Backgrounds

Backgrounds are extremely important when designing a mission. In addition to breaking up the constant blackness of space, backgrounds set the mood for the mission. If you are creating a standalone (non-campaign) mission, you can use whatever colors you like, regardless the colors don't clash. If the mission takes place in a system featured in the single-player campaign, it is ok to base your nebula backgrounds based on that particular mission.

If you are creating a campaign, be sure to create templates before starting work on ANY missions. It would also be a good idea to write down the number of planets, the bitmap associated with them along with their orbit. This will come in handy if you have a mission taking place closer to the star, and therefore the closer planets will be larger or only be seen. Make each system unique to give the player more than just the same color backgrounds over different systems. Some ways to vary systems include different numbers, colors and sizes for suns; different nebula patterns and planet systems.

Whatever you do, make sure to create your backgrounds first so you won't have to worry about getting killed while admiring your nebular handiwork.

There are three main ways to create backrounds for missions you create in FRED:

Creating backgrounds from scratch

Wether you are using flashy custom nebulas or the stock nebulas, placing nebulas is rather hit-or-miss. For each background bitmap, you must line up the nebulas using the pitch/heading/bank edit boxes. After each significant change, you must test the mission to make sure your tweaks have worked to your desire. You must also make sure each nebula bitmap isn't too streched to make it distorted. Keeping the bitmap's scale values nearly equal will avoid this. Additionally, bitmaps that have really large scales look too streched even when the scale values are nearly square. As with any other topic in FRED, you will get good at this once you have experience.

Using a background generation program

A few background generation programs can be downloaded that will randomly place background bitmaps for you. After running the program, it would spit out a mission file that contains the background. Some tweaks are necessary to get a realistic background, since you may need to change the background's bitmp, pitch, bank and/or heading. This method is much faster than creating backgrounds from scratch. Documentation for each generator varies and it would be a good idea to read it before using.

Skyboxes

A recent addition to the Source code project, skyboxes allow users to create a skybox model and place it around the field of play much like the background bitmaps. They are rendered in addition to the background nebulas, so be sure to include either a skybox or nebula bitmaps, but not both. To create a skybox, read the Skybox Option page.