Questions for modders

[peabody]

Originally Posted by Armistead

I love the game, except for the lack of drama and repetition that takes place. My sister is a game developer, basically a third party that works mostly in role playing. She is looking at the game with some of her friends and will try and make some mods for me. So far what I want seems to be hardwired...dang it. I wanted a complete sub.

I love RSRD..wouldn't play without it. Still, I wonder if it can be taken a step further. I know many make some intense single missions. Cannot these be programmed into a campaign?

For instance you get a mission to save a down pilot in shallow water. When you get close, several enemy planes are triggered to show up. You pick him up, then a dd killer group gets triggered. Basically when you get to a patrol zone or a mission it triggers events that unfold.


Instead of just getting to a patrol zone and looking for a ship or convoy, many events are triggered to add drama and some intense action.
If would be fun to drop off some supplies in a shallow harbor to have that trigger a killer group of dd's to try and trap you in.

I'm just trying to give them some different idea's.

You should be able to add missions like this. In fact if you look in the Campaigns folder, you will see the Battle of Midway.mis, that is similar to what you are talking about. Although it is not a "mission" for you to go on, it is written the same as a single mission.
Create your mission, put it in with the others in the Campaign folder and add an entry in the Campaign.cfg. You can look at the others to see the format to enter them.
Although I haven't written a mission specifically like you describe I have written some that are similar. I have written missions to destroy Refit stations. You have to be careful on some things, for example the one I just mentioned. If you happen to get the mission again, you can't destroy the refit station, it is already destoyed, so you can not complete the mission.

Just one thing to keep in mind. Planes and ships will not spawn within 20 miles of your location. So for example a ship 20 miles away would take an hour real time to reach you. So if you want this to happen you should have a trigger zone that starts them on the way before you actually reach your location.

Some other things to consider, you don't know the route a player will take to reach it's objective so you need to take that into account when designing. Also once a 'trigger zone' has been triggered. (passed through) it will not work again. Just a silly example, you can't put two zones in a harbor entrance with one giving you your mission and then another to welcome you back to base. When you leave the base you trigger both zones and they will not work again when you return. Or if the player chooses to start outside port, it won't trigger either one.

I know they are not good examples but you do need to think a bit of what could happen. They may be on their way to drop supplies and trigger the DDs to head toward the supply drop and he encounters a huge task force and decides to attack it. So when the DDs get to the supply drop, nobody is there.

Peabody

[Armistead]

Thanks,

I assume she should know what's she's doing. I told her to join up her so she could talk to other modders, but she seems to be a know it all and says it's simple stuff, which is fine if they can make some good mods.

Do you mind if I give her your name as a contact? She's a game design whiz so may be mutually helpful down the road. I was talking to her last night on the phone and she was speakig in terms I couldn't start to grasp.