Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => Diaspora => Diaspora 3rd Party Missions, Mods & Campaigns => Topic started by: Ozone14k on May 05, 2017, 09:33:36 pm
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Hello everyone!
I'm totally new to FreeSpace 2, but having recently played through the Diaspora:Shattered Armistice campaign, I am so excited to delve into creating my own missions. As a space sim and BSG fan, I was blown away!
After experimenting some with FRED2 and reading through the tutorials, I feel pretty confident about being able to learn my way around the program. What has me flat out stumped though, is how to add the Diaspora ships and resources to FRED2. All of the tutorials, both quick and in-depth seem to launch right in as though it started with vipers by default. However, all I have been able to find are the default FreeSpace 2 ships and resources. I'm sure it's something simple, and I apologize if this is something that has been asked before. I appreciate any help on this. Thank you!
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Diaspora ships with the wxLauncher right? - If no, which launcher do you use?
Do you have Freespace SCP installed elsewhere on your computer? - If yes, do you use the same launcher for it and Diaspora?
FRED2_Open builds can load the configurations from the launcher, this might be the cause of your problem.
If you use a unified launcher like wxLauncher it might cause it to read the wrong data. Note that the needed configuration file is written and loaded when you launch the game, not when you use the launcher - so you have to set-up the launcher then start the game, exit and than run FRED to see if it works.
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FRED loads ships and other assets exactly like the FS2_Open engine. Which, at its most basic level, means that if you launch FRED from within the Diaspora directory, you'll get Diaspora's shipset, and if you run it from within your FS2 directory, you get whatever shipset is being used by the currently active mod.
If you want to mix-and-match ships from Diaspora and other FS2 mods, you'll need to build your own mod pack. In order to do that, you'll need:
-A VP editor (I recommend VPGUI (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=83920.0))
-A text editor (Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code, for example)
-PCS2 (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=77292.0)
Now, in order to give you a good guide on how to proceed, I'll need you to tell me what exactly you want to do. Do you want to make Diaspora missions that feature ships from other mods, or do you want to make a FreeSpace mod that features ships from Diaspora?
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Thank you all for your replies; they are very helpful! Reading back through my post, I realize now I have very little information about my set up. I am using wxLancher for Diaspora and have purchased FreeSpace 2 from GOG. Diaspora seems to have its own file as does FreeSpace 2. To obtain FRED2, I used the FreeSpace Open installer provided by Hard Light, which correctly set up all of the FreeSpace Open suite in the FreeSpace 2 file. As such, running FRED2 works great, but creating a new folder in FreeSpace 2 for Diaspora (like a FreeSpace 2 mod folder) has no effect. Likewise, moving FRED 2 out of the main FreeSpace 2 folder causes the program to instantly crash.
The added factor is that I am running these on Mac OS X Sierra. Since only Diaspora is designed for Mac, all of the FreeSpace programs and files are run through Wine. Impressively, Wine has had no problems creating a stable port of the game software. However, I am concerned that having to use Wine might be part of the problem. I do however also have Windows 8.1 partitioned on my MacBook Pro and have run into the same problem, so that's what leads me to believe I must be missing something haha
As for what I'd like to use the program for, right now, it centers exclusively on Diaspora. I wouldn't mind even a set up where FRED2 is defaulted to Diaspora if it would be less complex. FreeSpace 2 looks amazing, and down the road, I definitely want to play through it. I hope this helps. Thank you all again for helping me with this!
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You're using FRED2 Open, right? Not FRED2? Try copying FRED2 Open to the Diaspora folder. I think you'll need to run it in WINE. However, you might need to run Diaspora for Windows on WINE first to set up configuration options, as I think Mac stores them differently? A lot of this is in the progress of being changed IIRC (moving away from Windows Registry settings to config files), but it's not done yet, so, I think you'll have to get Windows Diaspora running before FRED2 Open can read configs. That is, unless there's a Mac version of FRED2 Open, I'm unaware of whether or not there is. If there is, try using that (FRED2 Open Mac) after copying it to Diaspora's folder.
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No, there's not currently a non-Windows version of FRED. Hope springs eternal that wxFRED will eventually be able to fill that need, but it's not there yet.
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You're using FRED2 Open, right? Not FRED2? Try copying FRED2 Open to the Diaspora folder. I think you'll need to run it in WINE. However, you might need to run Diaspora for Windows on WINE first to set up configuration options, as I think Mac stores them differently? A lot of this is in the progress of being changed IIRC (moving away from Windows Registry settings to config files), but it's not done yet, so, I think you'll have to get Windows Diaspora running before FRED2 Open can read configs. That is, unless there's a Mac version of FRED2 Open, I'm unaware of whether or not there is. If there is, try using that (FRED2 Open Mac) after copying it to Diaspora's folder.
I believe so. I got FRED2 and it's associated programs through the FreeSpace Open Installer for Mac on Hard Light.net, but I have noticed there are several different icons that say "FRED2". One I know is the debug version, but I believe there are two other ones as well. Is there a way to distinguish between the two?
Yes, that is an excellent point. Macs store information a little different than Windows, the biggest difference I've experienced and read with porting Windows games to Mac, is that the games are designed to use the C:\Programs pathway. All of the porting software like Wine and Boxer basically create an environment where the game accesses a "virtual" windows file system, and the porting software makes the game think its saving to a Windows hard drive but it's actually storing it in the porting software, which then saves the files in Mac compatible format. Where this becomes a problem is when a game must access files from another game, because the file system the game thinks is real is more or less an illusion--there's really nothing there. This might be the problem, so I'm curious to see if I can get this to work on Windows and the reverse-engineer or copy the set up in Mac.
Wow, a Mac FRED2 open would be amazing. I'd love to be able to access a mission editor in game someday like Halo's Forge or even some of the classic Jane's Combat Sims like 688i Hunter-Killer.
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No, there's not currently a non-Windows version of FRED. Hope springs eternal that wxFRED will eventually be able to fill that need, but it's not there yet.
Ah, that's too bad. I will certainly join in that hopeful watch. I would be glad to help in its development and testing, although I'll be the first to admit, my programming skills are pretty rusty these days. Still, I know Mac is a minority platform in the gaming world, so finding devs and alpha/beta testers can be challenging.
Thank you to everyone for your help! All of the input has helped me identify the problem and provided several possible solutions. I am working on this right now, and I'll let you all know what I find out.
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I believe FRED2 Open will be labeled with the version name, eg, fred2_open_3_7_4_SSE2.exe and the debug will be the same except with _DEBUG added in the name.
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Okay, I've finally got a good update on this. If there are any users running OS X 10.12.4 (Mac OS X Sierra), hopefully this will be helpful.
I created a new folder in the FreeSpace 2 folder called, "Diaspora" and copied the Diaspora mac application to the Diaspora folder. Then, I right clicked on the Diaspora app and selected "Open in New Tab" from the menu. This opens the application contents folder, something OS X seems to do for its applications is "wrap" all of the application's files and support information into an application icon.
I then moved FRED2 Open into this Diaspora application folder that is normally "wrapped" by OS X. After doing that, if I open FRED2 Open from within the Diaspora application folder, it works perfectly!
I would have never been able to figure this out without y'all's help! Thank you so much for your replies about how FRED2 Open works and what files it needs to have in order to function properly.
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Glad you got it working.
If you haven't looked at the FRED documentation for Diaspora, I'd recommend doing so, I completely rewrote the FS2 docs so there's a walkthrough completely specific to Diaspora in there but also lots of stuff on how the newer SCP additions work.