Galactic War

This is the Lua code of the Galactic War support mod for the Forged Alliance Forever.

Launching a game

The game is set up by a very similar way as a ladder game. It doesn't open the normal game lobby where players could change anything, instead just shows the "Setting up Automatch" screen and everything happens in the background. Once all players are connected, the game starts.

Required files

This is the list of files for the GW mod to work. They need to be downloaded from the server into the correct folders:

1. init_gw.lua Init file of the mod placed in \bin folder.
2. gw_mod.gw The actual mod, placed in the \gamedata folder. All folders and files from this repo packed into a .zip file and renamed to .gw. The file extension is used by the init file to load only the files we need for the GW.
3. gw_reinforcements.gw A Lua file with the in-game unit reinforcements that will be generated before every game. Again packed into .zip and renamed, placed in the \gamedata folder. I will specify later what structure it needs to work...
4. Similar as above, a file with the map scenario. Again I will have to figure out how exactly this needs to be set and if it can be done directly in the game without the need of generating it at all.

Reguired command line arguments

To properly set up a GW game, several command line arguments needs to be provided at the game start by the FAF client.

• Common
  • /init init_gw.lua The init file for the GW mod, in the \bin folder of the FAF game patch.
  • /players number Total number of players required to launch the game.
• Per player
  • /faction Faction of the player. Example: /uef (This one is kinda an exception, when it's not using a number to set the faction, but the name of the argument directly.)
  • /team number Number of the team, the player belong to.
  • /rank number Rank of the player.
  • /StartSpot number Starting position of the player.

Game to Server communication

The game uses the standard GPGNetSend() protocol to send information back to the server. It's used to imform about players dying, reinforcements being used, game end, etc...

GW specific messages

TODO: A proper list with all the things that the game sends.

• GpgNetSend('ArmyCalled', armyIndex, groupidx) When a group of units from the reinforcements is used.
• GpgNetSend('GameResult', armyIndex, result) Army brain reporting a result. Result is a string containing a result type and the score. GW adds two new result types recall and autorecall. Example: GpgNetSend('GameResult', 1, 'recall -10').

Offline testing

To debug many thing, make and test new features the game can be started offline as well. It just needs to be provided with correct data. TODO: Proper guide for offline testing.