Or Mission Editor if you prefer.... In Janes FA-18 it was a mission builder, and Wags produced that one also. Since this is the ME/MB I am most familiar with, it is the context for my questions - which are:

1. Why do stationary objects, or structures as they are called, not shoot at me? If I place an SA-10 site as a structure it does nothing. If I place one as a ground unit, that may or may not have waypoints, it blows me to bits in no time. Is that how it is in this sim? Are these structures just that, nothing more than structures?

2. Do these campaigns have damage tracking? For stationary units/structures? For ships? For moving ground units? Need to test this, haven't done it just yet.

2. I see the value in the stages/ladders concept of this campaign builder, this is very very cool. However, is there a way to insert 'intro missions' into the beginning of the campaign, so that these are one-off missions which are never played again?

3. I understand that the score of the mission determines if we drop down a stage or move up a stage or remain in the same stage. How does the mission score then determine which missions we get within that stage? Say our player scores a 55, and he moves to the next stage. Which mission will be campaign assign him them? Will it look then for only those missions with a range that includes 55? So if I have a mission with a range of 60-100, our player would not be assigned that mission.... correct?

And yes I have read the GUI manual several times, so please let me know if I have missed something.

Any savvy mission/campaign builders want to give me some gouge?

Ripcord

Its a static object. Basically an empty shell for display only. For a S-300 to be active you need at least 1 launcher, a search radar, and a tracking radar in a single group. Static objects are indicated by a pushpin, while everything else that is "live" has their own icons. Also keep in mind major sam sites simply aren't mobile. I guess they never thought about how to tow one of these sites in the game. The only ones that are must be self propelled. HAWK, Patriot, and S-300 are the only ones that can't really move. There isn't much of a reason to move a S-300 or Patriot unless you have a scenario lasting a really long period of time. Only a few of the mobile sams can fire while moving.


Nothing like that is tracked between missions. Technically we can't even track that within a mission. Units are either alive, damaged, or dead. It is impossible to know how damaged they are however.

I think it is possible to make a "cutscene" but I honestly don't know how. Most of my focus on mission building has been for online scenarios.



Don't quote me on this, but I think each stage acts as a random selection. So if you are on stage 2, and stage 2 has 5 missions in it, When you replay the stage there is a 20% chance that you get the same mission. Bug again, I never played much with the campaign system so I could be wrong.

Hey mate, first of all thanks for the response.

Pretty disappointed that nothing gets tracked from mission to mission in the campaign builder. I was in the process of testing that out myself last night.

I mean if you bomb a SAM site in mission one, and only one launcher remains, what you expect to see in the following mission? A fully operation complete SAM site, with all the radars and launchers working? Or just that one launcher that survived your previous attack?

What about runways, bridges, train tracks, etc.? If you bomb those, are they immediately reparied and functioning like new the very next mission?

I think understanding this part of it is the most important aspect to setting up a mission template for building missions to go into a campaign.

Ripcord

Well bloody hell, man, you are right. There is no damage tracking in this thing.

Go blow up a warehouse or a garage with a mk-82 and it will be there standing unscathed in the next mission. Can that be? Am I doing this wrong somehow?

Unfreakingbelieveable.

How do you work around that if you are building a proper campaign? Like, nobody is ever going to bomb any stationary structures ever? Why put them in the game then?

Ripcord

Since this is a question thread I'll post mine here:

I've been generating some 'Navy' standalone missions with the editor, and so far it's been working great.

Here's the problem:

When I go into the file folders from outside of the game, my mission files don't show up. Scared myself at first (thought I'd lost them somehow), but when I went back into the game there they were and working fine.

Custom screenshots and wav files I've put in are there, but user-created mission files aren't showing up for some reason. Anyone able to explain this? It's gonna be hard to distribute user-made missions if you can't go copy them out of the folder to zip up and upload to folks. The game's own mission files show up fine when you access the folders- it's just my stuff that seems to be hidden somehow.

@jmarso That is very very weird. Are you sure they aren't hidden somehow? Maybe windows doesn't like displaying the .miz filetype. Try doing a windows search of the mission you made, it might turn up...

@Ripcord.

yeah. It blows. How hard would it be to write a log file showing that a specific world object was dead and to load said file on mission load? Within the current system its basically impossible to track multiple entities. I suppose its possible to keep track of a few mission generated groups, but the method is less than ideal.

Tried the file search right off the bat, and my system apparently isn't 'seeing' .miz files at all on a search, although when I open the folders the default mission files are there.

I'm running Windows 7- don't know if that has anything to do with it but I don't see why it would.

Here's another question: is there a 'water' mod that gives you an ocean surface that doesn't look like glass?

The missions should be saved under:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Eagle Dynamics\LockOn Flaming Cliffs 2\Missions

If your search function is finding them, well sorry man. Must be gone. I also run Win 7 so I kinda doubt that is it. But if you can open them in game (did I understand you correctly), then save the mission under some other name, or maybe in another folder.

Don't know about a water mod, mate, why don't you start a new thread for mods? We'll keep this thread for unlocking the inner workings of the mission editor.

Thanks

Ripcord

Check some of these responses that I got over at the DCS forum about the campaign engine :

This part in particular is key:

The main limitations you have one planning/building your campaign are:

* Scores only track to the next stage, and not beyond. This makes it quite difficult to do branching campaigns, but it can be done by being careful with the scores.
* The score is the ONLY way to pass any kind of state information between stages. But, you do have 49 ways of saying "the player won" and 49 ways of saying "the player lost".
* 50 points is a magical number: the only way to prevent the player moving forward a stage without moving backwards. However, it's also annoying: you completely lose the one piece of state information you previously had if the player ends a mission with 50 points.

Ripcord