The Web Tool

Status: new, in development. Read directly from missionforge.html (read in full) and flowgraph.js (structure/purpose confirmed). Behavior described here is what the code currently does, not yet independently confirmed by extended live use.

missionforge.html, in the companion mercs2-tools web hub, is the piece aimed squarely at non-programmers: paste what MissionForge captured in-game, fill in mission details and fine-tuning through plain forms, and copy out a finished Contract.Register({...}) — no Lua authoring required. It’s one tool among several on that hub site (a save-game editor and a cheat-menu builder live there too, unrelated to contracts); this page covers only the MissionForge companion.

Step 1 — Load

Paste either:

A MISSIONFORGE_EXPORT = { ... } dump straight from lua_loader_printf.log, or
An existing, previously-generated Contract.Register({ ... }) file — to re-open and edit a mission you (or someone else) already finished and deployed.

Both are parsed by a small hand-written Lua-table reader built into the page (handles nested tables, Contract.Reach({...})-style calls, comments, and captures whole function ... end bodies as opaque text) — nothing is sent anywhere; the whole tool runs client-side in the browser. Two “Load … demo” buttons load sample exports (matching grand_prix.lua/convoy_demo.lua) if you just want to see the tool work before making your own.

Re-importing a generated contract is a genuine round trip, not just a re-paste: it even reverses a fResolve function body with a regex to pull Pg.Spawn(...) calls back out as editable “provided units,” so a contract generated, tweaked by hand, and re-opened later doesn’t lose that hand-editing.

Steps 2–9 — the wizard

Step	Covers
2 · Mission details	`id`, `title`, `category`, `briefing`, `intro` radio line, reward cash/fuel, `mode`, `timeLimit`, fanfare message + style.
3 · Player start	Which captured spawn point(s) become `def.start` (or none).
4 · Objectives	One card per placed objective — description, per-type fields, optional/bonus.
5 · Units	Every placed unit, auto-classified as a destroy target, a single target (verify/escort), or provided (spawned at accept, not tied to any one objective).
6 · Relations	Faction ↔ faction stances (friend/neutral/enemy), including PMC (the player).
7 · Support call-ins	One card per placed support zone — effect type, position, and that effect’s specific fields (ordnance/aircraft/music cue/particle/etc., each from a curated pick-list with a “custom…” free-text escape hatch).
8 · Triggers	Generic named triggers, including the `all`/`count` logic gates, and which supports/orders each one `fires`.
9 · AI Orders	Per-group behavior (move/patrol/defend/attack/hold/face/follow/flee/enter/deploy/animate) and its own trigger condition.

Every field here maps directly onto the shapes documented in Objectives Reference / Support Effects & Triggers / Units, AI Orders & Relations — the generator (genLua()) produces exactly the Contract.Register({...}) Lua those pages describe.

Auto-wiring by group

Anything MissionForge tagged with the same group letter arrives pre-wired: a trigger and a support call-in placed under the same group are automatically connected (trigMode = "ref"), and an AI order automatically commands the units sharing its group. Nothing stops you from rewiring any of it afterward, either through the forms or the flow graph below.

The flow graph

The ⛓ Flow graph button opens a small, dependency-free node-graph editor (flowgraph.js) — drag to wire a trigger to the support call-ins/AI orders it should fire, double-click a node to jump straight to its full form card for the finer-grained fields. It edits the exact same fields the forms do (trigMode, ref, fires), so the graph and the forms never fall out of sync — pick whichever is faster for a given edit. Its own header describes it as reusable for a differently-shaped node relationship in the future (e.g. objective ordering), decoupled from the rest of the page behind a small init({state, onChange, create, locate}) hook interface.

The live map

A calibrated, pannable, zoomable top-down map (scroll to zoom, drag to pan) plots every placed unit, objective, support zone, trigger, and AI waypoint over the actual world map image, color-coded by kind. World coordinates map to image pixels 1:1 once calibrated (0,0 = image center, the shipped image spans ±4102 world units each way) — useful for sanity-checking that a “reinforcements arrive here” zone isn’t, say, on the wrong side of a river from the objective it’s meant to threaten.

Output

The right-hand pane always shows the current generated Lua, live, as you edit — Copy or Download .lua it, save it into scripts/OnLoad/ with a higher lua_loader.ini number than ContractFramework.lua, and it’s ready to play. See the end-to-end walkthrough for the complete path from an empty level to a playable contract.