Tutorial 1 - Mission Editor Introduction

Tutorial Goals

• To familiarize the reader with the basic Mission Editor interface
• Help the reader understand the different files involved and where they go
  

Introduction
If you have already played around with the Mission Editor, this tutorial may not be for you. I am making this lesson separate from the others in order to keep things in bite sized chunks. If you want to jump right into make a mission, skip to the next tutorial to get started. You can always come back here if you need to.

The Mission Editor is a graphical user interface (GUI) for building Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising missions. It is a 2D application, but it enables you to build missions for a 3D world. This can be challenging, but it is a lot of fun too.

So where is the editor. Depending on the Windows version and where you bought it, it can be in a couple of places for Steam users on Vista 64 it resides here:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\operation flashpoint dragon rising\Mission Editor\MissionEditor.exe

You should be able to locate it pretty easily with a little digging. If you purchased the DVD version, it might come as a separate installer on the disc (if anyone knows, please drop me a line).

Note: Depending on your installation and operating system, your path may vary. If you are a user of the non-Steam version of the game, please drop me a note where the mission editor is installed.

You might want to add a shortcut to your desktop so you don't have to drill down through all your folders in order to load the editor.

So once you have the mission editor loaded you should see a screen similar to mine. You can zoom with the wheel on your mouse. You can pan around the landscape by click-dragging with the mouse wheel.

You will also notice that when you zoom with the mouse will, it zooms towards the location your mouse is pointing.

You have a tool bar across the top. It includes buttons for New, Open, Save and Save As, Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, Undo, Redo, Move, Rotate, Scale, Pan, Zoom, Creation location drop-down, Run, Run-Live Link, and Stop. Most of those buttons are pretty straight-forward, but for those that you may not understand, they will soon enough make sense.

The main window has tabs for the Map view, Table of Organization, Log, and other lua scripts. The map view is where you will place your units, props, waypoints, zones and more.

On the right we have the following panels:

• Create - Allows you to select different objects and place them on the map
• Explorer - Allows you view the mission object lists by Entity Sets, Categories and Groups
• History - ??
• Modify - This is where you adjust the properties of entities you have placed on the map
  
• Mission Properties - This is where you the global mission properties and details. You can set the mission name, mission group, mission description, mission image, weather and many other things.

If you have read this far, I am sure you are ready to build a mission, so let's move on to the next part a basic mission!