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🚧 WORK IN PROGRESS 🚧

The documentation is being reworked, piece by piece. In the meantime, you can browse the old documentation.

use the Mission Selector - here
prepare the server settings file - here
setup the schedule definition file - here
use the Google Sheet helper - here

Introduction

The Mission selector is part of the VEAF Tools application. Read the installation and description in the global VEAF Tools application documentation.

Using the Mission Selector

The goal of the mission selector is to choose a mission based on a schedule that you’ll provide, and set up your server to start with the selected mission.

Therefore, some prerequisites are needed:

you need to have a dedicated DCS server configured on your machine
you need a list of missions that you want to use (a library of sorts); you can use the Weather injector to generate missions with different weather conditions based on a single template.
you need a schedule that defines which mission to run at which time; you should think about this in advance! Here’s a Google Sheet that will help you to define your schedule, generate the schedule definition file, and construct the DCS server mission list.

The way it works is quite simple: you set up a serverSettings-default.lua file. This file is the same as the classic serverSettings.lua; it contains the list of all your existing missions (it can easily become huge, with the all the weather and starting conditions!)

The Mission selector tool reads the schedule, decide which mission it will select, and searches for it in the serverSettings-default.lua file. If it finds it, it creates a serverSettings.lua file and sets the current and listStartIndex properties set to the correct index for the selected mission; the next time the server starts, it will automatically load this mission.

Command line options

The Mission selector tool is designed to be launched from the command line.

It’s actually a specific command of the veaf-tools application.

veaf-tools select-mission <source> <target> <configuration>

Mandatory command-line options

The following command-line options are mandatory; don’t use the option name, they’re positional arguments (i.e., you must specify them in the order they’re listed here):

--source: the path to the default server settings file. This file will be copied to the target file, and the current and listStartIndex properties will be updated. See Default server settings.
--target: the path to the actual server settings file that will be used by the server. This file will be created by the tool.
--configuration: the path to the schedule configuration file. This file will be read by the tool to determine which mission to select. See Schedule definition file.

Example:

veaf-tools select-mission serverSettings-default.lua serverSettings.lua schedule.json

Optional command-line options

The following command-line options are optional, and are available for both the inject and injectall commands:

--verbose: if set, the tool will output more information about what it’s doing.
--quiet: if set, the tool will output less information about what it’s doing.

Default server settings

As we said, this is a copy of the main serverSettings.lua file, with all the missions that you want to use. Here is an example of such a file.

It’s very important that all the available missions are listed, and that the indexes of the missions array is correct. You can use the Google Sheet helper tab “Mission list helper” to help with renumbering the missions.

Schedule definition file

The schedule definition file is a JSON file that defines the schedule of your missions. Here is an example of such a file.

It defines several items:

the server name, in the server element; it’s not used.
the default mission, in the default element; it’s used to select a mission if no other mission corresponds to the current time in the schedule.
the moments collection; this is the heart of the system; we’ll describe this below.

Each moment in the moments collection defines a mission to run at a specific time. It has the following elements:

//comment: optional; a comment to describe the moment
month: the month of the year, from 1 to 12; you can use null to indicate every month, or simply omit the element.
dayOfMonth: the day of the month, from 1 to 31; you can use null to indicate every day, or simply omit the element.
dayOfWeek: the day of the week, from 1 to 7, or as a string (English or French, either the complete day name or the first 3 letters); you can use null to indicate every day, or simply omit the element.
hour: the hour of the day, from 0 to 23, or as a string (“morning”, “afternoon”, “day”, “night”, “matin”, “après-midi”, “jour”, “nuit”); you can use null to indicate all hours, or simply omit the element.
missions: an array of missions to choose from; the mission selector will randomly choose one of them
mission: a single mission; the mission selector will use this mission

Google sheet helper

We made this handy Google Sheet to help you with the schedule definition file. It has 3 tabs:

Calendar: lets you define the schedule of your missions by adding a line for each schedule.
Mission selector cron.json helper: here the serverCron.json file will be generated from the data entered in the “Calendar” tab. You can copy/paste the content of the C-column in your schedule definition file (please remove the extra comma at the end of the last “moment” row)
Mission list helper: with this tool, you can easily renumber a modified list of missions in the serverSettings-default.lua file. Start by pasting your existing mission list lua code (even if it’s not numbered correctly) in the A column; you can then copy/paste the content of the C-column in your serverSettings-default.lua file, it’s renumbered correctly.`

Here’s an example of a generated schedule definition file.

Contacts

Made and maintained by the Virtual European Air Force, a French DCS pilot community.

If you need help or you want to suggest something, you can

contact Zip on GitHub or on Discord
go to the VEAF website
post on the VEAF forum
join the VEAF Discord

VEAF tools and scripts documentation site

The Mission Selector command

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