Thanks to Psycho for this tip!!!
I'm sure everyone of you wanted to make your OWN campaign. Not a series of single missions but a true campaign. Well now you can. You can create missions in any maps with any planes and weapons!!! Here's how. This tip requires a HEX editor and the knowledge of all PT and JT files in ATF.
CAMPAIGN TITLES: The title of a campaign (which will appear on the "Select Campaign" screen) is stored in a simple TXT files, here's a sample:
.section1
.header
Kuril Islands 1997 (Name of the campaign)
.body
..underline When hostilities spread to the Far East, the "Wasp" must
support a Marine invasion of the Kuril Islands. (A brief description)
.section2
END
As you can see this one is from USMF but the same format is in NATO, and even FA.
WEAKNESSES OF THE METHOD:
While the CAM file is a powerful tool for generating custom campaigns it is probably not something a beginner will want to get into on their own. First of all you can't be afraid to use a HEX editor. Secondly, the file isn't very intuitive. You can see obvious things like aircraft and weapon object names but it's not obvious where the quantity record is. I'd recommend that anyone attempting to edit a CAM file make sure they keep a safe copy of the original somewhere. That way if you do do something to a CAM file that the game doesn't care for, at least you can start over with a fresh copy.
There are some aspects of the CAM file that I personally do not know how to control. Examples of this are: Medal types, when medals are received, when new aircraft arrive, and the one biggy -- the total number of missions in a campaign. All three ATF/NATO CAM files (egypt.cam, vlad.cam, and baltic.cam) are set with slots for 40 missions. Psycho's attempts to insert an additional slot have resulted in crashes. For the time being it appears as though we're limited to 40 missions.
HOW TO EDIT CAM FILES:
The big thing Psycho has found so far about CAM files is that you can edit what is there but you can't insert additional records and expect the campaign to function. For instance, if I want to add the AIM54C.JT object to a campaign I need to find another weapon with 6 characters before the JT extension and overwrite it with the AIM54C. In my current project Psycho overwrote the MK82HD.JT object. If you used one that has less characters it won't work because you'd overwrite another piece of needed info. If you used one that had more characters than needed you may be able to use NULL but this hasn't been tasted with weapons. Psycho has successfully done this with aircraft. He overwrote ASTOVLE with F18 and 4 NULLs. Once you have a CAM file and associated TXT file you simply copy them to your ATF directory, start the program and bingo, you have a new campaign. (If you want to have the CAM file and TXT file in a LIB, just copy a Mission file line in the TK.TRN file and change the name [this also works with MM files]).