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Mission Illustrated
In CGF, missions are the way to define and start a customized battle: missions define
the forces and teams in the battle, their initial positions and plans, and the
objectives.
Because of these objectives, CGF missions allow the player fight with other goals
than just just survival (as in standard AQ2 team play). This way, CGF really
adds some single player experience to AQ2.
Below, you'll find both screen shots and the mission definition for a 'hitman' mission:
it's your task to eliminate Sabotage, some criminal leader. Sabotage is hiding
in one of the map's rooms, and is protected by some snipers and patrolling teams. (And
Sabotage is armed as well). You receive assistance from some fellow bots who
will engage Sabotage's patrols. You accomplish this mission only by eliminating
Sabotage in time; if you don't meet the time limit, or both your buddies and you die, the mission
is a failure.
Mission information is provided to the player, (left). Both friendly and hostile force (bot)
teams apply varying team tactics and procedures (center). Individual bots apply specific
Action behavior as well, such as sniping (right).
Fight alongside the bots - the player's presence will influence their tactics - solo, the bot might
hesitate to attack, but now the player is present, he may venture to attack (left). In single player
action, AQ2 features such as ejecting shells no longer create much lag (center). Fights
with hard to predict outcomes occur between the opposing forces, ensuring replayability (right).
The team AI explicitly tries to acquire good positions previous to and during combat,
as the player is about to feel (left - note the third bot in the lower left corner).
The bots meet their maker (player/programmer William), and down him without further ado (center).
Sabotage, the guy to be eliminated by the player already noticed the fighting
and has become alert and curious (right). Of course, this mission resulted in a failure
for the player.
(Note that these shots have been recorded during several missions. You're also
seeing upgraded MP5 skins and AQ2 icons from the AQ2 Guild site).
To create such kind of mission, a script similar to this
sample mission has been created (for the Urban map).
Detailed documentation on how to modify and craft missions will be forthcoming
after version 0.8 has been released.
Mission/Bot Launcher
To assist CGF users in dealing with scripts, missions, skills, weapons etc., a bot launcher
will be made available.
Ross "JoeSatch" Norton
set out to do his part of the teamwork behind
CGF: a beta of his no-nonsense CGF launcher now camps on our desktops, and helps
us browsing through the missions, adjusting some settings, and launching
us into the action.
Mission Editor
CGF mission scripts can be edited with any text editor. However, scripts become
more readable and easier to edit using a good editor supporting syntax highlighting,
as can be seen in the image below.
I've been using EditPlus (see screenshot above)
to view, edit and check CGF mission scripts.
Below, you'll find the handy configuration files to enable CGF mission script
syntax highlighting:
A stand-alone script checker (cgfparser.exe) is available to assist you in detecting syntax errors
when editing CGF missions. It is included in every CGF release, and you'll find it in the
action\mission subdirectory. You invoke it from the dos command prompt, with the script file as
input. It outputs the formatted script and any errors, if applicable.
As can be seen in the screen shot above, it can be integrated into EditPlus as a tool (cgfparser
output appears in the lower right window). You can add cgfparser as a tool via the "Tools" menu,
"Configure User Tools..." option, and filling out the fields like this (taking into account
your own directory structure of course).
Mission Script Documentation
You'll find detailed documentation on the CGF scripts here.
Questions and feedback is welcome, so I can improve the documentation. It is basically one large html file so
you can save it to your hard disk for further reference. (Please don't distribute it from your site,
but refer to this site for the most up to date version).
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![Technical CGF information [AI and design]](./graphics/aidesign.png){kind=small}
![Links to related sites [such as AQ2 or AI sites]](./graphics/links.png){kind=small}
![preview of the CGF mission launcher (one of the ca. five dialogs) [click, 40KB]](./shots/cgf_launcher1.jpg)
