13.1 - Introduction to the Scenario Editor

By: CafeDave

This section of the Café Tropico Game Guide is designed to give some assistance in formulating events for Tropico scenarios. The documentation for the Tropico Event Editor is good as far as explaining how the editor works, but lacking in detail on setting up specific events. Many events used as examples are from my own scenario, "Wooden Limbs & Aching Backs", but other examples are also used where necessary. My hope is that this guide will make it easier for you to script specific types of events and get some tips along the way for easier ways of doing things. I am no expert by any means, so your feedback and suggestions are always welcome. Send any feedback to: mailto:feedback@cafetropico.com

For more excellent tips on making scenarios compiled by Madam President, visit the Scenario Tips page at Tropico Isle!

This guide assumes that you know the basics of using the in-game editor and the eventadd.exe and eventget.exe programs and have the documentation for the editor from PopTop or Café Tropico. If you do not have my annotated and reorganized documentation file, make sure you download it from the Cafe Tropico Downloads Page now! This file makes it much easier to find event conditions and effects and has been updated for version 1.03 of the editor, the current latest edition. Another nice thing to have is Lord_Corwin's Event Creator, which is a separate program from the event editor. This program automates the process of getting and adding events and setting up events. It is also available from the Downloads Page along with updated data files for version 1.03. However, use it with caution once you have the basic events set up since there are some problems with it. More on this later. My favourite editing method is to just use Windows Explorer and Wordpad, set to save files as textfiles. This is even easier if you set up Explorer to automatically open .evt files in Wordpad. I even have the icon set to the Tropico icon!