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Mission .xml files in Russian TOW patch


Drawde79

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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.

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Originally posted by Cincinatvs:

That's an interesting Post ! smile.gif

Thanks

did you see that in G001-Mokra mission XML file?

- DiplomacyConflicts

Army1 2 /Army1

Army2 1 /Army2

/DiplomacyConflicts

DiplomacyAlly /

- /common

Maybe two nations against one in some scenarii ? :confused:

The IL-2 engine has been used for a whole lot of games. You will find traces of flightsims, FPSes and whatnot in there.
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Once we release the English version I will be providing all my notes and info on how to make changes to the mission.xml files to change a whole host of parameters.

While this is no substitute for a formal editor, which we also plan to release in the future, you can do an awful lot by hand editing those files.

Madmatt

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Originally posted by cinacchi:

When and if you have time, may you plz. copy and paste here some lines of the file where is specified the composition (quality and quantity) of the opposing forces?

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.

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Originally posted by Madmatt:

Once we release the English version I will be providing all my notes and info on how to make changes to the mission.xml files to change a whole host of parameters.

While this is no substitute for a formal editor, which we also plan to release in the future, you can do an awful lot by hand editing those files.

Madmatt

Great thanks ;)
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Note that there is a different game (Panzer Command) that also had XML files as scenario file format (actually XML for pretty much everything including weapons data).

The developers said that maybe they would sometime release an editor but to support people fiddling with the XML files they would post descriptions of the fields in a couple months or so together with the demo.

It took three weeks from the game release for somebody to come up with a usable scenario editor, without any prior input from the developers. A couple forum posts between the developer of the game and the editor polished it up nicely.

That is how powerful XML is. It is descriptive, people are not stupid, it is clear what the files are supposed to do - that is enough.

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