Mission Making

[Highdroponics]

ok i have been searching google for a long while now looking for advanced tutorials on scripting and making missions and have come up with nothing. i have also been studying other peoples missions and even modifying some of those to my liking, but most of the scripting and stuff like that i do not understand. i was wondering if anyone can give me some helpful tips or may know of a mission/script making tutorial that they can direct me to.

by the way, if you noticed this is my first post here at cncden, hi everyone.

[Me Myself & Pi]

Well learning how to work all the scripts takes a lot of time. I can help you with indavidual scripts, not a bunch of AI scripts. I don't believe there is any tut about advanced scripts because it would be VERY long! If you to know about certain scripts, experiment with them on a different map. (I usally just create a new map with a humen player or two starting positions & test scripts I want to figure out.)

Let me know if you have any more quesetions

[Highdroponics]

yeah, sounds good, i think i will just mess around a bit with the scripts first then come back if i need any help with anything.

[Highdroponics]

ok, so i want to make a nice intro now,

i plan to use a cargo plane and get it to fly across the battlefield to reveal the enemies territory and air drop the dozer and a few tanks/infantry(so how do i use the way points and camera view to move to the area i wish to drop them off). i also want to make a 60 minute timer for the nuclear missiles in the abandoned base that the player takes over and the game ends when this timer is reached, so id also like to know how to make a good ending with all of the missiles going off at once, turning the city and enemy base to dust...the rest i think ive pretty much got covered.... but ill test it all out when i finish the rest of that.


also is there any way to possibly make the nuclear explosion bigger instead of having a bunch of nukes? if so id like to only stick to one nuke.


EDIT: found out how to garrison and follow way point path,..now all i need to know is 1)how to set up how it knows to do that at the very beginning of the game[EDIT: FIXED], 2)how to set up the radar to reveal all territory until the intro end[EDIT: FIXED], and 3)the nuclear missiles timer so it begins the ending for the game...this is actually fairly simple stuff now that i have figured a lot of it out just by looking at other peoples missions...i may have a few other problems along the way, but im sure most of it i can figure out.

oh and i also had to get rid of the cargo plane, my dozer didnt want to garrison it..any who, my only problem now is the nuclear missiles timer.

[Me Myself & Pi]

I've provided a very simple map for you to study about paratrooping in units. Let me know if you have any questions.

For setting a super weapon timer use the script "Unit\Special Power (second one)\Countdown timer -- set."

For making the nuke missle's destruction bigger, you'll have to moddify it in it's INI file. Let me know if you don't know much about INI files.

[Highdroponics]

yeah i got the para dropping right, now im just having problems with the nuclear missile timer. when the timer ends i want the missiles to launch to the waypoints of my choosing. so far i have the timers set but the missiles will not launch after the main timer 'nuclearstrike' has been reached(5 seconds after the missiles are ready, 60:05 from game begining)...ive only got the 'unit' option 'neutron missile' under: unit 'nuke' fires special power 'superweaponneutronmissile' at way point 'nukedrop'....i didnt see the option for "superweaponnuclearmissile" so i thought neutronmissile would work just as well i want this to end the game after destroying the entire city and base.... any ideas on this? if you must you may start from the begining of setting the timers for this.


and yes im interested in the INI files, but i have no idea what they are or what to do.

[Me Myself & Pi]

Well, there's a condition that wait for a super weapons timer to expire "Player\Speical Power\Player completed using a special power." Then for the action use "Unit\Special Power (The second one.)\ Special Power -- fire at location."

Yes, the Neutron Missle is the Nuklear Missle. I found this out naming a nuklear missle silo, then using the script "Unit\Command Button\Use commandbutton ability." After selecting my named nuklear missle silo, clicking on the "Commandbutton" drop down menu, it says something like: Command_Fire Nuetron Missle.

Go ahead and watch these world builder video tuts about the INI files. http://www.cncmaps.com/mapmakingvideo.html Then we can talk about editing the nuklear missle silo.

[Highdroponics]

couldnt watch the video, i had a missing plug in, i tried to download that and i couldnt for some reason.

[Me Myself & Pi]

I'm not sure what you mean by, "i had a missing plug in". Could you explain it better? I tried just watching the first INI tut (without dowloading it) & it worked fine.

[Highdroponics]

its says: "additional plugins are required to display all of the media on this page."

i tried to download the plugin and couldnt.

