Help to make a basic mission please

[Mo74]

Hello all,

 

I have been playing around in the editor for a while and would really like to make some basic scenarios, but have come up a bit of a brick wall in my understanding of it.

 

I am hoping that someone could please summarise the steps needed for this just to get me (literally!) off the ground.

 

I know this is a big ask, but please don''t think I've haven't tried, I've read several PDF guides and watched editor basics but to little avail (it usually ends up with me flying around on my own).

 

The basic mission I would like to make is for me and a wingman in an IL2 to take off and head off for a flight over Stalingrad (flying from the east towards west) and land back again following waypoints - from the opposite direction (flying east) I would like a 109 to take off and also head off on a flight over Stalingrad and then land back again. If a dogfight happens over the city all well and good. 

 

I am okay at inserting ground object templates and adding the planes into the map, the issues have been getting my wingman to take off and follow me on the flight path, and for the 109 to even take off. I appreciate it is difficult for you to know what I've done wrong without posting a file or screenshot but I think I may have lost the one I had been working on.

 

Hence me asking if someone could summarise the steps needed to create the above mission. I know the editor is powerful but complex as a result so I appreciate even creating simple things require a certain number of steps. i also appreciate many of you who have 'cracked' the editor workflow probably did it with my less guidance than I now have available!

 

If i can grasp these basics and have fun by at least getting flights off and back on the ground I can then try to learn things beyond that.

 

Many thanks for any help,

Mo.

 

 

[Gambit21]

There are MANY missions and groups available here for you to download and look at, not to mention posts to search out. JimTM has posted a manual with sample missions.

 

I can’t speak for everyone but I don’t have the time nor do I see the point in typing a detailed description of something so well documented and easy to reference here.

[jollyjack]

Jim_TM's manual is a god (?) sent tool ...

[Mo74]

Hi there again,

 

Many thanks for you replies, reading you loud and clear on doing some more reading.

 

Can I ask: how long did it take for you to get a grasp on the editor, it seems like it's the kind of thing that eventually clicks in your mind.

 

Thank you,

 

Mo.

[Jaegermeister]

1 hour ago, Mo74 said:

Can I ask: how long did it take for you to get a grasp on the editor, it seems like it's the kind of thing that eventually clicks in your mind.

 

I know you weren't asking me, but I'll give you my answer.

 

Figuring out the logic (there is a reason behind it being referred to as that) happens one MCU at a time. There is no substitute for actually connecting it together and finding out how it works in game. I would estimate 6 months to get it working fairly well, and make passable missions. A year to be competent and maybe 2 years or more to really understand it, but still maybe not have everything figured out.

 

Maybe I'm just slow, but I also work with it a lot and it is a huge amount of information to process. One mission might have easily hundreds of interacting MCUs and objects.

 

I think many people have a hard time understanding certain parts of it, like activating triggers in a way that actually works, or timing things to work in an order that makes sense from the player point of view.

 

With the exception of maybe 2 people here, (G21/J_M) every mission I have seen made by another mission maker is a jumble of interconnected and overlapping spiderwebs that is almost impossible to sort out, decipher and keep track of. If you can keep everything neat, organized and grouped together in a sensible way, it will be much easier to improve your skills and fine tune your mission.

 

 

 

12 hours ago, Gambit21 said:

I can’t speak for everyone but I don’t have the time nor do I see the point in typing a detailed description of something so well documented and easy to reference here.

 

Yeah, that's why there were no answers for a couple of days. I read the post but don't have time to go over well documented procedures

Edited July 16, 2020 by Jaegermeister

[Thad]

Salutations,

 

I learned the basics of mission building going through all of the examples presented in the Guide below. 

 

You will learn by doing. It took me a week or so to become comfortable with the basics. That's with many hours a day in the guide.  

 

Prangsters Mission Building Guide

Edited July 16, 2020 by Thad

[IckyATLAS]

Let's be fair to the editor. If you follow some very well done tutorials like the series below from the same person in french, you can be very quick in doing some nice little missions. The second and third step will take much longer. One reason is that the editor is not documented at all by the developers. Without the work of Jim and his bible we would need to try and discover every object, parameter, MCU one by one. 

The series below helped me a lot, because it covers many aspects in a logical order.  But there are others.

Speaking five languages gives me a lot of freedom to choose tutorials. Unfortunately I miss not being able to speak Russian.

 

Presentation of the Editor

 

 

Creating a full mission from begin to end

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMzPVkppV_U

 

Vehicle convoys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEbp7xuOfDw

 

Manage an artillery attack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6lIzfPqlwA

 

How to use the complex trigger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jB7vmE1xJ0

 

Creating a dive bombing mission

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsF5Bltv01Q

 

Command behavior

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gndv1_vpl4I

 

Image and sound effects

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3ZOcTwM5V8

 

In a few hours you can create a simple basic mission. This can be somewhat treacherous, because it appears very easy.

