Custom Campaign support (on involuntary hiatus)

[TommyCD1]

Hello all. If you've been keeping up with my (relatively) recent streams lately, you know I'd been working on a short three part campaign on stream. The purpose of such was to use it as a demonstration on how to create not only custom single player maps, but full fledged campaigns. The reason for doing that was I had planned to create a add-on / mod that when installed would allow users to more easily install custom campaigns to their game.
The furthest progress I had gotten with this project was, I had gotten a more or less fully fleshed out shell (main menu) GUI written that you could launch a campaign with.

The thing not only supported campaigns of any length, but it also allowed users to define whether the campaign was open (i.e. Great Battles) or not (i.e. Story Mode) and also seamlessly supported up to a maximum of 100 missions per campaign, which could be cut off at any arbitrary point. So for example you could have a campaign of 7 independant single player missions, or a whole campaign of 10 or so maps that you had to complete sequentially in order to unlock the next. I even managed medal goals into it.
The only hitch with it was that, as far as I had figured out so far, there was no way to "hotswap" the currently selected campaign. That is, in order to change which campaign you wanted it to read from, you had to close the game, open a .cfg file, enter the directory, and then reopen the game. Everything from there worked as intended, it would even track progress independantly across different campaigns, but that was what I had so far...
But here's the really bad news. As you would have heard on stream, I suffered a drive failure and subsequently lost ALL of my coding progress I had made on this project... so once I began work on this project the second time, I decided to this time work on the actual demo campaign on stream. And that brings me to today, or more precisely, four days ago...

As of four days ago, I've had to begin dealing with a personal IRL issue that involves my ability to have a computer up and running at my home. Some of you may remember this happening some years ago, and some may even remember that problem not being resolved until almost two years later. Well, I regret to announce that this very same problem is once again happening and needs to be dealt with. This means that just like then, I'll at best be able to get online to the forum maybe a few times a week for an hour or so a day, and at most all I'll be able to do is type. So what I'm saying is this: I have a three mission custom campaign that I have made for an explicit purpose, a purpose of which I cannot fulfill at this time.
But there is some good news. After said drive failure destroyed my work on the main menu code, I decided instead to periodically back up my work on Google Drive instead of a physical medium. I guess it's a good thing I did, because now that I can no longer work on the project, I've decided to share the latest archive of what I've done so far with you guys.

I'm sharing this mostly because it would be a great disappointment to those who were keeping up with it on stream and now no longer get to see the finished product, but also because I am even able to do so and would wish for my work to at the very least prove helpful in some capacity to aspiring mod creators like I hoped it would. I really feel like I'm rambling now, so here's the link to everything I've done so far.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
As far as I can remember, the progress made on all three maps was as such:

1. Mission 1: You must build a base and reach the porch steps within 50 minutes. By far the most complete mission.
2. Mission 2: You must navigate a Tan minefield without a sweeper based on context clues and enemy movement. Mostly complete, but missing several cutscenes.
3. Mission 3: You must hold a defensive position and survival 30 Tan assault waves. The gameplay portion is fully functional and complete, but the intro cutscene is extremely rough and unfinished.

So feel free to download, play, and even take a look at the coding and all that of these custom campaigns. Unfortunately I never got around to add code comments that explains every decision I had made, but there should at least be a few of them here and there to point you in the right direction. All three maps are uncompiled, so you don't have to worry about using DrPack or the exe.exe program to get at the source files. And of course, feel free to ask about them here. I'll try answering anything I can.

[TommyCD1]

Some good news for an update. Just this morning I've been able to have my computer at home running again and am going to go straight back to work on this. Considering it took me a month's work to get the main menu UI alone and then lost all that progress before, I'd say work on this may or may not be finished by the end of this year...

Basically, I'm able to start working on this again starting today, but a good estimate for when it will be ready is sometime January or February next year.

[Jumper Snipèra]

If you are looking for test cases, you can use my custom story and great battles (JS Story and JS GB) to test your modifications to the selector you are building. They contain a modded version for each story and great battles mission in the game. Granted that I don't know the details of your approach, you may or may not have to rename them to allow them to be selected alongside the vanilla missions based on their unique name.

[TommyCD1]

That's very generous and I'll be sure to use it as a possibe example of installation.

What I had written last time and will likely code again, was that the main menu would have a second submenu for campaign selection. There you would select the main vanilla campaign, great battles, special operations, and from there would be two additional buttons: custom campaign and custom singleton missions. For custom campaign, it would be entirely setup on the back end to have missions playable in order from start to finish, would track medal goals, and all that jazz. The only concessions that I hadn't figured out was that:

1. Mission filenames had to be named in a specific fashion, that is; the first map would be MAP001.x, then MAP002.x, and so on.
2. The loaded campaign could not be hotswapped from ingame, so the only way to change what campaign you had selected would be to edit a custom .cfg file I had created in the game directory and change it from there before relaunching the game.

Everything else you wanted for you custom campaign: medal goals, how many missions there are, even unlocking goals for missions or if they need to be unlocked in the first place was all completely customizable by the content creator's whim.

[Jumper Snipèra]

Hey Tommy

How is the project coming along? I wanted to inform you that in case you are still willing to use my mods as a test for your mission selector, their names and the name of the thread have been modified. I merged the mods into 1 larger mod called 'Umbral Assault'. You can find the thread under this name in the 'Completed Mods' section where it previously resided.

Jumper Snipèra