XvT MISSIONS - THE NEXT STEP
Okay, so you can make a basic mission. It's playable, it works, but it lacks that certain something that the professional missions have. This course shows you the tricks that make XvT missions so much more fun and coherent. These include inflight messages, briefings, advanced mission goals and more.
At the end of each section, you will be prompted to make a mission or add to the mission what you have learnt during that lesson. By the end of the course you should have a mission which covers all the finer points of an XvT mission. The course is split into different lessons:
Lesson 1 - Flight Groups
In the Basic Mission Design course, you learnt how to create a FG and how to manipulate it to a limited extent. This lesson shows you what the rest of the buttons do.
Firstly, the Ship tab. If
you look below the craft selection box, you will see a series of
drop-boxes labelled Team, Player and Ship #. Team was covered in
the last course, so we'll move on to Player. Here, you simply
decide which player (in a multiplayer mission) flies in this FG.
Simple. Ship # allows you to choose which number ship in that
flight group the player flies in.
Next to it are two boxes labelled "Global Group" and
"Global Unit". These come in very handy when you want
multiple craft that have nothing to do with each other do the
same thing. They simply group each FG into a numbered unit, which
you can then use for things like mission goals. Simply select a
number in one of the boxes (or both, if the mission gets really
complicated) to allocate the FG to that group.
In the stats box, there are two Status menus. These hold special
values like 200% shields, half missiles, etc. Mix and match to
get the combination you want, or leave it for stock-standard
craft. You don't really need to worry about radio, since that
only matters for multi-player missions, but you can set it to the
right team if you want. Form (formation) is handy for the
strategically minded people. You can choose from over 30
different formations for your FG. Click "View Forms" to
see what each formation looks like. If you want, you can also
change the spacing. 6 is standard, but you can alter it for your
own needs.
"Appears in difficulty levels" is used when you want
to, for example, make the Hard setting a little harder by adding
extra FGs. Choose which level you want your FG to appear in. As a
side note, Cheat simply means Craft Collision is Off. There are
still no cheats for XvT that I know of...
Practical: Open up your basic practical mission. Make the player X-W Academy 3, give the FG 50% shields and charging, and put them in Stacked High formation. Make the GUNs appear only in medium or hard settings.
Next is the Options tab. As
its name suggests, everything here is completely optional and not
required for the mission to work. However, the whole point of
this course is to make the missions more fun, so we're looking at
it anyway. The CMD box looks important, but it isn't. It simply
tells XvT what to display when you target this ship. For example,
if the main goal of a mission was to destroy a PLT, then you
would put the PLT as "primary target" under Rebel. This
would mean that voice messages like "report on primary
target: their shields are out" would be heard during a
mission. Handy for situational awareness.
Optional ships is fairly obvious; choose what other craft the
player is allowed to fly. You can select all craft from a certain
faction (rebel/imperial), or you can choose your own. Make sure,
though, that the craft you choose can actually be flown by
players. These craft are: X-W, A-W, Y-W, Z-95, T/F, T/I, T/A,
T/B, GUN. No other craft can be chosen for people to fly in.
On the other side is the armament selection. This is all obvious,
simply choose what weapons the player can select from in the
Craft Selection screen in-game. Rebel craft, however, can not
have beam weapons. That is the only limitation on this.
Practical: Make the GUNs a primary target and FRG Home a mission critical craft. Allow the player to choose from A/W and Z-95 as well as X/W for Academy FG. Give Academy the option of using advanced missiles and proton torpedoes, as well as chaff and flare.
We covered just about everything in Arrival and Departure in the last course, so we'll go straight on to one of the more difficult sections: FG Goals. If this section is done improperly, then they can conflict with the Global Goals and screw up the mission. I only use them for bonus goals to avoid this, but it all depends on your style. They work essentially the same as any condition box, the exception being that the FG is already chosen for you. So, choose the quantity of the FG, then choose must/not or bonus must/not, then an action. You can assign an amount of points for this action being fulfilled, which is how bonus points are given in the LucasArts missions. Below all this is the User Strings box. This is where you give the condition a custom appearance in-game; for example, if the FG goal is to come and go, then you could say "FG Whatever must safely depart" in the Incomplete box, "FG Whatever departed safely" in the Success box, or "FG Whatever did not depart safely" in the Fail box. This makes the goals easier to understand for the player. An important note: when you're using the FG Goals section, make sure you don't repeat anything already stated in Global Goals. Try to use one or the other, or use FG Goals for bonus conditions.
