General hints (FRED)

General hints for FREDing

• Use the Y-axis and rotate most of your ships on one or more of the axes to give a more realistic feeling
  
• Use the Selection Lock if you have selected all the ships you want to rotate/move. This will make it sure you do not select an unwanted craft by chance.
  
• If you want a directive to appear only after a specified thing happens, you can use the event chaining in the following way:
  

Put all the conditionals to one event. Chain the next event(which is the actual directive) to the previous event with a delay of at least 1 second.
This will make it sure the event will not appear sooner then desired. This is especially useful if you want Command to order the desctruction/capture/inspection of a ship/subsystem.

• Use the designer's notes field to note down changes you want to do later.
  
• Learning and using Keyboard shortcuts makes your life easier.
  
• If you do not want a ship to open fire, simply use the turret-lock-all SEXP instead of disarming all the turrets manually.
  
• If you want to use a special, non-docking support ship, you have to make changes in the tables. You cannot simply place a Support ship and disallow all player orders.
  
• Always remove player orders for ship classes other than fighters or bombers. By default, the player can give orders to transports, freighers, cruisers etc. which can often deteriorate the mission. If you give the 'Attack my ship' order to a transport that is supposed to board and capture an other ship, it will not follow its default orders until the player-given orders are accomplished.
  
• If you do not want a ship destroyed, but you want to make its subsystems destroyable, use the ship-guardian SEXP!
• Increasing/decreasing the skill level of single turrets also affect the rate of fire. It is advised to increase the level of sentry guns by at least one rank
  
• Pressing TAB while having multiple ships selected changes the central point of rotation. If you start rotating, that ship will be the center of the circle your ships will be rotated around. The same is true for moving, the selected 'cetral' ship will be moving with the cursor.
  
• If you get lost on the grid, press SHIFT-Z. Or, zoom on any of the ships by selecting the fighter in the Selection Menu(H) and pressing ALT-Z
  
• Use the Selection Mode to make sure you will not make any changes in rotation/moves of ships unintentionally.
  
• Diversify the orders of wingmen by using the add-goal SEXP
  
• Diversify the mission by using variables. [Variables] can be used for randomising.

=See also=
Typical mistakes