I wrote a tutorial on how to make Dogfight missions for BtRL a long time ago while I was still on the team. Apparently that thread was deleted after I left but since
andicirk requested a tutorial and I happened to have one sitting around I figured I might as well drag this one off my hard drive.
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At the risk of putting myself out of a job I've decided to make a guide on how to use FRED to make simple multiplayer missions. Although I won't be covering the real meat of how to use FRED (i.e how to use SEXPs) I will show how even someone who has never used FRED before can stick together a working mission in a matter of minutes.
Bear in mind that FRED is constantly being upgraded by the SCP so by the time you look at it your copy of FRED may have features that you can't see in my screenshots.
If you're really interested in FREDding I highly recommend reading the FS2 walkthrough as about 90% of that will be relevent to you.
- Run FRED. You'll be greeted by the main FRED Screen. Go to the editors menu and choose Mission Specs (or just press SHFT+N).
- The Mission Specs Editor is used by FRED to define certain global properties for missions. It is sensible to fill in some of these now rather than later.
- The first thing you should fill in is the title and your name as designer. The Title does appear on the mission list so it is important.
- Below that you have the radio buttons that allow you to choose the type of mission you will be making. We're going to be making a multiplayer dogfight so make sure you select this type.
- The number of respawns is irrelevent to a dogfight mission. If you were making a TvT or Coop mission you'd most likely want to change this from the default.
- We'll come to the custom wing names options in a second. But first find the Disallow Support Ships option and tick it. Support ships are an FS2 feature which hasn't been implemented in BtRL so you'll need to turn them off in any mission you make.
- Now look at the music options. The pulldown allows you to choose the soundtrack you want for the mission itself. Your names will likely be very different from the ones on my list so just pick one. You can find out the differences between the soundtracks in-game or by consulting the music.tbl if you already know how to do that.
- Click on the Custom Wing Names button and the new dialog will open up. By Default FS2 uses the letters of the Greek alphabet for wingnames. BSG on the other hand appears to use colours so you'll need to change the values as shown.
- Click okay to close the dialog box. Your Mission Specs Editor dialog should now look something like this.
- The Mission Description should be filled in. This text will appear on screen when the host selects the mission and will explain a little more about what the mission is about. It is not the mission briefing however.
- You can fill in the designer notes if you wish. Only people who open up the mission to edit it will see them.
- You may now close the Mission Specs Editor.
- We're going to make a twelve player dogfight around a mining vessel. This means that the next thing you'll need to learn is how to place and move ships around. FRED automatically places a Viper Mk II in the mission by default. The next thing we're going to do is place eleven more. We don't care too much about where at the moment as we're going to move them into position in a bit. By default FRED is set up to place Viper MK IIs anyway so all you need to do is hold down CTRL and click on the grid to position a viper in that location. You may place the vipers wherever you like but you will find the next stage significantly easier if you place them in three groups of four vipers. Once you're done you should have something that looks like this.
- We now need to turn the individual ships into three wings of four vipers. You need to select four vipers (Either select them one at a time while holding down the SHIFT key or simply drag a box around them with the mouse). Press the Form Wing button
or simply press CTRL+W. The Wing Dialog will now open.
- Name the wing Green and then click okay. Repeat the process with the other ships until you have three wings called Green, Red And Blue (Which if you remember were the names of the wings you specified earlier on in the Custom Wing Names Editor).
- Now we place the mining vessel. In the top corner of FRED you'll notice a pulldown which currently says Viper MK II. Select the mining vessel instead. You can place it using the CTRL+mouseclick method you used with the vipers.
- Oh dear. It's all gone hideously wrong. The mining vessel is on top of the other ships and too big to see all of anyway. Actually that's what usually happens the second you start placing anything big in FRED and it's easily solved. This is where the two zoom buttons become very useful.
The first button will zoom you out until you can see the whole of the selected ship. The second one will zoom you out until you can see the names of every ship in the mission. In this case selecting the mining ship and zooming based on it will actually give your the better view than zooming based on all the names so do this. (If for some reason you find yourself unable to select the mining vessel by clicking on it press H and you'll call up a list which makes it easier to select).
- You should now be looking at something like this. With a lot more space to move things around in.
- It's now time to move everything around. Ships can simply be dragged and dropped into position in FRED. By default movement only occurs around the XZ plane. You can however use the axis selection buttons to move things in other planes.
In the picture below I simply dragged the Miner off to the right using the mouse then after selecting the Y axis button dragged it up a few hundred metres. Play about with moving ships around using the mouse as you'll need to get reasonably comfortable doing this.
- In addition to the mouse you also have the Objects Editor. This allows you to specify the exact location you want to place the selected ship in.
- Using whichever means you prefer I want you to move the ships around until you have a set up roughly similar to the one I have in the picture below with the Miner in the middle and all the other ships surrounding it (try to keep everything about 2km away from the mining vessel). Do not forget to use the y axis to place some ships above and below the miner. Remember that if you have difficulty selecting the vipers you can zoom in on them or simply press H and select them.
- Now press H and select every single viper except Green 1. Press OK and then Press SHIFT+S or choose the Ship Editor from the Editors menu. The Ships Editor is probably the second most important editor in the game. From here you can set a variety of different properties for each ship. At the moment though we are only interested in one. Find the player ship tickbox and select it.
- This box allows players to actually contol that ship. FRED automatically makes the first ship it creates a player ship so Green 1 should already be a player ship but if you didn't add the others you'd end up with a one player dogfight.
