1 post(s) tagged with "designer"

#Mission Control Designer - A Visual Contract Type Editor

If you’ve ever played a Flashpoint with conversations, seen extensive UI mods or played any of the Duel or Blackout contract types - then you’ve played my modding work or mods developed using my tools (Mission Control, ConverseTek conversation editor and BTDebug modder tool). I’ve always felt that adding more content to BattleTech was important for its longevity as a game so my long term aim was to keep adding where possible and help others add to the game. With that in mind I added new contract types to the game.

In December 2019 I released the first custom contract types for BattleTech - Solo and Duo Duel and in May 2020 I released the first full sized custom contract type ‘Blackout’. While I had made a system for other modders to make their own contract types - after almost a year and a half no one else made any. This was mainly due to the daunting task to learn, understand and create it even with Mission Control’s custom contract type system.

After taking a break from modding I came back and realised if the community was going to see more custom contract types then the process needed to become easier. A lot easier. That’s why after over three months of modding work in my spare time I’m happy to announce the development of Mission Control Designer - a visual custom contract type editor.

The Mission Control Designer is an editor that’s built into BattleTech itself. It allows a modder to make a new contract type and save it in a format that the Mission Control mod understands to load into the game. The single most important goal of this tool is to make creating new contract types as easy as possible. A contract type could be something like a Simple Battle, Defend Base, Blackout or new Campaign-styled contracts.

You’re able to easily set up a new contract type, or add new encounters to existing custom contract types. Once in you’re able to have a visual tool to drag, drop and edit your way to your vision of what you want to create.

The tool is still in a very early stage of development but it’s far enough that I feel confident that I’ll be able to achieve my goal - and so I feel confident sharing that with the community.

My long term goal with the Designer is to develop more contract types with it to battle test it, increase the set of features and logic that can be used in a contract type and refine how easy it is to use. After that I plan to develop a new mini-campaign that will be introduced either as a flashpoint or with a unique entry point. I will then be releasing the tool for everyone to use as open source software.

For anyone wanting to follow my progress feel free to drop by the Mission Control discord server and for those who want to support my development feel free to visit my Patreon.

For a peek at how the tool runs check out this video here.

Thanks guys!