How to port Escape to another terrain You will need: the current version of the mission a tool to unpack .pbo files a text editor these porting mission files to place markers (edit 2018: new link to folder where you can find newer versions) Step 1 - Prepare the files Unpack the .pbo mission file "co10_Escape.Stratis.pbo", this will leave you with a folder "co10_Escape.Stratis" that includes all mission files and scripts. Inside the archive with the porting missions you have three additional folders "TE_BuildCommunicationCenter.Stratis", "TE_VillageMarkers.Stratis" and "TE_PatrolBoatMarkers.Stratis". Put these four folders into your ..\Documents\Arma 3\missions folder. If you use another profile name it should be in ..\Documents\Arma 3 - Other Profiles\YourUserName\missions Now you need to change the terrain suffix on all four folders. Just rename the folders to whatever the new terrain uses, which could be as easy as ".Altis" or something like ".FDF_Isle1_a" for Podagorsk. If you don't know the proper name, just save a test mission on the island to look it up. Step 2 - The mission Now start up the game, go to the editor with the island you want and load the mission "co10_Escape". You will see the player units and logics. Go into (edit 2018: map mode first (M) and then) marker mode (F7) and a whole bunch of them will show up too. They might be on land, they might be inside the water, but they sure are in the wrong position. You will need to move all of them around. Player units: move them somewhere on land! If you want to change the units just edit them, but if you do delete them and place new ones make sure to copy the proper names and init. The two logics named "SouthWest" and "NorthEast" limit the mission area. You can still go outside of this area later, but camps, patrols or the prison will not be spawned there. Use it to exclude islands far from the mainland or the empty infinite terrain. A logic and a marker named "center", put them both at the center of the area Respawn_West, Respawn_East and Boot_Hill, place them all somewhere on land and away from the action. If available use a small island somewhere off the coast. The "drn_insurgentAirfieldMarker" tells the mission where the airfield is and keeps the prison and ammo camps from spawning in some radius I can't remember now around it. Put it on an airfield obviously, along with the "drn_searchChopperStartPosMarker" and "drn_dropChopperStartPosMarker" markers. Also move the "TrafficMarker_AirField" on one of the roads there. Move the eight traffic markers named "TrafficMarker_North", "TrafficMarker_NorthEast", "TrafficMarker_East", etc. on a road somewhere on the edge to that direction (edit 2018: not needed anymore, you can delete them. Will show an error hint in chat on v1.8, but work, no chatmessage anymore since v1.9) Place the marker "RoadBlockNullRoad" on a road somewhere Move around all markers for the possible extraction positions. There are always three of them belonging together for 8 possible locations. There are "drn_Escape_ExtractionPosX" and "drn_Escape_ExtractionPosX_1", this is where the two helicopters will land, and "drn_Escape_ExtracionBoatSpawnPosX" where the helicopters (yes, despite the name...) will get spawned in.
You need to move all 8 to a suitable position, I think placing more will do nothing right now.  (edit 2018: you can place as many as you want) (edit 2018: I added empty civilian boats on some islands since Tanoa was released. Only motorboat and rescue boat, to not mess with people that don't have DLCs. In harbours and near small piers, with a probability of presence set in editor. Only on small islands where a prison might spawn I set it to 100% so you don't need to swim. You might want to add them too, depending on terrain) Step 3 - ComCenter markers Load another mission, this time "TE_BuildCommunicationCenter" and you will see a player unit and some triggers. First, place the unit on land if it ended up in the water. Again, change to markers mode (F7) and a bunch of them will show up. The important ones are the red markers named "a3e_var_communicationCenter_X", where the X is a number. They are used to mark all positions the game can later pick from to put a ComCenter there. All other markers are just there to help you with placing them and ignored on export. You will have 9 of these relevant markers on the map already, which you could move around, but you can also delete them (and the area_X markers on the same positions) and start with a new one. There is a red empty marker named "a3e_var_communicationCenter" and a red rectangle marker named "area" without the _X suffix on the map. An arrow marker below point to them and tells you to copy the two. Listen to the arrow :) If you now paste the markers the game will automatically add the _X number on the end of the name. The mission stops exporting when it can't find the next number, so with _1, _2, _3, _6, _7 only three positions will be generated. This way you don't need to change the names and remember which numbers are used already. The area_x marker shows you the size of the comcenter, to help you placing it in the 2D editor, but you don't need to use it. Put down the markers wherever you want a possible ComCenter position. Depending on the terrain that can be just a few suitable positions or quite a lot. Don't be afraid to place them right next to each other if you found 2 great positions, the mission checks for the distance between them and will never use both (unless you want to change this minimum distance, more on that in step 6). When you are ready, don't forget to save the mission, and hit Preview. You now stand on an empty island, but you have three radio triggers available. 0-0-0 will build all the comcenters on the markers you placed. The best way to check them out now is the camera available in the editor, press "Esc" and the button "Camera" on the lower left. You can now see if your positions are viable, or if other objects are in the way or the terrain is to steep and you have to move them. Get back into the editor and change them, then check again. 0-0-1 will only build a single ComCenter. It's a3e_var_communicationCenter_1, but you can change the number in the trigger. Not really needed, unless want to check overlapping positions I guess. 