[Tec] Objectives, triggers and events.

[Egan]

For some of you used to making missions with SH3 a lot of this information is probably not that new, seeing as how mission objectives were used in single missions. For myself, though, who spent more time editing campaign files than single missions, I wanted to go through the various options to see whether I could understand them.

I thought I would post this information for the benefit of those who are still figuring this side of mission editing out and also to allow those veterans amongst you to weigh in with your own discoveries. Some I have tried and they work fine, others I have had problems with. Hopefully we can get a discussion going on how it all pulls together.

So far this is just a list of the Objectives, triggers and events available in the mission editor.

Objectives

1: Patrol: Stay within the set radius of the marker for 48 hours.

2: Deploy: Get to your patrol area and receive new orders, usually sink merchies but I think Life guard duty can be given by this too.

3: Photo recon: Get within a few miles and take photos of enemy shipping.

4: Special Ops: Get within the radius of the objective and launch the raft. I know you are supposed to surface before this triggers but I managed to do this without having to be underwater first in a test mission I did. Mind you, it crashed straight afterwards but I don't know whether that had something to do with landing British Commandoes rather than US ones.

5: Life Guard: Rescue the airmen. Simple enough if you can get to them before they drown or get attacked by enemy units.

Now, one top of this there are other ones I haven't really looked at yet;

Generic: No idea what this one does.

Destroy unit class: Probably more for single missions I would think although If it could be made very, very rare, there is no reason why being ordered to intercept and sink a particular battleship couldn't happen. And, yes, I just watched 'We dive at Dawn' this morning...

Base stop: Logically I would expect this one to activate if we are ordered back to base or as the primary objective when transferring with your boat to a new flotilla (undertaking a war patrol on the way.)

As well as this both primary and secondary objectives can be hidden - usually for when you need to sunk a set amount of tonnage.

Triggers
The triggers can be used to do all sorts of cool things. To trigger an event you can use these options:
Objective
Unit destroyed
Class destroyed
Tonnage
Probabilistic (Simple % chance of the trigger firing.)
Patrol area (not entirely sure how this one works.)
Time (activates at a certain time and date,)
Reach zone (the boat has reached a location specified by the mission editor.

And as if all this stuff wasn't cool enough, here's a rundown on the Event command:

Events

There are four types of event:

Update Objective: Activates a specific Objective if one is available. Can also be used to tag an objective as complete, or even better, failed..

Message: sends a radio message to the payer.

Update Instance: What this seems to do is allow you to spawn groups when one of the triggers activates.

The possibilities of this are endless. You could have a pick up mission set to trigger a sub chaser coming around the headland and steaming straight for you when you complete the pick up. You could have it set to spawn a specific capital ship in a specific harbour and create an objective where you have to sink that specific ship. All you do is place the ships( or random groups etc,) as normal and then set the event to either spawn them or even delete them. Well, perhaps it's a little bit more complex than that but only in relation to making sure that the life time of the ship as set in unit properties matches up.

Intelligence received: I haven't found any use of it yet but it would seem to send you a contact report on a specific unit or group. Brilliantly you can assign an error radius to it, thereby giving a slightly (or very) misleading idea of where to search.

So, a lot of interesting features. Some of them don't seem to be used yet and I really hope than means that they aren't buggy in use. So far I've been trying to get the 'update instance' event to work with mixed results and I'm not sure the 'Intelligence received' event works at all.

Anyway, feel free to jump in with your own discoveries or information as you see fit!

[Bill Nichols]

Excellent summary. I can't wait to try out some of the capabilities you've described above

[Binky1st]

Looks like experimentation is the key here then

[BBury]

This one should be stickied in the FAQ section.

[Egan]

The various triggers and events have become my number one interest in the editor recently - There are some great possibilites here.

[Egan]

Some useful information posted by ACsoft on the Sh3 mission editors forum. I thought I would repost it here as it is still relevent:

Yes, you can "trigger" spawn of units or groups

Here is a pratical example:

Create a test mission, let say to date 1.9.1942

In front of your submarine close to it (1 km), create a small zone you may name, for example, "SpawnMyUnit".