This Editor has an immense power in terms of building complex scenarios. Mastering the editor as such is one important thing, but to build complex scenarios you need also to master organizing the mission tree, creating group libraries that you can reuse, and develop your work methods.

Creating a scripted campaign means also creating a first mission of the campaign on which you build the others by chronological and events evolution.

Designing the first Mission, and how it is built will have an enormous impact on development and testing time later with the coming missions.

That level af expertise needs depending on how much time you can spend on it at least one year or more.

 

 

Edited July 16, 2020 by IckyATLAS

[Sketch]

I think the message we're trying to push to you, and every other future mission designer, is to go ahead and build stuff and fail. There's nothing wrong with failing a bunch until you get the hang of things.

Writing code is about solving problems, not following a step by step guide until it looks exactly like someone else's code. There's hundreds of ways to solve problems, and some of those ways are terrible!!! But that's a-okay! Think of it like a coloring book. The boring books, in my opinion, are the ones that have numbers for each color. Red = 1, Blue = 2, etc etc. The best books are the ones where I can color any color I want... even outside the lines if I want. 

 

To summarize, don't worry about trying to make something as cool as @Gambit's campaign, or @Alonzo's multiplayer Combat Box missions, or @JimTM's great groups for common events in the game - right out the gate. It will not happen, and will most likely make you want to quit as a mission designer. Even I started and failed over and over. Take a look at this thread to see how confused I was.
 

 

Like the guys are asking you to do, I spent a lot of time looking at other's work and ripping it apart. I read @JimTM's manual and Prangster's guide too. I spent a lot of time learning. After four years of mission building and learning; do I know everything? Heckn' no! But I do feel pretty confident enough to help others out, critic other's mission for performance gains, argue with the Combat Box design team (Alonzo, myself, and the CB patrons) about making great missions, and I've help make some pretty cool single player and multiplayer missions too. I'm sure I can speak for the gang above; we want the same thing for you guys. Go forth and fail until you're not failing anymore!

 

With that all said, here's how I can help you and any other future mission designers - make something to the best of your abilities and knowledge, and if it's still not working out for you; give us the mission files, explain the issue you're having, and what you'd like to have happen instead. I, or probably the five guys that just posted above me, can help you out with that single issue. 

 

 

Edited July 16, 2020 by Sketch

[IckyATLAS]

Just now, Sketch said:

I think the message we're trying to push to you, and every other future mission designer, is to go ahead and build stuff and fail. There's nothing wrong with failing a bunch until you get the hang of things.

Writing code is about solving problems, not following a step by step guide until it looks exactly like someone else's code. There's hundreds of ways to solve problems, and some of those ways are terrible!!! But that's a-okay! Think of it like a coloring book. The boring books, in my opinion, are the ones that have numbers for each color. Red = 1, Blue = 2, etc etc. The best books are the ones where I can color any color I want... even outside the lines if I want. 

 

To summarize, don't worry about trying to make something as cool as @Gambit's campaign, or @Alonzo's multiplayer Combat Box missions, or @JimTM's great groups for common events in the game - right out the gate. It will not happen, and will most likely make you want to quit as a mission designer. Even I started and failed over and over. Take a look at this thread to see how confused I was.
 

 

Like the guys are asking you to do, I spent a lot of time looking at other's work and ripping it apart. I read @JimTM's manual and Prangster's guide too. I spent a lot of time learning. After four years of mission building and learning; do I know everything? Heckn' no! But I do feel pretty confident enough to help others out, critic other's mission for performance gains, argue with the Combat Box design team (Alonzo, myself, and the CB patrons) about making great missions, and I've help make some pretty cool single player and multiplayer missions too. I'm sure I can speak for the gang above, but we want the same thing for you guys. Go forth and fail until you're not failing anymore!

 

With that all said, here's how I can help you and any other future mission designers - make something to the best of your abilities and knowledge, and if it's still not working out for you; give us the mission files, explain the issue you're having, and what you'd like to have happen instead. I, or probably the five guys that just posted above me, can help you out with that single issue. 

 

 

One important element that Sketch highlights, is that even with all the information, you will need to learn by doing, that means failing, redoing, failing and so on, until you learn many things about the hidden behaviors of the editor that are mentioned nowhere, because they will happen specifically during the particular combination of elements that will be unique to your mission.

 

[JimTM]

22 minutes ago, IckyATLAS said:

...One reason is that the editor is not documented at all by the developers. Without the work of Jim and his bible we would need to try and discover every object, parameter, MCU one by one. 

