Duck and Cover

How much do we really need to include when we distribute a mission? I've just had to do a clean install of FOT after getting my computer back from the repair guy and I discovered that standalone maps will work even if you've deleted some of the entities. So to test things out I installed the Quartz mission file but none of the entities, and it almost works just fine.

The actors appear to be all there, but any items added to their inventories in the entity editor are missing, (though the hand and armour slots are okay) display names, image colouring and tag names still work even though there's no entity in existence.

Presumably we'd only need to include the mission file, speech file, new sprites/tiles and only the actors/containers that have large inventories that have been added via the entity editor (merchants).

Has anyone done any experimenting with this?

Well without the entities, alot of the scripting that drives the game will not work. So yeah the included entities are absolutely required. I think everyone should try to minimize what is included to make the file size smaller. Use the game entities/sprites and tiles where needed.

You only need to include what you modified and added. Everything else should be left untouched.

Jimmyjay86 wrote:Well without the entities, alot of the scripting that drives the game will not work. So yeah the included entities are absolutely required.

Well my test map had a couple of new actor-entities I had created passing around some tagged items to test the give item commands, those still worked even though the actors and the tagged items no longer existed outside the map. And with installing your Quartz map the scripting is working fine even though I purposely didn't install the entity folder. I haven't been able to raise the money to bail the mechanic because the merchant has no inventory but everything else has been working, even the new items that you created such as the flowers work.

Red wrote:You only need to include what you modified and added. Everything else should be left untouched.

I presume that with campaigns you'd need to include new or moddified item entities, especially if you want them sold through the QM, but with a standalone map so far it seems that once an item has been placed into a map (either on the ground or into an actor/container's inventory) via the level editor the entity is no longer required, just the image.