missiongroups.xml

Every mission offer the player sees belongs to a mission group: the Argon Federation Police, the Teladi Trade Guild, the war between the Argon and the Xenon, a story, a game start. The mission menu sorts the offers under those names, and a script that creates an offer names the group it goes into. libraries/missiongroups.xml is the short table that defines the groups: an id, a name, whether the group is a story, and the faction and the enemy faction behind it.

This article covers the format, how the groups show in the mission menu, the script side and how an extension adds a group. It describes version 9.00.

Contents

• Terms
• How a group is used
• The file
  • Layout
  • Attributes
• The script side
• Adding a group from an extension
• Reading on

Terms

• Mission group: one <group> entry, named by its id. A script refers to it as missiongroup.<id>.
• Offer: a mission on offer, created by a script with create_offer or create_mission, and listed in the mission menu until it is accepted or expires.
• Guild missions: in the mission menu, the offers of the recurring groups, the police, the trade guilds, the wars and the pirates, listed under their group with a count.
• Story: a group with story="true"; its missions are the plot missions, listed apart from the guild offers.

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How a group is used

1. A script creates an offer in a group. create_offer and create_mission take a group attribute, missiongroup.argon_police for instance, and update_offer and update_mission can change it later.
2. The mission menu reads the group of every offer. Plot missions are listed under their story group; the recurring offers appear under the heading for guild missions, one collapsible row per group with the group's name and how many missions it holds; offers without a group are listed on their own.
3. The group's faction and enemy are there for the scripts to read back, missiongroup.argon_war_xenon.faction and .enemy, so a generic mission can tell who it works for and against from the group alone.

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The file

Layout

<missiongroups>
  <group id="argon_police"          name="{30206,1}" faction="argon"/>
  <group id="argon_war_xenon"       name="{30210,1}" faction="argon" enemy="xenon"/>
  <group id="teladi_trade_guild"    name="{30204,1}" faction="teladi"/>
  <group id="scaleplate_pirates"    name="{30207,1}" faction="scaleplate"/>
  <group id="mentor_plot"           name="{30201,1}" faction="argon"/>
  <group id="terraforming"          name="{30500,1}" faction="player"/>
  <group id="story_boso"            name="{30201,51}" story="true"/>
  ...
</missiongroups>

The base file holds the base game's groups: the police of the Argon, the trade guilds of the Teladi and of Antigone, the Scale Plate pirates, the wars between the Argon, the Paranid and the Holy Order, the mentor missions, terraforming, and the base stories. Every expansion ships a libraries/missiongroups.xml of its own, a whole file gathered with the base one, holding its stories, its game start groups and, for Split Vendetta and Cradle of Humanity, its wars and guilds. Nothing in an expansion file touches a base group.

The schema, libraries/missiongroups.xsd, documents the attributes.

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Attributes

A group needs no more than an id and a name. Vanilla's story groups carry neither faction nor enemy, and the terraforming group names the player as its faction.

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The script side

Vanilla's generic missions carry their group in a variable, $MissionGroup, set by the script that generates the offer, and pass it to create_offer; the story scripts name their group directly, group="missiongroup.story_boso".

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Adding a group from an extension

A group of the extension's own is what keeps its missions apart from vanilla's in the menu. The example below, for a fictional extension example_missions, adds a guild group for Teladi courier missions, and shows the offer that goes into it.

libraries/missiongroups.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<diff>
  <add sel="/missiongroups">
    <group id="example_teladi_couriers" name="{1234567,1}" faction="teladi"/>
  </add>
</diff>

t/0001-l044.xml, with the page id the extension owns:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<language id="44">
  <page id="1234567" title="Example missions" descr="" voice="no">
    <t id="1">Teladi Courier Guild</t>
  </page>
</language>

And in the extension's mission script, the offer that uses it, shortened to the attribute that matters:

<create_offer cue="this" name="$OfferName" description="$OfferDescription" difficulty="level.easy" faction="faction.teladi" group="missiongroup.example_teladi_couriers">
  ...
</create_offer>

Some points about the example:

• The group is read when the offer is created, so the diff has to be in place when the game starts or the save is loaded; the offer then shows under the new heading in the guild missions list.
• A whole file instead of a diff works as well, as the expansions do it: a libraries/missiongroups.xml with a <missiongroups> root and the new group is gathered with the base one.
• A story of the extension's own is the same entry with story="true" and its missions created with create_mission; the menu then lists them as plot missions under that name.

The extension itself, its folder, content.xml and diff files, is covered in Anatomy of an extension and XML diff patching.

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Reading on

factions.xml defines the factions a group names.

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