Sequence of events: Mission Startup?

[cfrag]

Dear ED ( @BIGNEWY or @NineLine to pass along perhaps?),

for many of us mission creators it's a bit of a mystery what happens during mission start-up. More precisely, it's not clear what happen when, in what order. This is usually not important for ad-hoc missions, but many of us wish to produce quality missions, and for this some added understanding of the mission startup process could be immensely helpful.

What I'm looking for is the order (or sequence) in which the following steps happen, and if you can add more information, the more the merrier:

Mission Startup Sequence: please order the following from the standpoint of a (client) mission

• map is loaded 
• weather is loaded and applied 
• all flags initialized / ready to access (synched with server)
• All map objects allocated and initialized (synched with server)
• static objects allocated and initialized
• All AI units (ground, air, naval) allocated and initialized
• FX allocated (smoke, fire etc)
• All map airfields initialized 
• All FARPs initialized 
• All naval airfields (carrier) initialized
• All warehouses initialized 
• AT START triggers invoked (i.e. the fist moment that a DOSCRIPT ACTION Lua script can start intercepting events and check for the existence of objects and spawn or change warehouse contents)
• Mission's INITIALIZATION SCRIPT (from TRIGGERS) invoked 
• Single-player: player interface invoked 
• Multi-Player: ready to synch with clients 
• First check if an airfield is contested/captured
• Multi-player: object synch with host complete (note: server-existing colored smokes aren't synchronized, bug exists and has been reported years ago)
• First moment when events are posted to world.eventHandler
• First point in time that the mission triggers are invoked (outside ATSTART)
• (this point may warrant its own breakout) Point in time, condition if/when, and order, of events when a player enters the cockpit (i.e. Birth, engine start-up, player enter, weapon add, etc).

Thank you so much for any information that you can share on this topic.

Kind regards,

-ch

 

Edited September 21, 2024 by cfrag