"mission" file inside *.miz files

Hi !

I'm currently writing a little application that extracts the "mission" file inside a random *.miz file, and duplicates specific airplanes inside it.

The objective is to ease the mission creation process. I'm part of a Wing that uses custom liveries, and it is a real pain to create 20+ aicrafts, all with the same NAV points, same loadout, and with specific pilot name and livery.

So what my application does is retrieve the aircraft template in the "mission" file, and creates all the required aircrafts, keeping the waypoints, loadouts, whatever, the same, but assigning the pilot name and aicraft livery for each pilot in the Wing.

In the end, the mission creator only have to make one, and only one, aicraft, and my application does the rest.

It is working quite well (still in ALPHA stage), but I was wondering if there is any description of all the variables present in the "mission" file somewhere. I could go with the trial-and-error way, but it would be so much faster if any documentation already exists !

Anyone knows of such a thing ?

(sorry for butchering english)

Well there is the Copy paste function in the ME...

Yes, but it does not apply the relevant livery and pilots' names, and I also plan to include more features once I grabbed the meaning of all those LUA labels. I just wondered if there was some documentation of them hiding somewhere on the internet =þ

If there was some documentation on it, I'd probably know about. And I know of no documentation on the mission file. Mission file editing/creation is not a feature supported by ED. However, the mission file is just a serialized Lua table, so it's really easy to figure most things out. What exactly do you need to know?

It is fairly easy to figure most things out, as you said, but the way the Mission Editor treats the file afterwards is sometimes obscure.

I happened to end up in the "pit" of a Russian fuel tank (sic), or with the unit list completely disappearing from the Mission Editor, and so on.

One got to be very careful when directly editing the "mission" file, as the slightest mismatch messes the whole thing up. I was hoping to take the "easy way" and cut through the discovery process with a handy documentation, but it seems to be a sweet utopia =)

Anyway, thanks a lot for your answer, Speed ! Have a nice day, everyone ! :beer:

The source code of the Lottu tool is available. It won't help you with the mission file itself. The source does document the FC2 'options' though if you ever need that:

http://stallturn.com/wiki/en/lottu

The source code is available either as a Netbeans project bundle, or you can take it out of the executable 'JAR' file (which mixes executable compiled classes with the source code so you extract and modify stuff).