Far Gate Campaign Editor Tutorial
By Louis S Carrozzi, Mission Designer - Far Gate
Super X Studios - Seattle, WA, USA
Section 2: The Object Panel
The Object panel is the heart of the Campaign Editor. It is divided into two sections.
The left hand section gives you a tree-view list of all of the available objects you can insert into your mission:
The right hand section, is called the "scene list" and this will show you what objects exist in YOUR particular system, otherwise known as a "scene" in Direct 3D terminology.
NOTE: This section will be empty to start with, and will gain objects as you add them into your mission.
The Game section controls your mission over time and space:
Your mission will always start at zero seconds, and will change dynamically when you hit the "play" button.
It works just like a tape recorder: Hit play to see what your mission will do over time, and then hit reset to reset your game clock back to zero. Since things such as cut-scenes, ship movements, planet movements etc. all occur over time, you will be using these two buttons a LOT while editing your mission, espeically when you want to see the results of particular triggers, which we will look at later.
The "Grid" checkbox is also very important. It displays the editor grid as seen here:
The reason this grid is important is that it will be your guide for creating "range" trigger events. For example, if you want to turn a neutral player's ships hostile when the player's units get within "50 grid units" of a hub orbiting a planet, you can eyeball the distance in the editor using the game grid. Each square of this grid represents 10 grid units. 50 grid units, in our example above, would be 5 squares on the grid.
Now, lets take a look at some of your menu options at the top of the object panel. The first menu is pretty straight-forward:
New Mission: Clears the Editor window, objects, and triggers, and gives you a "clean slate" to work with. (You will be prompted to save any prior mission you may have open before this clears your workspace.)
Open Mission: Opens a previously saved mission.
New Multiplayer Map: Use this option if you want to create a new Multiplayer map. (creates a slightly different type of mission file, specifcally for use with multiplayer). This is basically the same as "New Mission".
Open Multiplayer Map: Same as "Open Mission" above, but for multiplayer missions.
NOTE: Single player missions will be saved in your Far Gate\Missions folder by default, whereas Multiplayer missions will be saved in your Far Gate\Multiplayer folder by default. This is to ensure that the missions appear in the correct places in o
Save: Saves your current mission.
Save As: Allows you to save your current mission as a new file.
** Save Current State As: This one is very important! **
**In Far Gate you can add a Station Hub to a mission at zero seconds (mission must always be "reset" to add new objects), but what if you want to add a hub with two Pod-bays, a Hangar and a Shipyard? You CANNOT add these into the mission by default. However, what you CAN do is create a trigger that adds $5000 bucks to Player 1 at zero seconds, then add a hub in at zero seconds, then PLAY the mission and build your podbays, hangar and shipyard. Then, when you can PAUSE the mission, you can do a "Save Current State As" and the mission clock will be reset to zero, but you will still have your hub, podbays, hangar and shipyard all connected to your hub.
Basically, "Save Current State As" saves the mission at the point in time when you pause it, and saves any objects that exist at that time.
Let's now take a look at the other menu options under "Mission." These options are critical to creating a complete, working mission.
Info: This options brings up your Mission Info screen. You can take a mission "snapshot" which will appear in your single or multiplayer load screens, and allows you to name your mission and set the mission as either a single or multiplayer map. It will look like this to start with:
The "Take Snapshot" button will take a "screenshot" of your mission editor window based on the current contents of that window (and camera angle of that window). "Clear Snapshot" will clear your image. For example, with our editor window above (the grid picture) we would get a snapshot that looks something like this:
You can fill out the rest of the information for your mission and it might look something like this:
NOTE: Its probably not a good idea to put a password on your mission, as you may not be able to load it. The password field was created for the Far Gate single player missions, and is not intended for general use. Its best to leave this field blank for your custom missions.
The next menu item is "Triggers". I will get into a detailed discussion of Triggers in Section 3, below. The "Triggers" menu item will bring up the trigger editor window, which looks like this:
The next menu item is "Watch Variables".
The Far Gate Campaign Editor has a robust variable editor for both single and multiplayer missions, and this window allows you to "watch" those variables in real time to help debug your missions. You can use variables for such things as generating random amounts of money to add to a player, counting the number of ships entering a wormhole, etc. You can also use variables to track mission objectives. I usually create a variable to track each objective that needs to be completed in a mission, set it to "0" to begin with, then increment it by 1 for each objective completed. Once the variable hits the total number of objectives (say for example 3 for a 3 objective mission) then I use a "variable compare" trigger to "succeed" the mission.
The watch variable window looks like this by default:
You'll notice that there are no user variables to start with. That's becuase YOU need to define those variables via triggers. You set them, increment them, check them etc. Once a trigger activates a user variable (using the "Play" button as described above) then it will show up in this window, along with its current value. The "Variables" window is mainly used for debugging or watching what your variables do over time.
The other variables listed are standard system variables used in the game, and most of the variables listed are specifcally for multiplayer missions.
The next menu item is the "Delete All Objects" Menu item. This menu item allows you to delete all of the objects (ships, planets, and such) from a mission WITHOUT changing your triggers structure. This is very useful for creating Multiplayer missions off the missions provided in the ship version of Far Gate. Why re-invent the wheel?
The last menu item is the "Export Text" function. This is mainly for localization. When you have "text triggers" - such as the dialogue triggers in the single player missions of Far Gate - you can export all of the lines of text into a *.csv (comma seperated values) file so you can translate the text lines into other languages more easily. You will not likely use this feature unless you plan on making a full single player campagin and plan on having it translated into other languages. The *.csv file also contains *.wav file information to go along with your text. We will discuss text/dialogue triggers further in the triggers section (Section 3) below.
The last menu item on the far right is the "Help" menu. One option contains a link to your local help files (on your hard drive) and the other to this web-based help site.
Now, on to the fun stuff!!!
>> GO TO >> Section 3 - Managing Objects And Triggers