Extension “MizEdit”

One of the main concepts of DCSServerBot is to have you use any standard mission that you built or got from the community and do whatever you like with it, without the need of you changing anything in the mission itself. This works well for SlotBlocking already or the CreditSystem, but you can even go further and really amend the mission without touching it.

Sounds like magic? Well, it kinda is.

Concept

The whole concept behind MizEdit is, that your mission consists out of several files that are bundled together in a zipped file that ED decided to give the “.miz” extension. One of these files, the mission-file is a large lua table that holds the main information about your mission, like the theatre, the date and time, the weather, all units, triggers, the majority of settings and whatnot. Another one is options, which holds parts of the configuration of your mission and last but not least there is warehouses, that holds information about the dedicated airports and their warehouses.
The Mission Editor writes and changes these files to represent any change that you made to your mission. So - why not do that on our own, without the need of the editor?

Presets

Each mission change is represented in a small data-structure in yaml. I’ve called these “presets”, as they usually will work as a fixed setting for any mission you have, like any weather preset you know already from the recent DCS versions.

[!NOTE] If you want to look up the presets used in DCS, you can take a look at C:\Program Files\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World\Config\Effects\clouds.lua.

config/presets.yaml

As you usually want to re-use your presets, they are bundled together in a larger configuration file. Each preset has a name. Presets can be chained to create a combination of presets as a separate preset.

[!TIP] You can create any other file named presets*.yaml to better structure your presets. If you want to use presets from another yaml file, you can specify that in your MizEdit-Extension. You can mix several presets files by specifying them as a list (see example below).

a) Simple Presets 

Spring:
  date: '2016-04-21'
  temperature: 8
Summer:
  date: '2016-07-21'
  temperature: 23
Autumn:
  date: '2016-10-21'
  temperature: 10
Winter:
  date: '2016-12-21'
  temperature: -10
Nighttime:
  start_time: 03:00
Morning:
  start_time: 08:00
Noon:
  start_time: 12:00
Evening:
  start_time: 18:00
Late Evening:
  start_time: 22:00
Casual Weather:
- Summer
- Morning

In this case the preset “Casual Weather” will be the same as if you apply both, “Summer” and “Morning” to the mission.

With this method, you can change the following values in your mission (to be extended):

  • start_time
  • date
  • temperature
  • atmosphere_type
  • wind (including sub-structures like listed in your mission file)
  • groundTurbulence
  • enable_dust
  • dust_density
  • qnh
  • clouds (including sub-structures like listed in your mission file)
  • enable_fog
  • fog
  • halo (including sub-structures like listed in your mission file)
  • requiredModules (set this to [] to remove any module requirements from your mission)
  • accidental_failures (set this to false to remove any failures from your mission)
  • forcedOptions (force any mission option)
  • miscellaneous (set any miscellaneous option)
  • difficulty (set any difficulty option)

I highly recommend looking at a mission or options file inside your miz-file to see the structure of these settings.

date has different options:

  • date: ‘2022-05-31’ # normal date
  • date: ‘today’ # one of today, yesterday, tomorrow

start_time has different options:

  • start_time: 28800 # seconds since midnight (here: 08:00h)
  • start_time: ‘08:00’ # fixed time
  • start_time: ‘noon’ # one of now, dawn, sunrise, morning, noon, evening, sunset, dusk, night as a moment in time based on the current map / date
  • start_time: ‘morning +02:00’ # relative time to one of the above-mentioned moments

[!NOTE] The moments are calculated based on the current theatre and date. If you change the date through MizEdit, you need to set that prior to the start_time!

Thanks, @davidp57 for contributing the moments-part!

b) Attaching Files

If you want to attach files to your mission (e.g. sounds but others like scripts, etc.), you can do it like this:

Sounds:
  files:
  - sounds/alarm.ogg
  - sounds/beep.ogg

This will create a new preset “Sounds”, that - if applied - copies the two ogg files into your l10n/DEFAULT directory of your miz-file. The path of these files is relative to your DCSServerBot installation directory.

If you want to add files to a specific directory, you can do it like so:

AddFiles:
  files:
    - source: sounds/alarm.ogg    # upload a single file to the target dir inside of the mission
      target: l10n/EN 
    - source: kneeboards          # upload the whole file structure from this directory into the mission
      target: KNEEBOARDS          # at this place

c) Fog

With DCS 2.9.10, Eagle Dynamics added a new fog system, which allows fog animations, based on time. You can use this new feature set with the bot like so:

auto_fog:   # let DCS to the fog on its own
    fog:
        mode: auto
manual_fog: # set a manual fog animation
    fog:
        mode: manual
        0: {"thickness": 100, "visibility": 1000}
        300: {"thickness": 200, "visibility": 2000}
        600: {"thickness": 250, "visibility": 2500}
        900: {"thickness": 100, "visibility": 500}
        1200: {"thickness": 0, "visibility": 0}

The key is the time in seconds after which the specific thickness and visibility should appear. DCS will then animate the fog changes in-between for you.

d) DCS RealWeather

You can run DCS RealWeather from MizEdit now:

realweather:
    RealWeather:
        options:
            weather:
                icao: UGKO

e) Complex Modifications

Sometimes, only changing the weather is not enough, and you want to change some parts in the mission that are deeply nested or even dependent on another parts of your mission file. This is for instance true, if you want to change frequencies, TACAN codes or similar items. Therefore, I developed some SQL-like query language, where you can search and change values in your mission.

[!NOTE] As this is complex and very (!) powerful, I decided to move the documentation in a separate file here.

Usage

MizEdit is used like any other extension. It is added to your nodes.yaml and configured through it. Again, you have multiple options on how you want your missions to be changed:

a) Changes, based on the local server time

        MizEdit:
          debug: true                     # Optional: enable debug logging for "modify"
          presets: 
            - config/presets.yaml         # default
            - config/presets_weather.yaml # own preset - will be merged with the default one
          settings:
            00:01-06:00: Spring, Morning, Rainy, Halo
            06:01-12:00: Summer, Morning, Slight Breeze, Halo
            12:01-18:00: Autumn, Morning, Heavy Storm, Halo
            18:01-00:00: Winter, Morning, Slight Breeze, Halo

b) Random choice of fixed settings

        MizEdit:
          settings:
          - Spring, Morning, Rainy, Halo
          - Summer, Morning, Slight Breeze, Halo
          - Autumn, Morning, Heavy Storm, Halo
          - Winter, Morning, Slight Breeze, Halo

c) Permutations

        MizEdit:
          settings:
            00:00-12:00:  # Any permutation out of [Spring, Summer] + [Morning, Noon] + [Slight Breeze, Rainy, Heavy Storm]
            - - Spring
              - Summer
              - Autumn
              - Winter
            - - Morning
              - Noon
            - - Slight Breeze
              - Rainy
              - Heavy Storm
            12:00-24:00:
            - - Autumn
              - Winter
            - - Evening
              - Nighttime
            - - Slight Breeze
              - Rainy
              - Heavy Storm

d) Map-specific Settings

        MizEdit:
          terrains:
            Caucasus:
              settings:
              - Winter, Morning, Slight Breeze, Halo
            Syria:
              settings:
              - Spring, Morning, Rainy, Halo

e) Mission filter

        MizEdit:
          filter: MyFancy*  # apply to all missions that start with "MyFancy" in their name
          settings:
          - Spring, Morning, Rainy, Halo
          - Summer, Morning, Slight Breeze, Halo
          - Autumn, Morning, Heavy Storm, Halo
          - Winter, Morning, Slight Breeze, Halo