[Alex T.]

I was wondering if anyone ever worked on a mission editor that can be used without starting IL-2, that would be quite useful.

A.

[J99Eingehirner]

You can simply use a text editor on the .mis file created in the FMB. It's quite straightforward, you just go to the FMB, choose the map, place all objects you would like to have (once, just to know their names). Place one special object like a flag somewhere and save. Go to a text editor (even without closing IL2), find the special object (flag) and change its coordinates to (0,0). Open the file again in the FMB and look where the flag is located - this is your map origin. Now get ZipZaps ZipNav utility, load your map of choice, open a text editor (I'd recommend NEdit) and copy/paste your objects as you like, change their coordinates, waypoints etc... I tried it two times, after that I had it figured out quite well.

But if you are an able OpenGL/SDL programmer, you could as well create a very simplified (and therefore FAST) editor. No need to show tiling, only the height map; a simple green/yellow/brown/blue color scheme for the ground tiles would suffice. Make sure to include all the wanted features like copy+paste of objects groups etc... I think three programmers could do it in less than a week of free-time work.

I, for one, would be grateful for such an effort and would offer a little help on the OpenGL/SDL part as soon as my PhD thesis is finished (i.e., in about a month)...

[jfloren]

Try....Quick Mission Tuner V2

Quick Mission Tuner is a tool to tune or tweak missions that were created from the full mission builder in IL-2 Forgotten Battles. You can set or change the mission's weather; cloud height and mission start time. You can quickly change the number of planes, skill, fuel-load, weapons and start-time in a flight/group. You can also change altitude and speed of the flights waypoints. You can individually set skill, plane-skin, pilot-skin and turn country markings on or off to each plane in a flight/group. To maintain mission files you can rename all missions in a folder or individually move, copy or delete missions.

Some features include viewing the individual plane skin or pilot skin. There is a skin tool to link a screen capture (jpeg only) to a plane's skin for viewing within the Quick Mission Tuner instead of the plane's skin image.