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Mission Editing Basics

Mission Files

Adding Missions

Conditions & Goals

Goals Strings

Imports

Backdrops

The updated XWA engine

The XWA engine has bought many changes and improvements over XvT.

For mission designers, the most important are:

4 separate regions of space and the necessary hypering between them via hyper buoys
Each Flight Group now has 4 orders per region, with each order having it's own set of waypoints
The maximum number of craft in a mission at any one time has increased from 32 to 96
The emphasis on "scripted" missions being single player, with multiplayer intended only as melee-type (This can be worked around to some extent)
Lighting controlled by the placement and color setting of backdrops
New conditions and orders
Animated icons in Briefings

There are still many things to be discovered about the mission files.

IMPORTANT: A new requirement for XWA missions with briefings is that they must have a certain format for the beginning of the mission name. XWA uses the battle number and mission number at the beginning of a mission name to know which wavs to play for the briefing. If it doesn't have wavs to match, it won't play any, but if it doesn't find numbers in the right place, and the mission has a briefing, it will crash. The format must be:

1B <Battle Number> M <Mission Number><anything else?>

e.g. 1B9M2ThisIsAMissionName.tie will work

XWA Mission Files

Before creating and editing missions you will need to understand the "building blocks" of an XWA mission:
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Flight Groups (FGs)	These are all of the "things" that will appear in the mission and can be divided into 3 types: Craft: anything that is capable of having shields such as fighters and all other flying craft, but also includes platforms, asteroid bases, containers etc. Unlike XvT's limitation of 32 craft in a mission at one time, XWA's engine can handle 96 ships in a mission at any one time. Objects: satellites, probes, buoys, mines and asteroids. At this stage I don't know the limitation on the number of objects. Backdrops: 2 dimensional images of planets, nebulae etc. Unlike the earlier games, backdrops also provide light sources for the mission.
Teams	It is the Teams settings that determines who is on whose side, not IFF. All craft on the same Team are friendly and have the same goals to succeed in the mission. All other Teams are enemies by default, but it is possible to set multiple Teams to be friendly to each other using the Allied Teams setting on the Teams page. ..
Conditions	Conditions can describe just about any possible state of any element of the mission, or any event that can happen during the mission, e.g. 100% of FG Alpha must be destroyed. Conditions have a value of either true or false depending on whether the state or event that they describe is true. They are used to define Goals, (the goal is completed when all conditions which make it up become true) and also to trigger events such as FGs arriving, departing, or changing orders. Most conditions used for Goals have 3 Goal Strings attached to them:
Goal Strings	Goal Strings appear in the Goals box while in-flight, indicating to the Player the Global Goals and FG Goals they must achieve in order to complete the mission. The game will generate its own strings for conditions but these can be customized. ..
Goals	Goals consist of up to four Conditions. Goals are objectives a Player/Team must complete in order to win the mission. There may be additional goals to gain bonus points, or that must be prevented in order to not lose the mission. To see a summary of all goals in your mission, use the Goal Summary window. ..
Messages	Text Messages can be sent to selected Teams when specified conditions are met. There are also 3 messages per Team which (if non empty) will be sent to the Player automatically in the event that they: Complete their primary goal Fail their primary goal Complete their secondary goal Messages may also have .wav files assigned to be played along with them. XWA has a limit of 64 wavs for custom messages. You can use AlliED's WAV File Manager to assign wavs to Messages. ..
Briefing	The Briefing is an animated display which outlines the mission situation and objectives. ..
.lst files	.lst files are used by the game to tell it which files are available to it for various purposes such as: Which missions are available to play. Which WAVs are played along with messages. Once you have created a mission, it must be added to the appropriate .lst file(s) for you to be able to select it in the game. For Campaign missions this will be Mission.lst in your Missions directory. You can use AlliED's .lst File Manager to easily add missions to your .lst file. ..