...

 

Note that the developers did document the Rise of Flight editor, which is the basis for the BoX editor. I used that along with a lot of other resources (including every single BoX editor forum thread) to create my manual.

 

There are lots of useful resources under "Mission Editor and Multiplayer Server Guides" in the IL-2 Resources post.

Edited July 16, 2020 by JimTM

[Alonzo]

I tried to skip the early parts of JimTM's manual and "just get to the good stuff." That turned out to be an exercise in frustration; I ended up learning a lot faster by carefully reading the whole thing page by page, looking at a concept, exercising it a bit in the editor, and then moving onto the next thing.

 

Something that's very frustrating is that the game refuses to run at the same time as the editor, so your "edit, see if it worked" cycle is very long. The way I get this to work is by making a mission, running the game in single player to load the mission, pause once the mission is running, then open the editor. Usually that works and enables you to "save in editor ... restart mission in game" to see if your change had the desired effect. People advise against this but the worst I've had is graphical glitches.

 

If you think about your workflow and try to get faster feedback, that's going to help you a lot. These days I'm all cocky and just made changes and push them live, but we have a fairly forgiving community on CB and it mostly works out ok. Also I change log everything so people know what's up. Also also, we use Subversion (yeah, retro I know) to version control everything, so we can always go back to a "previously working" map. You can get away with zipping up your working folder or something each time you get a working map.

[Jaegermeister]

On 7/14/2020 at 5:54 AM, Mo74 said:

The basic mission I would like to make is for me and a wingman in an IL2 to take off and head off for a flight over Stalingrad (flying from the east towards west) and land back again following waypoints - from the opposite direction (flying east) I would like a 109 to take off and also head off on a flight over Stalingrad and then land back again. If a dogfight happens over the city all well and good. 

 

OK, so to the OP, @Mo74

 

Here is the mission you asked for. It took me just about 1 hour to make, starting from scratch. The first 15 minutes was importing the map objects and scenery. Test it, because like Alonzo mentioned, I have not. I'm sure you will find a few things wrong, so open it in the ME, use the Mission Tree on the left to to open the groups and look at how the logic connects. Figure out what might be wrong and fix it. Tear it apart, copy it, maybe even learn from it.

 

Just unzip it to your desktop and place all the files in one of your mission folders under the game directory.

 

If it works, put some scenery in it and you are welcome to use the icons, flight paths, waypoints, and whatever other groups you will find useful for a basic mission.

 

Let us know how that goes... 

 

   

IL2 Stalingrad Mission.zip

[Mo74]

Good morning all,

 

Thank you so much to everyone who has replied, I really appreciate it - especially massively to Mr Jaegermeister of Roswell (really?!) for doing the mission. Yes, I appreciate asking questions is a bit like a novice looking at Photoshop, where there are 99 ways to skin a cat, and there can be many paths to the same goal, some more elegant than others.

I will now go away and and load up Mr Jaegermeister's mission and peer into the exposed, radioactive core of the mission editor - like most I will have a play with this once free of the work commitments and come back with any novice questions.

 

Thank you all to who replied!

Mo.

[IckyATLAS]

14 hours ago, JimTM said:

 

Note that the developers did document the Rise of Flight editor, which is the basis for the BoX editor. I used that along with a lot of other resources (including every single BoX editor forum thread) to create my manual.

 

There are lots of useful resources under "Mission Editor and Multiplayer Server Guides" in the IL-2 Resources post.

Thank's Jim. That's interesting, i did not know that. I will surely now give a deep inside look to that manual. 

[Jaegermeister]

6 hours ago, Mo74 said:

Thank you so much to everyone who has replied, I really appreciate it - especially massively to Mr Jaegermeister of Roswell (really?!) for doing the mission. Yes, I appreciate asking questions is a bit like a novice looking at Photoshop, where there are 99 ways to skin a cat, and there can be many paths to the same goal, some more elegant than others.

I will now go away and and load up Mr Jaegermeister's mission and peer into the exposed, radioactive core of the mission editor - like most I will have a play with this once free of the work commitments and come back with any novice questions.

 

Yes, actually... I live in Roswell, Georgia just outside of Atlanta. It's funny that after I put that up under my Avatar, lots of people started putting things like Mars, The Moon, etc. on their profile. I never meant to imply a New Mexico, UFO reference but whatever. It seems appropriate now. 

 

There are plenty of ways to do most of these things, but some work better than others. When you look at the mission logic, if you don't understand why something is where it is, look it up in JimTM's manual which has a convenient clickable shortcut table of contents, and read the section referencing that particular MCU or action. That was the quickest way for me to learn the logic by seeing how it actually connects in the ME.

 

Then feel free to ask questions. We were all there once.