| Mission Creation
The missions are where your campaign succeeds or fails, if you have buggy or boring missions then people won't care how nice your cutscenes look. The types of missions you create depends greatly on the plot of your campaign, and to a certain extent the plot of your campaign will be guided by the need to produce a variety of missions. You may like dogfighting missions, but some people may prefer making the big-ships go boom. You may also decide to have some covert operations so that the player can fly non-standard craft. This is one area where XWA having a more X-Wing or TIE Fighter like interface (with a concourse) is at a disadvantage compared with BoPs simple datapad method as since XWA is built around one big campaign you don't have a place to choose between campaigns (unlike BoP) and so your mission sets would be a replacement rather than an alternative. There is also the problem that if your mission set is based around a group other than the Rebel Alliance / New Republic then you will have to choose between this mission set being rather more obviously an amateur addition and going to the trouble to make this a Total Conversion by replacing everything you can think of (see Frontend page). Thankfully there is an Imperial Concourse available which will partially solve this problem if you are making an Imperial based mission set, though this is the Concourse only and does leave the default XWA graphics in other areas so it is not a Total Conversion. Your first task will be to work out what sort of missions you are going to make for your campaign. Try to plan out the basic plot of the campaign in the same way as if you were going to write a story and then work through this plot and start making notes of general mission ideas. Gradually you should be able to build up a list of missions and sequences of missions of missions within this overall plot. Once you have a rough list of missions take a look at it and decide if the campaign can be improved by changing the order the missions will be played in so your mini-sequences intertwine and the general plot ebbs and flows correctly. Now work your way through the mission list pretending that you are playing the game and make general notes for each mission on the very rough basic sequence of events for that mission and identify any plot-points which will be revealed in that mission. Remember that although a great deal of plot information can be conveyed in the in-flight messages and through the use of e-mails in the pilot quarters that if you have the facilities that Cutscenes can be very useful in conveying extra information or information which the player can know but which the players character within the plotline would not know (an example would be the first cutscene in TIE Fighter where Harkov meets Mon Motha to discuss the defection of him and his fleet to the Rebel Alliance). You should end up with a good plan which will help you to avoid writing yourself into a corner and to help avoid having similar missions following one another. Remember though that you shouldn't be afraid to change this plan if a good idea occurs as you progress with your campaign or gain experience in mission-building. Once you have created your plotline the next step is to start actually building the missions.
Prompt sheet
Wing and a Prayer One of the main hazards facing real pilots is not so
much the actual attack as trying to return to base with
battle damage. XWA doesn't really simulate this problem
as your engines and hyperdrive are either working or they
aren't rather than being able to be partially functional
but one thing I do include in my missions is a Goal whose
condition is that the players craft must return to the
region where the mothership is. Hangar Entry and Exit One thing which can be annoying is when fighters enter
or exit the hangar in an incorrect fashion. There is only
a finite amount of space to go in and out of the hangar
so if 3 squadrons are trying to do this at the same time
it does look rather strange. Explaining things away Another tip for is to not be afraid to explain things
away in the briefing or in messages. Sometimes you will
have a plan for the mission and you will find that a part
of it is either impossible to do, or that doing it would
be a great deal of work and not add anything to the
mission. In these cases you may find that by putting in
an extra bit of explanatory text you can get the mission
done.
Mission limits Beyond certain limits the mission will not work. Mission Making There is an AlliED manual available at Troy Dangerfields site which includes a "AlliED for Dummies" step by step. There is also a tutorial available created by Rogue Wing. These are quite comprehensive but I decided that I might as well cut and paste the text from my old site and have a tutorial here as well. Having opened AlliED and created a new mission you will have a single Flight Group of one craft (of the default-type) which will be your fighter. One of the first things you should do is check the Mission Parameters. This where you define what type of mission it will be, what the names of the various regions in the mission will be, which tactical officer and what insignia will be used, and the time limit (if any). Next you may as well set up the player
craft for which there are various extra options compared
with AI Flight Groups. You can define alternate warheads,
countermeasures, beam-systems (if possible), and even
different fighters. When I was making the first version
of my mission set I was very careful to keep this as a
single-ship FG as I'd assumed that if I was shot down I'd
reappear in one of my wingman's seats but after much work
