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Build messages

What this is

You built a mission, the console printed something, and you want to know what to do about it. This section covers the messages that cost the most to interpret: what they mean in Mission Editor terms, how to find the situation that triggers them, the ways out — and above all what they do not mean, because that is where the time goes.

First: did the build fail?

Almost always no. Three kinds of output, which do not read the same way:

What you see What happened The .miz
A lone yellow line during the build A warning in passing written
A framed block at the end, "… mission.yaml reference(s) to a Mission-Editor object are missing" Missing references, deliberately grouped at the end written
"Cannot build: …" The build stops not written

In other words, a yellow message does not stop you from flying the mission. It tells you that part of what you configured will do nothing in the air — which you normally find out an hour later, in DCS, with no message at all.

A message can go by without your seeing it. Information lines are shown on a status line that keeps rewriting itself: in a terminal they scroll past too fast. Warnings and errors, on the other hand, stay on screen. To read everything back, add --verbose or redirect the output to a file.

The same checks run without rebuilding:

.\veaf-tools.exe validate

The .\ is required. The default Windows terminal is PowerShell, which does not search the current folder — deliberately. cmd.exe accepts both forms, so .\ works everywhere. See PowerShell or command prompt?.

validate prints the same checks, with an exit code: non-zero on an error, and with --strict non-zero on a mere warning too. That is the command for a script; the build prefers to hand you the .miz so you can go and fix things in the editor.

Find your message

The message is about… Page
countries, sides, coalitions.red, the coalition assignment screen Coalitions and countries
a missing group, trigger zone, unit or airfield Missing references
a .lua file in src/scripts/ The Lua files in your folder
waypoints, a route the editor refuses, an oddly numbered table Routes and tables
CTLD, TUM, a module turned on or off, a sound file Modules and community scripts

If your message is not here

These pages do not cover everything, and there is no point pretending otherwise: the tools can print about a hundred different messages, many of which are plain progress reports ("Injecting VEAF scripts…") or say everything they have to say in their own sentence.

What these pages cover are the messages that actually cost somebody something: the ones that block, the ones that leave a feature silent in the air, and the ones that have already sent a mission maker down the wrong path.

For anything else: Getting help, and in particular the Discord assistant's /ask command, which searches these very pages.

Going further