Standoff Mission Builder ??? Standoff Academy ???

heavy

Spaceman
Can i expect a release/update for Mission Builder compatible with Standoff ????

I would like to make some missions for Standoff, and i think that maybe i'm not the only one interested in make missions for Standoff. For sure the community will enjoy a lot a mission builder for Standoff.

It's easy to add the standoff ships to Mission Builder, the problem is the pilots list.
I don't know how to get the pilots numbers from Standoff.

What about STANDOFF ACADEMY ????

A simple mission builder combined with Standoff could be GREAT. I mean, a simple mission builder where you can set some waypoints and enemy ships. Some kind of WC ACADEMY.

It's VERY EASY to make missions with Thomas Bruckner mission builder, and i think that a simple misssion builder for Standoff will be a great addon.
 
We don't have unlimited time or resources. I don't know what I'll be doing after Standoff is finished - most likely, I'll take an extended break from WC editing - but if I end up doing more WC stuff, it would definitely be a new project, instead of add-ons to an already-finished one. So, no, we won't be doing anything like this. But you can easily extract the pilot files out of Standoff, so you don't actually need our help.

And that, by the way, is what I'd like to see most of all. As years go by, I find myself increasingly fed up by the lack of new people who'd want to learn how to edit WCP or any other WC game. If you have an idea, don't ask us to implement it for you - make the effort to learn, and do it yourself. It's how we started out, so there's no reason why anybody else can't do the same.
 
About modding games:

Well, i enjoy a lot to mod games. Long time ago i did a Total conversion for Doom with objects and sprites from various games (Duke Nukem, Redneck Rampage...)... a completely new Doom, i transformed everything from the original game, only for my amusement (i never uploaded my mod) The mod was 10 MB and it took me 3 months to complete it - only four levels.

I enjoy to mod games only for my amusement, trying to do the perfect game for me.

About the pilot list:

I know how to extract the files from Standoff, but i don't know how to read or edit IFF files, and i haven't seen a tutorial about editing the pilot list.
 
Not that I have used it so far... But from what I heard, you're looking for WCPPascal, it seems to be something to program WCP-missions, and thus it should also work for a WCP-mod (well, SO-mod, but it might not make that much difference) like Standoff (more qualified personal is of course free to correct me if that statement is wrong... ;) ) .
It should be somewhere in the CIC download zone. If not look around the community sites (HCl's and PopsiclePete's sites might be a good place to start, from what I remember from my old quick-tour through the community) .


@Quarto: Well, understandabe, I also do mod a bit now and then, and thus know it's time-consuming... So I guess I'll have to dig out that WCP stats editor and maybe some other things to get to fly Shok'lar / H'hriss, while hoping HCl will sometime in the future increase the number of shipslots for the simulator (though multiplayer is something I do hope for even more) .
 
heavy said:
I know how to extract the files from Standoff, but i don't know how to read or edit IFF files, and i haven't seen a tutorial about editing the pilot list.
Well, to edit IFF files, you have to decompile them using WCPPas, and then recompile them back into IFF files. Just one thing worth noting - unfortunately, the very last WCPPas version that Thomas released contains a bug, so it's recommended that you download version 24 and then the 24c update, leaving the 24d update alone.

Also, once you have WCPPas, you may want to download the UE source code package. It's well worth taking a look at - you may not be trying to make a complete mod just yet, but if you look at the files we edited, you'll get some idea about which files do what, and which you want to edit.

Oh yeah, and pilot files. All the pilot data is contained in pilots\pilots.iff. The file contains 177 entries, one for each pilot. Like with everything else in the WCP world, the entries are numbered from 0, so the last one is 176.

Here's what the contents of a given entry mean:
Code:
      CHUNK "ATTR"
      {
        long 1      // Number
        long 1      // XA
        long 0      // Language callsign string
        long 2      // Pilot type; 2 = fighter, 5 = capship
        long 4      // Loyalty
        long 4      // Verbosity
        long 5      // Flying
        long 4      // Gunnery
        long 0      // Ejection (0 = only if absolutely necessary?)
        long 1      // Special pilot = 1, generic = 0
        long 5      // Squadron; 0 = Diamondbacks, 1 = Wolfpack, 2= Black Widows, 3 = Kat, 4 = Bug, 5 = Confed Generic
        long 2      // Initial killboard count
        long 0      // Unknown (varies 0/1)
        long 0      // Unknown (always 0)
        long 0      // Unknown (always 0)
        long 0      // Unknown (always 0)
        long 0      // Unknown (always 0)
      }
      CHUNK "COMM"
      {
        cstring "spoons"  // ENG
        cstring "spoons"  // IFF
        cstring "spoons"  // IFF
        cstring "spoons"  // IFF
      }
 
If you're looking for a simple mission builder, and the prophecy engine is too complex for you, you're welcome to try Flight Commander's mission editor. Just don't expect the quality of a commercial engine.

Starting at 0 is a computer science thing.
 
eddieb said:
If you're looking for a simple mission builder, and the prophecy engine is too complex for you, you're welcome to try Flight Commander's mission editor. Just don't expect the quality of a commercial engine.
You know, I really don't appreciate posts like this - how would you like it if, every time somebody asks a technical question at the FC forum, we'd tell them that the best way to solve the problem is to switch to Prophecy?

Sorry if it might seem like I'm overreacting, but this isn't the first time you've posted something like this in our forum, so I figured it's time to say something about it. Such posts are the textbook definition of spam. Let's have a little faith in people's intelligence, and assume that when they ask a technical question about a specific engine, it's because they want to use that specific engine rather than the half a dozen other available engines, shall we? :)
 
I think Eddie had a valid point in his post, Quarto. FC is an easier engine to mod then WCP/SO. Heavy asked if you guys (the standoff team) would create a mission builder for Standoff, you told him that it was highly unlikely (for very good reasons, I completely understand that) and suggested if he wanted it he should learn and do it himself. All Eddie did was suggest a method that was a little easier to do that in.
 
My apologies. I'll be more careful in the future. No offense was intended.

I'll also apologise for iceblade's post, that was spam indeed, he probably didn't realize it.

Let me retract what I said before and help heavy more directly. If the user wants to create a graphical mission builder for standoff and the prophecy engine, they're welcome to the source code to my mission builder, it may help. I once offered to create such a prophecy mission builder but there was little interest, for good reason.
 
Maj.Striker said:
I think Eddie had a valid point in his post, Quarto. FC is an easier engine to mod then WCP/SO.
Absolutely - I didn't say Eddie was wrong in that regard. It's just that there's a time and place for everything, and when somebody asks me how to edit a specific file in WCP (because heavy didn't just ask about a mission builder, he also explained what particular problem he had when using Thomas' WCP mission builder). Additionally, it would be somewhat problematic trying to make Standoff-based missions for Flight Commander... I daresay that when you want to make new missions that use tons of files from an existing WCP mod, switching to an easier-to-use engine might turn out to be counter-productive :).

In short - in a thread where a user asks a general question about which engine has what advantages for WC mods, I'll happily chime in and explain how Flight Commander is much easier than WCP (...though obviously I'd also mention the advantages WCP has). This, however, is not that thread.
 
Actually I was just making a comment. Had I been dealing with modding another game that started its list of strings, or something to that effect, at zero then I would have mentioned that game instead.

But, yeah. It was unintentional spaming.

My apologies.
 
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