> Anyone been messing around with these mission files besides me?

I haven't gotten to this yet because (as you can probably tell from other threads) I am working on other things currently.

I hope other people are, like you, working on this, because adding more missions and mission variety would be WONDERFUL.

I miss the huge, epic battles from SP where you had to fight hordes of ships, kill battleships and gunboats, etc. So far, no MP mission has delivered that.

bump because this is pretty important imho

I'm working on this myself, however I'm currently focused on figuring out how to modify random encounters (mainly trying to get some random encounters with cap ships.)

The mission structure itself seems very complex, and in the single player missions there are even custom 'pilots', and AI state trees. In order to add missions (at least sophisticated ones) it looks like there's going to be a lot of different files that need modifying, so I decided to start a little smaller with the random encounters to figure out the spawning commands and zones.

While I haven't had any luck spawning large ships in an encounter, I have been able to create a set piece battle involving destroyable battleships (that shoot back) with defending fighters, but there's still some issues remaining. This isn't a mission however, in that the battleship and its defenders are -always- there, but it's a start. Once I resolve some remaining quirks I'll post a tutorial.

EDIT: credit for figuring out how to add destroyable capships goes to Marodeur.

later...sb

'I know a song, would you like to hear it?...Dai-sy...dai-sy...'

Edited by - strangelove on 11-03-2003 00:59:14

Oh man..... PLEASE tell us how you did that.

I am seriously hankering for some HUGE epic battles.

I want to make some battles with capital ships with OBSCENE amounts of hit points and tons of escort fighters. I think they would make for an awesome multiplayer battle.

Ok heres an update on what i have been up to.

Seems i was wrong in saying the mission ships/stations were in the solararch.ini, thats specifically for stationary ships/stations. No matter what i tried, i could not get a loaded battleship, mobile/stationary.

What i have found is were all the mission generated stuff is, here is a description of files

data\missions\mbases.ini <---- this is where alot of random missions from npcs are, also you can change the number of missions you get from the bases, but every time i uncompress the file, i cant get any missions. Someone else try to uncompress and see if they can get missions, im guessing we might need to recompress it after we make the changes. Not sure.

data\missions\faction_prop.ini <---- this tells what kind of ships the faction you attack on your missions have. They are references for npcships. Also the formation they will use.

data\missions\empathy.ini <---- faction rating modifier for generated missions

data\missions\npcships.ini <--- This is where all the mission ships are stored, you can change what you want to fight out there. Ive tried adding or changing a ship to be a cruiser or battleship class, but the game wont accept it, and wont let me take missions against that faction. I can replace ships with any other ships though as long as i tell it its a fighter class. I have replaced fighters with cap ships in the missions (they were armed and moblie)

data\missions\shipclasses.ini <--- self explanitory, been messing around with it, but havent really found anything of interest yet.

data\missions\formations.ini <--- this shows how many ships you will fight and how far apart they are for each formation.

Theres more files in there, but these look like alot of what i want to get into here. I think the vignetteparams relate to the rest of this as far as telling how many waves you fight. The only thing i still cant figure out is how you can add more than one type of ship class you can fight in a mission, if that can be accomplished, then we can have our epic battles involving cap ships, different kinds of fighters, etc.

Well back to work.

Thanks for the update troop5! It sounds like you are progressively uncovering more and more great information.

This is definitely one of the "killer" mod areas that a ton of people are drooling over. It is pretty clear that almost every FL player wants MORE mission variety in the game.

I am personally hoping for huge, epic missions where you have to take on massive fleets of fighters, gunboats, and even a few battleships/capital ships. These would be particularly exciting for MP.

If we can figure out how to create some other mission types as well, like cargo escort missions and such, I think there will be a lot of very happy people.

I hope the DA folks are watching these forums and decide to throw us a bone soon. The "word" is getting out that FL's missions are very limited, and I fear this will affect sales. If the modding community can "fix" this problem soon, that could really re-assure a lot of potential customers.

