[procdrone]

Can't promise anything.

[Thisisaverylongusername]

Spoiler:

Sorry for the negativity, but I'm going to complain about the transition between Reaching the Zenith and Home's Doorstep. The SRF Phoenix does indeed have self-repair systems, but they cannot restore it to 100% hull integrity. The missile banks getting damaged during the crash-jump also screams lazy design, as does having the forced loadout. I think this is the only major flaw in the story. Now for some compliments. The SRF Phoenix is a fantastic fighter. I love how fast you can go on afterburner. Even if its missile banks are small, it is a fantastic interceptor. It isn't the best at dogfighting, but that is easily patched up with the Hera missile. The Hera being essentially a Tornado that does more damage while taking up the same space as a Hornet is just great. I do not like the tracker, however, because the main advantage of the Harpoon over the Tornado is that you had more shots with the Harpoon, and I feel like I get less mileage out of the Tracker. The Jupiter APC is also fun to use, and seeing all the trails flying about is hilarious. It's just a shame you never gave us a boosted Tempest. Overall, you did well with the weapons.

[Spoon]

It took me a while to get through the campaign, I struggled a lot to get through a bunch of difficulty spikes.

I don't want to go all Gordon Ramsay on you (actually that's partly a lie, I wish I was as cool as Gordon Ramsay) and shout and scream at you. But there is definitely a certain amount of frustration that I'm not going to pretend to hide.

I absolutely understand that this is your first campaign and that's fine, great even, because without people taking up the noble art of fredding, this community will continue dying its slow death. However, while being a first time fredder excuses things on the technical end, it doesn't really excuse laziness. Because to me, it felt like you have just given up during the last bunch of missions. Dogfighting weapons in the weapon loadout, no debriefings, missing directives and so forth. Several missions just felt incomplete, like you had started fredding them, and half way through just moved onto the next mission. Completely unnecessary.

I must also urge you to think more clearly about mission balance... The last mission gives you the option to fly four different type of fighters but literally only the Phoenix is a viable option because none of the other fighters are remotely fast enough to get to the Sierra transports in time to prevent their demise. This should have been immediately clear after a single test play with a fighter other than the Phoenix. On the other hand, a lot of other missions play themselves, because of the high amount of BoE type mission and lack of good player direction in them. If the player doesn't need to actually do anything for a mission to meet it's end succesfully, you need to rethink and redo the mission. On the other other hand, some missions required too much player action and were excessively hard and felt really unfair in a lot of cases. Enemies jumping ontop of an objective that you need to defend... Please none of that anymore in act 2.

Polish your missions, test them, test them, test test test test them. Think them over, rethink them, polish them again. Refine, reiterate.
Is it a pain in the butt at times? Absolutely. But it is a necessary evil.

I liked the new weapons, I found both new missiles, the tracker and the hera to be solid choices and both felt pretty satisfying to use. Though again there is a lack of polish here. The loadout info to the right didn't actually contain any kind of info or anything about the weapon and were just clearly copypasted from another entry when the new table entry was made. If you are going through the effort of creating new weapons, why half ass it? Why not take the 5 extra minutes to do it properly? A lot of new weapons were lacking weapon impacts too, the judicator beam for example feels really meh to use because it just kind of 'stops' when it hits a target. (It's also excessively power hungry)

The story is decent but kind of suffers from lack of explaination. Who is the LSR? Who is Daniel Vest? Why does the LSR have white beams and such vastly superior electronic warfare? Who and what is the star alliance? Who are your wingmen? Generic named Jack sticks with you through out the whole campaign but by the end I don't know any more about him than I did at the start. Who is he? How old is he? Does he like pie or is he more of a cake guy?
It is fine if a story raises questions and then doesn't immediately answer them, it leaves the player wondering. But Venice mirror doesn't so much asks questions as presenting them as a fact of life and nobody seems to question them. There is this one instance where this GTI ship is raising the question of "have you guys ever wondered why a single system can sustain two fleets" but that's promptly shut down and nobody thinks or mentions anything about it again.

I absolutely want to encourage you to keep on fredding&modding and not let my venting get you down. I completely understand how ****awful it feels to release your campaign and then getting nothing but bug reports and hardly any feedback worth a damn. (But such is the current state of HLP, near dead community) And then the only review you get is from a grumpy old cynical veteran fredder who can only look at the negatives.

There is potential in Venice Mirror, but you need to put in the 110% effort to make it shine.

[CT27]

To address one part of one of your issues, he did say what the Star Alliance is would be addressed in a future installment.

[Vrets]

Spoon, your post was so wreathed in gloom that I lost motivation toward the end and flopped out of my chair onto the floor.

Fortunately, a colleague came by and kapton-taped me back into my chair.

(But such is the current state of HLP, near dead community)

That's the power of kapton tape!

[procdrone]

I don't want to go all Gordon Ramsay on you (actually that's partly a lie, I wish I was as cool as Gordon Ramsay) and shout and scream at you. But there is definitely a certain amount of frustration that I'm not going to pretend to hide.

