Editing a mission briefing

Editing an Old Mission Briefing

by Ed Benowitz and Phillip Ogden

briefing pic

These old style mission briefings only require a .xml file. They are simpler than newer mission briefings, which require a lua script, but are not as powerful or flexible.

Basic Concepts

A mission briefing appears before a given mission. It is used for storytelling, to get the player prepared for the mission. In every mission briefing, the camera movement is already predetermined. All you have to do is provide locations for nav points, ships, and some accompanying story text, and the mission briefing takes care of the rest.

Mission Briefing File

The mission briefing file must be named correctly. The briefing filename is the same as the mission filename, except that the briefing file name ends in .briefing.xml.
For example, if the mission is named mission_a1.mission.xml, then the briefing must be named mission_a1.briefing.xml.

Player

First, it is easist just to copy over an already created briefing file, but here is a basic form for it that will make things a little easier to change out.

Okay, first you have the initial lines.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<briefing playership="piranha.mesh.bin" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="briefing.xsd">

All you want to do here is to add the name of the ship you are going to fly in the mission. Change the value of playership. This ship will be at the (0,0,0) of every navpoint in the briefing. Say we what to fly a piranha, well what is the name of its primary mesh.bin. (piranha.mesh.bin) Not all mesh files are named so easily in relation to the ship's name, though.

Navpoints

Now that we have a player, we add nav points. A briefing can have any number of Nav Points. Nav points appear as green circles.
The navpoints element acts as a container for each individual nav point.

<navpoints>
  <navpoint radius="200.0">
     <location>
        <point x="400.0" y="2.66" z="500.0"/>
     </location>
  </navpoint>
</navpoints>

Now the first thing in a nav is it's radius or size. It is best to have capship navs with a radius of 200 and a radius of 100 for empty or fighter navs. Next, choose a location for the nav point. The center of the map is at 0, 0, 0. Keep in mind the radius of this and other nav points as you choose your location, you don't want nav points to overlap.

Optionally, you can also specify a nav point name that will be displayed in the briefing.

<navpoint radius="200.0" name="Nav 2">

Briefing Text

Now for the storytelling. During the briefing a ship does 2 things.

Rotates to face the center of the next nav. As we edit the brieifng, this is called the "atmessage".

Move to the next nav. As we edit the briefing, this is called the "leavingmessage".

This process repeats for every nav point.

You can have different text displayed during each of these phases for every Nav point. The folllowing shows adding text for both the atmessage and for the leavingmessage:

<atmessage>
This is your first mission, so you'll be flying a Piranha.
</atmessage>
<leavingmessage>
Leave the Midway, and proceed to nav 2.
</leavingmessage>

Currently the game does speech synthesis for every line of text in the briefing. Each nav point can have one at message and one briefing message.

Ships

Ships can either travel with the player through the navs, or they can stay at a fixed position at a nav. When the ship moves with the player, we call this autopiloting.
If the ship is autopiloting, when we specify the location, the location is always relative to the player's position. y is up, x is to the right, and z is forward. For example, to place a wingman to the right of a player, we would specify (20, 0, 0).

However if a ship is not autopiloting, the location takes on a completely different meaning. In this case, the location is relative to the center of the nav point. y is up, x is to the right, and z is forward.

It will take a little trial and error, though, to get the location right.

The player only has the mesh already defined at the top for the xml file, but for your wingmen, they will have to be defined in the nav they start in. Here is your wingman:

<ship name="piranha.mesh.bin" autopilot="true" alignment="friendly" capship="false">
<location>
<point x="20.0" y="0.0" z="0.0"/>
</location>
</ship>

let's look at each field

name: nave is the name of the mesh file of the ship. These files must end in .mesh.bin or .obj

autopilot: When autopilot is true, this ship will go through all nav points with the player. Otherwise, the ship stays at a fixed location within the nav point.

alignment: Used to control the color of the ship. Can be either friendly or enemy.

capship: Used to control the color of a ship. Set to false for fighters.

location: specifies the location of the ship, either relative to the player, or relative to the nav center, depending on the value of autopilot.

Capships

For capships, you may have to add in a scale to decrease the size of the mesh in the briefing. Here is the Midway:

<ship name="midway.mesh.bin" autopilot="false" alignment="friendly" capship="true" scale=".05">
<location>
<point x="60.0" y="0.0" z="0.0"/>
</location>
</ship>

Conclusion

With this information, copy over mission_a1.briefing.xml, and use it as a template for creating your own mission briefings.