Basic Operations and Ship Functions in X-ED 2.62
This is designed to be an overview of the basic functions of X-ED. This covers only the technical details in putting a mission together. By the end of the course, you should be able to create a basical mission. The skills that gives a professional look will be further developed in "Advanced Mission Design using X-ED".
This course is not designed to be simply read, but rather it is split between learning concepts and ideas and then using the skills just covered. As such, the MBA recommends that you have X-ED open as you read through this course.
The course is broken up into the following lessons:
Lesson 1 - Adding
Ships and Flight Groups
Lesson 2 - Placing
Ships and Navigation
Lesson 3 - Giving
Orders
Lesson 4 - Arrival
and Departure
Lesson 5 - Mission
Objectives
Specifications for
missions
Lesson 1 - Adding Ships and Flight Groups
This is obviously the most critical component of every mission that you can possibly make. Without ships, there's no need for any of the other things you will learn about. While it is the other aspects that make a mission complete, it is the ships that provide the backbone. As such, this is a fairly lengthy lesson. Do not get disheartened by it's length! A lot of it is explanation of concepts that, while critical, are not difficult to understand, just time-consuming.
Fortunately, X-ED makes it easy to add ships. Start the program, select Create New Mission and press Ok. Now we have the default flight group, and it's set as the one holding the player craft. This is to ensure that all missions have at least one flight group that has a player craft. The player's craft is by default set as craft #1 of the Flight Group. If you want to change the player craft FG, just uncheck the "Player´s craft" box for the flight group you don't want, select the flight group you do want, and click "Player craft" again. This should change the player's craft to the new flight group If you want to change the player's craft number, just change the "Player pos:" box from "1" to "X", where "X" is the number of craft in the FG.
To add a ship, click on the button that looks like the Z-95 (it's the leftmost button in the third group of buttons at the top). This will add a new flight group to the mission file. To delete a flight group click on it and then click on the trash can icon (center button of the same group of buttons). The description of the flight group, in the "Craft" window goes as follows:
>1 x [1] X-W Unnamed
- The ">" character defines the flight group with the player's craft.
- The first number is the number of flight group "waves" there are. i.e.- If there are reinforcements that appear once all the ships in the flight group have been destroyed.
- The number in the brackets ("[ ]") is the number of craft in the flight group. i.e.- If the above had "[3]" it would mean that there are 3 ships in flight group "Unnamed".
- The ship abbreviation code defines the craft type. "X-W" defines X-Wings, "T/F" defines TIE Fighters, etc. These are more or less the same abbreviations that appear on the targeting screen in the game. You can change this by simply selecting the appropriate ship from the list. REMEMBER THAT THE PLAYER CAN ONLY FLY REBEL FIGHTERS.
- The color of the flight groups indicated their IFF (Identification-Friend/Foe). Green for Rebels, red for Imperials and blue for Neutrals.
- The flight group name. In our example, "Unnamed".
Now that you're familiar with what X-ED is telling you, let's work towards changing it around.Click on the flight group you want to edit (in this case, the only flight group).
With the name box (the box at the top on the right, it has the flight group's name in it) you can change the name of the Flight Group you have selected but remember that while you can technically type whatever you want, the targeting display (where this information will be shown) can only show so many characters, so the X-Wing of flight group "Jumpin Jess's Jumbalya Jamboree" will probably only show up as "Jumpin Jess" A good rule of thumb is to try and keep it under ten characters (meaning letters and spaces) whenever possible.One thing that you should know is that XED provides you with a list of names, but these are not the only names you can use. Just type in whatever name you want when the text is highlighted (in blue). While LucasArts had fairly strict naming conventions, not all flight groups have to be named after Greek letters or colors. For the most part though, it is a good idea as it gives the mission a more "realistic" feel.
On the craft box (the region on the far right in the middle) we have five attributes available. "Status", is used to subtract capabilities to the ship to make it fit in the mission, if you wanted Gunboats without concussion missiles or a capital ship with no shields for example. An important note to people familiar with editing on the other platforms: you CANNOT specify the warheads carried by a fighter. This is a slightly annoying feature for those who are used to having their X-Wings or TIE Fighters carry missiles, but part of working with a platform is adjusting to its limitations.
A.I. is the box where you set the difficulty of the computer pilots. Rookies are obviously the weakest skill while Top Ace are the strongest. The IFF box allows you to chose what color/side this flight group will belong to. For now, leave it be, we will discuss it later on.
The color just sets the color of the wings on the ships, nothing terribly important (and in fact, invisible on Imperial craft).
