Overview text and image not working except for Steam publishing

[OMAC 254]

Hello,

 

I've been away from A3 for over a year, and am trying to get back to mission making.  I'm having a strange problem with mission overview text and images.  Neither of these work as they used to, no matter if I use overviewText and overviewPicture in description.ext, or fill out the overview sections in Attributes/General in the 3d editor.  No matter what I do, after exporting mission to Singleplayer from editor and selecting the mission in the scenario mission list, the overview image is not shown and the mission name comes out as the mission folder name (e.g. blahblah.island), and the author is "Unknown Community Author."  Loading screen images and text work as normal.  Could someone help me find out what is going on?

 

Even more strangely, I subscribed to a mission I published on the Workshop years ago.  When viewing the newly-downloaded mission under Scenarios, my overviewPicture has been replaced with my loadScreen picture, and my overviewText has been replaced with.........the description I typed in when publishing the mission (the mission description that appears on the Steam Workshop page for my mission!)   What???????????????????

 

Have there been some major changes regarding overview text and images?  Or am I screwing something else up? I spent at least an hour wading through the Biki pages and found nothing about possibly related changes.....

 

Thanks in advance......

[OMAC 254]

Overview text and image work fine if supplied in Steam publishing dialog when publishing or updating mission.  However, the apparent inability to have overview data work normally in a .pbo made by exporting to SP/MP from Eden editor is a problem.  Could it be true that BI delegated all overview data to the Steam system and removed the ability to make pbos with all overview data self-contained?  Seems unlikely to me...... 

[.kju 3244]

We have the same issues OMAC and werent able to find a solution so far.. might be us though

[krzychuzokecia 717]

I'm having the same problem with Export to Singleplayer feature of Eden editor. Mission name, author name, overview text and image and required DLC notification are not displayed in Scenarios menu. No matter if those are set via Eden mission Attributes menu, or description.ext. Interestingly enough - Eden seems to display that info properly, when previewing the mission.

 

The Steam connection is probably true - non-Workshop scenarios won't show proper authoring information. This also explains why overview texts of 90% of Workshop missions are full of HTML tags that Arma can't decipher.

[OMAC 254]

I would rather not waste time filing the issue on Phabricator unless I know that the issue is a bug rather than a known feature stealthily implemented to force users to publish missions on Steam!  😒

 

The fact that the issue has been around since at least 2016 suggests that the latter may be true. 

[krzychuzokecia 717]

Curiously enough, when you place an unpacked mission (folder) in Arma 3/Missions folder, all of the attributes (mission name, author, overview pic and text etc.) are displayed correctly. So indeed it seems that, when loading packed (.pbo) mission, game is simply forced to look for mission data on the Steam Workshop. Even if that mission doesn't exist on Steam.

 

However, and pardon me here, I think it's dumb, and not only because of non-Workshop missions. Here's why:

1. Most Workshop descriptions contain formatting and embedded images, which are not parsed by Arma, so in-game description is hard to read (HTML tags everywhere).
2. If one needs to see Workshop description, there's a very useful blue See scenario in Workshop button. Thus you don't really need to see several paragraphs of mission features and requests for comments/likes/subscribes in-game: a simpler description would suffice.
3. Skimming through missions I've subscribed on Workshop, it seems to me that most content creators are still using either Eden attributes or description.ext to name their missions and create overviews. Quite possibly because official tutorial tells them to do so.

In my humble opinion if it ain't broke, don't fix it - old-school overviews were often containing stuff like short description of story, or some other intriguing text (like mottos, or famous people quotes). Things that allowed mission to stand out in mission selection menu. On the other hand Workshop pages contain much more detailed technical information, with authors describing in detail mission features/scripts/ideas, similiar to forum threads. To me there's really no point in showing that in mission selection menu, especially since the text box is rather small to begin with. I don't want to have my screen cluttered with hard to read data, even more when it's available (in much more readable version) literally a one click away.

[OMAC 254]

I would love to hear what W0lle would have to say about this!  😅

 

BI is breaking their own editor functionality, and rendering many of their own Biki pages obsolete, by doing this.  Not to mention wasting many hours of mission makers' time trying to figure out what is going on.  There are other ways to integrate Steam data into missions. 

 

It is completely bogus that we can no longer make a mission normally to give pbo to friends or publish on ArmaHolic.  😣  Is there a workaround?

 

I wonder if the overview data work as usual if a mission is packed as an addon instead of the export from editor as mission pbo?  A pbo packed with the free version of Eliteness shows the same problem.  I also tried packing with Addon Builder in Arma Tools, but the mission wouldn't open at all (I must have done something wrong).

[krzychuzokecia 717]

2 hours ago, OMAC said:

I wonder if the overview data work as usual if a mission is packed as an addon instead of the export from editor as mission pbo?

I'm wondering the same. However, as a relative late-comer to A3 (previously only having made missions for OFP), I have no idea how to pack mission as an addon. All I ever did was simply pack the mission folder, move to /Missions, and voila! Even poor old OFP can do it right! :P

2 hours ago, OMAC said:

I would love to hear what W0lle would have to say about this!

Maybe... I told you so! :D

[krzychuzokecia 717]

Sorry for double posting, but regarding the following:

On 12/2/2019 at 2:06 PM, OMAC said:

I wonder if the overview data work as usual if a mission is packed as an addon

Yes, this method works (see Ravage for example), but you won't be able to tag your addon as a scenario in Publisher tool (campaign is the closest thing to use).

 

It's all a mess, why BIS, oh why we can't have nice things anymore? 

[OMAC 254]

Yep, and I guess it's been this way for years...   😒

[OMAC 254]

Thank heavens, the dev on Phabricator handling the issue says that a bug is the culprit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  👍

 

https://feedback.bistudio.com/T147399

 

🤞

[OMAC 254]

It appears that this issue (or issues) still exists in the 1.98 Old Man update.  Overview attribute data still isn't being read from pbo exported to Mission folder from editor.

[alpha993 122]

If I understand correctly, the Old Man scenario is itself a packaged .pbo. However, it shows up with a proper title and overview image unlike my missions. Has anyone taken a look inside the Old Man scenario to see if something was done differently? Or is it because Old Man is included as part of an addon?

[OMAC 254]

I've only tested with one mission exported to Singleplayer, but the issue appears to have been fixed in 2.0 update!!!!!  😀👍 

 

The bugtracker issue is still open, however.