I am dense. How's that for a way to start off an article? When it comes to game editors, whether it be worldcraft, MaxEd, or the infamous RSEditor, I tend not to be so bright. I can never seem to understand all that is going on. When I finally got my hands on Igor, the new editor for Ghost Recon, I was pleasantly surprised. I thought that I might just try making a mission right off the bat without any testing. To my astonishment, the mission loaded in GR!! No crash, no explosion, no blue screen of death. Now mind you, I had no enemies to kill, no objectives to complete, and no way to end the mission, but I made it in just the same. This of course set my mind racing to see what I could do next. For the benefit of all of the modders out there anxious to get their hands on GR, I will take you through the basics of creating your first mission.

One of the most beneficial new features with Igor is just about the first thing you stumble upon, mission templates. As you select File>New, it asks you to choose a mission template. Now you don't need to do this, but it is very helpful and a huge time saver. Select a mission for the map you are going to be creating a mission for. In this case since I am working with the demo, I have chosen the mp6_castle.mis file. Once the mission file loads up you will notice that a lot of the tedious work has been done for you.

All of the 3D sounds have been scattered throughout the map for you, and all of the "zones" needed have been placed. This includes the sound tags for each individual room. The first thing we want to do is name our mission and set its properties. In the top right window click on what now says MP06 Castle. This opens up your options in the lower right hand window. First, click the button to edit the Mission Properties. The mission we are creating will be a single player mission but it can also be used for coop play. So, in the new window that opens, select Single Player and Multiplayer Coop. This now allows you to name your mission. I will be naming mine Tutorial Mission 1. "Requires unlocking" and "Combat points" both only make a difference in full campaigns so we will leave those alone for now. The drop down boxes at the bottom allow you to set your ideal team. In game, when you choose to auto-assign your teams, this is what tells it what specialties to assign. I will set mine up as shown in the pic below.

Now in the case of this mission, the template gave us a little too much. We only want our mission available as a "mission" type game in the "Quick Mission" menu. So, we need to click the plus next to zones and delete all zones except for the "wind zone". (This zone is a box around the entire map only listed in order to play the windy sound in all areas). Now that we have cleared out all of the "zones" we are going to add back in the one zone we actually do need. Clicking on the misc. tab in the lower left window, we need to click once on "Zone" and then we need to choose a spot for it on the map. Once you have chosen, hold ctrl and left click that spot on the map. Now you will see that it has been added to the "File View" in the upper right window. Select that zone and look at its properties below. For now all we need to do is rename it to "Insertion Zone", or anything else to help you keep track, and at the very bottom of the properties click "insertion". Now we need to expand that zone a little bigger to allow six full grown men to spawn there. Press the Page Up button to zoom in a little on your planning map. To save time finding where your insertion zone is on that map, simply click on it in your "File View". To enlarge that zone hold your alt button, and click on the square designating your insertion zone and drag out a small square area. This gives us a little more room for the team to spawn.

Next we can get on to the most important part of any mission, the "bad guys". I know I know, they aren't really "bad" just misunderstood. Placing characters in Igor follows a basic military order. We need to first create a Company for our baddies. On the misc. tab in the lower left window, double-click on Company. In the properties window click the name and rename it to Enemies. Within the Company we need to create a Platoon. From the misc. tab double click on Platoon. In the properties click on name and rename to Exterior Enemies. All of this renaming, as tedious as it may be, is simply for organizational purposes. Now we need to add a team to this Platoon so on the misc. tab double click on Team and rename this team to Ext_Team1. Always remember to select the appropriate Company and Platoon by clicking on it in File View before adding a team or it will add your team to the last platoon selected. Now we want to go ahead and add our first enemy. While Ext_Team1 is still highlighted, select the Actors tab in the lower left window and click on one of the actors. Once you have decided which character to choose from this long list, you will add this actor to your planning map much like you did while adding your zone. Select a spot on the map and hold control then left click. You will see the icon appear for your first enemy. Again in the properties box rename this character to something that helps you remember where it is and what it does. I will rename this one to ET1_1(ExteriorTeam1_1). You also have the opportunity to select a kit for what weapons to be carried, but for simplicity sake, we will leave it on default. This tab also allows you to choose how they will be standing when they spawn, if they are idle what animation to use, and what difficulty levels this character will appear on. This is very helpful as you may make a team of 5 enemies but two of them only appear on hard difficulty, and so on. For our first mission we will add two more enemies as listed above. Be sure to place them on the map close to each other, so they may be able to work together. Also remember that you should zoom into your first enemy and place the other two close to him. With the map zoomed out, characters that look close to each other could be a long distance apart.