[Me Myself & Pi]

I'll just give you a brief explanation of INI files. When EA made each units they set verables all over it, then in a file like Notepad, they could just put in a digit or name to set that verable. For example: Lets take Colonel Burton & how his gun effects a target. First EA gave it a name like: ColonelBurtonMachineGun For some reason they leave out the spaces in they're names. Under that would say somthing like: affectiveness To the right of that they'd put a number that would represent how much damage 1 bullet would do. Then they right END. So the hole thing would look like this:

ColonelBurtonMachineGun
affectiveness: 1000
END

The lists for each unit are almost ENDLESS! They're all located in a .big file in your game directory called INIZH. To extract them you need a FinalBIG. I've uploaded mine at the bottum of this post.

After you open up FinalBIG, open "C:\Program Files\EA Games\Command & Conquer Generals Zero Hour\INIZH" I'd reccamend you extract all of them to a folder of your choice, but please note that doing this your'll add 17.8 MB to your computer. Or you can just extract one at a time. You only need one for this simple editing. It's called "Data\INI\Object\FactionBuilding" Go ahead & extract that file to the folder of your... I'll have to finish the rest of my post later, so check often today.

[Highdroponics]

I'll just give you a brief explanation of INI files. When EA made each units they set verables all over it, then in a file like Notepad, they could just put in a digit or name to set that verable. For example: Lets take Colonel Burton & how his gun effects a target. First EA gave it a name like: ColonelBurtonMachineGun For some reason they leave out the spaces in they're names. Under that would say somthing like: affectiveness To the right of that they'd put a number that would represent how much damage 1 bullet would do. Then they right END. So the hole thing would look like this:

ColonelBurtonMachineGun
affectiveness: 1000
END

The lists for each unit are almost ENDLESS! They're all located in a .big file in your game directory called INIZH. To extract them you need a FinalBIG. I've uploaded mine at the bottum of this post.

After you open up FinalBIG, open "C:\Program Files\EA Games\Command & Conquer Generals Zero Hour\INIZH" I'd reccamend you extract all of them to a folder of your choice, but please note that doing this your'll add 17.8 MB to your computer. Or you can just extract one at a time. You only need one for this simple editing. It's called "Data\INI\Object\FactionBuilding" Go ahead & extract that file to the folder of your... I'll have to finish the rest of my post later, so check often today.


i dont see the FinalBIG, am i missing something here? lol. anyway it seems like simple stuff the way you describe it, though everyone told me that map making was easy as well, but here i am lmao.

do you know if i could possibly change the visual of the nuclear blast though? i mean i dont care about how much damage it deals i just want the visual of it to be about 5-10 times bigger(something of the size of a true atomic explosion going off)...and possibly even take the explosion from CnC 3 and put it in zero hour..cuz that explosion is a lot better.

[Me Myself & Pi]

I didn't have time to finish my post so I didn't upload my FinalBIG program, you'll see it at the bottum of this post. You can find this file at http://cncden.com/cncgen_utility_downloads.shtml

I'm sorry it took me so long to finish my post, I was returning home from my grandparents. (They live about 4 states away & we had to drive it.)

Anyway, to finish my post: Go ahead & extract that file to the folder of your choice & open it in Notepad. press ctrl+f to serch for Nuklear Missle silo, or somthing like that. You might want to try Nuetron Missle too if you don't get a find & try leaving out any spaces in the search. When you find the part you want to edit, copy and paste it into another Notepad file. Then add the object name & add END to the end of it. I should look like this:

|Object NuklearMissleSilo
| ExplotionRadius: 1000 ; in feet
|End

Just ignore the verticle lines, they're just there to so I could a space will show up when this is posted. (You'll see spaces in a lot of INI files.)

Now save this file as "map.ini" in your map folder. Although sometimes I haven't been able to get to work this way. I usually have to mod the whole game to get it working. Check out the INI file downloads over at http://forums.cncden.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=339681 to see how they're arranged. Some times this site doesn't work so try it at different time of the day.

I don't know how to edit the shape of objects so I'm no good with that.

[Highdroponics]

ok, the ctrl+f isnt working is there any way to manually open the file? and if so where exactly would i find it?

[Zancloufer27]

Double click the file :p

If you don't have XP, you will have to find a program that opens Zips.

[Me Myself & Pi]

Pressing ctrl+F is a serch in Notepad. If you don't have an unzip program, try googling somthing like: "zip program"