Practical: Add another Imperial FG called CRV Duck (1 wave of 1 ship). It should arrive 20 seconds after GUN Mu is destroyed, and position it 2 kms from FRG Home's starting point in the opposite direction to the FRG's travel. Set it to any AI level. Add a FG Goal for it that gives the player 1000 bonus points for destroying it.
The last two sections are
short, and probably rarely used, but I'll cover them anyway.
Waypoints you already know: select the WPs you want to activate,
and give them co-ordinates. The Briefing co-ords are used
for...you guessed it, the Briefing map. Each team has a seperate
briefing place, but we will only be using one of them. To make it
easier in the briefings, you have to activate the Briefing line
that has the same number as the Rebel/NR team, then click the
button marked "Set to Start 1". This copies the data
from the Start 1 line into all the Briefing lines, which
automatically sets the Briefing map up. Nifty, eh?
The final part of this lesson is the Other section. This contains
stuff you won't usually use, and doesn't fit into a category. The
top box is Object alignment, which determines the angle of
objects (not craft). The more useful function here is "Jump
to Order 4", which allows a FG to automatically change
orders once a condition is met, say another FG is destroyed and
you want the selected FG to leave the area if that happens. The
last part is the unknowns. Leave them alone unless you know
EXACTLY what you're doing. They are generally completely useless.
Practical: Set up the Briefing map (using the WP page) exactly as it looks on the real map. Make both X-W Academy and FRG Home attack CRV Duck when it arrives.
Lesson 2 - Briefings
How convenient. We set up the Briefing map just before, making it easier and quicker to complete one of the harder aspects of XvTED. Now you've got to learn the rest of it...
It's not that hard, really.
It just takes a bit of time. We'll take a look at the buttons
along the top of the Briefing screen (to open it, click the
holographic sphere button at the top of the XvTED screen). The
first one opens X-Wing briefing files, which isn't really useful
unless you're converting them to XvT format. The second one saves
the current briefing to the .TIE file, unlike X-ED which makes a
separate briefing file (.BRF extension). The next two move the
highlighted instruction up or down the Instruction List, which I
will get to shortly. Try and guess what the little garbage can
icon does...that's right, it deletes the current instruction. The
two big arrows allow you to alternate between different briefings
for different teams. Generally, you will only use the Rebel team,
so make sure you check that you're creating the briefing for the
right team. The next few add instructions, and do the following
things (in order from left to right): Insert Stop Point; Insert
Move Map Instruction; Insert Zoom Instruction; Insert Briefing
Text Instruction; Insert FG Box Instruction; Delete All FG Boxes;
Insert Map Tag Instruction; Delete all Map Tags. Phew.
Now, to the tabs below. WYSIWYG is a simulation of what you will
actually see in the game. It shows the map, any boxes or tags,
and the briefing text beneath it all. The difference is, you can
drag items around the map to place them where you want them. The
controls along the side refer mainly to the map. The top two are
the Snap functions. These make items on the map "snap"
to the closest 0.1/0.2/0.5 of a kilometre. It makes it easier to
lines items up on the map. The "Seen By" box doesn't
really matter to us, but it may come in useful for your own
missions. It's self-explanatory anyway. So are "Total
Running Time", "Show Names" and "Pause at
Stop Points". The buttons down the bottom work like a VCR.
You've got play, rewind, fast forward, frame-by-frame, etc. The
slide bar allows you to position the map at an exact point in
time.
