Drawde79

Thanks very much for the information - much appreciated. Also glad to hear I won't have to pay tax on the game when it eventually arrives! (sometimes the case when buying from the US) [ April 30, 2007, 07:22 AM: Message edited by: Drawde79 ]

I ordered the game yesterday from Battlefront's website, I opted for mail delivery as the DL version would take several weeks to download over a 56k connection (should be getting broadband soon, but I'd still rather have a boxed version on disc). Is there anyone else here from the UK or mainland Europe who has purchased the DVD version of TOW? If so, have you received your copies yet? For that matter, have any US/Canada buyers got their copies in the mail yet? I don't mind waiting, just want to get a rough idea of when it should arrive - the confirmation e-mail says 7-10 days). Apologies if this subject has already been covered in previous posts, I did a search but did not find any.

The files are huge (usually several hundred KB of text) so it isn't really practical to post the whole thing here. I tried posting a fragment of one of the files, but since it's XML data, it doesn't show up properly in a forum post (everything in < > brackets is missing, and there are no tabs/indents). Your best bet is to download the patch from http://files.games.1c.ru/ww2rts/files/patches/ww2_1.1.0.11.exe install it into a temporary directory, and look at the mission .xml and .ini files with Notepad or another text editor.

For anyone potentially interested in mission creation for TOW, the recent patch for the Russian version of the game (you can install the patch even if you don't actually have the game installed) includes the .xml and .ini files for a number of the game's missions (most of the German and Soviet ones, and one or two Polish and US). Viewing these in a text editor gives a good idea of what will be needed to create custom missions. It seems like the scripted events for each mission are stored in a file called trigger.ini. Map parameters, troop placements etc. are stored in mission.xml. Both of these are plain ASCII text files. The file format appears simple (all of the text is in English) and it looks it'll be fairly straightforward to create a GUI editor to modify or create custom missions. I haven't had time to have a closer look at the trigger.ini scripts, but looking at these ought to give an idea of how "scripted" the missions and AI behaviour are. Not much anyone can do with the mission files at the minute (unless you're Russian) but could be a useful "head start" for anyone interested in mission editing.