I realised this was a wrong assumption. The next thing I do is to create all the Flight Groups (including Backdrops and Hyperbouys) and set up their basic information : What sort of ship they are, how many in the FG, what the name of the FG is, their starting location and at least the first waypoint, arrival conditions for those not present at the start of the mission (including if they are hyperspacing in or have a mothership), and if they are part of a Global Group (FGs grouped together so orders and conditions can treat them as a single entity) or a Global Unit (same as a Global Group but the numbering of the ship continues through the Unit rather than starting from 1 again with each Flight Group - useful for fighters). Once all the ships are in position it is time to start giving them Orders to follow. I normally start with the group the player is flying with as their orders can be the most complex and they are what the mission is focussed around. Once this group is moving through the mission sequence properly (and the hyperbouys are appearing correctly so the player can move with them) I start to enable any other flight groups which trigger a condition, respond to a condition, or simply have a sequence of orders to follow rather than just one. Eventually you will have these flight groups responding to events, or being responded to, and the complex part of the mission building is about done so now it is time to make things complex for the player by enabling all those single-order FGs which have one task to do and are determined to do it. Most of the time starships can simply just be moving along (or stationary with 0% throttle) shooting at any enemy ships ( "Patrol and Attack" order) and the complex part of this is setting up the waypoints so they behave logically. Most fighters are even simpler as their job is to shoot things down and the "Attack" order works fine, and doesn't even need more than one waypoint. Remember though to be careful with the targets and target priority even with the single-order FGs - especially TIEs which are death on fighters but get badly mauled by starships - so that even if their tactical plan is "Kill! Kill! Kill!" they are at least killing or trying to kill the appropriate things. Now that everything is moving you have a mission but
possibly one which will require further tweaking to try
to make the mission challenging in the correct ways. At some point during the above work you should start
to work on the Mission Messages which are used to improve
the feel of the mission and to give additional
information to the player. Messages can be triggered by a
condition or their display can be used as a condition
(which can be very useful in linking together a chain of
events). Once the mission is playing well and the messages are displaying properly then it is time to make your briefing. You may prefer to do this at a different stage but sometimes you will need to scrap a mission and start again because an idea doesn't work so I normally wait until I know the mission is going to be a good usable one. First thing to do is to produce your text
for the briefing, the mission description, the
mission-fail tips, and the mission-complete text. The
briefing text and the mission-fail tips should both be
quite short sentences and focussed entirely on the
mission itself with the story elements for the mission
set contained in the mission description (for what has
been happening since the last mission) and the
mission-complete text (for what story consequences your
mission has produced). Next is the actual briefing which
basically is a map with ship-icons which can be changed
to show different regions and which has the text you've
created displayed in sequence at the bottom. Things to be careful of are allowing
enough time for the region change animation, using
sensibly spaced Page Breaks , and to be very careful
when using the option to have the icons moving as
mistakes here can take a while to correct (though it can
look good). The wave files for the briefing seem to follow the format that where bb=battle number, mm=mission number, and xx=wave file number B-bb-mm-xx correspond to wave file for each string xx in the briefing, N-bb-mm-xx = introductory speech played as you enter the briefing room or family transport, S-bb-mm-xx is the wave file (or files in some TG cases) played over the mission description, and W-bb-mm-xx is the win debriefing. Now that you have a mission that is playing well, has well written message which are displaying correctly, and has a good briefing it is time to actually "win" it so your pilot can move on to the next mission and to do this you need to set up the mission-critical Goals. Set up the conditions and the text which will be displayed for the goal and then play the mission for "real". With luck your goals will be set up correctly the first time but if they aren't and you win by accident then remember that you can just use the replay option to wipe out the false-win. Once you are satisfied the goals are correct then accept the win, check the mission-complete text is fine, and accept congratulations for having made a mission - now all you have to do are several more of the same standard and you'll have a set. If your mission uses custom OPTs then you could chose to use custom Briefing Icons if you feel no default ship is close enough. If your player is not flying from a TG cruiser then you may want to use a custom Cruiser Insignia. Section Links: AlliED | Darksabers X-Wing Station | Rogue Wing
Creating a multi-player mission One of the strangest decisions that Totally Games made with XWA was in reducing the possibilities of the Multi-Player missions to being simple skirmishes rather than at least leaving these at the same level of complexity as seen in XvT/BoP. It is understandable that multiple regions could be too much for a multi-player game, at least at the time, but to replace the XvT/BoP format which had messages, arrivals and departures trigged by conditions rather than just replacement waves of craft and no retreat, and more complex goals, etc with the simplified missions created by the skirmish editor has caused a great deal of frustration (though in TGs defence if you consider these as the extended melees they were meant to be then they are a good improvement). Fortunately it is possible to "fool" XWA into using a more complex mission in multi-player mode by the reasonably simple method of making a mission file which is then made read-only (write-protected) so that the Skirmish Editor cannot overwrite it with the mission it will create. This multi-player mission will suffer from the same limits as a single-player mission as well as being restricted to a single area. No briefings will be available so this information will have to be conveyed in a different manner, though this lack of a briefing does at least mean that you will not have to create any custom wave files or cruiser insignia for this purpose. This method may differ from some peoples but it works for me :
Something that I have noticed is that if the player craft in the skirmish editor was different from that in the mission file that rather than flying this mission that, although temp.tie was not overwritten, a skirmish was created using the skirmish editor settings. Section Links: AlliED
