Game Master

Game Master Basics

Everything in MCF is set up live, in Game Master, without scripting. There are three different places you do it, and knowing which is which saves a lot of hunting.

Where	What it is for	Examples
The properties panel	Settings on one placed object	How far a trigger reaches, how frightened a civilian starts out, how close you have to stand to a board
The operations board	The mission's live state	Writing an order, entering a report, turning a report into an order

Why there are two kinds of editing

The properties panel is vanilla's attribute system, and it has a hard limit: every attribute value is packed into a single vector and replicated as twelve bytes. There are factories for int, float, bool and vector, and nothing else. A custom attribute class does not escape it — the value still has to fit.

So numbers and toggles go through the properties panel, which is where they belong. Anything textual — the body of a letter, a conversation, a phone's messages — travels over MCF's own RPC through a custom screen, where that limit does not exist.

That is why "Edit intel" is a screen and not a row in the panel. It is not a stylistic choice.

Finding MCF's screens

Right-click a selected object in Game Master. MCF's screens appear alongside the vanilla context actions:

Screen	On what	What it does
Edit intel	Any intel object	Writes the pages a document or device carries
Edit device	Phones and laptops	The apps and the messages inside them
Mission data	The operations board	Inspects, edits and deletes everything the server has stored, and manages save games

The attribute rows MCF adds

These appear on the objects that carry the matching component:

Row	On what
Read range, fade distance, refresh rate, sharpness	Anything with a screen
Object size	Anything with a screen
Lid open	Laptops
Secured, break-in difficulty	Anything with a lock
Markers, marker size, grid	The map board
Board use range	The operations board
Who may write orders	The operations board
Open permissions	The operations board
Accepted orders in HUD	The operations board
Show closed orders	The operations board
Source mode, fire once	Intel Source

If a row is missing from an object you expect it on, see Troubleshooting — usually the attribute is registered but the object does not carry the component.

Where to go from here

Each module page has its own Game Master half with the detail:

• Intelligence — intel authoring, the board, mission data, saves
• Core — screen tuning and the self test