[Guide] Mission Director Basics - Writing Your First Mission

[dillpickle]

The last one should be "Think"

Thanks, fixed.... at least someone made it pat the first post...

[Juggernaut93]

Am I missing something or the mercenary ship will continue to protect the player ship even after the mission is finished?

[dillpickle]

Am I missing something or the mercenary ship will continue to protect the player ship even after the mission is finished?

No, you weren't missing something- I'd removed the actor, but not his ship, have now fixed it...

[akruppa]

The 'Mission Director conversations.xml' in the 't' folder only contains the three specific conversations for this mission to make them easier to reference, in order for them to work in game you will need to extract the latest 'conversations.xml' from the relevant games CAT/DATS and add these three conversations to 'conversations.xml' in the 't' folder.

I'm experimenting with MD under X3AP and found that conversations are not taken into account if they are in their own .xml file in addon/t/. So users officially have to extract conversations.xml from the .cat/.dat, and manually edit in the new conversations from community-written missions? It seems to me that this very much runs counter to the purpose of the MD, allowing the community to write and share missions more easily...

[Shush]

I'm experimenting with MD under X3AP and found that conversations are not taken into account if they are in their own .xml file in addon/t/. So users officially have to extract conversations.xml from the .cat/.dat, and manually edit in the new conversations from community-written missions? It seems to me that this very much runs counter to the purpose of the MD, allowing the community to write and share missions more easily...

For the majority of scenarios users don't have to do any editing of the conversations.xml file, you can do it for them. i.e. extract it out of the last .cat/.dat to contain a conversations.xml and insert your specific conversations between the last </conversation> and last </conversations>. Then give that conversations.xml file to your user base and they can put it in the appropriate place. Obviously there are a couple of caveats:

• - You need to extract the correct conversations.xml file for TC or AP and from the appropriate .cat/.dat files.
  - You need to rebuild this conversations file whenever a new patch/addon whatever appears for X3, (unlikely to be happening frequently if at all).
  - Your users need to do the inserting of your conversations themselves if they are trying to get your stuff working with a mod that has it's own conversations.xml file.

I do all of this in my LIFE mod and it works fine.

[akruppa]

That works only if the user wants to install only a single community-created mission. As soon as he installs another, it will overwrite the conversation.xml file of the first one, unless he edits it to merge the additional conversations of the second into the first.

[Ketraar]

Yes the issue with conversation file was addressed, time constraints and other priorities lead to it not being looked at (yet?). Unfortunately until it does IF it ever will be there is not much one can do, all I can suggest is to try and use the existing conversations as much as possible to avoid incompatibilities. Alternatively one could go and just add all conversations from all mods/missions and redistribute that.

MFG

Ketraar

[Shush]

That works only if the user wants to install only a single community-created mission. As soon as he installs another, it will overwrite the conversation.xml file of the first one, unless he edits it to merge the additional conversations of the second into the first.

Yes the issue with conversation file was addressed, time constraints and other priorities lead to it not being looked at (yet?). Unfortunately until it does IF it ever will be there is not much one can do, all I can suggest is to try and use the existing conversations as much as possible to avoid incompatibilities. Alternatively one could go and just add all conversations from all mods/missions and redistribute that.

As I said, my users don't seem to have too many issues copying/renaming/inserting my mod specific conversations into the right places.

Given that, it would be totally trivial to create an external utility that presents a file browser/list box that selects a base conversations.xml and then allows the insertion of multiple mod specific conversations. It would generate a new conversations.xml and save it into the correct folder based on game type. You could even keep a repository of mission conversations online, once again all trivial. But personally I really don't see the need, the majority of X3 users have not only been dealing with combining mods for years, most of them are computer literate as well /shrug

[Purls]

Hey there. I doubt that this thread is ever looked at anymore, but does anyone have a link to the files used in this tutorial?

[X2-Illuminatus]

Here you go:
mission files (MD Basics.7z)
x3_terran_conflict_director
ap_director