Talk:Worms Armageddon mission file

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)