Using FRED2_Open To Make Missions For Diaspora

Welcome to FRED2_Open. FRED2_Open (normally referred to simply as FRED) is the mission creation software used to make missions for Diaspora. This guide will talk you through the basics of mission and campaign creation.

FRED originally started out as a mission designer for Freespace, a space combat simulation by Volition. The name actually stands for FReespace EDitor. When the source code for the second game in the series was released it was worked on by several coders to give us FS2_Open (the engine Diaspora runs on) and FRED2_Open. FRED is constantly updated by the SCP team so it's worth bearing in mind that this documentation was prepared while the team were working on the first Diaspora release and some of the pictures may be out of date by the time you are reading this. In general though, the coders rarely remove features, so the button or text box you are looking for is almost certainly still there, it may have just moved a little from when the picture was taken.

The help is divided into the following files:

• Quick Start - This is a simple walkthrough that covers the basics of making a playable skirmish mission in a couple of minutes. The Quick Start assumes you have done nothing with FRED before beyond opening it and looking at this help file.
• Basic Concepts - Before you can get started you'll need to know how to do some simple things.
• The Toolbar covers the buttons near the top of the FRED2 window.
• Menu Commands explains the various pull-down menus. The most important of these are the commands in the Editors Menu.
• The SEXPs section explains what symbolic expressions are, and how you can use them to make your mission react to the player's actions
• The Extended Walkthrough is a much longer walkthrough than the Quick start. It covers many of the more advanced details involved in building a mission. After doing this you should be able to go straight to creating your own missions.
• Multiplayer Tutorial - A tutorial detailing the main differences between making a single player mission and a multiplayer one as well as some of the common pitfalls you may encounter.
• The Troubleshooting section covers how to get started on debugging your mission (You probably will spend about as much time on this as writing them) and also covers some common problems FREDders run into.
• Diaspora Resource List - A list of all the resources available for FREDders in the game.
• BSG Phonetic Alphabet - A list of the designations used in the show (and the ones we have made up to fill the gaps).
• Common Mistakes - This is a list of things to check you have accounted for when making your own missions.
• Modding Diaspora - A guide on how to get started creating your own ships for Diaspora.
• Creating Ship Nameplates - A guide (in pdf format) on how to create your own nameplates for ships.
• Useful Links

If you've used FRED before (even slightly) you can probably skip the first walkthrough and go straight to the extended walkthrough. Experienced FREDders will probably find bits of the walkthrough useful as it covers how we do combat landings amongst other things. They should also found the mission checklist useful as although it includes many of the pitfalls they already know about, it also includes some Diaspora specific ones that they may not have encountered making their own missions.

This documentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.