The Form Box sets how the ships will fly WHEN THEY ARE IN FORMATION. Remember that fighters will break apart and dogfight and at this point, formation is useless. Also, it is very difficult to know what each formation will look like in the game, but do not worry, Vic is appropriate for most fighter formations. Besides of that, there are certain formations that doesn't work properly with large capital ships such as Calamaris or Destroyers.
Keep in mind that B-Wing is only flyable by the player with the X-wing add-ons. While these add-ons may see quite common, you may have to adjust your mission slightly if there are people who do not have these add-ons in the group you are writing the mission for. Fortunately, the B-Wing can be mostly replaced by the Y-Wing without many changes, but that's covered more in your lesson.
The Cargo Box is where you specify the default cargo. It's useless to put in a fighter or a capital warship (except corvettes). If you want to place a special cargo, make sure that your flight group has at least two ships. Then you simply specify what the special cargo is (keeping in mind that it, too, is limited in how much can be shown on the targeting display) and what ship in the flight group has it. Putting different cargo on a flight groups gives the mission a touch of quality. Doesn't matter if the cargo isn't really needed for the completion of the mission, small details can really go a long way.
In the Numbers region is where you can set the number of ships in the flight group and the number of waves of that flight group the game will create. The X-Wing targeting display can only display numbers 1 through 8 so you should try to keep the number in a flight group below that. Remember, the waves are on a white background and the number is on a black background.
Also, the basic X-Wing engine (the software that powers the game) can only support 28 ships (this includes containers, tugs, ANYTHING) in the combat area at once (MBA CO's note: While I believe the later XWing95 supports more since it really is using the X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter engine, many many people still use the old 3.5" disk and collector's CD-ROM versions that do not support more than 28). If you have more than 28 ships, the most recent arrivals will simply not be created (which would be bad if say...the group had a mission critical ship in it). You can have more than 28 ships in the mission, you just can't have more than 28 ships ACTIVE in the mission.
So what if you want the player to fight a full three squadrons of TIE Bombers? That's 36 ships right there not including the player's flight group! The answer is quite simple, you'd just adjust the waves of the ships. Have each squadron be represented by a flight group of 4 ships and then set the waves to 3. This means that when the four craft of a flight group get destroyed, another four will be created two more times, and, after that, no more will be created. So the players will get the feel of fighting 36 fighters, but the game would only have to deal with 12 fighters at a time (plus the player's flight group). Capital ship flight groups can also have numbers and waves, but in general, it's hard to find a reason to have waves for capital ships (especially since they will all have the same name).
Now that you have a good grasp of what each of these regions can do, let's make this a flight group a little more personable.
We will make this a 3-ship Rebel Y-Wing flight designated "Academy", an Ace skill level, flying in Line Abreast formation with no missiles. As these are fighters, no cargo information is needed. Also, since it will be the player's group, no waves are needed as waves are only sent in when all ships are destroyed and the destruction of the player's craft ends the mission (sorry, no XvT style waves in this game).
When you are done, your "craft" window should look like this:
In general, it is a smart idea to have all the ships in the mission planned out and created before you move on. The reason for this is that some orders need to have targets specified and you cannot provide this information if the flight groups do not exsist. This is not to say that you can't add fluff ships later or add more challenge, but the basic ships critical to the mission should be completed before you begin worrying about orders and other details.
This concludes the lesson on adding ships and flight groups. You have learned the basics in adding ships, adjusting the basic attributes and how to delete them. You will begin to manipulate the ships in the following lesson, "Placing Ships Navigation."
Lesson 2 - Placing Ships and Navigation
Ships all need points specified for them or else the game will have no idea where they are or where to put them. The navigation box is found at the right corner at the bottom of the screen. The first major concept that must be covered is fairly complicated and math intensive. While the concepts are presented as simply as possible, they might still be confusing.
The way in which X-Wing associates a ship with it's position is through plotting it on a graph with an X, Y and Z axis (which is why the X-Wing game is a 3D game, even though it does not have fancy graphics). The first number is the X coordinate, meaning where it is horizontally (side to side). The second is the Y coordinate, meaning where the ship is on the vertical axis (top to bottom). The third is the Z coordinate, meaning where it is in the 3rd dimension (short to tall is the simplest explanation). There is a demo at the the end of this lesson if you are having problems with the idea. For now, we will move on.
The ones marked "Start 1" seem to be fairly obvious, but why would you have more than one? Well, what if a capital ship is now where that start point is? The ship would crash the moment it entered the battle. Having alternate start points will prevent this from happening. Note that this value is only needed if the ship is A) deployed at the start of the mission or B) a craft arriving by hyperspace. Ships being deployed from motherships do not need this value (more on that later though). By selecting different starting points you can also make that a flight group appears on a random position. When you give a start point to a craft that have a mothership, the craft will depart from its mothership (except for player's flight group) and will go to the starting point. It won't "appear" at the start point (note that orders will override this behavior to go to the start point).
