It's tempting to forget about events and just stick ships in the mission with a bit of background but you'll find that the missions you make are rather poor in comparison to the ones you'll see in campaigns like Raider Wars. If you can't use events properly you'll have difficulty making any mission that isn't a "kill 5 waves of minbari fighters" style mission.
Events are needed to make arrivals and exits work and also for debriefings and goals. Without them your missions will be pretty flat.
Events are really pretty simple creatures though so there's no need to do that. Each Event has three parts. The Conditional, the Trigger and the Action. You can pretty much ignore the first one for now as beginners never use anything except the When SEXP.
Let's take the simplest event possible
when <-----------Conditional
-true <-----------Trigger-do-nothing <-----ActionFor an Event to occur the Trigger must evaluate to true. Once that happens the game will look at the action section and do whatever is contained in there. It's basically that simple.
Let's look at something a little harder.
When <------------------------Conditional
-is-destroyed-delay
--3 <----------------------------Trigger
--EAS Agamemmnon -Send Message
--#Command <---------------Action
--Medium
--Oh No! Pretty self explanitory this one. The game checks continually to see if the Agamemmnon has been destroyed. 3 Seconds after it's been destroyed it send a message from command.
That's the basics of events right there. Don't worry if you don't get the complicated stuff in my FAQ, some of it is pretty advanced. What you need to do is play about with the simple events and learn how to get them to work.
Try doing a few simple things like using the above SEXP to send messages when something blows up. Try using add-goal to make the friendlies start attacking a ship when something happens. Just play with the simple stuff and you'll find the harder stuff slots into place pretty easily afterwards.
Originally posted by Slasher
The TBP FRED2 walkthrough could really be helped with a comprehensive update. I don't suppose anyone here wants to take a stab at it?
What we really need is a generic FRED Walkthrough cause when the BSG guys finish their mod you can bet they'll be lots of people who want to FRED missions for that too.
