Custom Mission Building, by Richard Muth How To Become A Master Mission Builder Before creating a custom mission you should plan it! By planning a mission on paper, you can save yourself a lot of time and frustration. As you begin to plan your mission, here are some questions to answer: 1. How difficult should it be? 2. What is the point of the mission? (Downing planes, Bombing, Ground attack, Intercept, ...?) 3. Where should the player start the mission? 4. What is the target for the mission? 5. How complicated should the mission be? 6. What types of aircraft should be involved? After you've completed your pre-planning, the next step is to design it. I know at least one person who likes to make a "screen print" of the full SWOTL map to use for marking his mission. Many people find that having some type of "check list" really helps them get the details right. If you are doing a "Historical Mission," based on some research, this may be very important! The following check list is just an example (Fill in a line for each flight group): | Group | Aircraft | How Many | Formation | Skill | | # 1 | | | | | | # 2 | | | | | | Begin | Altitude | Way point | Altitude | Target | Altitude | Orders | Land at | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | After you've completed your designing, it's time to start the Mission Builder and begin entering all of the information you've gathered thus far. You will need to pay close attention to details like locations on the map. If you want different units to stay close together you may need to "zoom", or magnify, the map to make precise locations. Using land marks helps a lot! Finally, it's time to start play testing! You must test your mission to see how it performs, and undoubtedly, go back and make some changes. It's a good idea to jot down some notes as you fly it (hit [Alt][P] to pause first) so that when you return to the Mission Builder you can make the proper changes to anything that's not quite right. There will be a lot of this fine tuning in any truly good mission. It's nearly impossible to get all the aircraft locations and waypoints right the first time around. If your location is off they won't be near each other, and if they "timing" is off they may never meet! Making your Custom Mission More Difficult If you find your mission too easy, there are some things that can make it more difficult: - Start the your mission on the ground and climb to altitude, or to intercept the attackers. - Use fewer planes in your flight group or increase the number of enemy planes. - Add "waves" to the enemy groups so that they regenerate once you shoot them all down. - Change the experience level of the enemy to ACE or even TOP ACE. "The 16 Plane Limit" The following section is from a message by "hexmaster" Keith Heitmann: I tried installing more planes in SWOTL quite a while ago by hexing them into the mission file. I'm afraid you are stuck with a 16 plane limit. The program will crash if you try to add more to it. The problem is that the program will not recognize and will not know how to handle more than sixteen aircraft at any one time. To make it handle more the entire program code of SWOTL would probably have be rewritten. The only way I have found to give you at least the "feel" of more planes is to construct missions where each plane is a "group" or, in other words, each group only has one plane. You then set the "waves" function to the appropriate number. If you load BODEN.MIS or AIRRAID.MIS that I created into the Mission Builder you will see what I mean. You start with 8 planes against you. However, each enemy plane is a group all by itself. I carefully set each plane on the map using maximum zoom so they fly together in formation to their identical waypoints. This keeps them from wandering off on their own to start with. As you engage this enemy group and shoot down the first enemy and start after the second, the first plane's replacement aircraft is already on its way into the battle. Normally, the new planes are not created until all the planes of the group are shotdown. This creates lulls in the battle as the number of enemy planes gets less and less. However, since you only have one plane in a "group" as soon as he gets shotdown his replacement is created. So instead of having to shootdown 3 or 4 enemy planes and have 3 or 4 new ones finally created and sent into battle you only have to shoot one down and his replacement is on its way. This has the effect of keeping the pressure on the player. He will rarely face less than 6 or 7 aircraft at any one time in the battle and the combat should be nearly continuous until the "waves" run out. Writing Mission Briefing Files Briefing files can add fun, and clarity, to custom SWOTL missions. Unfortunately, it seems that LucasArts never bothered to include any information about writing the briefing text for your Custom Missions. I hope this will make up for that. Mission Briefing files for SWOTL missions are simply ASCII text files. These can be created with any word processor or text editor capable of saving a file as "plain text". That is, without formatting codes. You might want to look over some of the TXT files from the missions that come with SWOTL, or those written by some of the legendary Mission creators, to see what they look like when viewed with a text editor. Here are a few rules you should follow when writing briefings: The file name must match the mission name, but with the extension TXT rather than MIS. Therefore, a custom mission called "D-DAY.MIS" would have a briefing file named "D-DAY.TXT". Like the mission file itself, the *.TXT file will reside in the main SWOTL directory. The size of the file must conform to certain rules as well, or else you will not be able to read it all. The width of each line is about 40 characters. However, SWOTL uses a "proportional font" on screen, so some lines can have more than 40 characters, and some must have less. I found that using a word processor with proportional fonts, and page measurements in inches, you can set it up as follows: A font pitch of 12, a left margin of 0" and a right margin of 4.4", leaving a text area 4.1" wide seems ot work well for me. The length of the file is another matter. It is usually about 45 lines, but it really seems to depend more on the total file size. I have found that SWOTL will only display a certain number of characters (including "hidden" markers like "Line feeds".) If you can keep your file size under 1,540 bytes (as reported by DOS' DIR command) you should be fine. You usually need to write the file, and then enter SWOTL to see how it looks. If something runs off the edge of the screen you must exit and change the length of the line accordingly. Like the mission creation, this can be a bit tedious, but it is worth it. The first line of your file should be a title. SWOTL will automatically center, and highlight (in yellow) the first line of the briefing file. Leaving a space between this line and the start of the briefing is a good idea. That's all you "need" to do, but here are some things you should think about as well. Be descriptive, and/or creative in your briefing. If this is a "historical mission", tell about the real one you based it on. Or, set the "scene" with a short story. You can give some idea about what to expect, but don't give it all away. Be careful how many hints and tips you put in the briefing. Lastly, give yourself some credit! If you are thinking of sharing this with friends, or other SWOTL fans, add a line at the end, often set apart by a line of dashes, about who conceived and wrote the mission. (Perhaps even include an E-mail address, or leave that to a README file - or FILE_ID.DIZ - you should include with the set.) Take a few minutes more to write about the missions you work so hard to create. We'll all be glad you did!