All this talk about "Campaigns"

posted on July 24th, 2009, 7:30 am

Recently it seems threads regarded campaigns for FO have been on the rise. I can't claim to know if the FO team will eventually make a campaign for this game, but it certainly seems like it's planned far down the road. While offering ideas and whatnot is fun and all, what I am really curious about more then anything is 'how the freaking heck are they going to even construct the missions?' I've been searching for ages for a program that can edit all the scripts used to trigger events such as spawning ships, causing a particular .wav file to play for narrative, move the camera around for cinematics, or create animated sprite overlays like in A1. I am really curious to know, FO team, if you know how you'll create such things for a campaign and if so what programs will be used to do such an event? Such knowledge would be the biggest contribution to the A2 modding community since the game was released in my personal opinion, and you would have my undying gratitude (and I'm sure countless other modders) as well if such knowledge was made public.

posted on July 24th, 2009, 8:05 am

I remember having a good talk with Optec about this and campaigns are very very very far away....

Basially he said to create missions they would have to create their own set of tools, but before they could even start creating their own set of tools they would need to reverse engineer the scripts themselves and some other files to see how Armada does it and in short, said they have more important things to work on...

posted on July 24th, 2009, 9:33 am

What about your attempt at something similar mark? How does it work, without giving away your secret?

posted on July 24th, 2009, 11:24 am

i dont mind giving away my secret if it helps the community, especially as i have limited time at the moment.

I used assault maps to give precise starting units to each faction, so every campaign map would have to be two human players vs each other to an extent as the AI doesnt deal well with being given set units, just sorta sits and does nothing unless you attack it....

then i used a modified warp in to make specific map events happens when i wanted them to...

i even had a way to give each human player their own little naration...

posted on July 24th, 2009, 11:47 am

yep, single player campaigns (and the tools to make them) are on todo, but at the moment not on high proprity

[Megadroid]

posted on July 24th, 2009, 1:16 pm

Last edited by Megadroid on July 24th, 2009, 1:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I've doing some stuff on campaign modding at the minute. Right now I'm sharing control of the first tutorial mission with an AI player, so both myself and the computer can build things, give orders and such. I still have a lot to figure out though.

Edit - I should have also mentioned that the AIP gets loaded at runtime, so it should be possible to switch around between AIPs to get a more advanced AI.

posted on July 24th, 2009, 1:44 pm

PM sent to you Megadroid

posted on July 25th, 2009, 4:35 am

yep, single player campaigns (and the tools to make them) are on todo, but at the moment not on high proprity

Thank you for confirming this. You guys have never let your fans down and I look forward to seeing how this all comes out down the road.