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How to build a mission?

Prerequisites

Manual installation

You need a few things set up on your PC for these scripts to function.

• LUA : you need a working LUA interpreter, in your PATH, ready to be called with the lua command
• 7zip : you need 7zip, or another zip tool, in your PATH, ready to be called with the 7zip command
• Powershell : you need Powershell, and you need it to be configured to allow script execution (read this article) ; basically you need to run this command in an elevated (admin) Powershell prompt : Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope LocalMachine
• npm : you need the NPM package manager from NodeJS to get the VEAF mission creation tools ; see here

Using Chocolatey

The required tools can easily be installed using Chocolatey (see here).

WARNING : do not do both manual installation and Chocolatey installation

To install Chocolatey, use this command in an elevated (admin) Powershell prompt : Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

After Chocolatey is installed, use these simple commands in a elevated (admin) command prompt to install the required tools :

• LUA : choco install -y lua
• 7zip : choco install -y 7zip.commandline
• npm : choco install -y nodejs

Build the mission

Building the mission from source is easy ; you simply have to run the build.cmd script. You don't even need to run it in a cmd window, double-clicking it will be ok.

The process will take all the files in the src folder, fetch the latest version of the VEAF Mission Creation Tools (from GitHub), and compile all of this in a ready-to-use mission for DCS (in a .miz file).

This file will be named after the mission (this is configured in the first line of the build.cmd script), and placed in the build folder.

Editing a compiled mission

After a mission has been compiled, copy it from the build folder to the main mission folder (the folder where extract.cmd and build.cmd are stored). Then, you can open it in the DCS Mission Editor and edit it (add/remove units, add triggers, change zones, etc.).

Also, you can edit the mission source files in parallel (using a text editor, I recommend Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code); specifically, you can edit :

• the mission configuration file src/scripts/missionConfig.lua, to setup the mission parameters ; this is the main file you'll edit.
• the radio presets file src/radio/radioSettings.lua, to setup the radio presets pushed to the aircrafts.
• the weather presets in src/weatherAndTime

If you edit one of these files, and because they're compiled into the mission .miz file, you'll have to rebuild your mission before you can test your editions in the game.

There's a way to easily test these changes : the first trigger has a LUA predicate, that conditions the scripts loading method. If set to false, the scripts are loading statically (i.e. they're loading from the mission) ; if set to true, the scripts will be loaded dynamically, so each time you restart the mission in DCS (Left-SHIFT + R) you can test whatever change you saved to the files.

Extract an edited version of the mission

Once a mission has been edited and saved in the DCS mission editor, you need to extract its content to the src folder, in order to reinject it later with the build script.

To do this, simply run the extract.cmd script. You don't even need to run it in a cmd window, double-clicking it will be ok.

This script will take any mission file starting with the mission name (configured in the beginning of the script), in the mission folder (the folder where extract.cmd and build.cmd are stored, not the build folder), extract its content, process them and store them in src.

Advanced settings

Setting the location of the 7zip executable

If your 7zip tool is not in your PATH, you can set its location in the SEVENZIP environment variable. It's a string which should point to the 7za executable (e.g. c:\tools\7zip\bin\7zip.exe)

Setting the location of the LUA executable

In the same way, you can set its location of the LUA executable in the LUA environment variable. It's a string which should point to the lua executable (e.g. c:\tools\lua\bin\lua.exe)

Skip the pauses

If you set the NOPAUSE environment variable to "true", then the pauses in the script will not be marked.

How to use this - graphic version