[headdie]

Firstly would it be possible to have the player ship not as part of a wing, especially useful in capship missions.

Secondly can we have a Fred option to have an empty support wing (beta, delta, gamma etc) which the player can choose to assign ships to if they want but leave empty if not

[karajorma]

Why would you want to do the second one? Can't you just set them as reinforcements and have the player decide whether or not to call them in?

[Crybertrance]

Firstly would it be possible to have the player ship not as part of a wing, especially useful in capship missions.

You could always set the player (single ship) as alpha wing. Set any other wings as Beta, Gamma or whatnot..

[headdie]

Firstly would it be possible to have the player ship not as part of a wing, especially useful in capship missions.

You could always set the player (single ship) as alpha wing. Set any other wings as Beta, Gamma or whatnot..

I am thinking so that the player ship shows as GTCv Monitor rather than alpha 1 or GTCv Deimos 2 etc.

Why would you want to do the second one? Can't you just set them as reinforcements and have the player decide whether or not to call them in?

if the player is assigned for example 6 fighters in the loadout the player can assign 2 of them to wing Alpha and 4 to beta or 3 to wing Alpha and 3 to wing beta or any other permutation as the player decides to best suit their approach to a mission if they want to split their force between two.

These two requests come from my toying with a Capship based mission/campaign where the player is assigned 4 fighters to screen the ship and they can decide how the fighters are organised between two wing.

[zookeeper]

If you only need this in one mission, then you might be interested in trying to simply open the mission file in a text editor and change the player ship's name; the last time I checked, you can change it to whatever you want (such as "GTCv Monitor") even though FRED doesn't allow you to and even if there's other ships in your wing.

[headdie]

I will give that a go, thanks

[Dragon]

Could we have FRED support everything that FSO does?
There are a few things that can be done by using text editor to tweak the mission, but FRED either doesn't support or actively prohibits them.

[Iss Mneur]

Could we have FRED support everything that FSO does?
There are a few things that can be done by using text editor to tweak the mission, but FRED either doesn't support or actively prohibits them.

Yes, but that requires us to know about them.  Please file a mantis report for each feature that FRED is missing that FSO supports.

There are three reasons that something that FSO supports is not in FRED.  First, not everyone can build FRED which means all of the features in FRED have to filter through the people that are able to build it.  Second, some "features" are actually parsing bugs in FSO, FSO doesn't check something it should.  The third issue with supporting everything FSO does is some of the features are actually really hard to build a GUI for.

[zookeeper]

Yeah, and for example that ship name hack might very well break something in some circumstances even though it seems to work. I've never ran into a problem with it, but who knows. Making FRED accept arbitrary ship names would be saying that "yes, that's a supported feature and is supposed to work", and quite possibly no one knows if it is truly so.

[Axem]

You can always hide the number by using # in the wing name. Anything after the # is ignored by the game. So Alpha# wing would have Alpha# 1, Alpha# 2 etc in FRED, while in game it the whole wing would show up as just Alpha.

[headdie]

You can always hide the number by using # in the wing name. Anything after the # is ignored by the game. So Alpha# wing would have Alpha# 1, Alpha# 2 etc in FRED, while in game it the whole wing would show up as just Alpha.

Ironically enough i was thinking about that on the way back from the doc's earlier so thanks for saving me the effort of looking up the char axem

[karajorma]

I'd be very careful about using the kind of text trick described here. As Iss said often you're exploiting a bug. Which will bite you on the arse if someone fixes it before you are ready to release.

[Iss Mneur]

I'd be very careful about using the kind of text trick described here. As Iss said often you're exploiting a bug. Which will bite you on the arse if someone fixes it before you are ready to release.

To be clear.

The thing with the # is fully documented and supported (as far I recall).

The manually editing the mission file to change the name of the ship may technically be a bug, but I haven't looked at that code in a long time so I don't know either way.

[karajorma]

Yeah, I meant the manual text edit of the file not using #.

[Goober5000]

Well, I used that trick for Iota and Kappa wings in str10...