The new mission stuff will go up on Git soon, so I figured I'd give a break down of the changes ahead of time to avoid any unexpected surprises. It's probably gonna get real confusing, so feel free to ask any questions you have (it'll be clearer once the updated ruleset is up).
Changes to globe terrain- Region cities and mission areas have been combined. This is because keeping them separate just leads to redundancy and confusion (mission areas are what the game actually cares about, the "cities" are just visual indicators on the globe). Worse, in TFTD not every mission takes place in a city. In fact, a "terror mission" can be completely different depending on the area it takes place in!
So where before you had this:
cities:
- name: STR_LAGOS
lon: 3.125
lat: -6.5
- name: STR_CAIRO
lon: 31.25
lat: -30
- name: STR_CASABLANCA
lon: 352.375
lat: -33.5
missionZones:
...
-
- [3.125, 3.125, -6.5, -6.5]
- [31.25, 31.25, -30, -30]
- [352.375, 352.375, -33.5, -33.5]
It's been reduced to this:
missionZones:
...
-
- [3.125, 3.125, -6.5, -6.5, -1, STR_LAGOS]
- [31.25, 31.25, -30, -30, -1, STR_CAIRO]
- [352.375, 352.375, -33.5, -33.5, -1, STR_CASABLANCA]
If the zone has a name, it'll show up as a "city" on the globe. The -1 is the new associated "texture" (more on that below).
- Instead of terrains being associated to globe textures, now globe textures are associated to terrains. Why? Because that's how TFTD does it.
There's a new texture definition for this, example:
globe:
textures:
- id: 0
terrain:
- name: CULTA123
weight: 40
- name: CULTA456
weight: 60
area: [0, 360, -90, 0]
In this case, when a UFO mission starts on globe texture 0, there is a 40% chance of CULTA123 being picked and 60% chance of CULTA456 being picked, however CULTA456 will only be used if the mission is within the north hemisphere (area).
Additionally, textures can be used for mission areas, for example:
globe:
textures:
- id: -1
deployment: STR_TERROR_MISSION
- id: -2
deployment: STR_TERROR_MISSION
terrain:
- name: NEWCITY
You saw before that the default "cities" have texture -1. So when a mission takes place, it will spawn a STR_TERROR_MISSION site. You can use this to create your own mission types (eg. TFTD port/island/ship/etc). You can also specify your own terrains, and they will override the deployment terrains. You could use this for example to have european city terrains, asian city terrains, etc.
So, to sum it up:
id: Texture ID, matching the one in the respective globe polygon / mission area.
deployment: Alien deployment to use for this texture if it's used in a mission site (optional).
terrain: List of possible terrains for this texture:
- name: Terrain ID.
- weight: Weight to use for selecting this terrain (optional). Don't have to add up to 100.
- area: Globe area this terrain applies to, in [longitudeMin, longitudeMax, latitudeMin, latitudeMax] format (optional).
The old terrain "textures" and "hemisphere" are obsolete.