[eliex]

 Recently, I reinstalled Freespace2, with the original disks and Turey's installer.
 To my *great* surprise, I actually could see the models using FRED3.6.9 as before that I was using FRED2 only.

 I just have a question: Can you change the way you click and drag ships?
 I find it extremely hard to group fighters into wings, select craft easily . . . you get the idea.

 Plz help me! Would be greatly appreciated.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Yes you can with the x y and z axis buttons on the toolbar.  The easiest way to group wings is to right click on the ship and edit the ship position.  Say Alpha 1 is at 0,0,0.  Click on Alpha 2 and put it at something like -50,0,-50 Alpha 3 at 50,0,-50, and Alpha 4 at 0,0,-100.  Of course those numbers are open to adjustment.  After that you can highlight the whole wing and move it whereever you want again either by the drag method or by right clicking on any of the ships (preferable the lead ship) when they are all selected and edit the ship position.  They will all stay in formation. 

You can also press T when the ship is selected and use the keypad and a and z to move it.  Last option is to switch camera view to ship and fly it where you want.

[karajorma]

Or you can select a ship, press SHIFT+O and use the Object Orientation Editor to move the ships around. Slow, but it gives you the most control.

[eliex]

Awesome. Thanks for your help 

I am curious, will there be a newer build of FreeSpace Open anytime soon?

[karajorma]

New builds of FS2_Open 3.6.10 are available for development and testing purposes from the recent builds forum. The official release of 3.6.10 however isn't going to be any time in the immediate future.

[eliex]

 Wow . . . those betas are really cool . . .   

Actually I've got another *problem*

 I was irritated at the simple inferiority of the GTD Hecate at ship to ship combat and I wanted to change the tables about the Hecate's hitpoints.
 I was flicking through Karajorma's FAQ about table modding, how to do I save my changes? The TBL view can't let you adjust tables, so I had to take out the ships.tbl from Root_fs2 and then open it with Notepad. 
 
I was also wondering, how d'you take out a new ship mod, e.g the GTD Titan (from Blue Planet, Darius) and save it into standard FRED2 Open, because whenever I want to use the GTD TItan, I have to take out the BLUE PLANET vp, and put them directly into the Freespace 2 directory.
Then I have to put it back into its folder again, when I want to play. 

Thanks.

[Wanderer]

Do not save (ever) anything into the main game directory or to the main data directory. Always make use of mod directories. Should you want to add an additional ship to the main game you need to first find the ship and all the related files (model file, textures, table entry). If they are in vp which doesn't have table files included and will not cause any problems to the gaming you can simply toss the vp file into the mod directory, recreate the table entry using modular tables to the \moddirectory\data\tables. If the files are not in vp or there are lots of stuff you dont want from the vp you'll need to extract the required files and place them into correct directories (model file goes to \moddirectory\data\models, textures go to \moddirectory\data\maps and the table entry (preferably in tbm format) goes to \moddirectory\data\tables.

[Shade]

Also, if it's just the hitpoints you want to change, don't bother with tables. Just select the Hecate, press Shift-S to enter the ship editor, and click on the "Special Hits" button in the right-side column of buttons. Then check the "Enable Special Hitpoints" box, and you can enter in new values which will override the standard hitpoints given in the table for that ship only.

Another way to ungimp it in capital ship combat would be to edit its weapons, also doable from FRED itself without modifying tables. By clicking on the "Weapons" button in the same column in the ship editor, you get to a screen that lets you change the weapons in all hardpoints and turrets on the ship, as well as set individual skill levels for the turrets.

[eliex]

Gee, thanks a lot Shade! 

 Sorry if I'm sounding a bit like a dolt. 
I have extracted the tables, models, etc and put them into the moddirectory.

 Ok, I tried doing GTD TItan (BluePlanet, Darius)
1. I use VP View and extract out the ships.tbl, models etc and put them into the Blueplanet folder.
2. I make a tables and models folder within the data folder in Blueplanet.
3. I put in the models in Blueplanet\data\models and ship.tbl in blueplanet\data\tables.

 How, then can FREDOpen accept these mods? 

[Jeff Vader]

You need to add  -mod blueplanet (that's [space]-mod blueplanet), or whatever your Blue Planet folder is called, to the command line of FRED. Basically, right-click on the FRED executable or even a shortcut of it, find the part that says C:\Games\freespace yadda yadda yadda and add the part above after it.

Edit: Wait, I just realized what you had said. If you want to use the Raynor in your own mod, stuff the files into \freespace\yourmod\data\, into the appropriate subfolders, and then add the -mod parameter I described.

[eliex]

 Thanks so much!!
Saved me a LOT of hassle. 

 I've just got one last Q.
You know about the cutscene function of FRED right? How d'you get the wordings onto the cutscene screen.

I mean I've tried the 'show subtitle' operator but it just messes up the cutscene by making it flash for a moment.

On a side note, is it possible for the camera to "move" with the ships it is supposed to be viewing?