[Conspark]

Greetings!

Thanks to the people over at my “Desire to Contribute” thread who sent me down the FRED rabbit hole. It's been quite fun experimenting and figuring things out. I've got no shortage of ideas at the moment, but of course my FREDding skills are still somewhat lacking. With that in mind, I do have a “short” list of questions for any who may be brave enough to tackle them all:

1 :: Can I protect an entire category or a list of subsystems with ship-subsys-guardian-threshold? For example, the default value for this is “<all turrets>”, but that doesn't work. For example, I want to protect the forward beams on a Deimos. I tried “turret11,turret12” and others, but no luck.

2 :: I really like that with “kamikaze” enabled a capital ship will immediately explode upon hitting 0 hull. This seems great for cases where a large capital blows away a smaller one with a powerful beam - no laborious "rolling" death (if that's the correct term). Given that kamikaze makes the ship move straight toward its target, is there a way to get the same effect without the movement AI?

3 :: Is there a substantial difference in AI types for capital ships? e.g.: “Coward” vs. “Captain” vs. “Little Devil” and so on? Or are these meant only for fighters? I can't see that they make a difference. At that, how does this affect turrets given that there are options for AI type in the weapon screen?

4 :: What's the trick (if there is one) for getting dialogue timed just right? Is this simply a matter of trial and error and what's going on in the mission? Nothing I've done so far has required complex message handling, but I can foresee this being a headache.

5 :: Weapon balance! I'm toying with the idea of a souped-up Moloch using an LRed in its forward “eye” blob turret position (part of a broader idea involving stronger-than-usual Shivan vessels). That beam is downright scary – provided I make that turret invulnerable, a Moloch in such a state can consistently destroy a Deimos, a Fenris, and an Aeolus at the same time and walk away with 10%~ hull. How can I go about creating a very powerful capital ship threat without it being over the top? I guess the same question could have been posed with regard to the Sathanas, so I'll look there for more inspiration.

6 :: Is there a generally accepted number of fighter / bomber wings that should be thrown at the player at once in a mission? Say, one wing of each at any one time? Or does this vary a great deal depending on desired difficulty / number of friendly wings supporting?

7 :: Naming conventions. I just threw the names “Moscow”, “Paris”, “Berlin”, and other capital city names onto my Terran ships for want of something better. What are your favorite ways of gaining inspiration for ship names? I suspect I'll struggle the most with Vasudan nomenclature.

8 :: Is there a way to change every reference to a given thing in a type of “search and replace”? e.g.: I named the GTC Moscow when it was a cruiser, not a corvette. Do I need to manually change every reference to that to “GTCv Moscow” or is there a faster way?

9 :: Can capital ships be given custom top speeds? Every time I've set a capital ship's starting speed it's immediately slowed down to its normal maximum.

10 :: Last one for now, I promise. Is there a set of turret hardpoint maps available? In some cases I've been struggling to figure out which turret is located where when setting custom weapons for capital ships.

[Black Wolf]

Lots to get through here, and I'll probably get ninjaed on a few of these, but here goes anyway.
Small caveat - I don't have FRED open in front of me, so this is off memory. It'll hopefully be at least roughly correct though, have a play with the general ideas.
1. This looks like a scenario where "Add data" will come in handy. For many, but not all sexps that affect subsystems or ships, you can make it apply to multiple targets, but generally only if that target is the last thing you enter. In the events editor, right click the ship-subsys-guardian-threshold sexp itself, then select "Add data". You should get a new menu with a list of subsystems you can add... I think. Like I said, no FRED in front of me, and I can't remember specifically whether it will work for this particular sexp.

2. Is there a way? I think so... But I can't remember what it is. I feel like this is a sexp or a ship flag that the SCP added? Will check and confirm.

3. Again, this is one Ill need to check, but I'm pretty confident that there is an effect, it's just less significant than for fighters, and likely depends on the ships class. Someone more familiar will be more helpful, no doubt.

4. Messages are sent by events, and events can be set to trigger at very specific times based on events unfolding in the mission. For example, you can tell a message sexp to trigger, say, 17 seconds after a ship is destroyed. Then, if that's a medium length sentence that takes about 5 seconds to say out loud, the response message could be timed for 23 or 24 seconds after the ships destruction. But you can get much more detailed than that, triggering when hitpoints or subsystem hitpoints reach a given limit, when ships are a specific distance apart, after a certain number of ships have been killed, etc. Etc. You can even specify things down to the millisecond if you needed that for some reason (like timing events to music). The sexp system is really flexible - almost any event or event combination can trigger a sexp, and therefore, send a message.

5. This is a tough one, because it's essentially a mission balance question, which is one of the hardest parts of FREDding. Assuming that you want to stay entirely within FRED, and not play around with the table files, there are some broad stroke things you can do to buff individual ships. Changing weapons is a good one (Volition did this a lot), as is the "Special  Hits" button in the Ships Editor, which can increase or decrease hull strength.
Beyond those, there are a lot of more subtle things that can help. The way you control your ship will have a huge influence on its destructive potential - a Moloch with a powerful forward beam is much scarier if it can keep that beam pointed at its target, which you can do with careful use of waypoints. Another option is to increase or decrease the fire wait on a beam turret by locking it, and then using the "fire-beam" sexp to manually fire it at a greater or lesser pace than its default value.
One thing I would suggest though, is be careful with the subsystem guardian sexps. They're useful, nut also potentially frustrating for players - use sparingly. And also, consider using the guardian-threshold sexps in place of the straight guardian sexp. Setting it to 13 or 5 or 11 or whatever will partially hide the use of the sexp, and is a little more subtle that a whole bunch of ships or subsystems at exactly 1% after a battle.
There are lots of other ways to tweak mission balance - player loadout plays a huge part, ship positioning and the paths they take, their defensive fighters, the presence or absence of secondary targets - so many things can have much bigger impacts than you might initially think. Best advice here is practice, experiment and playtest a lot. Oh, and get a beta tester to help out - other people's opinions are much more meaningful than your own when it comes to balance issues.

