Objectives

What this is

By default this mod takes the base game’s objective announcements away from everybody and hands the information back through radio kit instead. Nobody is told an objective has landed because the game said so — somebody with a handset asks for a briefing, somebody carrying more gets it drawn on a screen, and somebody carrying nothing has to be told by another player.

It is one setting, m_bGateObjectives, and it ships on.

What each player gets

The tiers are cumulative. Everything a lower tier gets, a higher tier gets as well.

Carrying nothing. No banner, no task-list row, no task icon, no progress bar and no hold bar. The map says nothing about the objectives and neither does the screen. Someone in this tier finds out where the fighting is by being told.

Carrying a handset. A contact called Command appears on the handset. Inspecting the handset asks Command for a briefing, which is texted back: the live objectives and where they are. Command also texts unprompted as each objective lands, as each one completes, as a defend position is lost, and when one fails or is cancelled.

Carrying a handset, a receiver, a compatible display, and standing on a data network that reaches a static antenna. Objective map markers are drawn on the device’s screen, and the display carries an Objectives tab, from ATG Scenario, listing the ones that player is entitled to.

The last tier is the whole of the condition — a receiver and a display on their own are not enough, and neither is a network with nothing installed behind it. A ground jammer that takes the network away takes the markers and the tab with it; a satellite denying somebody their own fix does not, because Command’s coordinates do not depend on what the asker is carrying.

A line landing on the Objectives tab sounds the device, the same as a text from Command does and through the same objective-report alert setting — see Being told one arrived. Lines arriving within a second of each other sound once, since one objective resolving can put several there together, and a line repeating something Command has already texted makes no second sound.

Where the markers draw

On device screens only, never on the paper map. A player entitled to the markers sees them when a display is open and sees nothing on the map they unfold by hand. That is the same rule this mod already applies to contacts and relays: the paper map is where a player’s own annotations live, and a network-derived picture belongs on the device that received it.

A marker carries one identity for everybody who receives it, so it draws as a hostile installation with an infantry mark rather than describing who currently holds the ground. A defend position keeps that frame after it has been handed over.

Turning it off

With m_bGateObjectives set to false the base game’s own announcements come back in full — banner, task icon, task list, progress bar and hold bar — and there is no briefing, no unprompted text, no objective marker and no Objectives tab at all.

The two are alternatives, and nothing is ever said twice. A server either runs the base game’s announcements or runs this, and there is no setting in which a player gets both.

Writing to Command is not governed by this. A handset can message the people running the session either way, because that has nothing to do with objectives.

Two things it deliberately leaves alone

A Game Master with the editor open keeps the base game’s task icons, on the map opened while the editor is up. Somebody who shuts the editor and goes back to playing is a player again and gets nothing.

The extraction task always announces itself — banner, icon, task-list row and its own progress — whether this setting is on or off.

Naming Command

m_sCommandName decides what the contact is called on every handset in the world. It ships as a localisation key, so it reads in each player’s own language, and a scenario can hand out a different key to call it something of its own. A plain word works here too and is shown exactly as written.

The server log always calls it Command whatever players see, so a log reads the same on every server.

Settings

Both keys live in ATG/atg-signals.json under the server’s profile directory, alongside the rest of this mod’s settings. See ATG Signals for the full table and ATG Core for how the layers stack.

A bool in this file is written true or false. A 1 is ignored — the setting keeps the value it already had, and nothing says so.

A complete file, carrying the shipped values for both:

{
  "m_bGateObjectives": true,
  "m_sCommandName": "#ATG-Signals_Text_CommandName"
}

To rename the contact without changing anything else:

{
  "m_bGateObjectives": true,
  "m_sCommandName": "Rampart"
}