Talk:Worms Armageddon mission file

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Revision as of 10:57, 17 September 2012 by Muzer (Talk | contribs) (Features required to make WA mission editing better)

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Features required to make WA mission editing better

In order to bridge the gap between the current status and the slight possibility of future full WWP custom mission integration, I thought I'd make a list of some of the things that would be required if custom missions were to be officially possible in WA before this time. These extensions will be fully backwards-compatible, making existing missions (theoretically) work the same with the same parser.

  • A directory for custom missions \user\missions - same as WWP.
  • A mode for custom missions - probably with a button at the bottom of the existing mission screen to flip between disc missions and user missions. This would list all missions in \user\missions in something resembling a logical order, like alphabetical by either mission name or filename, or perhaps using the MissionNumber field.
  • Ability to set mission name and description:
    • WWP does this in a binary concatenated onto the start of the mission file. This is far from ideal as 1) editing binaries is hard and 2) it would require two mission formats; one for disc missions, one for custom ones.
    • So, I propose NameText and DescriptionText settings in the [Mission] group.
      • DescriptionText would have to have some way of inserting line breaks without breaking the file format. Perhaps something like \n? Just got to make sure it's backwards-compatible with all existing missions.
  • Difficulty, which exists in WA missions but appears unused, could be brought out into the custom mission screen (only) as an indication for difficulty.
  • Map files would have to be specified somehow:
    • For LandFile I have no idea what the function is. For all missions I can find, even WWP ones, it is listed as LandFile=data\land.dat
    • WWP concatenates the map after the mission data - again, I don't like this for the reasons listed above.
    • So, I propose a new option - UseLevel (can't quite think of a good name for it). There you should be able to set a filename for any supported (non-import) map format in the \user\missions\levels directory, or the name of any intrinsic map (they should be differentiated by the fact that maps in user\missions\levels will have file extensions).
  • Text strings would have to be supported
    • On the whole, this can be done the same way as WWP does it. The only problem is the WWP mission text strings are not localisable; I don't however see that as a problem (not too many mission makers are multi-lingual anyway).
    • Event type 10 text strings in WWP are simply Text=somestring
    • AI worm names are simply Worm#_Name=somestring
    • AI team names are simply Name=somestring
    • I don't see a problem with implementing these.

Additions/suggestions/corrections welcome. Muzer 12:57, 17 September 2012 (CEST)

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