Need help making intros work for single player missions.

[armamonkey 10]

I beg you, please don't treat this simple request with scorn and advise me to search through the many tutorials and threads etc. I have done this for almost ten days - e.g. video tutorials by Keefygeorge, McMurrays's editing guide, Newbie FAQs, every page of the scripting and editing forum (I've found very similar threads but either the answer given was not clear or didn't work, or I was just too dumb to understand it. I don't have much scripting knowledge...)

The problem is this. I click on the "Intro" tab in the editor and make an intro in the usual way (thanks to the help and advice of this website, among others). The intro plays fine. When I switch to the mission and call the intro (using, for example, this exec "intro.sqs" in the init. field of my character), the camera positions of the intro play correctly, but there are no units. Saving the mission as a "user mission" didn't help. Then, I read that you have to save it as a "single player mission" to get everthing to work. So, I did this, but when I play the mission from the scenarios list, my "intro.sqs" file is not found.

Yes, I know that the step I'm missing must be extremely simple - and I know that many people using these forums must regard people like me with contempt. But I have honestly tried to find the answer. It seems it is something to do with calling the intro in a different way or using a "description.ext" file - but I have no idea what to do. Can anyone show some sympathy? After ten days of trying to find the very simple thing I am missing, I am extremely frustrated.

Another issue is a conceptual one. I understand that the intro is not a video and that it plays in real time with units actually on a map - obviously. That's why it's never the same twice. Therefore, I understand that the intro must work on a duplicate map, which is run in parallel by the game engine. Is this correct? And is this the same with cutscenes in the middle of a mission? To be honest, I'm not especially interested in creating an "intro" per se; I just want to be able to create a scene which I can call during a mission - that is, a scene which is "saved" somewhere and doesn't interfere with the actual arrangement of units and positions on the mission map. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.

[twirly 11]

Hi mate... can't solve your problem for you but can suggest a way forward.

Get Eliteness or some similar tool and de-pbo a single player mission that does what you want and try to figure it out from there.

You can load the de-pbo'd mission into the editor and fiddle with it.

[armamonkey 10]

Thanks, Twirly. It might be a bit over my head, but I'll take a look.