New mission for RA mod

[umairazfar]

You can grab it from here.

Just unzip it in OpenRA\mods\ra\maps

it should should up in single player missions.

Enjoy!

[zypres1]

Thank you for documenting it and make it easier for others to mod.

I linked some of the great wiki pages you made, a little more. bottom here

I also would like to reward you the bounty if you do a little start-map for scripting, since you did great work with documenting it.

See here: https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/5084

[umairazfar]

thanks! Unfortunately I am quite busy with my own stuff (thesis writing, papers writing, completing my PhD software, etc) and what little time I get, I try to add a few things here and there, mostly to my own mod.

I will look into these as listed:

1: Starting playing sound
2: saying welcome, and tell the rules of the game
3: Map centers on units, each player get one engineer
4: One HQ on the middle is shown with spy plane to all players, and location F9 is sent to all players
4: when engineer enters middle hq, mcv is given on the egdes of the map
5: when that is deployed, player gets 5000cash, and can build 5 oil derrics and barracks/tent, nothing else
6: The other players get the message: user xxx has built a base
7: all players get one plane each to explore
8: Each player get reinforcement, one apc with medics
9: music starts
10: all map is revealed, but not units
11: When players wins, the HQ changes from neutral to the team of the winner.

and maybe make something in a few days. What I do not get is what do you want to get made exactly. My tutorials are enough to get anyone started and this latest mission has been commented to death. I do not think anyone can go wrong if he follows the comments and tutorials

[umairazfar]

map uploaded to resource center

http://resource.openra.net/maps/1758

[squidgeny]

Fantastic little mission! Unfortunately the mission crashed after I destroyed the last of the four helipads (this was after I already destroyed all the AA guns). I suspect, and this is just a guess, that the primary objective of destroying the entire base isn't actually listed in the objectives?

I've seen your stuff on the wiki about the .lua and .yaml files - very helpful. Thank you for that. I've recently become interested in making scripted maps myself, but the code has always been somewhat opaque to me, even though I'm a bit of a coder already. The documentation has always seemed missing or incomplete, but I see you're working on fixing that Perhaps if I get a good grip of the code I can help with that too (no promises though... very time-consuming!)

[umairazfar]

the mission has been updated and I removed the helipads as a secondary objective. I will improve it further in due time.

I keep updating the code whenever I get time.

Just keep at it and check the missions that come with openra to learn

the irc channel for openra has very good support, you can ask them all the problems you encounter.

A friend of mine also started to code using my tutorials and his experience was not bad, so I guess you can start making stuff yourself.

It does take a bit of time but the reward is worth it.

[zypres1]

thanks! Unfortunately I am quite busy with my own stuff (thesis writing, papers writing, completing my PhD software, etc) and what little time I get, I try to add a few things here and there, mostly to my own mod.

I will look into these as listed:

1: Starting playing sound
2: saying welcome, and tell the rules of the game
3: Map centers on units, each player get one engineer
4: One HQ on the middle is shown with spy plane to all players, and location F9 is sent to all players
4: when engineer enters middle hq, mcv is given on the egdes of the map
5: when that is deployed, player gets 5000cash, and can build 5 oil derrics and barracks/tent, nothing else
6: The other players get the message: user xxx has built a base
7: all players get one plane each to explore
8: Each player get reinforcement, one apc with medics
9: music starts
10: all map is revealed, but not units
11: When players wins, the HQ changes from neutral to the team of the winner.

and maybe make something in a few days. What I do not get is what do you want to get made exactly. My tutorials are enough to get anyone started and this latest mission has been commented to death. I do not think anyone can go wrong if he follows the comments and tutorials

Nice.. These are just examples of what could be cool to have.
My wish is that some guides will help scripters make cool maps, and you created that. But I also think that a file you can download and start with is important.
Some of the features I would love to see more of, like music, text on screen after "happenings", triggers, and stats related trigges(when first player gets x). My wish is to have more scripted maps, but also some more multiplayer ones. Your work help other scripters, and I would like to thank you for that. What more can we do to achieve more scripted maps?

It would be cool if some of the missions could be played (or seen) in the map browser, so you can start with specs and also do multiplayer if map supports it.

