Missio Pack Editing

Editing for the Mission Pack

These notes are based on the use of QuArK 4, which is relatively easy to use without a lot of built-in support for a specific mod. To use another editor for the MP you might have to know more about what you're doing. If you're using Qoole or BSP, stop now and head straight over to Bludbath's site.

General Setup

To run the MP executable (h2mp.exe) from the editor, simply specify h2mp.exe (or some batch file that you'd like to run instead) rather than h2.exe for the program that the editor calls in order to run the game. You can continue to use the old vis and light tools (except for the fact that the new release has no EULA, hooray, but for bsp-ing you should use hxbsp06.exe, available from the QuArK websight.

The MP has its own subdirectory (Portals) containing pak0.pak, progs.dat, strings.txt files, etc. As with regular H2, you can put your project in its own subdirectory (directly within the H2 directory, sister to Portals, not inside it); when it's run with the command parameter -game myproject, h2mp.exe will look first in the myproject directory, then in the Portals directory, and last in data1.

Finally, to get full MP behavior from the entities, you need to set the spawnflags key of the maps worldspawn entity to 1. If you forget to do this, some MP features will work, and others won't.

Entities

The MP has a rather substantial stock of new entities; the new or changed ones are listed here, with their flags and some commentary. To use them, you will need to know how to manually type classnames and entity specifics, since I'm not aware of any editor that provides full entity support for the MP (QuArK 5 will, but it doesn't have all its functions in place yet). I've provided a highly incomplete and quite minimalistic (intending only to really support spawnflags) QuArK 4 .qme file for some of the new entities, but you'll need to refer extensively to the new & changed entity list to use it.

All of the finished and genuinely useable entities from original H2 seem to be available in MP maps, but there may be some useless but unfinished ones that aren't, and their behavior may not be 100% the same (the Raven programmers intended that the original maps be playable under the MP .exe, and they basically seem to be, but it wasn't tested thoroughly, and I don't know if anyone has actually finished original H2 as the demoness).

A final difference is that while original H2 uses progs.dat for entity programming in ordinary maps, and progs2.dat in the rider maps containing the big bosses, the MP just has one (bigger) progs.dat, and the `maplist.txt' file that says which map uses which progs.dat file doesn't seem to work (at least when I just tried it, maybe I screwed something up).

Texture Wads

Finally, you'll want a texture wad containing the new MP textures, these include some additional textures from the Medieval theme, and lots of new ones from the Tibetan theme. I've made some available from here, together with instructions for importing the wads into a QuArK 4 .qme file, such as the one above containing (some of) the new entities (I'm distributing them separate because I expect to be putting out improved versions of the entity .qme.).


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