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SDOE Mission Making Tutorial - Part 2
By Scott VergeText Editing A Mission
There is some stuff you can do by editing the mission with WordPad instead of the mission editor. WARNING! Be aware that if you do use WordPad to hand edit, it is a one-way street; you can’t re-edit, change, or add to the mission with the mission editor afterwards because it might erase any info you added in WordPad. The mission editor just doesn’t recognize these extra commands although the game itself does. So make sure you are done with the mission editor if you decide to advance to using the following steps.Assigning Headings
With text editing you can more accurately place units than you can using the drag-n-drop icons in the mission editor.
Using SDOE Control and turning on Display Coordinates in Target Map or by pasting DisplayCoords=1 into your sdemons.ini. Then when you turn on the target map in game by using ALT M you will see your exact coordinates displayed on the screen.
Now, enter slew mode with the "S" key and move around with the joystick or numpad (8 is move forward, 2 is backwards and 5 is stop. Hitting a number a couple times will speed up the travel).
So now we can move where we want and see where we are. Once you find a spot you want to place an object either write it down or just take a screen shot and you can refer to that number while editing the mission.
We don’t need it for this mission but with stuff like carrier starts you can use text editing to place units. To place planes on carriers try using different formations or put each plane in its own squad so you can place each one individually. To do this, get your coordinates via the slew system described above and then open the mission with WordPad again and enter those coordinates into the mission. When doing this don’t forget to direct that wind opposite the direction of take-off and landing as mentioned above.
One of the biggest advantages to text editing is getting your units pointing in the proper direction. Without text editing you simply cannot set-up your planes and carriers to be pointing in the proper direction.
With text editing you can also assign headings to the ground units so they are pointing the way you want. This makes the ground battles look better instead of the units just pointing North.