I thought for a while how should I answer your post Spoon. While at one side, this is discouraging, but on the other... How should I see my mistakes if everyone goes "good job", and pats my back?

I must also urge you to think more clearly about mission balance...

I have problems with balance, that's true. No surprise here

Polish your missions, test them, test them, test test test test them. Think them over, rethink them, polish them again. Refine, reiterate.
Is it a pain in the butt at times? Absolutely. But it is a necessary evil.

Maybe that will surprise you, but these missions seen a lot of testing, but maybe that was not enough.

The loadout info to the right didn't actually contain any kind of info or anything about the weapon and were just clearly copypasted from another entry when the new table entry was made. If you are going through the effort of creating new weapons, why half ass it? Why not take the 5 extra minutes to do it properly?

At one point, I planned to make descriptions of these items as soon as they become available to the player in CB's. Lost those descriptions few times to FRED crashes, so they never made it to live version.

About the rest, like weapon impacts, and so forth... Technical side I guess. Either they never had them, or they were just lost in the sounds.tbl revamp.

The story is decent but kind of suffers from lack of explaination. Who is the LSR? Who is Daniel Vest? Why does the LSR have white beams and such vastly superior electronic warfare? Who and what is the star alliance? Who are your wingmen? Generic named Jack sticks with you through out the whole campaign but by the end I don't know any more about him than I did at the start. Who is he? How old is he? Does he like pie or is he more of a cake guy?

Ahhh, my favourite question out of this. Everyone dreams to make a hit on scale of BP, but then again - hard wall of reality strikes. After consulting my "story" with one of my team members, it appeared shallow, with many leaks and low ends to meet proper "FS2 Lore" without going crazy.
With my inability to create nice english fluff texts, somewhere on the road, I just dropped the idea of Heavy Story Driven campaign. Because it would never see the daylight.
There are actually answers for all these questions, but they never made it to the campaign.

I absolutely want to encourage you to keep on fredding&modding and not let my venting get you down. I completely understand how ****awful it feels to release your campaign and then getting nothing but bug reports and hardly any feedback worth a damn. (But such is the current state of HLP, near dead community) And then the only review you get is from a grumpy old cynical veteran fredder who can only look at the negatives.

True, that campaign file troubles somehow broke my spirit entirely, as I scrambled for a working fix. To tell the truth, Campaign file never underwent any tests. It was done as a last moment thing before the upload. Wanted to make it live as fast as possible, so no miracles here. I got what i earned.

Veterans/Freders surely see more then I ever did, or other members of the community.
And Spoon, I do not think that HLP is close to dying. I've seen and been in communities faring 10x worse.

[JSRNerdo]

Okay, so the release... was rushed. Most of this would likely have been the fault of some communication errors, which the language barrier probably didn't help. I will take full responsibility for these failings on my part.

Within the next week or so, I will be working on a vm1.1 patch, hopefully making the campaign what it should have been on release. It my hope that, with this patch, the campaign can be fully playable, and fun, from start to finish, with none of the original errors or failings. Within this I will attempt to address all the issues raised by the thread posters, and hopefully address all concerns satisfactorily.

[Spoon]

I thought for a while how should I answer your post Spoon. While at one side, this is discouraging, but on the other... How should I see my mistakes if everyone goes "good job", and pats my back?

Well, I think you are taking my feedback/critism like a champ. (Axem agreed)

I have problems with balance, that's true. No surprise here

Play other campaigns and look at them from a designer perspective instead of a player one. Identify how they get a player involved (or fail to do so) in the mission etc. etc.
Study up (It's fun, I promise!)

At one point, I planned to make descriptions of these items as soon as they become available to the player in CB's. Lost those descriptions few times to FRED crashes, so they never made it to live version.

About the rest, like weapon impacts, and so forth... Technical side I guess. Either they never had them, or they were just lost in the sounds.tbl revamp.

I'm talking about weapon descriptions for the weapon loadout screen +Description: XSTR()

Setting a weapon explosion impact is so incredibly simple: http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Weapons.tbl#.24Impact_Explosion: just add that to your weapon entry, define an impact effect and presto.

Ahhh, my favourite question out of this. Everyone dreams to make a hit on scale of BP, but then again - hard wall of reality strikes. After consulting my "story" with one of my team members, it appeared shallow, with many leaks and low ends to meet proper "FS2 Lore" without going crazy.
With my inability to create nice english fluff texts, somewhere on the road, I just dropped the idea of Heavy Story Driven campaign. Because it would never see the daylight.
There are actually answers for all these questions, but they never made it to the campaign.

I thought the writting was pretty decent in venice mirror, the mod.ini description was probably the worse case in the whole campaign  Whoever did the spell/grammar checking/rewriting for you did well.
I don't really understand the attitude here though, nobody expects you to write 'the next bp' on your first campaign. But look at other 'classic' highly regarded campaigns, such as procyon insurgency, shrouding the light and derelict. Do those campaigns have super deep and engaging stories? Nah, no they don't. But here you are, basically telling me that venice mirror act 1 could have had a far more engaging story but you just choose not to do it. What a waste! Don't write yourself short like that.

