Your First Mission - Theseus-Aegis/MissionTemplate GitHub Wiki
Template Setup
Template Setup will explain how to utilise the template and follow the format correctly.
Guidelines
Regardless of experience everybodys first mission for Theseus is always a Sub-Contract or Non-Contract with no exceptions. This allows you to gain useful feedback from members and other mission makers.
If you are brand new to mission making you will want to start with a basic idea to work with, keep in mind that Sub-Contracts normally have a reduced player count to our normal Saturday Missions. Going for more intermediate/advanced plans is never a good idea, while you do have support from the mission making team you should aim to learn this for yourself and not rely on others to do it for you.
Before the mission is submitted for review you should ensure that the Autotest has no errors, the mission template is correct and the briefing is complete. If any of these are not completed it will be returned back to you so you can complete it.
Good Practice
Some key points to ensure that your mission maintains the Theseus standard.
Ambient Objects - Objects placed in the mission take performance away, The performance hit can be negated by disabling simulation or setting it as a simple object. Things that do not ever need to be interacted with or moved should have disabled simulation or marked as a simple object.
Ambient Vehicles - Much like Ambient Objects above, vehicles do utilise performance. If it is simply an ambient object for vanilla vehicles it should be set to a simple object, for CUP vehicles it should have disabled simulation and be locked to prevent people from being stuck inside. ALL vehicles should have the inventory cleared.
Enemy Contact - This should always be a reasonable force for us to be fighting, the enemy shouldn't just have tanks for the sake of having tanks. It should be a force which we can realistically deal with.
Gearing - When setting gear for players, it is probably easier to utilise the ACE Arsenal. While forcibly setting gear on the player slots is another option, you really need to know what each player needs and has for this to work out perfectly.
Objective - The objective should be exactly where you say it is, either by a clickable marker (explained in fnc_briefing.sqf) or a map marker which is available via the AO image on the website. These should be removed before the mission is played with the exception of the Theseus HQ.
Testing - When testing your mission, ALWAYS test in multiplayer, not singleplayer. (Click Play on the top bar > "Play in Multiplayer (MP)")
Triggers - With the Z axis (Height) If the trigger is designed for a person to activate, it does not need to be more than 3m high, vehicles 7m and aircraft 200-300m.
Avoidances
For the very first mission it is generally good practice to avoid the following:
Civilians - Civilians are great assets, but adding 30+ Civilians to your mission does count towards your total AI count. Only place what you need and nothing more.
Defence missions - While these sound easy to make, this is an advanced idea with a lot of logistics to consider and the flow of time makes it incredibly hard to test and debug if something doesn't work.
Stealth missions - Again this is an advanced idea that requires some scripting knowledge and general understanding of AI logic and triggers/eventhandlers.
Too many moving parts - Immersion is great, but performance is greater. Fancy little additions are nice immersive factors in small doses. This can be overdone and with the limitation of Arma itself may just become a hindrance.
Random scripts found online - These for the most part are not written with performance in mind and are generally very old. Nothing prevents you from asking mission makers if they have something like this around or know how to do it with a simpler method. Just avoid throwing them in for the sake of it as it will more than likely fail the review.
Water based missions - Arma does have the ability to provide on and under water missions, But the AI is severely bad at this and it often turns out to be a less than fun experience for most.
Zeus reliance - Theseus does not for the most part utilise Zeus, for your first mission you should avoid requiring it at all as it is a curation tool, not a building tool.