A Journey of a Thousand Miles....

[CptTrips]

...starts with a single step.


I'm starting this thread for Ciaphas, or anyone else interested in dabbling with the Staged Missions.

First, you need something to bite down on.  A stick, or piece of wood.  Something that won't break you teeth.  I prefer a folder patch of rawhide.  You'll need this because working with Staged Missions is mostly an exercise of pain tolerance.

There are a lot of bugs, and a lot of missing features.  There is a lot of pain, pain, pain.  But Staged Missions are not directly a revenue center for HTC, and the community has not seemed to maintain an interest, so it is hard for HTC to justify putting too much effort in that direction.  There are not enough man-hours to spare.  That is why I was hoping HTC would open-source the editor so those of us who had an interest could first silly bugs and maybe add some more features.  I guess that would just expose too much IP.  The Staged Mission editor is not really a customer-facing product.  It is a tool for content providers, so your comfort isn't the highest priority compared the people who pay a subscription to play the game.   

Second,  don't waste your time trying to get offline missions working.   IMHO, there are just too many bugs. Apparently it functions a lot differently than the code running on the servers.  I wasted months beating my head against that stone wall.  Build, then upload your missions to the server and run them from a Custom Arena.  That will save you a lot of pain.  I wouldn't be surprised to see offline missions be deprecated, which would be unfortunate, but it is what it is.


Next start with these excellent videos to get your head pointed in the right direction.  Mr. Bob Boson did a really excellent job.  They are for a much older version of AH, but there is still enough in common to be a good starting point to get some of the concepts.   I think there a 14 videos in the series. If you are impatient, you might skip to video 3.



There is also a tutorial stidky'd at the top of this topic and Mustang wrote a nice one you can find here: https://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,382993.0.html

To get started I'd recommend this exercise:

1.  Create a simple 1 plane vs 1 plane mission.  Just a single waypoint each heading straight for towards each other.
2.  Get that to build without errors.
3.  Upload it to the server using the upload tool that is in your installation.
4.  Start a Custom Arena using the terrain you built the mission for and run it online.

Once you got that far, maybe I can answer specific questions you'd have in this thread.  Or if you have questions above getting the above exercise done, also don't hesitate to ask.


CptTrips
 

[streakeagle]

The last vestige of the Tour of Duty effort. If you can't play offline missions, what is the point? Sadly, Aces High is spiraling down the path of Warbirds with just enough subscribers to linger on, but not enough to keep growing and improving. AH3 with VR is pretty darn good, but not good enough to keep new faces playing and paying. How much longer is AH going to be in business? All things, even good things, eventually come to an end

[CptTrips]

The last vestige of the Tour of Duty effort. If you can't play offline missions, what is the point?

Well, I'd certainly like all the bugs with offline ot be fixed someday and the mode kept around.  For one thing, it keeps the possibility around of dabbling in a standalone game if I can ever talk him into it.

Having to upload the mission and run it on a Custom Arena is only a minor inconvenience once you learn how to to it.  The workflow is not that bad.

On the other hand,  it also has the benefit of your mission being automatically shared and available for anyone else who would like to play it also.  It works well, because in the old days there had to be complicated instructions for people wanting to share offline missions on what files to copy where it get them to work. 

When you play a mission in  Custom Arena, the client/server code handles the download and installation of all files locally automatically into their proper locations.

It also has a lot of potential for Micro scenarios.  It might be fun for you and 3-4 friends to meet on a Custom Arena and fire up a Staged Mission where you and your friends scramble in Spits from Manston and intercept a massive AI bomber stream with AI 109 escorts. Etc. Etc. You can't do stuff like that offline.


$0.02.

[CptTrips]

.oops

[Ciaphas]

Once I get the mission editor to stop crashing on start I will dig in to this.

[CptTrips]

Once I get the mission editor to stop crashing on start I will dig in to this.

Yeah.  Remember the part where we talked about pain threshold?   

Through negative operant conditioning, you just eventually learn what to touch and what not to touch.

If it is crashing on startup, sometimes I had gotten my config file in a weird state.  If that is what is happening, try finding the config file and renaming it to something and then restart and let it generate a fresh one.

Settings/AHEDMISS.cfg

  

[CptTrips]

One of the other pain points you are bound to run into quickly is that when you are trying to create/edit routes, it won't render your lines properly.
After every change, wiggle the view with the 'W' and 'S' keys to cause it to refresh the view.

$0.02.

[CptTrips]

I just wanted to update this so if someone interested in learning missions sees it, they are not lead astray. 

In the past the offline missions just didn't function.  I recommended using a Custom Arena.

Hitech has recently reworked the offline system and it works much better.  I'd recommend using offline for developing missions.  If fact you can keep the mission "local only" while you are developing and don't need to upload it to the server until you want to share.

 

[Ciaphas]

I just wanted to update this so if someone interested in learning missions sees it, they are not lead astray. 

In the past the offline missions just didn't function.  I recommended using a Custom Arena.

Hitech has recently reworked the offline system and it works much better.  I'd recommend using offline for developing missions.  If fact you can keep the mission "local only" while you are developing and don't need to upload it to the server until you want to share.

 

Offline, works for me as well