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# Mission maker

## Introduction

With these tools offered free of charge by the Virtual European Air Force, any mission maker can easily create a complex, dynamic mission in the DCS mission editor. In as little as 1 or 2 hours, you will have a mission with :

- a complex setup of dozens of units, easily added by using special templating commands.
- a system that dresses up FARP units to make them complete forwards bases of operations, with the required logistic vehicles, tents, guards and even windsocks
- a build system that will normalize your mission files so they aren’t completely randomized and shuffled each time you edit them with the DCS editor.
- a radio presets frequencies injector; it’ll use a template to set all the radio presets in the players planes.
- a player-controlled radio menu to control this mission at runtime.
- a robust, easy-to-setup security system that can restrict certain features to specific user groups.
- a Zeus-like system that can be used to spawn AI groups, convoys and units at runtime.
- a carrier vehicle that can automatically navigate upwind when requested by the players, and automatically return to its initial location afterwards; it can also manage a rescue helicopter on station (port side of the ship), and a S3-B emergency tanker.
- a ground attack mission system; this will generate a ground attack mission when requested, and create the radio menus needed to control it.
- a helo transport mission system; this will generate a helicopter transport mission when requested, and create the radio menus needed to control it.

## Prerequisites

There are two sets of prerequisites to use the VEAF Mission Creation Tools. First, if you simply want to use them in your missions, then you’ll need :

- DCS World (of course)
- community lua scripts (provided in the `src/scripts/community` folder)
- our scripts (provided in the `src/scripts/veaf` folder)

But if you want to use the full mission maker environment, and take advantage of the advanced features (normalization, injection of radio presets, multiple time and weather versions), and easily publish your mission to a source control system (e.g. GitHub), you’ll also need :

- git (optionaly, a git desktop tool like GitKraken)
- a code editor (I recommend Visual Studio Code with the EmmyLua plugin, but Notepad++ is a good enough alternative)
- node.js
- 7za from the 7-Zip Extra: standalone console version
- lua from Lua for Windows

## How to set up a mission

You can clone the VEAF-Demo-Mission repository and use it as an example (or fork it and create a new mission from your fork). Then you should read the readme.md file in this repository. It will explain how you should setup your development environment. There is detailed documentation for all the modules (see menu on the left).

If you choose to start with a new mission (and not clone our demo mission), the important point is to load and initialize the scripts.

Please read the Load scripts in the mission chapter.