Dynamic mission goals Something you may wish to consider using are Dynamic Goals since these can be very useful for springing a surprise on a player by suddenly giving them a new objective. This sort of surprise should be used sparingly and remember that you will have to be vague in both the briefing and mission-failure tips to stop the player from realising a surprise is coming. Dynamic goals work by using something called the Active Sequence which defines the order in which the goals are displayed. A 1 or 2 would be displayed at the start of the mission, a 3, 4, 5, or 6 would be displayed as each preceding goal (or group of goals) are met, and a 7 means that this goal will only be displayed when it is failed or completed. A much fuller tutorial on this is available at Darksabers X-Wing Station, which is why I felt no need to go into much detail. intelligent pilots By using conditions to jump to different orders you can make the pilots more intelligent by letting them respond to events or be more flexible in their actions. One example of this would be that rather than having a group of fighters attack the opposing fighters from the start give them orders to attack the opposing starship, but have them jump to the order to attack the opposing fighters when they are out of torpedoes OR enemy fighters are in proximity. This would let the AI pilots duplicate what a human pilot would do in firing torpedoes off as part of the initial strike before switching to space superiority work. A simple proximity trigger could also be used for escort craft to stay close to the craft they are protecting until the attackers approached close enough. Another idea would be for fighters to switch orders based on the status of the enemy. If the opposing starships shields go down then some fighters could "decide" to help finish it off quicker, if more than a certain number of the opposing fighters have been destroyed then some fighters could be spared from dogfighting for the strike role, etc. Or conversely if most of the opposing starships are destroyed or the main targets shields are out then some of the strike craft could switch to dogfighting then rather than this waiting until the ship has or ships have been finished off. Another idea would be to alter the priority of the targets, a group of fighters could be acting as a strike escort and so concentrating on the opposing fighters as first priority and opposing strike craft as a second but if a starships shields go down then they might switch to the opposing strike craft being the priority to try to prevent the starship being lost. Generally speaking just think how you would fly the mission and how you would react to events and see if there is a way to emulate this, however crudely, using the jump to order facility. These can be very difficult to debug as you have to create a set of specific conditions but can be worth it, at least for flightgroups that are meant to be relatively elite. Making ships defect Although in XvT/BoP you could use the "Jump to
Order 4" to make ships attack former-friendlies in
XWA this is far nicer as there is a proper defect order
which changes the IFF/team to the new side. You can
either use it as the name suggests for a ship to decide
to switch sides or you can use it instead of having a
ship "Board to Capture"ed if you want the
captured ship to do more than simply leave. Multi-container convoy ships You can use condition 53 to make one of those cool
convoys with a bunch of containers in-between the cockpit
and the engine. Just go to the Arrivals tab for the
container you want to connect in-between a cargo hauler,
and make the arrival condition this... Proximity Triggers and semi-branching missions One idea to try to increase the enjoyment of repeatedly playing a mission is to attempt to make the mission subtly different each time it is played, and one idea of how to do this is to use proximity triggers and messages. Messages can be used to provide a small amount of branching as they can be cancelled by one another and set to display at a set time. Therefore you can emulate the first battle in the first Rogue Squadron novel by Stackpole (which itself was based on a training mission from X-Wing) and have XWA check if the player is near a particular ship and change the mission accordingly. In the novel if most of the fighters were near the Corvette then the enemy Frigate kept its distance, but if they went further out then the enemy Frigate would hyperspace in at close range. With XWA this could be done by having message
"A" set to be displayed when message
"X" (set to be displayed at a set time) was
displayed and if the particular craft were in proximity
to the set location and for message "A" being
displayed to cancel the display of message "B."
Then the appropriate group of ships arrival condition can
be set to be if message "A" has been displayed. This can be good as it would hinder the players ability to pre-position himself to intercept an attack since if they move to where the attack came from the previous time they played the mission then they would find the attack coming from a different place. Remember though that the alternative groups of ships will each take up FG slots so if you use this too extensively you could run out.
AlliED includes a list file editor but you may have created your mission.lst as part of the planning process of the campaign. You can simply copy your mission files and your mission.lst into ..\xwa\missions\ and then play them. Remember though that if you give missions numbers lower than 7 that you would not have access to the concourse and you would also have a problem with mission number 1 (which is the second mission as the first is number 0) with XWA insisting on you being on autopilot, so start your numbering from a higher value (probably simplest to just add a digit to the start and start from a hundred and something). If you expect that people will enjoy your missions enough to want to play them in the combat chamber then you could add some MISSION/mission/Battle pictures. This is done using DATech with the Battle id number being how many battles are in mission.lst (so if your battle is first one then set battle id number = 0) and the Mission id numbers (MISSION and mission) being the mission number in mission.lst (so if your first mission is 100 then set id numbers = 100). One way that you could distribute your mission set is as an XMOD so see that guide for more details. |
