No generated missions... at all.

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6 years 7 months ago #20682 by DarthJahus
Hello, everyone!

There's a question, though, that always remained unanswered: Why don't I get any "generated mission"?

I knew these existed for their streams\speech and \text\generated_missions files exist and contain lots of mission that are supposed (I guess) to be triggered alongside the story. Unfortunately, none of them has ever triggered in my game and it always stayed a mystery. Now that I have access to Internet (it's been a while since the last playthrough), I hoped to find some answers.

Maybe I've got to note that the game is in French, but I don't see any reason for them to not work, since they have been fully translated and all the speech files are available. Is there any editable script file where these can be fixed?

Thank you.

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6 years 7 months ago #20683 by Chessking
Welcome DarthJahus,
I faintly remember experiencing the generated mission in my playthrough. I believe it involved a ship called "Oregon" and some mining trouble. Unfortunately, this is all I know about the generated mission. IronDuke should be able to help you better, so I'll PM him to speed up the process.

This is one tough navy, boy. They don't give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay

Storm Petrel
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6 years 7 months ago #20684 by IronDuke
Thanks Chessking :)

Oregon is a character in a regular game mission; he's not one of the generated missions. Generated missions are a big pile of entirely optional missions the game might throw at you; they're simple things, usually a targeted piracy or assassination. In return, you'll get a couple relatively rare goods or some equipment. (There's one you can get from the MCA that will let you earn up to four PBCs - considering it's impossible in the regular game, that's a handy deal. Although I just go and load up six Pulse-Accelerated PBCs on my Corvette... :P ) They're just nifty extra things you can do. They're well written though, with great tying into the story line.

What triggers them? Honestly, I am not entirely sure, but I know that the first one pops up after your first stint at piracy, when Jafs informs you that he's having trouble finding trade deals. I suspect that it's triggered by having a good score after that first trip. I know that in my earlier years of I-War 2, I rarely got the missions, but now they're run pretty much every single time. So, I believe it's something to do with how much skill the game thinks you have.

You have me intrigued now... I'll have to utilize my knowledge of the game's file organization and try to find something that links to their trigger. :)

Happy Hunting!

Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. :)
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6 years 7 months ago - 6 years 7 months ago #20685 by DarthJahus
Thank you for your reply, IronDuke, and thanks Chessking!

You said that in your earlier years of I-War 2, you've got some missions and so did I. Some times, I think that I've dreamed them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But I'm sure that I played the "Books for the Stepson". Books are so rare, nowadays…

If the missions are related to skill, then I'm going to try both sides (skilled and unskilled) before Jafs says he can't get good deals. And maybe try the game without any mod installed. Or even, as last ressort, try the pre-F14.6 version… I even paid it on GOG to see if it's related to my own oooold CD copy of the game. Going to report back.

As for game files, I hope we find something. The game would be great if we could force it to throw all the side quests :side:

Fly safely!

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6 years 6 months ago - 6 years 6 months ago #20686 by DarthJahus
Interesting things to look at:

When looking at the "packages", we can see script files named: "imissiongenerator.pkg", "imissiongeneratorselector.pkg" and "imissiontracker.pkg".

From the header files directory of the SDK ("include" folder), we can see that "iMissionGeneratorSelector" has a function named ini_for_mission() that takes an argument named "list_of_missions_ini".

The "iMissionGenerator" script contains test functions that rate pilote's piracy skills: testPiracyRating();
A hint that they are generated depending on player's skill?

These functions are undocumented.

The "list_of_missions_ini" argument can only be an ini file that has lots of missions separated by act, because ini_for_mission() takes act name as a parameter.

So somehow, some script uses the mission generator and passes a ini file containing a list of missions.

The only .ini that apparently contains a list of mission organized in that way is "mission_directory.ini" located in "resource".

It contains 3 missions. One being commented out.

The missions are all located in an inexistant directory named pre_alpha.

All 3 missions don't exist in the normal missions directory.

The start_mission function tells us that missions are ini files.

prototype start_mission( hinifile mission_ini, string current_mission );

Sadly, all "normal" missions are scripts and not ini files. And there are absolutely no ini files for them.

Generated missions have got a .csv file in /resource/text/generated_missions/.
In the .csv, there's text for all of them. And even their emails. But it looks like the emails have been moved to /html/email/generatedmission (with a "done" mark in the comments). The .csv also contains ship names.

There's a total of 35 generated missions. Some look really complex with up to 4 emails related to them.

In /streams/audio/speech, there are .wav files for the generated missions that need speech.

Now the questions are:

• If missions have been moved to script files, instead of ini, where are the script files for these missions?

• If they are still ini files, where are they?

• Did we really get into any of them? Or was it just a dream caused by the speech files we've listened to?

Edit. Some more elements:

Inside iActOne.pkg, there's:

iActOne.StepsonMember - player has completed enought generated Stepson missions to advance to next state....
iActOne.StepsonMember - player has completed generated Stepson missions - five are needed to progress.....

There's also g_added_gm_batch_1, g_added_gm_batch_2, ... that look like states for which generated mission batches have been used. The same goes for Act 2 and Act 3.

So… maybe they are handled by iActOne.pkg, iActTwo.pkg and iActThree.pkg.

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