Updates and Triggers?

[Wilde Jagd]

Hi,

After lurking around this site with so much curiosity, I've finally given the go-ahead and downloaded the game. I honestly have to say, I'm really impressed, for a game in its alpha stage. This game has so much content and playability to offer, plus I love the creativity, originality and even the authenticity and attention to details incorporated into this game, even the troop and building names!!  Honestly, it's a perfect 10/10 game.  

But I do have a few questions though:

 

Will there be triggers implemented in the editor in the near future?

I explored the scenario editor for a bit and I was honestly impressed with the variety of possible terrains you can impose on the map, as well as the many varieties of eye candy you can add in, with all these objects available.  It kind of reminds me of the Empires: Dawn of the Modern World editor where you can even place stuff that belonged to buildings (e.g. an anvil that belonged to the armory etc).

But one minor let down was the lack of triggers or anything of the sort.  The only options you can have in functionality is something akin to AoE 1 but even less options than that: Capture the relic, Wonder, Regicide etc. I looked up if there was any possible trigger system and only found a wiki on it that well.. seemed confusing to me, describing stuff related to scripting and stuff, which I have very little knowledge of.

Heck, I doubt I can really do much with that sort of stuff, like change civ name, create and task enemy units to a particular area, change class/unit attribute, get a person to an area to win the scenario, adding a variety of objectives instead of the usual B&D type of game  etc.

It would be great if there were triggers implemented in the map editor - something as powerful and rich as - for instance, those from Empire Earth or Empires: Dawn of the Modern World, and not anything like AoK or AoM which were both lackluster imo...

Suppose there was an update or a bug fix available. How do I update my version of the game if these were available?

I read somewhere that it had something to do with PPA or something?                                                                                                                                                          But I honestly have no idea. Would love to know if there was a way I can follow up any sort of future update. 

Edited June 19, 2018 by Wilde Jagd

[Lion.Kanzen]

@elexis @stanislas69

[elexis]

Downloads of new releases are always available on play0ad.com. The most recent developer version can be obtained via BuildInstructions.

After having created some triggerscript maps, the freedom to use the entire simulation is a freedom in map creation I wouldn't want to miss and hence probably never use the map editor if it had a triggerscript editor.

Some functions are common already (the ones currently in Trigger.js and TriggerHelper.js for instance) and can be exposed in the map editor, but the map editor will likely never have the same freedom as writing some code. For instance the ship ungarrisoning on Danubius needs to account for the angle of the river and compute if there are still units on that side of the river. This is some procedure which we can barely implement in the GUI.

If you want to create some triggerscript maps, I suggest to take a look at the existing ones, some have 20 lines of code (elephantine), some 40 lines of code (gallic fiedls), 100 lines of code (polar sea), 300 (survival of the fittest), 600 (danubius, jebel barkal). One has to understand that units buildings and resources are entities, and that each entity is made up of components, each component being some code implementing a certain feature of the entity (such as walking, attacking, health) defined with a set starting values defined in the entity template XML file.

Then one can imagine some small thing that is supposed to happen on that map, translate that to actions that the entities do (for instance spawning, garrisoning, patroling). For these mentioned options adding triggers is possible. As mentioned, each map is different and needs to account for something (such as figuring out where the left and right riverside are).

[Guest]

The wiki is rather incomplete. It needs detailed instructions for doing the basic stuff like how to get entity positions, issue unit commands etc. Seems like it was written assuming the reader already has knowledge of how game simulation works.