Tribes 2 // Mod Development Handbook GitHub

11 · The Mission Editor

F11 toggles it, on the currently loaded mission [script]. Everything below is from the shipped manual in base/scripts.vl2’s help/ directory unless marked otherwise.

The eight tools

Selected from the Window menu [script]:

Tool Purpose Documented in
World Editor Full-screen object movement and selection 12
World Editor Inspector Inspect and edit object properties 12
World Editor Creator Create new mission objects 12
Mission Area Editor Adjust mission bounds; mirror terrain 13
Terrain Editor Manually adjust the heightfield and square properties 13
Terrain Terraform Editor Procedurally generate the heightfield from fractal operations 13
Terrain Texture Editor Procedurally place terrain textures by rule 14
Terrain Texture Painter Manually paint terrain textures 14

The split runs objects vs terrain, and within terrain, procedural vs manual. The intended order is procedural first, manual second — generate a heightfield with Terraform, correct it with the Terrain Editor; place textures by rule, then touch them up with the Painter.

Movement

“The normal movement keys can be used to control both the player and the camera. The right mouse button is used to rotate the camera or adjust the player’s view.” [script]

You are editing as either the player or a free camera, and switch between them from the Camera menu. The distinction matters: the player collides with the world, the camera does not, and several object-drop rules are relative to the camera specifically.

File menu

Item Effect
New Mission… Creates an empty mission with a default terrain and sky
Open Mission… Opens an existing mission for editing
Save Mission Writes the current mission to disk
Save Mission As… Writes it under a new name
Import Terraform Data… Imports terraform rules from an existing terrain file
Import Texture Data… Imports terrain texture rules from an existing terrain file
Export Terraform Bitmap… Terraform Editor only — exports the current terraform map to a bitmap

The two Import items are the most useful and least known. Terraform and texture rules are stored in the .ter file, so you can lift an entire generation recipe off a shipped map and re-run it — the fastest way to learn what produces Tribes-like terrain is to import Slapdash’s rules and read the stack.

Save Mission is what writes the .mis. The output is SimObject::save(), which is why every shipped .mis and .gui carries the //--- OBJECT WRITE BEGIN --- marker (SimObjects and namespaces). It also means anything you hand-edit into a .mis outside the marked block survives, and anything inside it does not — the editor rewrites that region wholesale. Put your // MissionTypes = and // DisplayName = headers above it.

Edit menu

Item Effect
Undo / Redo “Undoes the last action in terrain or world editing. Not all actions can be undone”
Cut / Copy / Paste Clipboard for world-editor selections
Select All / Select None Selection in world and terrain editors
Relight Scene Recomputes mission static lighting — see 15
World Editor Settings… Planar movement, gizmos, drop behaviour
Terrain Editor Settings… Brush falloff filter, Set Height value

Take the undo caveat seriously. It is the manual’s own wording, and terrain operations in particular are not reliably reversible. Save before any terraform Apply.

Camera menu

Item Effect
Drop Camera At Player Moves the camera to the player and switches to camera mode
Drop Player At Camera Moves the player to the camera and switches to player mode
Toggle Camera Switches between player and camera movement
Slowest … Fastest Camera speed

These are exposed to script as client commands [script]:

commandToServer('dropCameraAtPlayer');
commandToServer('DropPlayerAtCamera');
commandToServer('ToggleCamera');

Camera speed is $Camera::movementSpeed, default 40. The Construction mod raises it to 80 for its scaled-up TR2 missions and restores the default afterwards [mod-script] — a reminder that a mod can retune the editor for its own content:

if( %missionType $= "TR2" )
{
    $_Camera::movementSpeed = $Camera::movementSpeed;
    $Camera::movementSpeed = 80;
}
else
{
    %val = $_Camera::movementSpeed $= "" ? 40 : $_Camera::movementSpeed;
    $Camera::movementSpeed = %val;
}

The console is part of the toolchain

The editor and the console are complementary. Anything the editor cannot express, script can — and the object you are editing is an ordinary SimObject:

$Camera::movementSpeed = 120;
MissionGroup.getCount();
nameToID(team1flag).dump();
MissionGroup.save("missions/MyMap.mis");

MissionGroup.save() is exactly what Save Mission calls. dump() on a selected object shows every field the Inspector can edit and several it cannot (SimObjects and namespaces).

Under the community patches

The QoL patch extends the terrain painter from six material slots to eight, via EPainter::setup, EPainter::onAdd and EPainterChangeMat [patch-script].

That matters for portability: a map painted using slots 6 or 7 will not paint correctly in an unpatched editor, and Sierra’s own guidance is to keep to four or fewer textures in any one area anyway (14 · Terrain texturing).

Nothing else in the editor is modified by either patch.