Waypoints are used to provide the ships with navigation. Capital ships will use these the most, fighters will really only use this in lulls in combat. Only certain orders will use waypoints so make sure that you only specify waypoints for ships that need them. Hyperspace point is similar to the start point except you only need to use it for hyperspace capable craft. This is their departure point and where they will go if they complete their mission or are withdrawing. A good idea is normally have this be fairly close to their start point, although there are always exceptions (like if you are making a blockade running mission).
Please note that any point you wish to use MUST be enabled. Even if there are coordinates in the boxes, the regions must be selected for the game to recognize them as being used. You can tell if a point is selected if the box next to the coordinates is highlighted in blue.
While you can manually enter in the values here, most people find it simpler to activate the points you will need (by clicking on the box) and then go to the map by clicking on the map icon. This will bring up a graphical display of the units with start points and waypoints (if you select the "All WPs" or "Curr WP" option) and allows you to manipulate them by simple drag-and-drop. The letters by the name are WP for waypoint and HYP for hyperspace. Making changes here will automatically change the values on the navigation chart. Personal preference is to use the map for X-Y coordinates (the default view) and to then take a look at X-Z to change the altitude of the ships.
When in the map window, you can add flight groups by clicking on the palette icon (it looks like the thing artists use to hold and mix paints). This will bring up a row of icons, simply find the one you want to add, click and drag it onto the map.
Now that you know the basic ideas behind this, do the following with the mission you created in lesson one:
Create a flight group of a single corvette, make it Rebel IFF, and call it Echo Base.
Select the Corvette and activate start point 1 and waypoints 1 through 3. Go to the map window and place them adequately apart trying not to set the startpoints at the same location, otherwise your Y-Wing would collide with the corvette and explode.
You have now created a corvette and given the fighters a path to fly a patrol around. While they will not fly it as of yet, the framework to do so now exists. This concludes Lesson 2, please proceed on to Lesson 3 - "Giving Ships Orders" where you will learn how to make the Y-Ws patrol around ther corvette.
DEMO IF YOU ARE HAVING TROUBLE WITH THE XYZ CONCEPT: Think of the battle as taking place on a 81/2 inch by 11 inch sheet of paper (which is pretty much a normal piece of notebook paper , try to do the following demo yourself). The X would be the short portion of the paper or the width. If you were told to put a dot at the 4 1/4 inch mark on the X axis, you would measure halfway through the page and make a dot. Now, the Y axis is the long edge of the paper or the length. If you were told to make a dot at 5 1/2 inches on the Y axis, you would measure halfway up the page and make a dot. If you were told to make a mark at (4 1/4 inches, 5 1/2 inches) you would make a dot 4 1/4 inches over, 5 1/2 inches up (the approximate center of the page). Now, take you pencil and put the tip on the dot you made in the middle of the page. The pencil is now the Z axis. In this system, the coordinates of (4 1/4", 5 1/2", 2") would be 4 1/4 inches over, 5 1/2 inches up and 2 inches from the paper up the pencil. In X-Wing, the location of the point you made would be called (0,0,0), so to have things in the bottom portion would require a negative second number and to have it in the left half would require a negative first number. The third number can also be negative.
Lesson 3 - Giving Ships Orders
So you now know how to add ships and you've created a set of ships for a mission, even placed them on a map and given them waypoints. It looks like a great mission, except the ships don't DO anything, they just kind of sit in space and wave at each other. What you need to do now is to give the ships orders, otherwise they're just fancy background. There are several different orders that you can give to a ship. On the advanced course we will study the different kind of orders. On the "Order" box, there are four regions. Order Selector, Primary target, Secondary Target and Dock Time or Throttle. They work as such: The Order Selector enables you to specify in what kind of order a flight group will execute. The default order is to Hold Steady. Remember to change it otherwise you'll have a stone lying on space. There are some kinds of orders that need that you specify a target. For example if you want that our Y-Wings escort the corvette, select the loose escort order and then specify corvette Echo Base as Primary Target.
At the Dock Time or Throttle you can select the minutes required to finish a docking operation or select the Throttle of the ship. An important thing to know is that any ship has it's own speed and though you specify 30% to a corvette and 30% to an Imperial Star Destroyer, the corvette will go faster. (This will be discussed later on the advanced course).
