If you’ve not read Part 1 which shows the setup of the Mission Editor, do that first. Otherwise, in this guide we will explain the User Interface.

When you first start up the mission editor, the game will ask you to place the player ship. You can use the arrow keys to move the camera around in this top down view and can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

Once you find a suitable location to place your ship, left click in the desired spot. Your ship should now spawn.


Once placed, the ship should be visible and the control toolbox will open. If you hover your mouse over the buttons, a small pop up will appear. We will go into each of these buttons in detail but the buttons include:

Quit to main Menu


Quick Save Mission


Jump to preset points

Place New Trigger

Remove trigger or ship

Move Trigger or Ship

Scale Trigger

Rotate trigger or ship

First, you’re going to want to position the ship, you can select one of these buttons in the control toolbox and this will affect whatever you click on. For example, the tug boat needs to be better positioned so we will click the Move trigger or ship button and click and hold to drag the ship.

Two new boxes have appeared since we selected the ship. The trigger Toolbox and the trigger properties. Be cautious of editing these values when creating missions. These are highlighted in red


To make sure that you are selecting the correct ship, look just underneath the control toolbox where it says “selected ship” Because we’ve chosen the player ship, the selected ships ID should be 0. It also tells us the type of vessel that is selected, in this case a tug boat. I have highlighted this section in red.


First, let’s continue placing the ship in the position we want to start. We have moved it into the area we want using the move trigger or ship button. But now it’s time to use the rotate trigger or ship button. Click and hold the left mouse button and then drag to change the rotation of the ship.

Now it’s time to take a quick look at the trigger toolbox menu. The buttons include

Mission text

Tug

Local Time

Jump

Anchor

Weather

Mission Time

Clicking on each of these adds a new box below the Trigger properties menu.

Now, for a quick test let’s create some waypoints for the player ship to follow.

Once you have your tugboat selected, click the place new trigger button in the control toolbox.


Now, click on the map. A green box should appear.


Because we have selected the player ship, this becomes the player’s goal. Clicking in several other places on the maps creates a series of waypoints for the player to follow. I have placed three waypoints and as you can see it reveals a line that the player will need to follow in this mission.


If you want to delete a trigger, click the remove trigger or ship button and then click on the trigger. It will ask if you are sure and if you select yes, it will be removed.


If you want to save your progress, click the Quick save mission button in the control toolbox. If you quit now, and do not save it will lose all of the work you have done.

If we save, quit to main menu and play this now, we can hit the P button to bring up the arrow. Once we reach the first arrow, the second objective will appear. And once we reach the final objective, the mission will end. Some odd text will appear on screen for the moment
















But in essence this is a very basic mission where the ship will need to go from one location to another.

In the next part I will share how to adjust the time of day and change the weather conditions