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Unify objectives language in public facing places#7391

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MjnMixael wants to merge 8 commits intoscp-fs2open:masterfrom
MjnMixael:unify-objectives-language
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Unify objectives language in public facing places#7391
MjnMixael wants to merge 8 commits intoscp-fs2open:masterfrom
MjnMixael:unify-objectives-language

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@MjnMixael MjnMixael commented Apr 20, 2026

In FRED and QtFRED I noticed that the Mission Goals dialogs use the terms "goals" and "objectives" interchangeably. It's not clear why and it can cause confusion because "goals" can also refer to AI Goals. The goal objective of this PR is to unify around a single term to minimize confusion, which aligns with one of my core goals objectives for QtFRED; making mission design more accessible.

With this PR in place we have

  • Directives: mini tasks given to the player during missions and shown on the HUD
  • Objectives: major tasks given to the player during the mission briefing, shown in the Objectives screen during missions
  • Goals: tasks given to AI ships to cause certain behaviors

This is almost exclusively a public facing change only; that is in editors, the Lua API, and the sexp names. Internal code such as enum & variable names, and file names should probably be changed at some point so that coder language matches user language, but that can come later and in smaller chunks. Doing that here would be an unnecessarily large PR.

This PR does add two API changes. First, there is a new ADE_INDEXER_DEPRECATED to match the existing versions of Func and Virtvar. I copied the methods from those directly. Second, there is a new path in missionsave.cpp that will use the old sexp string names in place of the new if we're saving in retail format. I was surprised this didn't exist before, so there may be other sexps that were renamed over the years that may benefit from this as well.

@MjnMixael MjnMixael added qtfred A feature or issue related to qtFred. fred A feature or issue related to the FReespace EDitor (FRED) labels Apr 20, 2026
@github-project-automation github-project-automation Bot moved this to Work In Progress (PRs) in qtFRED2 Apr 20, 2026
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fred A feature or issue related to the FReespace EDitor (FRED) qtfred A feature or issue related to qtFred.

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