We need to now give these enemies something to do, which is called a "plan". If you do not give them a plan they will still fight, but will not move around the map unless they hear or see you. Select your Team in the File View window, and on the misc. tab double-click plan. Now click on the plans tab and you will see a list of actions that you can assign to your team. I will go over the two most important being patrol and path. If you assign a path your team will follow a specific route until they come into contact with you. If you assign a patrol zone, they will randomly patrol an area until they come into contact with you. To assign a path click path in the list and ctrl-click the first point in the path you want your enemies to take. The first point should be near to where your enemies will spawn. Now we need to add more points in the path. Hold the shift button and click out a path on the plan map that you want your enemies to follow. Be sure to place points going around objects on the map so that your characters don't need to "figure out" how to get around themselves. In this instance I want the enemies to walk this path, then turn around and walk the other way. So in the properties window click loop. Once they reach the final point, they will turn around and go back to where they started.

The other type of plan I will show you is patrol. In this type we want to give the team an area to patrol. This will work best on the interior of the castle so I will create a new platoon(Interior Enemies) and a new team(Int_Team1). I will also add three actors to this team exactly as we did above, always following naming conventions, inside the castle walls. Then select your new team and assign a plan to them from the misc. tab. In the plans tab we first want to determine the area for them to patrol, so you will click add zone. We need to place this zone exactly like our insertion zone. Click one spot on the map and then hold alt and drag the mouse to outline the patrol zone. We will simply make an outline of the open area inside the castle.

Once we have added the patrol zone, double-click on patrol in the plans tab. This tells the team to patrol that zone. Now I must admit that sometimes getting them to actually patrol is a little difficult. You may need to delete your plan and retry it. You now have two teams with two different ways to find you. You may add as many more teams as you like, with a large variety of different and more complex plans that I am sure will be covered in future tutorials. For our first mission we just wanna finish this thing up so we will move on to the final touch.

The only thing left that is not allowing our mission to work is the script telling the engine what we have to do to complete the mission. Since this mission will be a search and destroy type mission we want it to end once we have killed all enemies. Again, like the mission template, there is an easy way to do this. From the top toolbar click script>import. Our mission is most like a firefight mission, so open the (sp)firefight file. Now if you go to script>edit you will see that it automatically added the scripts for you. Only one problem, it again added more than we need for our particular mission. All we need here is a script that tells the computer that we won if we eliminate all enemies. So we can delete the first two lines and close out of the scripting window.

You now have a mission that is playable from the Quick Mission menu.

Although the above may sound very difficult I can assure that it is not. After finishing this tutorial I went back and created the above mission start to finish in only 5 minutes including the proper naming conventions. I have found that Igor has an amazing learning curve. You are able to create simple missions in a very short time, or you could spend hours taking advantage of all of the plans, sounds, mission objectives, and especially the scripts. This is good on the one hand because it allows the average Joe to create a mod. This is also bad because it means that there is a good possibility of a ton of un-original mods flooding the community soon after Ghost Recon's release.

My advice is as follows: Those modders who are well known in our community, Mother.May.i, Serellan, Oblivion, etc... are only known because they put massive amounts of planning and hard work into their mods. No one ever gets famous for 5 minutes worth of work. So, I urge everyone out there to test the limits of Igor. Learn all you can and implement it in your mods. I can honestly say that there are few limits to creating missions using Igor and it is a vast improvement over the RSEditor. Until next time, enjoy your modding.

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