Briefing

By Cheetah

The briefing is an important external file that should be present in a mission which is to be released for public use. Before using any of the external files, you should locate the mission folder. Be sure to save the mission (explained in the first chapter) as ExampleMission!

There should be a folder named "ArmA" or "ArmA Other Profiles" in the "My Documents" folder. Open the folder, select your account and go to "Missions". There should be a folder named "ExampleMission.Intro". This is the folder in which all the documents for the mission are to be placed in. There is a file called "mission.sqm" inside, which contains all the editor placed units, triggers, markers and waypoints. Do not touch it!

Image 1

Here we go! The briefing makes use of HTML language and therefore should have an .html extension and html formatting. Its name? "Briefing.html" !

Note: the briefing.html can be found in the Example Mission. Feel free to use it for your missions! Read on to learn more about the formatting and options available to you.

To the right (Image 1), you will see the minimal content of a briefing.html file. Don't worry about the first five and last two lines - these are required for the HTML formatting. Instead take a look at the different sections. Available are 'plan', 'main', 'obj_0' and 'debriefing: end1'. Remember that this is the minimal setup, you can have a lot more objectives for example - more on this later.

A brief description of every section:

  • Plan- Displayed in the ingame 'Plan' tab. It should contain the mission plan or a shorter version of it.
  • Main- The notes section. Often, you will see a diary-style text in here.
  • Obj_0- Objective text and objective name.
  • End1- Text for the debriefing. Depending on the end # - a debriefing will be displayed.
Image 2

Let's head over to each section in more detail while writing the content for each item with regard to our mission. First: the plan section. Inside should be a description of the mission, including details, pictures and links to map markers. Link to markers on the map and adding pictures as really easy!

Consider what you are going to type before doing so. Our plan: a few lines of text in the plan section, with a link to more details and information about the officer which is to be assassinated makes decent plan. An image will be added, showing the officer and links will be made to markers on the map allowing for easy map browsing.

Don't be scared by the the "br" tags, these are the html way for "enters".

To the right (Image 2) are two additional pages used for the mission details. Notice that a link to a special section should have a #, when making the additional page. Don't put the # in the title, only put the name of the special section in. As you can see done with "#details" as a link and "details" as a title for the page.

Use <a href="#text"></a> to link to a page. With only a slight adjustment, you can link to markers. To link to them, put in "marker".

So a link to the insertion marker, named "insertion", would have the following code: <a href="/marker:insertion">insertion</a>

If you like adding pictures, use: <img src="/img.jpg" alt="" />. Make sure that the dimensions of the image are 2^n * 2^n. For example: 256px x 256px.

With these codes you can develop comprehensive briefings with a lot of information.