Company of Heroes 3 COH3 ESSENCE EDITOR

PLAYBILLS - WHAT ARE THEY?

Playbills are new to the COH3 Essence Engine.

Think of Playbills as pre-configured scripts (Code) that can be easily used - without coding.

Playbills can communicate to each other, create variables, timers, actions, and decisions based off what's happening in the game.

Examples,

- Troops see you coming, run away to building, garrison building, and fire on you.

- Troops walk across bridge, an airstrike automatically comes to wipe them out.

- Change the atmosphere throughout the game from morning to night.

- Spawn squads/entities throughout the match depending on things like locations, player size, capture points, progress, and much more.

There is infinite options you can perform with Playbills..

However, being new, there is very little to no documentation. So a lot of it is simply trial and error.

Important to note: Some playbills and playbill options are not working and/or crash the level.

When I'm experimenting with Playbills, I simply create a default new grey map, and only focus on what task im ultimately trying to do. Once its tested and works, I simply copy it over to my map.

Discords COH3 Map Making[discord.com] is a great resource for questions. Also COH Worldbuilders [discord.com] !

PLAYBILLS - HOW TO USE THEM

Let's jump into it, shall we?

We are going create to a Playbill that spawns troops once the player enters a specific zone.

Below screenshot I started a new basic map. nothing special.

On the left hand side you'll see by default a line item called, "Prefabs". This is where all the magic starts.

Open the tree by clicking the arrow ">", and you'll open up another folder. This folder is named whatever your map is by default.

Right click the new folder, and chose "Add".

You'l be given a bunch of options here. I'm not going to cover anything but basic Playbills. So click "playbill" option.

A new folder will open up called, "playbills". Right click this folder and click "Add" again.

Now you have your first playbill! There are two options by default:

"conditions" means what has to happen for this playbill to start? If you leave it blank as it is, this means the playbill will start automatically (or if triggered by another playbill).

"actions" means what happens once that condition is met.

For this example, lets add a condition. Right click the "conditions" folder, and chose "Add"

On the right pane window you'l notice some options appear. These are the Conditions you can select to activate your playbill. There are tons...

Let's keep it simple, choose the last one, "UnitAtLocation". This means what it says, if a unit walks into a specific area, the playbill will activate the actions.

Keeping things simple, we're doing minimum for this example. We simply want to create a zone if player walks into, it activates the playbill action.

Click "Comparison" and change to "IS_GREATER_THAN_OR_EQUAL".

Now change the "Amount" from 0 to 1. This means any troop that walks into this zone of 1 or more will active the playbill action.

You'll now notice on your main window there is a line and zone. It defaults the zone to the middle of the map and can be moved anytime. Let's expand the radius of the zone, so its easier for troops to walk into.

On the right side, you'll see "Radius", I changed this to 10. It can be whatever.

Now you'll notice a circle, that is the area a troop needs to walk into to active this playbill.

Now let's move the zone by simply clicking and dragging it closer to the HQ.

Now lets set up an action. on the left window pane you'll see a folder called, "actions". Simply right click this, and click "Add".

Now you'll see a ton of Action options you can select from. For this example, click "SpawnSquads". This will create a new squad in the game.

Now we have some options, the only one we will do is click, "Squad PBG". This means what Squad do you want to spawn.

Optional Tips (not required for this example): You can also select which player gets this squad here, and most importantly, this is where you can name your squad.

You can name this new squad by typing in a name in the "SGroup" option above the "Player" line item. Why is this important? In the future, you need to be able to reference this squad, to UseAbilities like firing, walking somewhere, or killing/etc...

Next window that appears gives you all the options. For this example, click "races", "infantry", and "assault_engineer_us" and click "Open"

A new marker will appear and you can drag and drop this anywhere on the map. This is where the new squad will spawn.

Optional Tip: There is actually two markers, "Start_position" and "Dest_position". This means you can have the squad start in one place, then walk over to the destination place.

Lastly, we need to tell this Playbill to be active immediately. On the left pane, click the playbill i have highlighted. A window of options appears on the right side. Click "immediate". This doesn't mean run the Action immediately, this means run the Condition immediately.

Remember the action wont start unless the condition is met in this example.

Why would you have this unchecked? If you have another playbill, that is waiting to be activated by this or another playbill. So if I didn't lose you yet, you can have crazy big workflows that active/inactivated each other depending on what's happening in the game.

So now your screen should look like this.

Tip: You always want to name your playbills, conditions, and actions. You can do this by looking for the "name" on the right pane. This is just for you and has no effect in game. This will help you understand what everything does and essential for troubleshooting.

Another tip, since the zone we have doesnt show in game, i just use a simply texture to fill it in, so I know where to send me troops in game to active the playbill.

... and that's it!

Of course there is so many other things to do and best practices I don't cover here, but I just wanted to get this tutorial down in the quickest and simplest fashion without confusion. (hopefully!)

When you run the game, it should do this below.

If video doesnt play - here is direct link - https://youtu.be/9XOgSISHCyc

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3015921653

COH3 ESSENCE EDITOR - PLAYBILLS BASICS

PLAYBILLS - WHAT ARE THEY?

PLAYBILLS - HOW TO USE THEM

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