I don't know if you remember this, KM, but Bubblehead1980 might also be interested:
I am not sure how to 'calculate' this anymore. I have found a 2nd mission in the next release that fails due to "verbosity", although both missions are under 950 characters... I thought I had it yesterday with it being due to the size of the words and where they land in the line of 50 characters across the page. The game will not hyphenate words, so if you use a word of say 16 characters but only have 15 left on the line, then if falls to the next line, and you basically "lose" those 15 blank characters on the line. OK, got that... We had also figured that there was a maximum of 20 lines on the page, and if you look at the "Spoiler" image above, that's what it has, not counting the Objective synopsis at the end. There apparently must also be a blank line between the body of text and that closing Objective Synopsis... so 18 lines to be "safe"... but wait, if the synopsis isn't much of a synopsis and takes two lines, then you are now hitting 17 lines for the body... I had an "order set" of 842 characters taking up 16 lines fail a few minutes ago... made it 840, and it ran fine... Now I am leaving extra space, figuring 17 lines x 50 characters equals 850, which is a figure we had some up with before... but that "Tab" to start the orders text, which we thought that was one character, is apparently five "space" characters... so 845 characters - plus the wasted white space... Do you know how difficult it is to describe a SpecOp mission with three Objectives in 840 characters or less, not using very big words so as to not waste line space?... especially for ~me~?...
needless to say, we're going back through some of the suspect files and trying to do test "layouts" in a text editor to be able to accurately count lines, until I can figure-out a 010 script to do my character, word, and line counting for me recursively...
No, we do not have plans for that as part of the mod at this time. All previous attempts that have been successful for the player to do night surface attacks result in a failure of surface battles at distance, and or planes' failure to attack. On the back burner for the time being, so have at it. Another thing to fix would be the shadows not cast by the moon... lol - I have a really pretty screen grab of the west coast of Negros Island in the Philippines, coming east toward shore in the sub, with the moon clipping the horizon beyond a hill, yet the moonlight is reflecting all the way from the shore, lighting my way to the landing zone...
