Thanks for that site Phantom! It is really great and I'm already making a lot more progress than I've made in the pastÂ
I'm gonna take this 'becoming an Arma 2 mission maker' in a few steps:
1. Spend a week or few weeks just piddling and fiddling to get a sense for what everything is and does, make some very small simple throw away 'scenarios' as a learning experience. If I get one that seems half way decent I'm happy to share it.
2. Advance to making a true mission that is intended to be shared with other users, but is relatively simple small and straightforward. Not sure if an SP one is easier to do to start with or if okay to jump straight into an MP/coop mission.
3. Make a few more missions of various sorts but still smallish and learn from those (this is probably a matter of weeks and months of elapsed time).
4. Eventually, dive into innards of MarkB50K's "Lost" and "Apocalypse" missions and try to make sense of how everything in those works with the goal of making some personal adjustments and additions to those. Not sure about sharing any changes I would make to his mission, though I understand getting his sanction would be the best way. He seems to have been completely inactive at BIS forums for about a year.
5. Assuming I get this far, and I seem to have successfully modded the Lost mission to my satisfaction, start to think about the longer-term goal of making a coop version of a Lost-like mission/campaign.
The idea is that each player would spawn alone, and be required to complete at least one mission solo in order to either rendezvous with his teammates or take a step toward rendezvousing with this teammates. In the 3rd if not 2nd mission, several team members would spawn together and then be tasked with rendezvousing with another group. This wouldn't necessarily go on endlessly, but the basic idea that I'm toying with is to try to capture the 'feeling' of the Lost mission of being behind enemy lines and having to piece together a stronger and stronger fighting force and progressively 'take back' the island.
Another idea that I have in mind, but not sure how it could be executed is that there is not really -any- respawn in the course of the 'campaign.' Meaning if you start as a particular soldier, say "John Smith" the US Marine Corps Assault Rifleman, and you get killed at some point, John Smith is DEAD. This is not to say that the player who was playing John Smith can't participate in the mission-series any longer (nor even necessarily that John Smith cannot be played by someone else, though if it were possible I'd prefer it that way). Rather, if your player character gets killed, then the way I'd like it to work is that, you then have to complete at least one solo mission spawning as a local partisan or POW or something of that sort in order to RV with the other surviving members of your force and then be able to participate in actual coop sessions with your team.
I realize that the current mechanisms for coop missions don't seem to be particular well suited for this sort of 'inter-mission' dependency, and perhaps it would depend on an 'honor system' and use of a large available pool of soldiers for 2nd and 3rd and successive missions and exclusion of those 'optional' but not yet unlocked soldiers using the Disable AI.
I don't know if each users account could somehow be linked to the data in the mission to make it so that each player can only play his 'unlocked' soldier character or not. If that was possible then I think it would add a lot to the flavor of the mission series as more of a campaign than a quickie.
The other thing I was wondering is if it might be possible to allow Saving of coop missions, so that if a mission is proving to be too much for a particular evening it can be saved and the team can return to it later without having to restart from the beginning.
IF Saving and reloading of Coop sessions is possible, then divvying the campaign up into separate missions might not make so much sense, and instead using triggers that are preset in a fully populated island might be the way to go instead. This is basically how the Lost mission works in SP. In setup, you tell it what forces you want to play with, and relative proportions of each, as well as the size of the enemy force you will face. It then uses its random spawning/placing/scripting magic to "create" an island that is populated with all of the enemy you will have to defeat to win the mission. It basically populates the island with an enemy army, as well as a friendly force which you are separated from, and also various place markers that will trigger spawning of additional friendlies as you search around doing your geurilla / partisan skulking thing.
If it would be possible to somehow load the Lost mission as a coop and then simply save it, that might even be the better way to go.