We'll skip the Instruction List for now, and go to the Strings tab. There are two types of strings: Map Tags and Briefing Text. The map tags will generally just be one or two words which say what that FG is, or the name of a planet, or whatever. The briefing text shows up underneath the map as it is playing and cycles through the strings that you've made. (String 0 is used for the XvTED heading. Don't use it for the briefing text.) The next tab is the most useful one. After making your briefing text, you can use the Auto-Brief section in the Accessories tab to make a simple briefing automatically. Put in how far apart you want the text to appear (I generally use 5-7 seconds), whether or not you want a FG to be boxed automatically (this isn't all that useful, so I don't use it much), if you want it to begin centred on a certain FG and at what zoom you want it to start at. After you've done all that, just click the "Make Briefing" button. If you've made an entire briefing, then realised it was for the wrong team (hey, it can happen), you can copy the whole thing to another team using the handy function located directly below the Auto-Brief. You can even set the start points to correspond with the briefing map, just like you did in the opposite order before. Now, to the Instruction List.
If you used Auto-Brief, you should have a few instructions here already. From here, you can insert your own instructions. Let's use a FG Box as an example. We want to box X-W Academy two seconds into the briefing. First, click the Insert FG Box button. You should have a new instruction called FG Box #1: X-W Academy. It will probably be placed at 0 seconds. Select it and look at the functions on the right. You can set what time and what increments you want to measure in, what instruction it is (there are multiple FG Box instructions to allow for up to 8 boxes), and which FG you want to box. It will probably be already on X-W Academy, so you can leave that. Set the Time Adjust Increment to 1 and move the Time box up to 40 (2 secs). Now, go to WYSIWYG. Press play. You should see the X-W icon be boxed 2 seconds into the briefing, plus your briefing text underneath. The same principle applies to Map Tags. Play around with all of the instructions. You will be able to make some very useful and neat-looking briefings once you figure out how it all works. Eventually, you may want to make your own briefings from scratch without using the Auto-Brief. It's up to you.
Practical: You've got a lot of freedom in this part. Create a briefing which accurately shows what you are supposed to do in the mission. Ensure you include at least one FG box, one map tag, and two briefing texts. Zoom and move instructions are recommended, but not required. Make sure all FGs are seen on the map and that it is made for the Rebel team.
Lesson 3 - Enhancements
This lesson shows you how you can add a bit of personality to the missions and make them a bit more customised. We'll start off with the messages. These are what show up at the top of the screen when you're playing. Sometimes they are accompanied with wav files, which REALLY adds a professional touch to a mission. Let's try making an example message. Go to the Message tab. This is located next to the Flight Groups tab. Click the New FG/Message icon. On the left is the message list, and on the right are the options. The top box on the right is where you insert the message. Type something, anything, whatever you think the flight leader would say at the start of the mission, like "Maintain patrol until the FRG Home arrives." Set it to a colour, presumably green since it was from a Rebel. You can leave the conditions box, since we want it to show up at the beginning of the mission. We also want it sent to the Rebel team, which is probably highlighted already. If no team is selected, the message will appear a dark grey and not appear in the mission itself when you're playing it.
Practical: Create at least 3 messages, at least 1 from each side (make the Rebel msgs green and the Imp msgs red). Use the conditions and delays. Wav files are not required, but if you're really obsessed with hearing your own voice and have a lot of spare time, feel free to include it. I'll probably add points for it.
Next, we'll look at the Global Goals section. If you use FG Goals instead of this, it doesn't matter, the basic principle applies. If you complete the mission, you automatically get 10000 points for it. However, you can assign points for completing individual goals. In Global Goals, all the goals get the same points, but you can assign different points for different goals if using FG Goals. As with FG Goals, you can also create custom strings for use in the Mission Goals popup in the game. It works the same as before: just interpret each condition in your own way, and give separate strings for each stage of a condition, e.g. Incomplete - "must be", Success - "has", Failure - "did not".
Practical: Create custom strings for both Primary and Prevent goals, and give the player 500 points for completing the Primary objective.
Lastly, we come to Teams. In this section, you can change the name of a team (like from Rebel to New Republic or Rebel Squadrons), set the Autolink IFF for the selected team, choose allied teams, and create success and failure messages. These work the same as messages, except their conditions are preset: they automatically come up depending on whether the mission was a success or a failure, the same as in TIE Fighter and the original X-Wing. This means you don't have to make them in the Messages section. The arrows down the bottom change the teams.
Practical: Change the player's team name to Rebel Squadrons, the enemy to Empire and give the player success and failure messages.