Many times people have asked me how I managed to convert the original Freespace missions into Freespace 2; was it a simple copy and paste, or did you have to replicate everything? Well, it's a little complicated. So, for your use in converting your old Freespace 1 missions and campaigns for re-release, I have here instructions on how I converted the FS1 campaign missions into FS2.
Originally, I had FRED and FRED2 open simultaneously and copied all the object, message, and events information by hand.
It was awful, and it took a month to copy five missions.
THEN I opened up the FSM and FS2 missions in WordPad and found they're almost exactly the same. This is the proceedure for converting most FS1 missions:
-Open the .FSM mission and save it as .FS2. (The first step.)
-Do a find-and-replace for PV and replace it with GV.
This makes all the Vasudan ships recognised by FS2--PVC Aten is replaced with GVC Aten etc.-Find and replace GVF Anubis, GVB Amun, GVFr Ma'at and GVFr Bast with their PV* equivalents.
These ships retained their PV designations in Freespace 2.-Find and replace Prometheus with Prometheus S.
I didn't include the standard Prom with the port, just used the Prom S.-Replace capital ship weapons with their definitions in the FS1 ships.tbl.
That replaces the beams and flak on the ships with FS1 laser turrets.Save and open it up in FRED2. It should work, but check up on any error messages you may get. Most common ones are medal grants and if the Galatea or Bastion are included. Once it checks out OK, try it in FS2. If that runs, you're in good shape--save a backup. For the finishing touches, give the Vasudan ships AltNames (give all the GVF Thoths PVF Thoth designations,)
make sure all fighters have the right FS1 weapons, and give all large Vasudan craft Vasudan turrets instead of Terran turrets. Add backgrounds and music, fix icons, and edit any briefing text that doesn't fit or has quotation marks. Run through the mission
a few times and make sure everything fits. Save, test, etc. throughout.
If the first few steps don't work... er, add all the objects manually, anywhere. You can copy and paste ship position and orientation, briefing information, and events and messages from the FSM piece by piece until you run into a problem. Then you can add that much by hand.
Hope this helps the folks who made their wonderful FS1 campaigns and anyone else who wants to port their missions!
