New Plymouth Mini-Campaign in Development

[Vagabond]

Hey everyone,

I've been working on a couple of shorter scenarios that I think would flow together nicely as a campaign. I do not believe there is an easy way to add more campaigns to the base game, so I'd like to just release them into the colony game section of Outpost 2 and add a label to them all so it is clear they belong together and the play order.

Yesterday, the first scenario finally came together enough that I am confident it is viable (and hopefully a little fun to play, not sure on that part yet). The second scenario is basically complete and just needs some polish. I have a third scenario in mind but zero work has been done on it.

The first scenario is to evacuate a colony already partially destroyed by a rogue AI player. The second scenario is a land rush into preparing for another base evacuation. The third planned scenario is a unit only mission escorting a third party convoy past enemy positions. I still need to look at the third scenario more to make sure it is possible with the current SDK, but I'm fairly sure it is.

[Hooman]

Sounds good. I look forward to seeing this.

A few times I've thought we should have a standard way of adding new campaigns. I don't know much about that section of the code though. Maybe we need to pester Eddy-B some more about releasing the source for Renegades.

There is a setting in the DescBlock export for unit only missions. It disables the factory reports and such in game. That, and the mission objectives should be the only real differences.

[Sirbomber]

Renegades has an op2mod.dll that tells OP2 that Plymouth campaign maps are named "oXX.dll" instead of "pXX.dll" (among other things).  Though from my experience you don't even need that much; just put your own pXX.dll's into a mod folder and OP2 should use those without any problems.

[Vagabond]

@Sirbomber,

Thank you for the info.

If I want the researched tech to transfer between scenarios like currently occurs in the Eden and Plymouth campaigns, does this automatically occur between scenarios or do you have to add something to each scenario DLLs for it to occur?

How does specifying the pre mission briefing, novella, and post mission video work? Do you simply follow the naming convention of the supplied campaigns and it hooks in correctly?

[Sirbomber]

All player info (population, resources, technology, starship parts, satellite/RLV count, etc) automatically transfers between campaign missions.  Editing the mission briefing/objective/novella text will require extracting and editing the contents of story.vol.  These files are stored in RTF format and almost any text editor more sophisticated than Notepad should be able to handle it.  You can then optionally repack the files into story.vol or just leave them as-is in your mod folder (I thiiiiiiink?).