How will the menus handle campaigns?

[Fidcal]

Winkler Oszkar has a good question in the public forums about can we do campaigns and got me thinking. Unlike Thief, Dark Mod includes its own FM installer so the menu will show different FMs, probably dozens, even hundreds of FMs, much like Darkloader for Thief. Only the currently installed one can be played. So how do we intend to implement campaigns where there is a briefing for the first mission, objectives, shop, the mission itself, Mission complete, then some continue option, next briefing, mission, Mission Complete, and so on. There will not be many if any full 12+ mission campaigns, but 2, 3, and 4 mission packs are not uncommon in Thief.

[Dram]

Indeed. Loading one mission to the next is no issue, but it may be a good idea to have our loader read multiple lines of 'contained maps' or something. So for example, let's say we wanted to have 3 maps link into each other - ToSL, BM, and Gathers. We would use the current system but read multiple lines, so for this 3 map campaign it would be:

 

saintlucia

blackheart_manor

gathers

 

The briefing etc would be loaded for each map in between the missions as per ToSL and loadout and difficulty would also be selected as per normal. Then we could have certain things a mapper could change around, for example keeping items already in inventory, keeping previously allotted loot minus the objective requirement, etc.

 

Opinions?

[Tels]

Guess we have to make a mini-campain (ok, nano-campaign to really test this. Otherwise it will never really get finished

[Springheel]

As long as this can be done in a modular fashion (ie, not screw up anything else), it could be left until after release, as there won't be any campaigns for some time.