End-to-End Walkthrough

Status: new, in development. This walks through the pipeline as each piece’s own source documents it. The full chain — Forge placement through a played, completed contract — hasn’t been independently re-confirmed as one continuous live session in this writeup; treat each individual step as accurate to the code, and the walkthrough’s shape as the intended path.

Everything on the other pages in this section, tied together: from an empty level to a contract you can actually accept and play, without writing any Lua by hand.

1. Deploy the framework

Two files, in scripts/OnLoad/ and scripts/OnKey/ respectively, with ContractFramework.lua loading before any contract file:

[OnLoad]
ContractFramework.lua=5

contracts.lua (the Contract Board) goes in scripts/OnKey/ — its KEYVAL (f5) auto-binds, no .ini entry needed. It also needs contracts.gfx, cpanel.gfx, and cbar.gfx alongside it. At this point, pressing F5 already shows a working board — in demo mode, with three fake contracts, since nothing real has been registered yet.

2. Place a mission with MissionForge

Drop MissionForge.lua into scripts/OnKey/ (F7 auto-binds). Load into a level, walk to where you want the mission to start, and press F7.

A small, concrete example — three vehicles to destroy, then reach an extraction point:

  1. Open the menu into a faction’s Vehicles branch, highlight one, walk to a spot, press P three times at three different spots (each drop is a separate placement, no group needed for a simple destroy — see Objectives Reference for how “destroy” sources targets from a live area query when nothing was explicitly grouped).
  2. Open OBJECTIVES → Reach / Go To, walk to where extraction should be, press P.
  3. Press End to export.

Check lua_loader_printf.log for the MISSIONFORGE_EXPORT = { ... } block — copy it, from MISSIONFORGE_EXPORT = { through the matching closing }.

3. Finish it in the web tool

Open missionforge.html. Paste the export into 1 · Load / import, click Load. The editor populates from your placements:

  • 2 · Mission details — give it an id, a title, a briefing, a reward.
  • 4 · Objectives — the destroy objective and the reach objective are both already there; adjust descriptions, add a quota, whatever the mission needs.
  • 5 · Units — the three vehicles should show up here, auto-classified.
  • Skip 3/6/7/8/9 entirely for this simple example — none of them are required.

The right-hand pane shows the generated Contract.Register({...}) Lua updating live as you edit. Click Download .lua (or Copy and paste into a new file yourself).

4. Deploy the generated contract

Save the downloaded file into scripts/OnLoad/, with a number higher than ContractFramework.lua’s:

[OnLoad]
ContractFramework.lua=5
MyFirstContract.lua=15

Every generated file already guards against the framework not being loaded yet — if you see "... Contract framework not loaded - give ContractFramework.lua a LOWER [OnLoad] number" in your log, that’s exactly what it’s telling you to check.

5. Play it

Load into a level. Press F5 to open the Contract Board — your new contract now appears in the list (under whatever category you gave it), no longer in demo mode. Select it, press Enter twice (the double-press is a deliberate guard against accidentally starting the wrong contract), and the board closes, teleporting you if a start point was set and beginning the objectives.

A tracker panel stays up in the corner while you play, showing each objective’s checkbox state. Finishing (or failing) plays the native completion fanfare and tears the tracker down automatically — see The Contract Board for exactly how that handoff works.

Where each piece is documented in depth

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