ORIGINAL: Gunner98
OK, so you're talking to a guy who has never created or done anything in HTML before - nada - zip - nothing...
So I guess the first question is - how do you build an HTML document? Is there a tutorial on that somewhere?
Thousands all over the web (
https://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp is pretty popular), most any document editor these days will give an option to save as html, if looking at a tutorial though you want to keep to things that are supported in html 4.0 (not 5.0 as the in-game control is has basically Microsoft ie 8-9 level compatibility). In addition to tutorials there are hundred of html\wedpage editor available in-browser (google docs is very popular docs.google.com). That said, if you want to keep it really simple, you can type what you want into the usual in-game editor including inserting the images that will never show up while editing as placeholders, then select 'view|edit html', copy that and paste it between the body tags in the sample above, or those provided below in the attachment.
I see in some of the Standalone scenarios (like Downtown) there are files in 'Assets' directory which look pretty spiffy. In the editor the Scenario description has [LOADDOC]Assets\DownTown_Desc.html[/LOADDOC] and then the text - but that text is already in the html document?
Right. The scenio description with [LOADDOC]is basically saying...go get the html file at this location and display it.
So when I get the html document built and I package it up with the scenario - where does the user put it?
Remember -- I'm an old dog and these are new tricks..
B
If you want it in a sub folder of where your scene file is you can (like you see with Assets in some of the CMO stuff), but if you want to keep things very simple just put it in the same folder as whatever your scene is going into, and when doing href's just type the filename. I would advise (just in case the user is throwing both into the root of scenarios or something that the image file name be kinda unique though).
So for example:
I have "MY Cool Scenario Name.scen" file it has two side called Yellow and Green.
Inside that scene I use the [LoadDoc] method as follows.
For the scene's Description [LOADDOC]MyCool_ScenarioName_Description.html[/LOADDOC]
For the Yellow side Briefing [LOADDOC]MyCool_ScenarioName_Briefing_Yellow.html[/LOADDOC]
For the Green side Briefing [LOADDOC]MyCool_ScenarioName_Briefing_Green[/LOADDOC]
I have folder called "My Cool Scenario" in the zip, inside it I place those 3 html files, 2 images, the scene file, and one style sheet file that without getting into all the details the 3 html files use to "pre-set" some stuff like the background color, it's a copy of what's used for quick-battles, (most online editors will embed that stuff into the html itself so don't sweat it for now).
The user can choose to just throw all contents inside "My Cool Scenario" into like <CMOInstall>\Scenarios\Community, or they can copy the folder itself to <CMOInstall>\Scenarios so it has it's own top level entry, or really where ever it is they want under <CMOInstall>\Scenarios, or where ever you tell them too, should work regardless.
I also included in the zip a "My Cool Scenario_Organized" folder, it shows the exact same as above only with storing everything but the scene file in an MyCoolScenarioNameAssets sub folders. In that case you'd tell them the same as above. The only difference in the .scen and .html files are the path locations, you can look at them to see the minor difference.
@jkgarner
I mean if one is THAT paranoid about the user, one can just build their own simple scene installer with InnoSetup or the even more basic InstallForge freeware for now, pulling the root path from "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Matrix Games\Command Modern Operations\installed to" to build their install path, provided it's also exists for Steam version installs.