User blog:Sypwn/Mission Editor tips

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  • Decide who your target audience will be, and adjust the mission appropriately. If you are making a mission that you want mainstream players to enjoy in public lobbies, it should:
    • Have shorter flight times
    • Have easy access to rearm points, such as capturable airbases.
    • Have fewer and less difficult mission failure conditions
    • (Missions intended for more serious teams and roleplayers can relax or ignore these, but I recommend noting such in the mission description and/or first page of the briefing.)
  • Name your units. Give each unit a short name about its location and role. If you put a number on the end, that number will be incremented automatically when the unit is copied. Having a consistent naming scheme makes setting up complex triggers much easier, thanks to the search boxes.
  • Add slot labels to player slots. They should specify things like the spawn location, the role of that slot, or loadout limitations.
  • Add recommended loadouts to player slots. You do this by checking the "Assign Equipment" box in the spawn properties, and filling out the equipment editor.
  • Use alt spawns. These allow you to mix up the locations of units so people don't know exactly where they will be after playing the mission once. Select a unit, add an alt spawn, then move the alt spawn somewhere else nearby. If you have a group of units, you can check the box to "sync" alt spawns and the entire group will spawn together.
  • Use objective actions. These are a great way to help control mission flow. If you have an objective to destroy units that spawn in when the objective starts, put the unit spawn action inside the objective's start action. You can also easily make completing one objective affect other objectives by using an objective control action as a completed action.
  • Use event sequences. Any time you have a number of conditional events that are expected to happen in a certain order, you can often put them in an event sequence. Each "node" will wait until its entry condition is met, then fire its actions. If you want to make a node that's optional (only fires during some playthroughs), put a Conditional Action in it. Timed Events and Trigger Events are both more limited than Sequences, mainly because they can only fire once.
  • Use event sequence nodes liberally. Nodes in a sequence can be reordered by dragging the small rectangle next to the Delete button. Therefore, when experimenting with sequence flow, split conditions and actions into many separate nodes so you can rearrange things easily.
  • Use the player.log to debug your mission. The player.log file (located at C:\Users\%username%\AppData\LocalLow\Boundless Dynamics, LLC\VTOLVR\player.log ) makes an detailed entry every time a trigger fires, a unit dies, and many other events. Do you see a unit misbehaving, but you aren't sure which one it is? Kill that unit, then immediately check the log to see the name/ID of the last unit you killed. Is an Event Sequence not progressing properly? Search the player.log for the name of the sequence and you'll see exactly how far it progressed and what it's waiting on.
  • Use "debug tents". For each objective in the mission, create a tent (somewhere near the player start usually) that's set to not spawn immediately. Create a Sequence (or Trigger Event) that, when that tent is destroyed, it completes the matching objective. Now create a Timed Event named "DEBUG TENTS" and give it a single action to spawn in all those tents. When testing the mission, leave that DEBUG TENTS event enabled. Now, destroying those tents in order will "fast forward" through the mission progression, making it easier to test later objectives. When you're done testing and ready to upload to the workshop, simply disable the DEBUG TENTS event. (Note: For best results, debug tents should complete objectives indirectly. For example, with an objective to destroy some targets, the tent should complete that using the System -> Units -> Destroy Units action, instead of the Objective -> Complete action. For escort and transport objectives, you may have to use something like alt-spawn teleportation to allow the mission to continue to progress properly.)
  • Read over my Mission Editor FAQ. The VTOL VR mission editor has lots of "gotchas" that can result in wasted time. The more you can learn about these quirks up front, the better you can avoid them.
  • Join the VTOL VR Content Creation discord server. https://discord.gg/vbhdz3Y99c If you ask a question in the #missions-general channel there, I'll get a pinged if I'm available.
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