Missions

[Neahle]

Hello,

I'm not really a guy who loves to play against other players but enjoy the single player content a lot and all the changes Openra makes to Red Alert. When do you think you will implement all the missions from RA and the expensions?

Furthermore, for France, what do you think about merging the Radar Jammer and the Mobile Gap Generator as one single unit.


With kind regards,

Neahle

[avalach21]

Hello,

I'm not really a guy who loves to play against other players but enjoy the single player content a lot and all the changes Openra makes to Red Alert. When do you think you will implement all the missions from RA and the expensions?

Furthermore, for France, what do you think about merging the Radar Jammer and the Mobile Gap Generator as one single unit.


With kind regards,

Neahle

that was a really cute post. how sweet.

i also am curious to the answer. I have been thinking about ways that I could help with the project and one of the things I'd like to start with would be enhancing the campaign experience. I really like how they have now added in mission briefing support but I think there's still a lot that could be done.

Are there currently any plans/has it already been discussed about the following features/ideas:

Having cinematics for successful/failed missions play?
Having a map inbetween missions to select which level you would like to play?
Having a score screen/hi scores inbetween missions?

Off the top of my head, these 3 features would make a big difference in giving the single player a "campaign" feel.


I was always bummed out how the counter strike and aftermath expansions were just a list of missions as it didn't give you the progressive campaign story feel. I was even more upset to hear that the playstation folks basically got all the missions but they added in General Carville briefings for a more campaign-like experience? Still never did get to play through RA: Retaliation, but it would be cool if that could be a part of Open RA one day.

[Murto the Ray]

The short answer is that there is nobody knows. Porting a mission isn't a simple copy and paste job, it requires a lot of time translating each stage of the mission over into lua and custom rules; there may also be special behaviour that was only used in the missions that needs to be ported over, too. Currently i don't think there is anyone solely dedicated to doing them so they will be released piecemeal. If you reaaaaallly wanted to see those missions released you could try to learn how to create them yourself (It isn't as hard as you might think, it just takes time).

[MustaphaTR]

D2K Campaign had some momentum recently as i made 8 missions (not all merged yet) and abcdefg30 2. But it is silent in RA and CnC's side for a while.

As Murto said, poting a mission from original game to OpenRA requires you to write almost all the triggers and stuff from original in LUA. So it is not that easy to do. Importing original .map file to OpenRA's .oramap file is the easiest part, as can be done with utility.cmd. The rest are a bit hard but not really much.

I'm not touching CnC because i don't have much knowledge about it. For RA, i may take a look to it too in the future, but i'm not familiar with original's mission trigger system/map editors.

Proper campaign progression is planned, but no-one take a hand on it yet. You already can watch the videos, but you need to manually copy them from original games to Content folders.

There are lists of missions currently added:
https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/9287
https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/4988
https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/4989

[SirCake]

Hey,
you can also go absolute freestyle and cook up your own missions of course!
If you don't want any new units or stuff like that you can do it with just the map editor (for terrain and starting units) and a lua script (for mission goals, reinforcements, etc)

Just D.I.Y. and upload it on the resource center

[windwalker]

I'm also interested in the single player.

I had a quick look at how OpenRA implements mission scripting to understand why it's so unpopular to add new ones.

Two questions for any developers in the attendance jumped into my mind right away:
Why doesn't the OpenRA engine support the original format missions were delivered in?

and

Wouldn't it be easier to write a translator from the original format to the Lua script format used by OpenRA instead of manually writing scripts from scratch for each mission?

[Sleipnir]

The simple answer is that we don't have access to the implementation details of the original scripting formats, and our internal engine details are very different to the original game. That makes it difficult and a huge time investment to reverse engineer and natively support or translate the original script definitions. The four games also had different scripting support, so if it were possible we would still have to maintain multiple parallel implementations which isn't desirable.

[noobmapmaker]

Hey,
you can also go absolute freestyle and cook up your own missions of course!
If you don't want any new units or stuff like that you can do it with just the map editor (for terrain and starting units) and a lua script (for mission goals, reinforcements, etc)

Just D.I.Y. and upload it on the resource center

At this time I don't have the time figure out how to do it, but one day I hope to build a mission that teaches micro. It'll consist of a serie of small challenges that are only doable if the player micros his units properly.

Some ideas:
Player starts with a destroyer and a transport. In order to reach the beach the player must destroy subs by outmicroing their torpedo's. Once killed the transport unloads tanya and a flaktruck. They encounter 3 artillery and the flak truck has to shoot them. Next is a flametower that can only be passed by Tanya when the flak truck distracts the flametowers flameballs.
Then they reach a base with hardly any ore and no ore-spawn. It's just enough to build ~7 rocketinfantry. The player has to overcome an enemy base, but it will only succeed when he sells the refinery and uses the ore truck and civilians as tank.

Well.. you catch the drift.

@Mustapaha: awesome work on the Dune missions. Although not a popular mod, I know that you will make the few that do like it extra extra happy!

[windwalker]

The simple answer is that we don't have access to the implementation details of the original scripting formats

Are the documents linked from the Reverse engineering page of the wiki not sufficient? There must be some sort of access to the original scripts available otherwise how were any missions added?

and our internal engine details are very different to the original game.

I suspected that may be the case.

That makes it difficult and a huge time investment to reverse engineer and natively support or translate the original script definitions.

To me, as an outsider, it's not obvious how time consuming that would be. In any case, it's worth while to look at that cost not only in isolation but also to compare it to the effort needed to create the missions manually.

The four games also had different scripting support, so if it were possible we would still have to maintain multiple parallel implementations which isn't desirable.

Would there actually be any maintenance burden? The formats are not going be changing so once an implementation is complete it's frozen. They are also not entirely different but progressions of previous formats.