the messages so it can read them.


@Badtutta: kind of scared you can notepad read a mission.

weapons: thought all weapons only loaded if you ticked that flag, but simple change to make.

re: stop: not annoying, don't know what effect to have that command make on the mission though.

heeeeeeeee

*e* Viva la poils des jambes!

[Suongadon]

Dear Diary:

Since I like pictures, I made pictures in my mission briefing, and then I reordered the ships so they were all pretty-like and in order rather than stupid and not in order. And then I fixed up a bit of the failure branch and wrote some terrible debriefing words and probably a couple other things I do not remember.

And then I journeyed to the edge of time and space itself to smite the vile Space-Dragon P_objp Assertion who I had summoned through ill-conceived invocations of 'not' and 'and'.

[Hammer65]

I played through your latest build and this play through was much more satisfying.  I think I mentioned before I wasn't sure what to do after scanning all of the vessels.  I'm ashamed to admit even with the new directive it took me a minute to figure out just to use protect my ship to get the desired behavior, but I'm sure your average player will figure that out more quickly.  My first play through was 23 minutes.  Most of that due to me watching the first 3 raptors dock before moving on to the next scan.  Also, I didn't follow a very orderly path through the vessels.  My second play through was about 10 minutes.  I think the only real bug I saw was that my secondary weapons were locked throughout.  The first play through I was too far away to kill the Azure.  The second time I positioned myself beside it to ensure I could kill it.  However, once it flipped I was unable to disable the FTL before it jumped because my primary was not up to the task, and my AGM's were locked.

As I said up stream I like the look of the mission and the layout.  The briefing was very good, and I'm curious about how the lines were drawn?  Command Briefing is obviously still remaining to be done.  I only saw the one debriefing with the Azure escaping.  The mission itself seems to be fairly locked down so I'm not sure there can really be another outcome beside Azure escapes, Azure is destroyed.  I'm not sure there is a way to fail besides not completing the mission.

Given I'm 2A I see I need to rename the Rising Sun

[Suongadon]

Thank you again.

Your secondaries didn't unlock when the boarding failed? Ach. Notepad tells me I put two 'unlock-primaries' in, rather than both types Though you should have been able to destroy the ship with primaries anyway (unless get-damaged-caused is percentile?)

And you should be able to fail the mission by ordering the wrong raptors to dock with the bombed/hijacked ships in addition to the two endings you said.

Lines are drawn by selecting the icons and clicking one of the check-boxes 'draw lines' or somesuch. And the best way (I think) to get a particular color is to change the color of both icons to that color and then make the lines, then swap the icons back to what you want.

to the name, I'm a little attached to my Starsiege, can't help it.

*edit* speaking of watching them dock, did you notice the raptors sinking through the ships on their docking approaches?

[General Battuta]

I believe get-damage-caused is a percentile.

[Suongadon]

I believe get-damage-caused is a percentile.

The lesson here is 'don't test things with one value and change it afterwards thinking it will be fine'.

[ThePsuedoMonkey]

I just did a quick playthrough, and my first impression was "wow, that's a lot of messages!"  They all blew by so quickly that I was only able to read about 1/4 of them.  It took me a while to figure out what I was supposed to be doing, but I'm not sure if it can be made any more clear without literally telling the player "order one of your wingmates to protect your target."  When I was failing to work with query_orders, I did notice that the colonial shuttles can accept the order "capture my target," which seems close enough to what's going on that the player wouldn't think twice about it... Like I said, I'm not sure if that's any help.  Also, what's the deal with the orbital stations?  Maybe I wasn't paying attention, but I didn't realize I wasn't expected to scan everything I found.

I tried reading the mission in FRED, but the event titles throw me in loops!  It does seem like you've addressed a lot of branching paths but I didn't really notice those options while playing it.  Overall, the mission feels pretty darn solid to me.  And since you requested suggestions for the "good" ending debrief, I thought it would be cool to make a reference to when Apollo shot down the Olympic Carrier in the series.  The line from the series that I had in mind was "A man takes responsibility for his actions, right or wrong. He accepts the consequences and lives with them… everyday."

[Suongadon]

So yeah    i had an asshole named sandy over last week and she broke my electricity wires and phone lines and ****. So i cant use a real computer until it all gets fixes. Or we run out of food and any need to keep the freezer on.


I hate new jersey. A lot.

So much a lot.

But yeah because of that -and because niether an iphone or a nook can run freespace- i am like extra indefinitely indisopsed from freddoing and stuff like that

[General Battuta]

So yeah    i had an asshole named sandy over last week and she broke my electricity wires and phone lines and ****. So i cant use a real computer until it all gets fixes. Or we run out of food and any need to keep the freezer on.

What's up Sandy buddy

Brooklyn actually came out pretty well, but the **** going down in Long Island and New Jersey looks awful. Hope you get electricity and internet (and gas and civilization) back soon.

[Suongadon]

T:icantmakeiconythings,sobackatyouyo:

Yeah. Th einterweb tell sme shi tis pretty hideous around here. I cant actually go out an dsee for myself becauee my road is still closed and blocked bya tree

Thank **** we have dinojuice for heat at least i'd be cooking my kids husband otherwise 

Not all bad though. I was fully stocked on wine when thi s**** went down.