6. Completely variable depending on all those factors you mentioned. There's been a big shift away from the endless waves of fighters that Volition built into a lot of their missions towards cleverer, more tactically rational choices by enemy forces, so just imagine yourself as the enemy commander, and do what seems rational. If that's too tough, add more restrictions on yourself as the commander, or tone yourself down a bit until you get the balance right.

7. Broadly, the naming conventions tend towards historical or mythical figures - mainly Egyptian for Vasudans, often but by no means always Greek for Terrans, and sometimes Hindu for Shivans, but also a lot of Christian mythology and general nasty mythological creatures. But there are tonnes of exceptions - canon terran ships are named for Norse mythology, historical generals or figures (GTD Eisenhower, Amadeus, Hippocrates, Einstein etc) as well as just generally strong sounding, naval ship esque names (GTD Legion, Bastion, Glorious etc.). The Vasudans have the most consistency, but even they varied a bit, especially in FS1 (PVD Hope, for example). Check out Encyclopedia Mythica for Egyptian mythological inspiration.
Just go with whatever sounds cool for now.

8. Freespace missions are just text files. Open the .fs2 file in your missions directory in notepad and do a straight up Find and Replace.

9. Unfortunately, no. Ship top speeds are set in tables, and there's no way that I know of currently to increase that from FRED. You can cap their speeds when flying waypoints, but you can't make it higher.

10. You want the K button. Click the ship you want, then press K. It will cycle through all the turrets for you.

Hope these help, don't worry about asking more, we like training up new FREDders.

[karajorma]

BW Ninja'd me on a few of these, but.....

6 :: Is there a generally accepted number of fighter / bomber wings that should be thrown at the player at once in a mission? Say, one wing of each at any one time? Or does this vary a great deal depending on desired difficulty / number of friendly wings supporting?

Depends on the situation really. It's the sort of thing your playtesters will help you with once your mission is in the beta stage.

7 :: Naming conventions. I just threw the names “Moscow”, “Paris”, “Berlin”, and other capital city names onto my Terran ships for want of something better. What are your favorite ways of gaining inspiration for ship names? I suspect I'll struggle the most with Vasudan nomenclature.

http://pantheon.org/areas/mythology/africa/egyptian/articles.html

The Greek and Roman sections might also prove useful to you. Just don't spend the whole hour you planned on FREDding on reading up on Egyptian myths (been there, done that)

8 :: Is there a way to change every reference to a given thing in a type of “search and replace”? e.g.: I named the GTC Moscow when it was a cruiser, not a corvette. Do I need to manually change every reference to that to “GTCv Moscow” or is there a faster way?

Save the mission, open it in notepad and do a search and replace there. Just be careful to back up the mission first in case you mess up.

10 :: Last one for now, I promise. Is there a set of turret hardpoint maps available? In some cases I've been struggling to figure out which turret is located where when setting custom weapons for capital ships.

Pressing the K key in FRED will allow you to cycle through the turrets.


EDIT :

2 :: I really like that with “kamikaze” enabled a capital ship will immediately explode upon hitting 0 hull. This seems great for cases where a large capital blows away a smaller one with a powerful beam - no laborious "rolling" death (if that's the correct term). Given that kamikaze makes the ship move straight toward its target, is there a way to get the same effect without the movement AI?

You can always cheat and use the kamikaze SEXP when the ship is just about the blow up.

[Conspark]

Thanks for the info. It'll probably be a while before I get something worthy of beta testing, but where would I post such a thing?

I'm also running into a sudden problem: loading the mission I've been messing with is now giving me a "Fred encountered unknown ship/weapon classes when parsing the mission file" error and a subsequent FRED crash. This happens with or without the "GTC Moscow" -> "GTCv Moscow" text edit. I wasn't having this problem last night, but I did notice that I was getting a "There are 48 missing weapons" or something to that effect every time I loaded the mission in FS2. I was in the base FS2 campaign with a pilot that has only participated in that campaign. I'm guessing that the mission was attempting to pull up Blue Planet weapons, but I don't know why it would.

Edit: Forgot to ask. Under "Special Exp", is "custom death roll time" a way to modify how long bigger ships will sit at 0% hull spontaneously exploding before being fully destroyed? I also wouldn't mind messing around with creating a custom beam texture / color. That requires the editing of a .bmp, correct?

[karajorma]

http://diaspora.fs2downloads.com/FREDDocs/editors_ships.html#Special

In general, if something on this page is missing or not clear enough, tell me. I'll fix it.

[Conspark]

http://diaspora.fs2downloads.com/FREDDocs/editors_ships.html#Special

In general, if something on this page is missing or not clear enough, tell me. I'll fix it.

Eeeeexcellent stuff. Thanks

Are you aware of any Shivan station models floating around aside from SI Arachnas over on Freespace Files? Arachnas would work but it's missing textures on the pylons between the center structure and the weapon modules.