Really. I'll have to go look at the behavior I got again. I thought it did actually move to to another planet.

Gentlemen, are you ready for this?

Here is one large mission:
Mission 1:

Briefing text, Accept Text.

OnComplete: B3 S12

Mission 12:

{B3: Accept text3}

OnComplete: S13

Mission 13:

{B3: Accept text3}

etc...

see where I'm going with this? Heres a new thread, starting a different mission:

Mission 2:

OnComplete: B4 !B3 S12

Mission 12:

{B3: Accept text3}
{B4: Accept text4}

OnComplete: S3

Mission 13:

{B3: Accept text3}
{B4: Accept text4}

etc.....

So you can see, mission 12 always leads to 13 always leads to 14. You use bits 3 and 4 at the beginning of the thread to determine which of a large block of text is shown, thereby reusing the same mission resource over and over. You still need three missions to make three panes come up, but these missions can be reused.

The only drawback (Aside from needing to be clever enough to implement it correctly), is that you can't nest conitionals (and forgive me if the syntax is slightly off, i know all this functionality exists, its just been two years since ive read my Bible).

Advanced developers may discover that wildcards CAN be used with clever writing.

do something like this:

{B3: Accept text3}
{B4: Accept text4}

<gender or other test thing "him">

{B3: Accept text3}
{B4: Accept text4}

You just need to collapse your writing such that both blocks of text use the same number of wildcards in the same order. This is simple enough from a writing standpoint though, and if you don't understand how to do it, you can always ignore it and write around using gender pronouns.

And keep in mind, the mission you actually do, the one that matters, is the first in the list that starts the chain, so it will be distinct every time.

Hey that sounds quite cool. Though won't that mean a fixed number of descs? If you have your first mission use 5 descs then your second mission is going to have to use all 5 of them even if it only wants 3, right?

@guy, on Dec 3 2007, 07:03 PM, said in How many descs can you cram into a fake mission?:

Hey that sounds quite cool. Though won't that mean a fixed number of descs? If you have your first mission use 5 descs then your second mission is going to have to use all 5 of them even if it only wants 3, right?

Nope.

M=real mission

D=Desc only mission

a/b=What bits are set.

M1->D1a->D2a->D3a->D4a

M2->D2b->D3b->D4b

Missions can chose how late in the chain to start. The only thing they are tied to is wildcards, but even that isn't such a big deal (using Sir/Ma'am once in the beginning of each thread is plenty)

Also note, the size of a desc resource is effectively infinite (though it occurs to me the parser might have a limit). So that will not be an issue.

This post has been edited by NebuchadnezzaR : 06 December 2007 - 12:13 PM

Ah I see, yeah that could work. Though I wouldn't bother unless you're short on mission resources.

Yeah, the only point at all is to conserve mission resources.