Wrecking Crew’s DCS Mission Editor Primer – Part 1

DCS Mission Editor Basics

The DCS Mission Editor (ME) provides the opportunity to create missions for your favorite aircraft. You set the objectives for success, along with the defenses to guard them. Different playable aircraft can be added to missions for single player variability and for multiplayer cooperation or head-to-head. The Combined Arms module allows for ground commander control and a Game Master that can be helpful with mission design.

My preferred ME mode is to set the DCS screen resolution to 1920×1200 and not to Full Screen. In this mode there is screen real estate so I can use other document and browser windows. It is a good idea to have Notepad++ to use for mission notes, and for LUA code snippets and development. I keep a mission (.lua) document for every mission. That .lua file holds the Briefing, Messages, and any lua script – because it is easier to edit that on a big screen rather than within the small ME dialog boxes. Use Copy and Paste (Cntrl-c & Cntrl-v) in the ME dialog boxes. I have a separate folder for each mission’s documents. But all my missions are in one “Missions” folder, with a sub-folder called “History” that holds older mission versions.

Creating A Mission

With a scenario in mind, the mission is created by selecting the Red and Blue coalitions on the New Mission Settings screen. You also must choose the map. Once you say OK there is no going back.

On the Red side with Russia and the USSR, a large variety of Soviet style weapons are available including air defense. Other typical Red countries do not offer much more in weapons but do bring some of their liveries to aircraft.

Blue has limited air defense capability with the USA units. I like to include Georgia in Blue for the Zu23s, while Germany offers the AAA Gepard and the SA-10 system. The Blue side HAWK and Patriot systems have templates available to place on the map.

Balance

Is your primary mission objective air-to-ground or air-to-air? For air-to-ground scenarios the objective can be close at ~10 miles or out many times that. Depending upon the aircraft, an A-10’s target out 60 miles is a long way to go while for an F-14 it may be just enough time to set up the run. That balance is important for the mission to be fun.

Do be careful about the saturation of enemy air defenses in your mission design. Too much enemy air defense has caused more complaints that anything else.

For air-to-air missions, the distances can be far. AWACS and EWR can easily vector the player to a target 100 miles away.

When placing an aircraft in the mission, it can be put anywhere as an Air Start, or it can be put at an airbase, or on a carrier if capable. When the aircraft is placed on a surface, it can be set for a Cold (Ramp) Start, Parking Hot, or Runway Start. Helicopters can also be placed on any ground and started there.

Airbases have numbered parking slots for player aircraft and artificial intelligence (AI) aircraft. Some parking slots are restricted by aircraft type. Some airfields have only a few slots, while others may not (yet) have any. Airfield resource limitations may adversely impact your mission scenario ideas! Some airfields are too short to accommodate some aircraft; in this case an aircraft may never take off or may orbit instead of landing and eventually crash.

Helicopters should be put onto a FARP or they should use a Ground Start instead of an airbase. If they are parked at an airfield, then they will take forever to taxi for a runway takeoff or landing.

When an aircraft is placed at an airbase then that airbase will ‘join’ the aircraft’s coalition. If the aircraft is then moved away from that airbase, the airbase will remain in the coalition. For an aircraft to be serviced at an airbase both must be in the same coalition. Click on an airbase icon to manually change the Coalition and to see the Tower Frequencies.

Creating an Aircraft

First, let us create an aircraft at an airbase. Next, we will make some waypoints. Then, at a mile out, and perpendicular to the runway put a waypoint. From there go out 5 miles any direction and lay down a couple more waypoints. Then put one more waypoint a mile out from the runway on the other side from the first waypoint. Finally put a waypoint down right in the center of the runway. On this last waypoint that is on the runway, change its Type to Landing.

Change the Waypoint mode from Add to Edit.

Now go back to the first waypoint, #0. Review the Type that you want: to start the aircraft cold from the Ramp, or a Hot start or Runway start. Select Takeoff from Ramp. You now have an aircraft that will start up and fly around and land (I hope).

For now, leave the aircraft Skill at Veteran level.