I'm not sure we'll be able to add whole new mission types (such as escort missions), unless we find some residual scripts laying around that implement the base mission type. Unfortunately, the scripts that seem to run the missions (the .thn files) appear to be written in a modified form of Lua Script 2, so without some help from DA, we may be stuck there. If we can rip this format apart, we could add custom missions with cool camera work and everything, as all the camera paths and such appear to be defined in these files, but that's some serious work.

I'm down with the flu right now so I won't be much help here for a couple of days...but I will put together a tutorial on adding ships with defense zones when I'm feeling a bit better.

If you want to take a stab at this yourself, there's a post entitled 'Was anyone able to find out where the "Archetypes" are listed ?' that covers adding a destroyable battleship with loadout. The defense zone is a bit more work, but if you look through the system file for Liberty, you'll see how zones are setup.

later...sb

'I know a song, would you like to hear it?...Dai-sy...dai-sy...'

I can't believe they didn't make any random escort or cargo missions. I presume that they were planned but for some reason couldn't be made to work correctly and were dropped. Well, nothing is perfect I guess. At least the game is stable, first space sim I ever had that didn't crash constantly.

No, i can add mobile destroyable battleships to a mission, they just take the place of the fighters you would normally encounter.

I, too, have been working on breaking this beast of a random mission generator. I've been spending a lot of time staring at vignetteparams.ini and am thinking about making a tool to visually represent the different nodes in it so I can get a better idea of what it's doing. If i do, it will prolly be in Java or for a Unix platform in QT as I'm not overly familiar with MFC and all that.

There's also this idea i've been throwing around in my head. What if it's a DLL that handles loading in the data for random mission generation. I've been working on this, but I can't make any progress. If that is, in fact, where all the mission stuff is defined, we might be able to see if there are any other mission types that were implemented but not added to the random generation for one reason or another. It would make a lot of sense to put it all in a DLL b/c when they release a patch or whatever, all they have to do is replace that DLL and the mission generation files in order to add in new mission types... Unfortunately, I don't have a decompiler for win32 programs and can't get into the .dll files to see what functions are in there.

A question - I was looking through vignetteparams.ini and i see a lot of the nodes have a comment not_implemented. Perhaps there was more there at one time that was removed or something.

Edited by - imrahil on 21-03-2003 01:41:01

Edited by - imrahil on 21-03-2003 02:07:21

Yes alot of what happens regarding equipment, even mission properties is in the common.dll file. Even though its almost impossible to create new mission types it still might be possible to modify current types, but exactly where does it point out what wave of ships are used in a mission and is it possible to modify 2 different waves compossed of different ship classes. That might be in the dll also, or its in those script files .thn

We just wont know until we can decompile them into a modifiable form.

Hello there modders, I was hoping to learn how to add some random missions to the game and came here foolishly looking for a tutorial. Oh well, putting my dissapointment aside, I'd like to contribute what little I found out.
I'd suggest looking into offerbriberesources.dll , since it seems to be where the random missions text information is generated from.

Peace,
Johnny

vignetteparams.ini has a root node. Node_id 2 is the only node in the file which isn't used as a child node:

[DocumentationNode
node_id = 2
documentation = RANDOM_MISSION
child_node = 247

I'm going to write a script to turn vignetteparams.ini into psuedo-code, to see if it's any easier to understand when I don't have to jump around all over the file.

Well, after gruelling over writing a node tree walker, I've got a 9.5 MB text file showing the possible paths through vignetteparams.ini. Unfortunately, it hasn't helped shed any light on how the bloody thing actually works. I was hoping that when I collapsed identical node paths in branches I'd wind up with something that would be more structured (like a program,) and wouldn't have anywhere near as much redundancy.

I'm wondering how DA made this file in the first place. I was under the impression that it used to be a script, and was automatically converted to an INI. Only masochistic Choose Your Own Adventure authors would organize their nodes like this.

I suppose I could convert my outputted file into XML and use IE's XML viewer to expand and contract sections, making it easier to browse...