Okay, so the release... was rushed.

Why was it rushed though? There shouldn't have been any pressure or any deadlines to meet. Just take it easy, take another 2 months to polish what needs polishing and release when it's done.

[procdrone]

Okay, so the release... was rushed.

Why was it rushed though? There shouldn't have been any pressure or any deadlines to meet. Just take it easy, take another 2 months to polish what needs polishing and release when it's done.

It was a motivation like - Or Ill do it to this day.... or it will just linger around forever. Well, I see it serves me right.

As for text and all. All credit goes to Lepanto, who did a complete overhaul. I written basic text while he added all the flavor.

[Gee1337]

I gave my criticisms regarding the campaign, but in all fairness I think you do deserve a pat on the back. I couldn't dream to do anything like what you have created as I don't have the patience nor the time to put in to learning to FRED. Hell, I've started to write a book, but that came to a grinding halt after I began the third chapter and I just haven't got round to picking it up again.

Anyway, if you are looking to do a voice acted director's cut and you fancy some awful voice acting talent, then hit me up! (Yeah... I know I don't sell myself well on this but I would definitely give it a go! )

[Vrets]

Based on the first two missions, I think it's a strong first release and you should be proud.

Now that it's out, you can always make another pass and touch things up for VeniceMirror 2.0.

[JSRNerdo]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/7s9x3pcisijf2vt/VM-Core.vp

Here's to hoping that this is the final patch that'll be needed, and the mod'll be completely playable from here on out.

[Thisisaverylongusername]

I forgot there was one more change I really liked. It seems the LSR beams can't kill the player and other fighters. Awesome!

[Phantom Hoover]

I can definitely attest that your writing is completely serviceable. That's kind of why I gave you almost no feedback on the beta -- you said you wanted proofreading but I saw nothing to correct. It sounds like you could accomplish much more if you gave your own abilities a bit more credit.

[procdrone]

Phantom, really... its not my credit. Its all Lepanto work. All credit to him. He overhauled whole text in VM

[Phantom Hoover]

I meant 'you' as in 'the team overall'. The point is, you don't need to worry that if you try to explore interesting concepts they'll just end up lost in translation.

[sgtinvictus]

So, I just ran into a rather annoying problem after trying to start up this mod. First time I've seen this particular one, so I'm posting the log here in the hopes that someone might be able to help if the mod isn't already dead.

VM-mod.tbm(line 2):
Error: Missing required token: [#END]. Found [$Beams Use Damage Factors:YES] instead.

ntdll.dll! NtWaitForSingleObject + 12 bytes
KERNELBASE.dll! WaitForSingleObject + 18 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_2_RC3-DEBUG.exe! SCP_DumpStack + 354 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_2_RC3-DEBUG.exe! Error + 229 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_2_RC3-DEBUG.exe! error_display + 369 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_2_RC3-DEBUG.exe! required_string + 106 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_2_RC3-DEBUG.exe! parse_mod_table + 1831 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_2_RC3-DEBUG.exe! parse_modular_table + 267 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_2_RC3-DEBUG.exe! mod_table_init + 91 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_2_RC3-DEBUG.exe! game_init + 397 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_2_RC3-DEBUG.exe! game_main + 519 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_2_RC3-DEBUG.exe! WinMain + 330 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_2_RC3-DEBUG.exe! __tmainCRTStartup + 358 bytes
fs2_open_3_7_2_RC3-DEBUG.exe! WinMainCRTStartup + 15 bytes
KERNEL32.DLL! BaseThreadInitThunk + 36 bytes
ntdll.dll! RtlSetCurrentTransaction + 212 bytes
ntdll.dll! RtlSetCurrentTransaction + 159 bytes

Edit: Nevermind, was using the wrong exe.

[Lepanto]

Welcome to HLP!

Thanks for giving this mod a shot, and hope you have fun once you've sorted out your technical issues.

[sgtinvictus]

Welcome to HLP!

Thanks for giving this mod a shot, and hope you have fun once you've sorted out your technical issues.

Well, the fix for the problem was quite simple. I use two different exe's as some mods don't work with the SSE/no SSE ones and some don't work with the exe that has neither of those. Venicemirror works with the no SSE exe. Great mod though, looking forward to further updates if there are any coming.

[AdmiralRalwood]

I use two different exe's as some mods don't work with the SSE/no SSE ones and some don't work with the exe that has neither of those.

...What? SSE2/SSE/No-SSE should have zero impact on whether or not a mod works; if your CPU doesn't support those optimizations, the executable should simply fail to launch in the first place.

It sounds more like your executables are different versions entirely (3.7.2 RC3 is from halfway through 3.7.2's release-candidate phase, before "$Beams Use Damage Factors:" was added to the engine, so if your "other executable" doesn't choke on it, it's not because SSE2 builds don't like this mod).