Overview.html
Introduction
The overview.html is an optional file, which simply means the game won't crash without it, but it adds polish to your creative efforts. It appears on the notebook before you start a mission or campaign. When you click on a mission, on the right you see an overview, which is mostly comprised of a picture and one or two lines of text. Alternatively, you could de-PBO an existing mission and use its overview file as a template.
The overview applies to:
- single missions,
- a campaign, and
- individual missions of a campaign.
The overview of a mission within a campaign is not visible until after you have played that mission. The intent of all overviews is to provide a brief idea of what the mission is about. The keyword is 'brief', because space in the notepad is at a premium.
Version numbers and mission author details should really be kept to the ReadMe.txt file, but many authors choose to include this information within the overview for reference.
Anatomy of the overview.html
<html>
<head><title>Overview or anything you like or nothing at all</title></head>
<body>
< h2 align="center">YOUR WAR< /h2>
< p align="center"><img src="Apicture.jpg" width="230" height="170">
< p>a single sentence description< /p>
< p>another sentence if you must< /p>
</body>
</html>
The three displayed elements of this html are
- A centred title
- A centered picture
- One or more sentence descriptions
Alter colored content to whatever you desire.
Centered Title
CAMPAIGN ONLY Do not use this for missions
Using this in missions has no ill effect, however the title is already displayed as part of the mission content and you are losing valuable space to repeat the same thing. h2 tags can be used to make the font bold.
Note: Other document sources indicate this should be a header tag "Main". They never discuss it in the context of campaign overviews, only 'missions'. It is completely unnecessary and will mess up picture positioning if you use it.
Default Title
Centered default titles occur unconditionally for all missions. They do not appear for campaign overviews.
The title of the overview (not the html <title> above, the name of the mission this overview represents) comes from one of two sources:
- The filename of the mission folder will be displayed. Eg Apples.Pbo.Cain OR
- The briefingName= contained in the mission.sqm of the mission folder, written as follows:
class Intel
{
breifingName= "One Big Pineapple";
It would be rare for you to want the mission filename to be displayed. In order to work 'correctly'
- the briefingName= must exist
- the briefingName= must be different to the filename.
There is a "bug" in OFP, in that if the briefing name is identical to the primary name of the mission folder the mission folder is displayed.
Example: folder name apples.cain (or apples.pbo.cain)
breifingName="apples" : results in the briefing name effectively being ignored. For this reason, you will often see
breifingName="apples " : (a space is added to force correct display)
Or, the name of the folder containing the mission has underlines or some other device to make it different.
Note: Filename title is also displayed as a diagnostic aid if you use cheat sequence -campaign.
Pictures
Many people have trouble creating a good overview picture. Pictures must be 2^n pixels wide and 2^m pixels high (where n and m are whole numbers) keep in mind that very large pictures will not fit on the page. Possible dimensions (width and/or height) in pixels are:
32 64 128 256 512 1024
Many simple HTML tags will work in the briefing.html or overview.html. For an added touch of professionalism, centre your text by adding the following above your main body of description.
< p align="center" >
Resources
BI has a few tools to get you started.
OFPEC hosts a variety of tutorials on building a better briefing.