Add a couple ground units around the airbase to use for viewing in the mission. They can sit at their location, or they will move to any waypoints that you set for them.

Save the mission and click on the Fly Mission button in the ME.

Use F2 Aircraft View, F7 Vehicle View, F10 Map View to watch the mission progress.

Make Stuff Happen

To make something happen when the aircraft gets to its waypoint #3, we will create a zone there. Then we will build an Event that will Trigger a Message.

Create the zone and move it to WP #3.

Go to the Menu item called Set Rules for Trigger and click New Trigger. Next, make a New Condition, with Type of All of Group In Zone, and the Group is the aircraft you created and the zone is the new zone just created. The ‘stuff’ is a Message To All that announces the plane is at Waypoint #3; Put text in like, “Plane is at Waypoint 3”, and set the Seconds to 20.

Save the mission and fly it again.

Add Other Units and Clone Groups

To show visual indicators for each waypoint, ground units can be used. Put two units under WP #2, three units under WP #3, and so on.

The event we created can be expanded to activate other units or to send a command signal. An enemy aircraft or radar site could be activated. A friendly tanker could be commanded to start up and takeoff. An enemy armor group could be signaled to attack the airbase.

The one aircraft that we have in the mission can be multiplied a couple different ways. The number of Units in the Group can be increased, to have a flight of 2, 3, 4 …; except for large aircraft. Or, the original aircraft can be cloned with Cntrl-c to Copy it, followed with Cntrl-v to make clones; do not move the cursor because the waypoints will shift, too.

The Human: Player vs Client

Make a clone of the original aircraft for a human Player to use. Do not change the original aircraft. For the Player aircraft, change its Skill setting to Player. Not all aircraft are player-flyable. An aircraft that is available to fly will show up on the Select Role screen when the mission starts.

Another Skill setting is Client; this is the one I use. I understand that the difference between Player and Client is that the Skill = Player allows for Events that can be triggered from cockpit conditions which are often used in training missions. These Event Conditions and Actions are at the bottom of the Condition and Action Type lists, like ‘X: COCKPIT …”.

Activate An Enemy Aircraft

Create an enemy aircraft at about 20 miles away from your WP #3. Give it some waypoints that point to WP #3. You can also give it a Task like Combat Air Patrol (CAP) and add weapons.

Go to the first waypoint for this enemy aircraft. On the Airplane Group information panel, the Start Time (at the bottom) should be 0800, or whatever time the Mission Start Time is set to on the Weather tab. In the middle of the information panel is the checkbox for Late Activation. Check this box. Now, this enemy aircraft will be inactive at the start of the mission, until we generate an action to Activate it.

Go back to the Set Rules for Trigger tab (I call it Events). Click on the event for the message at WP #3. Under Actions, click New and select Action: Group Activate and select the enemy aircraft group. Now go and edit the Message To All to say something like, “Eeeek, we are under attack!”

End On A Note

Make an Event that announces the successful winning completion of the mission objective. The Condition for this event is something like the enemy aircraft Group Is Dead, and the Action is a Message To All that congratulates the Player on the win.

And if the mission is lost, an Event can trigger a message for that: “You lost this mission, because the enemy just overran your airbase!”

When making new Event Triggers, I only use the ‘No Event’ value in the ‘Event:’ field. This setting can be used to ignore events unless a particular activity occurs, as defined in the choices. This originally was to lessen the load on the computer, but that was 1990s. I do not think it is an issue now, so I leave all events set to ‘No Event’. Also, I have made the mistake of Cloning an Event that was set to ‘On Destroy’, and then spending way too much time trying to troubleshoot why the new event did not generate a message on something simple like when an ac flew into the zone!

Naming

You may have noticed the automatic naming that the mission editor is assigning to groups, units, zones and events. You need a naming convention that separates the Blue and Red, at least. The easiest is to precede Blue groups with “Blue” and Red with “Red”. I also separate planes, helicopters, ships and armor. It will be much easier to manage your mission resources when your naming convention allows for quick identification.

In my next article we will look at my naming conventions and group numbering scheme.

Enjoy!

Wrecking Crew
December 2020
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