All major client programs except DOS Planets support extended missions. The standard method is a file mission.ini which defines all these missions.
- Winplan supports extended missions via the mission.ini file. Actually, Winplan introduced this mechanism.
- DOS Planets does not support extended missions.
- VPA supports mission.ini
- PCC comes with PHost mission definitions pre-configured, and also supports mission.ini
Installing mission.ini
The file mission.ini is part of the PHost distribution. You can probably also obtain it from your host. All you need to do is to copy it into your game directory. You can then select the extended missions from the mission menu.
The Extmission Command
When you can not use mission.ini, you can still set extended missions using the extmission command. To set an extended mission, write a message to yourself containing the line
extmission 123 32 4 9
Here, 123 is the ship Id, 32 is the mission number, and 4 and 9 are the parameters. This directs PHost to set the mission for you. Note that this will override the mission you set in the normal ship screen! As a reminder, set the mission on the ship screen to something you normally don't use, say, Explore. Since planets.exe won't let you edit messages afterwards, it makes sense to collect these commands on a sheet of paper and send them afterwards as a group.