[umairazfar]

I am actually not too keen on multiplayer maps unless they are coop maps.

As for the tutorials I made, if you look at them, I have given the entire code for the tutorial at the end of every tutorial. If someone wants to download a file, he does not need to do it, but rather just copy paste the code.

More tutorial can be made for all the features that you mentioned and I just might do that in near future, but sadly I am very busy these days. I did however create this software to help people design their own base using a text file, This should speed up map generation immensely.

I however also have plans to make another software where you have a User Interface that lets you create units for a patrol and then add triggers to those units and then the software generates all the code by itself. That can be very handy for people who are not into coding.

So instead of copy pasting code and making changes to it, the code is automatically generated and all you got to do is name the actors as according to the map. That is my next project once I complete this current one regarding making bases from templates.

that should also help with a couple of features that you want as well. So people will just design maps and note down the places for waypoints. Then all they got to do is to tell the software what unit will be generated where and the software will do the rest and generate a lua file with all the code.

How does that sound?

[umairazfar]

This is what I mean. It is work under development and I will release a version as soon as I add reinforce functionality so that you or anyone else can test it out and give feedback.

So a lua file will be generated which can be used directly with a map, provided the map.yaml has been made correctly.

I think that this will cause a surge in the development of community based single player maps.

Although writing down all the logic and also for it to work properly will be difficult, but once the basic code and logic is in there, I will make it open source and maybe the OpenRA developers will start to support it with the game itself so that everyone can benefit from it.

I am a newbie when it comes to github and pull requests etc, do not know how to set it up and how to use it and quite frankly I do not have time at the moment. But I will eventually do all that once I am free.

[umairazfar]

This example shows that the user can

add waypoints to a path

then create a path

the code is generated

this is just one example of what can be done. With time I will slowly improve it to take other things into consideration. This is just a taste of things to come and should reduce the time to make the single player missions and make that process a lot more intuitive.

[zypres1]

Sweet, I like what you have done.

Coop maps are one my, and I guess other also, top list of what we want.
There is a lack of that, but we have seen one, but now I cannot find it in resources. (can anyone upload it there? even if it does not work anymore)

We need to get support in missions for more players in coop, and also ppl specking when you play your missions.. I would love to see other ways of playing missions, and also by downloading replays.

My dream, is that programming missions could be done with something similar to Scratch or blocky.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_%2 ... anguage%29
https://developers.google.com/blockly/

Yes, please put your mission maker in public, so you can get help and inspiration to continue it. It would be awesome if you make it workable, and at least forkable if anyone could try out their ideas.

Thank you for your work, and please take the bounty if it helps you.. If bounties would help you, you should also make one for your mission maker.

Again, this will lead to a lot of new cool maps, and that is really welcome..

[umairazfar]

Let us save the bounty for someone who takes the mission maker forward.

I will make the mission maker work, in fact some parts of it are already working, but my knowledge of all the lua functions is limited, so I will try to put in as much as I know and try to make that work. I however do not know if I will continue support for it in future as many things are bound to change in future for me (moving back to my home country from japan, getting settled at a job, things like that).

I was also thinking of a functionality where you give the mission maker the map.yaml file and it extracts all the waypoints from it. That will further increase the map coding speed, but it is actually too much work for a very little benifit.

Someone forwarded me the code for a coop map, but I have not looked into it yet. I will do so in due time.

I have played around with scratch and it is a compelling idea but I think it requires a lot of work to get it right. I believe the under construction OpenRA ingame editor will be able to do that if done right. Till that time, these little tools of mine can help a lot in making quick maps. Although some tweaking will need to be done eventually to make a complete map, but this software will help immensely.

The next time I will post, it will be after I complete some basic functionality and have a proper working lua code created by the Mission Maker.

[umairazfar]

Now some of the code is working and it is generating lua code as I had imagined it will.

[umairazfar]

Map updated and can be found here:

http://resource.openra.net/maps/1824

It should not crash this time and the objectives are more streamlined

[umairazfar]

Forgot to turn on the Shroud and Fog of war, this upload fixes that
http://resource.openra.net/maps/1827