Modding the countries files
I didn't want to clutter Lima33's thread so this is a quote by Daiwillelti from the ETO BoB campaign IIs' ripping yarn. :applause:
Quote:
The next thing though would be to create an entirely new country.xml where each Fighter Group is listed - so is treated like a "nationality". Then QC locations would need to be tweaked - it lists available airbases by nationality. Also cutscenes would need to be tweaked - it also lists airbases by nationality. Also UnlimitedPilots, pilotattributes.xml, and a new global_layer.csv with the "owner" column (lists by nation) listing the Fighter Groups as owners of the airbases. That aspect of CFS3 does not seem to work as intended - notice how in Era 3 or 4 campaign, you can be flying a British aircraft yet still be assigned to a USAAF base? Frustrating because if that worked better it would be easy to get the right aircraft at the right airbases.
That's pretty much how it's done in the BoB install. The 'countries' are the RAF Groups (LW is done by the countries they were flying from) and under each group are the airfields in it. So are you saying David that it may be possible to link aircraft types to a base? That would be brilliant if so!
Insert Frontline Into _mission.xml
Well just to throw into the 'wildest dreams" department, the _mission.xml file IS editable (ie the one in the AppData pathway). I'm not adept so it takes me hours to pick up where I left off, or even work out what I did last time, but my uploaded "Campaign Mission Skill editor" is an example. I used some basic commands in Autohotkey so that, when sitting on the runway at the start of a campaign mission, I could press a couple of keys which edited the skill settings in the _mission.xml file.
It may be possible, for example, to change the mode in the _mission.xml file from "qc" to mission mode, AFTER making the selections of airfield, aircraft, weather, etc using the QC interface. In effect, you would be using the QC interface to act like an accessible mission builder, much less clunky than the real thing. Maybe WindingMan started off playing around with this sort of process when developing OFF, as Clive says. In fact, I often suspected that the early manager that WM developed was a re-skinning of the QC interface with a few more things accessible and built in as buttons - like selecting the weather which is actually already there in the QC interface.
It would not be hard to get the _mission.xml file to pop up in Notepad when you are in CFS3 at the start of selecting options for QC. If you had a specific frontline in mind, maybe that could be popped straight into the _mission.xml file? In that way immediate semi-historical scenarios could be played out, such as Bastogne, or Dunkirk, with an accurate frontline. And it would be much quicker and immediately satisfying than laboring over the Mission Builder for hours making one-off missions.
There are people around who are pretty adept at the simple string of commands required to get the _mission.xml file to open. I think it could be done through a .bat file or by programs like AutoHotKey. For me, it would take hours because its so long between attempts that I have to look at old stuff I did and try to repeat it.
So, in summary the idea would be to
- make selections in QC interface
- edit the _mission.xml for date, mode, frontline, etc
- try to get the darn thing to open without a ginormous crash
- or, another idea, close out of the _mission.xml file, rename the file as a conventional mission file, and open through the Missions tab in the UI. That would avoid the crashing perhaps?