Krishty’s Sim Forums

This thread is subject to change....

Mission editing like it’s 1998

We take a look at a few of the original 3rd party mission editors.
-------------------

First we define a way of arranging the mission files to be compatible with the 2026 version of the game, then we’ll see what needs to be done to hammer the output of the old mission editors to fit.
Note that these editors are the property of their original authors and we will not go into detail of what each editor does.

For simplicity, we’ll call our example mission mod ‘testmiss’ and each set of mission files will consist of the following:
testmiss.pdl
testmiss.mdl
testmiss.udl
testmiss.txt (this will be the Briefing, and it’s optional)

Then the game needs to be aware of the missions, and the recommended way is to copy the existing ‘td_miss.txt’ and ‘td_tours.txt’ from the game’s f22data directory and edit in the new mission file names.

Any game mods including missions must be placed in the ‘MODS’ directory located wherever Steam has installed the game.

So, the steps to add our mission would go like this:
1. Locate the ‘MODS’ directory and create a directory called ‘testmiss’ inside it.
2. In the new ‘testmiss’ directory, create another called ‘f22data’
3. Locate the main ‘f22data’ directory from a couple of levels up and copy the files ‘td_miss.txt’ and ‘td_tours.txt’ to the newly created ‘f22data’ directory.
4. Create directories called ‘pdl’,’mdl’,’udl’ and ‘briefing’ so the hierarchy looks like this: Now we need some actual mission files, so we’ll start with ‘Air Combat Designer’ (ACD) which can be found here:
download/file.php?id=2442

On extracting the zip file, we get 3 files. The ‘readme.txt’ instructions should be ignored, and running ‘ADF_ACD.exe’ gets us this: On my PC, I got a lot of popups as can be seen on the left of the picture, but they can be closed without issue.
Without changing and parameters, if the ‘Generate Scenario’, followed by the ‘Save Scenario’ buttons are pressed, we see that the mission files are now generated: The ‘SIMULTOR.TXT’ file can be ignored, but ‘adf_dmd.mdl’,’adf_dmd.udl’ and ‘adf_dmd.pdl’ should be copied to the appropriate directories created earlier. ACD can now be closed.
It seems ACD does not produce a Briefing file, so our ‘testmiss’ directory now looks like this: Now we need to edit some files with our favourite text editor.
First, open ‘adf_dmd.pdl’ and change lines 5 & 6 from:
MDL_FILE ..\ADD_ONS\ADF_DMD.MDL
UDL_FILE ..\ADD_ONS\ADF_DMD.UDL

to:
MDL_FILE ADF_DMD.MDL
UDL_FILE ADF_DMD.UDL

Now, open ‘td_tours.txt’ and edit it so it looks like this: We are basically adding an extra tour, so the number of tours on Line 12 needs incrementing, then we add some details of the tour name etc.
Doing it this way means that all the existing missions are still available.

Next, edit ‘td_miss.txt’ in a similar fashion.
Line 10 needs to change from:
NUMBER_OF_MISSION_TYPES 7
to:
NUMBER_OF_MISSION_TYPES 8

then the end of the file should look like this: Note, the “none” on the last line is where the Briefing filename would go if there was one.

Now it’s just a case of priming Steam to use the mission.
Right click the game in your Steam library, then select ‘Properties’
Add in the Launch Options which mod to use: Start the game, and the extra tour should be visible

The second editor we will look at is AGE (ADF GUI Editor) which can be found here:
download/file.php?id=2446

Once extracted to an empty folder, we ignore any instructions and run the file ‘AGE.exe’.
Again, we just want to produce a sample mission, and that can be achieved by selecting ‘Generate’ in the ‘Options’ tab. Pressing ‘Yes’ when the ‘Warning’ box appears results in the mission files appearing in the directory above where ‘AGE.exe’ is located. Of these, we are only interested in the contents, of the ‘PDL’,’MDL’, ‘UDL’ and the ‘BRIEFING’ directories which should be copied to the ‘MODS’ directory just like we did for ACD.
AGE, by default produces files with filenames like:
1998-06-24 AGE (ADF GUI Editor)AGE214.pdl
...which I’m going to rename to AGE214.pdl etc to tidy things up.
In ‘AGE214.PDL’ itself, lines 11 &12 need to reflect the shorter names, thus:
; Used files
MDL_FILE AGE214.MDL
UDL_FILE AGE214.UDL

Our ‘MODS’ folder now looks like this: Since we are going to use the same tour as we created for ACD, ‘td_tours.txt’ should be edited to something like
MISSION 7 "ACD and AGE Tour" "Tour3" "Tour3" -1 USE_BITMAP 2
This will have no effect on the game, but will present a more accurate description of the tour.

Now ‘td_miss.txt’ needs to have the mission description added, so the end of file should look like this:

MISSION_TYPE 7 "ACD and AGE Test" 2 0

MISSION 0 "ACD Test" "adf_dmd.pdl" "none" 102 USE_BITMAP 104
MISSION 1 "AGE Test" "AGE214.pdl" "AGE214" 103 USE_BITMAP 31

Now running the game, and selecting the final tour should result in this: ...well, maybe without the ‘Failed’ stamps, but I just started the missions to make sure they ran…

Finally, we’ll look at MAWGUI which is somewhat more involved.
It can be downloaded from here:
download/file.php?id=2443
This needs to be installed, so run ‘setup.exe’ and let it do its thing.
By default, the result will be a ‘MAWGUI’ directory in ‘C:\program files(X86)’ MAWGUI.exe is basically a graphical interface to the MAW program (_maw.exe) but it will not work as it is expecting the 1997 game executable which no longer exists. So, we will have to use ‘_maw.exe’ directly to produce the mission files we need.

This requires a set of specifically named input files that we need to create.
We can use ‘Highlands.mgc’ as a source, but we need to cut it up.
Create a directory in ‘MAWGUI’ called ‘mawtest’. Now open ‘Highlands.mgc’ in a text editor and clip out the sections, the first section will end with:
@END OF MAWGUIAIRCRAFT.CFG DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE!
Everything above that (except the lines starting with ‘@’) put in a new file called ‘aircraft.cfg’ in the ‘mawtest’ folder.
After all the sections are treated in a similar manner, the ‘mawtest’ directory will look like this: Now open a command window in ‘MAWGUI’ and run the following command:
_maw.exe -init mawtest
This will produce a bunch of extra files in ‘mawtest’. I have a Linux PC so have to use Wine… Next create a file called ‘maw.bat’ in ‘MAWGUI’ which contains 2 lines, the first is a path to our ‘testmiss’ folder, which in my case is this: Run this file in the already open command window, and after answering the questions, the mission files will appear beside the ACD and AGE mission files produced earlier.

So, ‘td_tours.txt’ and ‘td_miss.txt’ need to be edited as before. The end of ‘td_miss.txt’ should now look like this:
MISSION_TYPE 7 "ACD AGE MAW Test" 3 0

MISSION 0 "ACD Test" "adf_dmd.pdl" "none" 102 USE_BITMAP 104
MISSION 1 "AGE Test" "AGE214.pdl" "AGE214" 103 USE_BITMAP 31
MISSION 2 "MAW Test" "MAW.pdl" "MAW" 104 USE_BITMAP 34

Now a MAW mission will appear in the game