There are two basic kinds of orders. Capital ship orders and Craft orders. Capital ship orders are the ones at the bottom of the list. You should never (this is one of the few nevers that is more or less constant in mission building) give a craft order to a starship. Craft orders are meant for use with small ships and includes logic structures such as jinking (or moving suddenly to throw off an attackers aim). Nothing makes a mission look more silly than having an Imperial Star Destroyer try to jink!!! Also, it can cause a lot of collisions as the craft acts a lot smaller that it is.
Now, time to get back to the mission we've been working on:
Go to the Y-W orders and change order to Loose Escort the corvette. Order the corvette to fly through its waypoints once. Your orders should look like this (The Y-Wings are on the left, CRV on the right):
That is the end of the lesson on giving ships orders. You should now have a general idea about how to make ships do what they need to in the context of the mission. The next lesson, "Arrival and Departure" will cover the methods of making a mission dynamic and adaptable to the player's performance.
Lesson 4 - Arrival and Departure
Up until now, we have dealt primarily with ships that have been in the mission since the start.However, what if the ships aren't supposed to be there until later? Or what about that 28 ship limit? How can ships be in the mission without starting off? For these reasons, each flight group has its own arrival and departure methods, and its timing at the "arrival" box.
The main focus is on arrival, as good use of this feature can make or break a mission. The Arrival conditions is a bit tricky. For the most part, it's easiest to make their arrival dependent on the arrival of other ships or from the start of the mission. To make them arrive after a certain amount of time, all you have to is set the amount of time at top. The other easy method entails getting the flight group that will arrive first in the selected menu (make sure the depends on is set to "Flight Group") and then set an interval, if desired, for it to arrive. Another popular method is to have ships arrive when another ship is attacked. This is good if there are neutral ships or ships they aren't supposed to be attacked in the mission, or for the escort of an Imperial starship.
Just remember, 28 ships is all you can have. An important thing to remember is that player´s flight group must arrive at the start of the mission, otherwise the mission would crash (makes sense, doesn't it?). The arrival and departure methods (represented by the checkboxes and Mothership box) are really designed to make the game more pleasing to those who demand a degree of realism in a fictional universe. If you want a craft to be launched from a ship, specify that as it's mothership. In X-Wing, you can only specify one mothership (which won't work if the ship is destroyed in the mission) or hyperspace (which will always work). Keep in mind that standard TIEs don't have hyperspace capabilities, so you should specify a mothership for them unless you want to have the modified TIEs which DO have hyperspace drives (On a sidenote, they also usually have shields as well, but X-Wing has no option to add shields to a ship that normally doesn't have them, so try to use standard TIEs only). If you want a capital ship to not be able to escape from the battle, unchek the box "Depart by Hyperspace."
Since we thus far have had a fairly boring patrol mission, let's spice life up for our flight of Y-Wings.
Create two Imperial flight groups, one of Gunboats called Rho and another flight group of TIEs, exact type of TIE is your choice. The gunboats must have 3 waves of four ships. The other at your discretion but they cannot have more than 16 ships total (Remember that it's waves times number in the group that determines the total). Make them both the "Officer" setting.
Set the Imperials to attack the corvette. Make both flight groups arrive 45 seconds after the mission starts.
Make sure that your Y-Wings start at 00:00.
Once you have done this, you'll have put together a very basic mission. In the next few lessons, some of them continued on the following page, we will get into the touches that make a mission interesting.
Lesson 5 - Mission Objectives
Up until this point, there has been no way for the mission to actually happen. Sure, you have your different flight groups and they will attack their targets, but the game has no way of determining whether or not the player was successful. If you have noticed, in the screen there is a box called "Objective" (on the odd chance you haven't noticed, it's directly under where you would put the craft name). It is here that you assign what significance the flight group in the mission. Now, keep in mind, this is where you assign the SELECTED flight group's significance. If you want a ship to be captured, you set that in the ship that will be captured's properties, not the craft that will be boarding it. This is very easy to get confused so just remember to check the mission goals before you save the mission for testing.
All of the conditions are quite easy to understand. Conditions like "Special Craft Destroyed" requires that you have a flight group of at least two ships and one of it selected as special. For example, a group of freighters with the second one carrying a special cargo. The mission, as said above, doesn't have any objectives for the flight of Y-Wings. So to give them a purpose, let's set the following objectives:
Set both Imperial flight groups to "All destroyed" and set the corvette to "All survive." When you are finished, your craft window should look like this (except for the TIEs that you have discretion over):
While this might not be a very complex mission, it now would be flyable by a player. Now that the basic concept of the mission is complete, it's time to add the parts that make the mission more entertaining than just a plain old dogfight. The following lessons allow you to tell a story in the mission rather than just fly and fight.
":)Captain Jae-Keito Gra