playtesting of nth scenario of a campaign

[mercurius999]

Hello community!

I recently restart developing a campaign, before presenting it here and publishing it, but I discovered i missedd to call a macro (to modify the recruitment of the player side) at the beginning of 4th scenario. i modified the WML of the scenario, but, how to playtest the modification included?

I must play again the whole campaign from the beginning? I must reload the save file of the scenario number 3 at the last turn? There is a way to modify the savefile?

thanks in advance for your kind patience

mercurius999

[WhiteWolf]

I must play again the whole campaign from the beginning?

Of course not Reloading the scenario start save will apply modifications that happened to the codebase to the extent possible. What I mean is that some changes are not possible to apply to saved games at all, for example if you change some values of a unit type, then it's only applied to newly recruited units, if you have instances of that unit type in your recall list, then those won't be changed.
In your case this won't be an issue, a changed macro in the side's recruit list will be applied just fine.
Mind that any turn autosaves, or saves made during the scenario will not load your new modifications for that scenario yet (just from the next one)! It's only the scenario start save that will do this for itself already.

I'd also recommend to get familiar with the developer's debug commands, they are extremely useful for these kind of applications. You can type debug to the ingame console to allow these commands, and type help to see their full list. For your case, the most common ones are:

• n: skips the scenario and jumps to the next immediately
• cl: skips the scenario and lets you select the new one, jumps to any scenario practically
• unit <some_value>=<new value> sets a unit's value to a new desired value for testing purposes. Also very useful to "patch up" units in a half-broken outdated saved game that you still use for testing.

I hope it's needless to say to only use them if you know what you're doing, and only jump through maps for such testing purposes if you know it's safe, because such a jump means that the events inside the scenario will never fire. Depending on your code, this could lead to crucial variables not being set, essential units not spawning, etc. (Of course those could be hand-patched with other commands, if rapid skipping would still save you a lot of testing-time.)

[mercurius999]

many thanks WhiteWolf,

what I missed was exactly

Reloading the scenario start save will apply modifications

And yes I used the debugger in the past even if nowadyas I'm bit rusty with it

mercurius999