Is there an editor available for changing the way ships look, or adding ships to the game?

No.  Specifically, John Hanton notes that neither Volition's plug-in
for 3D Studio Max nor the BSPGEN utility are available.  A ship editor
is not likely to be released soon, as the ships were built using a
third party's proprietary 3D modeling software.

Can I get the program used to decrypt the ship and weapons statistics?

No.  Volition has asked that this not be made public, presumably to
prevent cheating in multiplayer games.

Yikes! My mission got corrupted! Did FRED by any chance save a copy?

Yes, you're in luck.  Check for files with names of the form *.bak or
Backup.00* in your missions directory.  By renaming these to .fsm
files, you can recover your lost data.

Where can I learn more?

If you've gotten this far, you know more about FRED than most people. To find out more, practice, experiment, and take apart other missions that you find. To look for missions, check the various web sites in the FreeSpace Webring, particularly Descent Chronicles. You can discuss things with other helpful FRED users on the FreeSpace Developer List.

Can I link to or mirror this document?

Sure!

It takes an awfully long time to test my missions. What can I do to speed this process up?

Set the difficulty level to very easy until the mission is mostly done. This way, you'll be able to test events and such without worrying about getting killed. Alternately, you can temporarily make your ship invulnerable in the Ships editor.

If you're dealing with waypoint paths and the like, remember that you can change the time scale in the mission. (Use F1 in flight to find your keys for this.) This will cut down on waiting.

How do I get a ship to warp out after if completes a waypoint path?

First, make sure you're giving the initial order "waypoints once" instead of "waypoints". Then, for the departure cue in the Ships editor, use a sexp like

are-waypoints-done-delay

  This ship

  Waypoint path 1

  0

How can I make my own .wav files?

You'll need a microphone and a sound card, of course. Most sound cards come with software for creating .wav files; I have a SoundBlaster AWE64, and use the Wave Studio program.

Sound files can get very large if you use the highest quality record settings. You can get good quality without huge files using 11,025 Hz, mono, and 16 bit.

Sound files add greatly to the player's experience, especially for in-flight messages which might otherwise be missed. Still, since they're so large, it's best to keep them in a separate file so that those with slower connections can download just the .fsm file.

If you don't have the hardware to make sound files, a reasonable compromise is to use some small .wav file of a beep or other signal, to alert the player that a mission-specific message has been sent.

How can I get a convoy of ships to stay together?

Unfortunately, there is no general way to do this. The best option available is forming the bigger ships into a wing and giving the fighters and bombers initial orders to guard them.

How do I grant medals?

You can only do this in campaigns, and you have to cheat a bit to do it. Make an event which goes off when whatever merits the medal occurs. Then, close FRED and open the .fsm file with a text editor (such as wordpad or Emacs). Change the effect of the event to grant-medal.

Do you speak German? Do you know of any German FreeSpace sites?

No, sorry.

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