Now, create the unit "MyUnit" to be triggered WITH AN ENTRY DATE IN THE FUTURE, let say 30.9.1942 AND AT A DISTANCE OF MINIMUM 25 TO 30 KM OF THE POSITION YOUR SUBMARINE WILL BE, WHEN ENTERING INTO THE ZONE.

Now, create a trigger "MyTrigger" of type "Reach Zone" using zone "SpawnMyUnit".

Finally, create an Event of type "Update instance", option "Spawn", instance name "MyUnit" and triggered by "MyTrigger".

If you want to check it work, you have a problem, because to found and survey a precise location at about 25 to 30 km of the submarine is not easy, especially with an invisible unit !!! So do the following:

Create a chain of small fishing boat going to the position of your "MyUnit", with the last fishing boat close to your unit.

Now, run your test mission, follow your chain of fishing boat with external free camera, start your submarine full ahead and wait. You will see that your unit will spawn, when the submarine reach the zone. If not, your unit is probably too close.

You might improve this test by also creating a message Event, triggered by "MyTrigger", so you will know when zone is reached.

In this example, we use a "Reach Zone Trigger" to trigger the spawn, but of course any other type of trigger will also do the job, AS LONG AS THE DISTANCE BETWEEN YOUR SUB AND THE UNIT IS FAR ENOUGH, WHEN THE TRIGGER TURN ON.

Hope this help,

Well, I've been having real problems getting 'Update instance' to work. Sometimes it has and others have been lessons in frustration. My current test set up is a Japanese search plane to spawn after I'd destroyed a Small freighter. I adjusted the Entry date (in the unit properties,) to about 20 days after the mission was set to start and moved the aircraft to 36km or so away from the Maru.

And it worked!

Normally the aircraft would spawn at the start of the mission and I'd see it after 6 - 8 minutes or so regardless of whether I'd sunk the Maru or not. This time I gave it a full 20 mins before I attacked and there was no sighn of the aircraft. I sank the boat and after a couple of minutes - there seems to be a stock delay of about 2 minutes between triggers firing and events taking place - it's been the same in all mission I've made. - I got the shout that the aircraft had been picked up on radar!

I don't know how much the distance influences it - I suspect it might be more to do with setting up the entry daye so that it cannot be physically present in the game world until triggered that does the magic.

This is good news, though, as I was beginning to suspect the whole thing was borked. I'm looking forward to trying it with random groups as well.

[FAdmiral]

I am also fooling around with the extras (triggers & events) in SH4.
I just made a single patrol to check out some features to see if they
work. One was to check the ships docked at Wake Island and send a
report back (contact report) to COMSUBPAC. I tried the generic objective
but that didn't seem to work. I didn't want the recon photos. I wanted to
do it just like you spotted a convoy and were reporting it. The spawning
idea is one I will be trying sometime in the future. I'm glad they made a
new forum just for creating missions, patrols and careers. It'll sure help
alot of us understand and create better ones....

JIM

[Binky1st]

Originally Posted by Egan

Some useful information posted by ACsoft on the Sh3 mission editors forum. I thought I would repost it here as it is still relevent:

Well, I've been having real problems getting 'Update instance' to work. Sometimes it has and others have been lessons in frustration. My current test set up is a Japanese search plane to spawn after I'd destroyed a Small freighter. I adjusted the Entry date (in the unit properties,) to about 20 days after the mission was set to start and moved the aircraft to 36km or so away from the Maru.

And it worked!

Normally the aircraft would spawn at the start of the mission and I'd see it after 6 - 8 minutes or so regardless of whether I'd sunk the Maru or not. This time I gave it a full 20 mins before I attacked and there was no sighn of the aircraft. I sank the boat and after a couple of minutes - there seems to be a stock delay of about 2 minutes between triggers firing and events taking place - it's been the same in all mission I've made. - I got the shout that the aircraft had been picked up on radar!

I don't know how much the distance influences it - I suspect it might be more to do with setting up the entry daye so that it cannot be physically present in the game world until triggered that does the magic.

This is good news, though, as I was beginning to suspect the whole thing was borked. I'm looking forward to trying it with random groups as well.

That looks like the info Bill needed.