- Now we want to set up the Vessel in the Ships Editor. You don't need to close the ships editor to select a different ship. If you select the mining vessel the editor will update. Or you can simply use the next/previous buttons to cycle through the ships until you find it.
- Firstly the name Mining Vessel 12 is ugly. So change that to something more in keeping with the show.
- Now click on the Misc button. A new option will open up showing you a quite bewildering array of things you can make this ship do or not do. Since the ship is just there to give everyone something to fight around we don't want anyone blowing it up. So tick the invulnerable option. Click OK and then close the ship editor.
- You now have a working BtRL multiplayer mission. It's ugly and crude but it works. Lets pretty it up a bit though. The first thing the mission needs is a briefing. I'm not going to go into full detail on how to make and position mission briefing icons as the FS2 walkthrough covers that but lets at least add some text. Bring up the Mission Briefing Editor from the menu or by pressing SHIFT+B.
- Press Add Stage to add the first stage of the briefing. Type in some text describing the mission.
- Briefing music is chosen seperately from the main mission soundtrack so choose something off of the list.
- You should now have something that looks like this
- Once you're done you can close the editor.
- Next thing that needs at least a once over is the loadout. Open the Team Loadout Editor (SHIFT+P). The Loadout Editor allows you to choose which ships the players can fly and which weapons are available. As mission designer this is completely up to you. The picture below shows a standard loadout that includes both Cylon and Colonial weapons and ships. If you don't want Cylons in the mission don't choose any. If you don't want Colonials in the missions you'll have to remember to select all three wings and turn them into Cylon Raiders in the ship menu cause at the moment they're vipers.
- Now lets add a background cause just stars is ugly. Call up the Background Editor (SHIFT+I). There are several things to play about with here.
- First lets add a sun. The game will automatically add one of these anyway by default but if we add one we can change its position and type. Click add. A new Sun will appear (SunWhite is the default).
- Make sure the Sun is highlighted then if you wish to choose a different type you may pull down the box to the side and choose a different type.
- Again make sure the Sun is highlighted and you can now edit the Pitch, Bank and Heading settings. All three of these settings are in degrees.
Pitch determines how many degrees above the horizon the sun appears.
Heading determines how many degrees
anti-clockwise the sun will be from straight in front of you when you start FRED.
Bank rotates the image on the spot by the chosen number of degrees.
- Last but not least Scale allows you to make the sun bigger or smaller. Scale is a number with 1 being small and 10 being massive.
- The picture below shows a blue sun with a Pitch of 10 and a Heading of 20. I didn't adjust the Bank cause I doubt you could tell the difference much.
- The bitmaps section allows you to add planets and background nebulae in the same way as with suns. The only major difference is that you can scale the x and Y axis seperately. You should keep the numbers the same for planets so they remain round but it can have a nice effect on other backgrounds.
- The skybox model option allows you to choose a background skybox. These can often look prettier than the bitmaps especially for large objects. Unless you have good reason not to you should always use Starfield.pof as your skybox to give you a much better starfield than the game gives you by default.
- Once you're finished you should have an editor that looks something like this.
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- Last but definitely not least open the Events Editor (SHIFT+E). The events editor if the heart of FRED. When working on a non-dogfight mission you will spend about 90% of your time here. For this dogfight mission we only need to create one event. FS2 multiplayer missions end when a ship jumps into subspace. Obviously we don't want that happening with Vipers (although it's not so bad with Cylons) so what we're going to do is tell the game to keep an eye out for the host pressing the Alt-J key. If that key is pressed the mission should end immediately without a jump.
- Click the New Event button. A new event appears. Click on the little + signs to open it up and you'll see this.
- As you may be able to see this is doing nothing. First lets name the event. The name is nothing more that a reminder what the event does but it is a useful one once you start having lots of them. Simply Click on the event name option until it becomes editable and change it.
- Now lets look at the rest of the event. Events are divided into two parts. The first part is the trigger. The game looks at the event every frame and sees if the trigger is true yet. If it is the event triggers and the second part of the event goes off. The event you have at the moment will trigger the second the game starts (the trigger is When-True) but won't actually do anything because the action it has been told to perform is do-nothing. Obviously we'll need to change both trigger and action. We do this by selecting the correct ones from a list of triggers and actions known as SEXPs (Symbolic EXPressions). Although we're only doing simply stuff here you can combine SEXPs to make much more complicated triggers and actions (e.g When the cylons are all destroyed and galactica is not destroyed send a message giving the player permission to land and end the mission).
- Rightmouse click on the word true. This will pop up a menu giving us access to all the different SEXPs we can use. Feel free to look at the massive variety you have at your fingertips. The one we're after is called key-pressed and you can find it by choosing Replace Operator -> Training -> Key-Pressed.
- The Key-Pressed SEXP defaults to looking for the T key. Rightmouse click on the T and use the Replace Data option to change that to Alt-J.
- That's the trigger dealt with. Now lets change what the game does. Rightclick on do-nothing and Replace Operator with Change -> Mission and Campaign -> End Mission.
- You should be left looking at an event that looks something like this.
- That will now do what we wanted it to do. Click the OK button to close the Event Editor.
- The mission is now finished. You can save it.
And there you go. A working mission in probably under 30 minutes work. There are some things you can do to clean it up (For instance I forgot to rotate the vipers so that they start off looking at the miner) but it should prove that FRED is pretty easy to work with. Look forwards to seeing your missions soon.[/list][/list]
