Mission Builders Workshop 1 : The Basics

REGISTER HERE FOR THIS WORKSHOP

Objective: Completion of this course will give the student a template mission to be used in future missions.
Audience: Anyone interested in making missions. With a focus on MP missions like those found here on The Fighting 99th.
Topics to be demonstrated:

1) Mission Editor Basics
a. Brief Overview of each major section of the ME.
b. Trigger Zones & Triggers – What are they? How to use them?
c. Static vs Fortification
d. Naming Conventions – Group Name vs Pilot Name.
e. Flags
2) Scripting
a. MIST
b. CTLD
c. AFAC
d. Auto Respawn
e. Dynamic Unit Creation On Demand
f. Flak
3) Design Considerations (my personal thoughts)
a. Mission Objectives
b. Flight Times
c. MP Mission Performance

Demonstration will be performed by TracerFacer through a TeamViewer Meeting Conference. All students must have TeamViewer Installed prior to this course.

www.teamviewer.com/en/

Meeting Number will be given out at the start of the course. Be in TeamSpeak and ready to go at the start time. If you need help getting TeamViewer setup let me know.

Recommend students with two monitors repeat my clicks in their ME’s in real time.

"EVENT TIME IS 2000 CST"

right in the description of the event.

Thanks to those who showed. I even learned a few new things myself! Overall pretty successful online meeting!

If you all thought that was worth your time and would like to do it again / and or take it a bit deeper let me know.

For the most part.. the custom scripting that I have done is pretty simple. Score counting / display, or counting the number of blue/red units in a zone to display to the players.. etc...some of my code snippets/ideas actually made it into the CTLD script around counting cargo in a zone. You have to dig into the CTLD script to find these functions but they are there and usable.

Creating lots of triggers can be tedious for sure. But they do work, and anyone can understand them. If you have a method to your madness when creating / cloning triggers, it's not that bad really.

I've started looking into MOOSE and I think this is more along the lines of what you were thinking Pyro.
flightcontrol-master.github.io/MOOSE/

Much more complicated and if you've never done any coding, probably a steep learning curve. But probably a lot more powerful. And probably not something we could cover in an hour

If the moose docs seemed overwhelming, the DCS wiki will have a similar effect on you.

Lua Triggering
en.wiki.eagle.ru/wiki/Simulator_Scriptin....2.1/Part_1#triggerh

That is a gap not easily bridged. A trigger is either in the ME or it's in a LUA script. If its' in the ME, setting the conditions are MUCH easier.. especially if you have multiple conditions that must be met. I have some triggers that look like:

CONDITION
Unit 1 In zone
Unit 1 above alt
Unit 1 below speed
OR
Unit 2 In zone
Unit 2 above alt
Unit 2 below speed
OR
Unit 3 In zone
Unit 3 above alt
Unit 3 below speed

That would be a crazy trigger to type out in lua. There are 6 ANDs and 2 ORs there. for 1 trigger. You have to consider that the unit names that you add to triggers are selectable from dropdowns in the ME.. if you were writing every trigger by hand, the opportunity to fat finger and misspell something is at every keystroke. You will spend more time debugging then editing/creating.

It's easy to read and understand in the ME for the average person. A quick clone of the trigger, and a few changes and you move on to the next one.

I feel odd defending the kludgey ME, lol, but it is very simple. That simplicity gives the mission designer more time to make his mission, instead of spending time learning LUA programing. Even if you were an excellent LUA developer. I bet someone proficient in the ME could make that trigger quicker than the guy writing it out in code.

Could the guy writing it out in code do more interesting things with it? Probably. BlueFlag comes to mind. Shadough's Racing server also comes to mind. His missions are almost fully LUA based.

I think it comes down to using the right tool for the job at hand. If it can be kept simple, keep it simple and the ME is about as simple as you can get. It's like a swiss army knife of tools. All the tools kinda suck individually, but together you can make something useful out of it.

Moose has some very interesting features... imagine a scoring system that can keep track of who killed specially designated targets. The output of that scoring system is dumped into a csv file which can later be displayed on webpages or converted into database data that an be queried. Imagine the helo pilots having a 'score' where you can see that individual's contribution to the mission progress..instead of just the "kill" count on the DCS scoreboard, Moose provides a scoring framework where you can develope your own score system that all players can take part in..but like you said.. it can be overwhelming to try and learn if you don't have a LUA programing background.