Creating a Campaign with alternate mission starting points.

[Phantom Hornet]

Can someone explain how the developer of Raven One was able to create a mission in the campaign where you can choose to skip ahead to a different part of the mission without having that second version of the mission show up in the campaign mission selection menu?  It seems that that alternative version is somehow hidden.

Just for further clarification and for the sake of saving everyone's time, I am not asking how to create a mission in which you can "load" another mission using the trigger system.  I am specifically asking about how to accomplish this in the campaign builder and have the alternate forms of the said mission not show up on the list of missions to select from in the campaign menu.

[TEMPEST.114]

On 12/13/2022 at 1:13 PM, Phantom Hornet said:

Can someone explain how the developer of Raven One was able to create a mission in the campaign where you can choose to skip ahead to a different part of the mission without having that second version of the mission show up in the campaign mission selection menu?  It seems that that alternative version is somehow hidden.

Just for further clarification and for the sake of saving everyone's time, I am not asking how to create a mission in which you can "load" another mission using the trigger system.  I am specifically asking about how to accomplish this in the campaign builder and have the alternate forms of the said mission not show up on the list of missions to select from in the campaign menu.

Did you ever find out?

[Phantom Hornet]

No.  I am still working on it.  I have joined Baltic-Dragon's discord channel and have presented the question there.  He is busy working on other things and said that he would answer the question as soon as he is able.  I will post back when he does.

 

[BuzzLine]

Probably with the use of multiple missions per stage and some clever use of scoring to fall on the right one.

[Grimes]

Its done by the score applied at the end of a mission. To advance a stage the score needs to be anywhere from 51 to 100. If you have multiple missions per stage then the campaign UI will pick a mission at random within the score range set for each mission within the stage. Lets say you have 5 missions and for each their range is 50-100. Then each time you played a mission on that stage it picks one at random. You could modify the conditions to cover a unique range of values. 50-60, 60-70, 70-80, etc. Then on the mission in the previous stage you could setup 5 mission goals that award 5, 15, 25, 35, 45 points each. Most of the story campaigns that don't allow you to go backwards award 50 points right a mission start. So whenever the mission is deemed "complete" they use trigger logic to decide how many points to give you, which in turn results in which of the 5 missions in the next stage the campaign is allowed to load. 

[Phantom Hornet]

I finally have the answer I've been looking for.

 

Ok, I understand why there is no easy answer to my question.  What I'm trying to accomplish requires mission "persistence".  There is no mission persistence in DCS unless a main DCS .lua file is modified to allow it.

The mission scoring system does not accommodate for persistence.  In other words, you can play a mission and get a score that will either push you back to the same mission (score of 49 or less), call a draw (score of 50), or allow you to advance to the next mission (score of 51).

What I'm trying to do is to create a mission where the first time you run it, the mission begins at the beginning without any options to start at other points in the timeline of the mission.  You then play until certain timeline checkpoints are encountered.  The next time you start the mission, you will have the option of choosing various checkpoints to begin the mission at.  This requires "persistence".

I have created a workaround for this.

Every mission in the campaign that has alternate starting points will begin by presenting the player with a question, such as, "Is this your first attempt at this mission?" if they answer yes (using the F10 menu), they will be presented with various tarting point options that will be triggered using the "LOAD MISSION" function.

The trick to making this work (thanks to Baltic-Dragon's help) is this:

1.  Create a folder in your "/Saved Games/DCS.openbeta/Missions/Campaign/en" with your campaign name on it.

2. Create alternate versions of your missions each starting at various points along your timeline.

3. Place the alternate versions in the campaign folder you created.

4. Create a campaign using the Campaign Builder in which you only insert the initial missions, not the alternate missions, all of which start at the beginning of the missions.

5. Save the campaign in the folder you created.

What this will do is only show the main missions in the campaign list but the alternate versions will be present behind the scenes and can be loaded from within each mission.