As part of a needless expansion on my Offset research, I decided to test the "LocationOnPlanet" vectors used to place Scenes/Sites on the Scenario/Campaign planetary map to confirm they use the same axis directions as everything else. This means having a Scenario-mode Activity which only pulls up my custom Scenes, and Scenes which only appear for my custom Activity.
I knew nothing about Lua scripting or how to set up Scenes going in. But with determination and a lot of reference made to how Tutorial.rte and weegee's Swarm did it, several long hours of trial-and-error later I had successfully wasted several hours gaining little better idea how it all works than when I started.

I decided to come here. At worst, I'd waste a few minutes making this post. At best, I'd land a publishing deal, win a Ferrari, and marry PhD/beauty queen twins, all of which having nothing to do with these forums.

So far, I've managed to get both the Scene and the Activity to load, finding them in the Scene Editor and the Scenario list respectively. They can't find each other. When I remove the GetArea check for the custom Area in my custom Scene from my custom Lua script for my Activity, it brings all the Scenes in B27 to the yard, and it even works as scripted: nothing really at all happens after buying a brain.

I've tried many theories and variables (which sounds better than "I tried random stuff like a frustrated lab monkey", however true it may be) and haven't been able to figure out how weegee was able to place Swarm as a site on the B27 map and I just ..can't. So, I'll attach it here and maybe someone can tell me what's wrong. My ultimate goal with this is to answer the question "What is the bare minimum needed to get a modded Scene and Activity to show up on the map."

Aside from doing stuff right in the activity.ini you have to make a uniquely named area in your scene (eg. This scene's special area place). Then add to your lua script (in the create function presumably)
self.thing = SceneMan.Scene:GetArea("This scene's special area place");

Obviously self.thing can be any name and the area can have any name.


Out of interest, why didn't you just take swarm and edit its location on the planet (found in the scene's ini)? If all you want is to figure out how location works that would probably have been easiest. Also, and I might be wrong but I believe it starts at the center of the planet and goes left/up negative, right/down positive.

You'll never believe what the problem was. I actually had all the technical issues straight. It was the name of the Scene. If the characters "Test" appear anywhere in the name, it was treated as a special case somehow and wasn't shown! Some names that did work: test, tseT, Tesst, Exam. But "GridTest" "TestGrid" and "GridTestGrid" (and, of course, "Test") all failed.

Likewise if the LocationOnPlanet is (0,0). But the coordinates (0.00001,0.00001) work just fine-- kind of odd.

As for why, well I might have satisfied my own curiosity scooting Swarm around the map, but it wouldn't be as much use to anyone else without an example proof. Being new, I can't argue from authority or experience. And I also wanted to know what the bare minimum necessary to place a site on the map for a Scenario was, and Swarm is the furthest thing from minimum anything-- it's tremendous!


By the way, I'm not sure who did the art direction for Last Exile, but I was quite impressed with it.