SS2 IonosFear Testlevel

[6632d3b8e99a2Hikari]

Pity. It looks nice. Just... Barren (not even 'locked' noises when approaching unopenable doors.. It looks very nice, much more expansive than the actual in-game intro level.

And the career selector works, which is nice.

[6632d3b8e9ce2unn_atropos]

°blueprint

[6632d3b8ea1a0RocketMan]

Theoretically, one could force this level to load first and then launch into the normal earth.mis, without breaking the game, yes?

EDIT:

I think this could be made to work.  I already blew away the normal level ending markers in the test level and replaced them with a tripwire in front of a tram that would send the player to the real Earth.mis.  Changing cam.cfg could start the player here first.  The problem is Ionosfear made a custom gamesys for this level which would be incompatible with the rest of the game and the gamesys it would likely use.

Is there any way to circumvent this overlapping gamesys problem?  If so, I think the easiest way to use this test level (which I have basically already done) is to treat it as a part of Earth where recruitment used to take place, which is now abandoned (fits with the somewhat silent and incomplete nature of the level).  Then I just block off the exit tunnels with a detour sign pointing to another tram that takes you to the real earth.mis starting location.  This way players get to enjoy this level without breaking immersion by having to exit the game and swap level files.

[6632d3b8ea3f1RocketMan]

I've confirmed my underlying hypothesis that this level could be turned into an "earth 1" level, that would launch into the normal earth level.  While I'm sure there are much better ways to integrate this level into the game, doing the above is by far the easiest as there is no brush work to be done and I don't have to add training or any of that either. 

The work that does need to be done is:

1) Add some trivial objects at the end to indicate to the player that the recruitment center is decomissioned and that there's a detour via tram that will take you to the currently active recruitment center somewhere else.  This is nothing but a couple of objects and some signage.

2) The bulk of the work would be to export each unique gamesys archetype from this test level into whatever gamesys the player happens to be running.  Now I can do this manually and have done it on a few archetypes to verify that it works.  It does.  The problem is, it's not future proof unless I use DMLs to do it, but I don't know how to write DMLs. 

3) The real earth.mis needs a very simple and small alteration to the level start marker to let SS2 know where to spawn the player after the testlevel is over

4) cam.cfg needs to to be modified to launch the testlevel first instead of earth.mis

So, what I can do, if anybody is interested, is I can modify the level geometry to have that nice clean exit I was talking about, so as not to break immersion, and I can either A) post the latest SCP gamesys with the modifications already made to it, along with a modified cam.cfg, preearth.mis and earth.mis or B) attach a zip file with all the exported archetypes so that somebody else can amalgamate them into a single DML file.  I know B is the obvious choice but at the moment I only have the ability to do A entirely on my own.