0-0-2 exports the marker postions to your .rpt file You only need to do this once, when you are finished and all markers are ready. We'll use them in Step 6 (edit 2018: adding a help-trigger instead of the helpmarker will make you see the (approximate) dimension in the 3D editor, making it really easy to find positions and place them properly. Copy markers and trigger in map view, paste and move/rotate in 3D. Select all in map view if you want to change, 3D view will only select the trigger) Step 4 - Village markers Next mission to load is "TE_VillageMarkers", again you will see a player unit you have to move onto land and a trigger. Change to marker mode and find the blue circle named "a3e_village", there's another helpful arrow pointing to it and telling you to copy it. You can use all the other already existing villagemarkers or delete them and start from scratch. As explained above when you paste the marker the number suffix is added, so you don't need to mess around with the names. You do need to change the sizes though, so open up the new marker, guess the sizes and type them in by hand, press OK and repeat. Place markers on every city, village, industrial area, military installation, farm or small lonely fishing hut and whatever area you want to have enemy patrols. You can place a single big marker or a bunch of smaller ones to cover a bigger city. If you want to confine the patrols to the inner part, make it smaller, if it's larger they will also patrol around the city. The size of the marker determines the number of enemies, so don't just slap a big marker over square kilometer with three farms, if you don't want that area heavily guarded. These markers are only used for the village patrols, there are still the random searchgroups and military traffic and other surprises to find you outside of these places ;) 0-0-1 exports the marker postions to your .rpt file You only need to do this once, when you are finished and all markers are ready. We'll use them in Step 6 Step 5 - Boat markers This one works the same as the village markers, only the marker names are different. It is kind of optional, if you can do without the patrol boats (I think only Altis, Stratis and Porto have them right now), and sometime in the future Neo wants to change the boat system anyway, which will make them obsolete. If you do place them, remember that the size of the marker determines the number of boats spawned. If you place a big one spanning a kilometer of coast or more, there will be a lot of boats. Try the mission on Porto, where I covered the whole coast :D 0-0-1 exports the marker postions to your .rpt file You only need to do this once, when you are finished and all markers are ready. We'll use them in the next step Step 6 - Putting it all together Now you will need the text editor I mentioned. First find and open your .rpt file. (It's the error log Arma creates while running. It should be located in "C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Local\Arma 3", you will need to show hidden folders to see AppData. Open up the latest arma3_YYYY-MM-DD_hh-mm-ss.rpt and scroll to the bottom after you exported some markers. You can search for "a3e" and will find blocks of lines looking like this: Open up the mission folder of the edited Escape (Documents\USER\Arma 3\missions\co10_Escape.ISLAND) and inside there go to the folder named "Island". Here are the files you need to paste the marker data into. Copy the blocks with all the marker positions into the corresponding file. Now you need to clean up the rpt output. No need to do it by hand on every line, just use the replace option of your text editor: Replace the Timestamp and double quotation marks at the beginning of each line, and the quotation marks at the end with nothing, press "Replace All". In our example it looks like this afterwards: (edit 2018: since some time (I think 3D editor) Arma will export marker shape with doubled quotation marks, so ""ellipse"" instead of "ellipse". You need to change that too, so replace all "" with " after you did the other two changes) If you don't place boat markers just put this single line into PatrolBoatMarkers.sqf: a3e_patrolBoatMarkers = [];   Now open up the WorldConfig.sqf in the same folder. Change the values according to the islands size. You will see the ones for Stratis are pretty low, so I added the ones for Altis and Chernarus as examples: A3E_MinComCenterDistance = 1200; Altis 5000, Chernarus 3000 A3E_WorldName = "Stratis"; The name of the island displayed at the start of the mission, where it says "Somewhere on ..." A3E_ComCenterCount = 2; Altis 6, Chernarus 5 A3E_AmmoDepotCount = 4; Altis and Chernarus 10 A3E_CrashSiteCountMax = 1; A3E_MortarSiteCountMax = 4; A3E_MortarSiteCountMin = 2; The maximum and minimum number of mortar sites is used as set here only on the "normal" setting, if the parameter is changed to "DiF" the values will be doubled, if changed to "lowered" it will be halved. So don't go below 2 for Min if you don't want to test if Neo added a proper check in the script ;) If you extract another mission and don't find some of these entries in the WorldConfig, that's because we didn't change them, a standard value will be used. Now you should change the name of the mission. Inside the mission folder open up ..\include\defines.hpp with your texteditor and change the name on lines 2 and 3. You can now load up the mission in the editor again and change the name there, too. Now save it and you are nearly finished. Step 7 - Release it You did all the work to port Escape onto another terrain. Why not share it with others? If you send us the files we can add the terrain to the next release. I only need the mission.sqm of the co10_Escape.ISLAND mission and the content of the \Island folder, but you can of course just post the whole .pbo of the finished mission. If you have problems with extracting the markers from .rpt just save the placing missions when you are finished and send those. (edit 2018: I really want to stress this again: Please send us the files, a lot of people helped us with this so far and a few modsets and I guess a third of the islands would not exist. Send the mission.sqm and the whole marker mission folders, then we can publish those here and change markers later/add more) That's it. I'll explain how to do mod versions and the content of the unitclasses.sqf a bit in another post, coming soon™ (edit 2018: Wow, still no post for that. I really am lazy... I think the content of unitclasses file is pretty self-explanatory, but maybe that's just me working with them for years now. Just unpack a current version and use that as a base. To find unit classnames place them in the editor, mark them all and rightclick -> log to clipboard. You can place the whole faction and copy the classes into another text file. Weapon and magazines just use arsenal and export to clipboard, but that's a lot more alt+tab work)   If you have any more questions about porting the mission ask here or write me a PM.