The AI designer

The AI designer is a chat with a team of agents that design missions with you, each with its own job. Tell it what you want, in plain words, and it builds it on the map while you watch. It works through the studio's own editing, so everything it does is an ordinary change: you can undo it, it shows in the change log, it saves, and it goes into the game only when you apply.

The AI designer fencing in the radar dome and posting guards round it, step by step

Open it with the AI designer tab on the right edge, beside Selection.

It needs a language model

The AI designer uses your own account with OpenAI, or any server that speaks OpenAI's API: a model on your own computer (LM Studio, Ollama, vLLM, Unsloth Studio) or a service such as OpenRouter. See Settings below. Everything else in the studio works without it.

The team

Pick the agent above the chat. A chat keeps its history when you switch, so the next agent reads what happened.

Agent	What it does	Changes the mission
Ideas	Suggests missions that fit the level	No
Mission	Plans a whole mission, then builds it one area at a time	Yes
Edit	Changes the mission as it is, while you watch	Yes
Workshop	Designs buildings, characters and objects for your inventory	No
Review	Plays the mission on paper and lists what to fix	No

Ideas

It looks at the level (its named places, buildings, guards, alarms and walkways) and answers with mission designs: a pitch, objectives, enemies and where they stand, security, time and weather, and difficulty. Nothing changes. Each design has a Build this button, which hands it to the Mission builder.

Mission

A whole mission, planned first and built one area at a time. It is at its best on an empty map, where nothing is built yet: a new chat on an empty-map mission of yours starts with it.

1. It surveys the map: where the ground is flat, where it rises, where the walkways run.
2. It proposes the mission as a plan: a card with the title and pitch, the settings, 3 to 6 areas (each lettered, with its role and what goes there: ground work, buildings, guards, cameras and alarms, pickups), the objectives and the events. The areas are outlined on the map: blue while planned, yellow while being built, green once built, red where one hit a problem. The studio checks the plan before you see it.
3. Ask for changes in the chat ("move B north", "three areas, not five") and the card changes.
4. Build it builds every area in turn, then finishes the mission: objectives, events, the player start, time and weather, the texts, the check list and a stealth check. Area by area stops after each area for you to look, with Build the next area and Build the rest. Typing yes does the same as Build it.

Each area is a request of its own, with its own Undo these changes, and Undo the whole build on the card puts the mission back as it was before the first area. An area that ends with nothing built is marked, with Try again. The plan and how far it got are kept with the chat, so a build left halfway goes on later.

It shapes the ground too, to make the place its own: it can stamp mountains, ranges and valleys, and take hills away.

Edit

Say what to change, and watch it happen: "make it harder", "move the snipers so they cover the road", "check the mission and fix what you can". It reads the mission as it is, your own changes included, and what you have selected on the map is part of what it knows: "put a sniper up there".

Each step is a row, with Show to find it on the map

Each step is a row in the chat, with Show to find it on the map, and appears on the map as it happens. Follow on the map moves the map along with it. At the end it runs the same check list as Apply, and fixes what it finds.

Workshop

New things for Your items in the inventory: "a sandbagged sniper nest", "a Spetnaz officer with a Desert Eagle". It makes a structure out of the game's own parts, or a character with a model, weapon and sight of its own, as a card in the chat with its 3D model turning. It does not touch the map itself: Place puts a design where you click, and Add to inventory keeps it for any mission. It cannot make new weapons or new 3D models: those come from the game.

Review

It walks the mission as the player would meet it: the ways in and who sees them, the objectives, the alarm, the texts. It lists what to fix, most important first, each as a card saying where, why it matters, and the fix. Fix on a card hands that finding to Edit, which makes it. Review itself changes nothing.

Repairing a mission

Fix with the AI designer, at the foot of the check list, hands everything on it to Edit. It fixes a problem by making the thing work: walkways laid where a guard has none, a sniper stood on a tower's platform, a camera pointed elsewhere. It does not remove a guard, a camera or a building to make a check pass unless you ask it to. Under Edit's suggestions, Repair the mission does the same.

Stopping and undoing

• Stop ends a request at once (and a plan's build after the area it is on).
• Undo these changes, under a request, puts the mission back as it was before it. Ctrl+Z brings the changes back.
• One of the original missions is never changed: Ideas and the Workshop work on it, and the Mission builder and Edit offer to make a mission of your own first.

Showing it what you mean

Tag a place, sketch on the map, attach the map, attach a picture

The buttons above the message box:

• Tag a place: drag an area on the map, or click a thing or a spot. Tags are lettered A, B, C, drawn on the map and sent with your message, so "a sniper nest in A facing the road" means exactly that.
• Sketch on the map: draw on the map in red, yellow, cyan or white, and say in your message what each colour means. "A fence along the red lines, a camera at the north-east corner" builds just that.
• Attach the map: the map as it is on screen, with a grid in metres.
• Attach a picture: a file, a pasted image or one dropped on the panel. A sketch on paper, a plan, a screenshot of another game's map.

What it can do

It can look at the mission and the level, find named places, look around a point, and check the mission. It can place and change guards and their patrols, structures (a building brings its doors, lift and furniture, a gate its whole gateway), fence and wall runs, a fenced compound, pickups, cameras and alarm parts; move and remove things, yours or the level's; set objectives, events, the time limit and weather, the mission's name and the player start; lay new walkways; level, raise, lower and smooth the ground, stamp mountains, ranges, hills, craters and valleys, and take hills away; and move the map or open the 3D view to show you something. It keeps to the game's rules, as you would: guards need a walkway nearby, the map computer lists six objectives, a guard carries only a weapon the game arms soldiers with, and so on.

A few things worth asking for:

• A stealth check: "is there a quiet way in?" It finds the quietest way on foot from the start to each objective, says how much of it is watched and by whom, and suggests fixes, or makes them.
• Texts: the mission's name and description in the game's list, objective texts, map labels, and a short briefing shown at the start, in the game's terse style.
• Cutscenes: "make an intro and an outro", or "add a shot of the radar tower with the line 'The radar must go'". It makes them the way the Cutscenes tab does, and you can change them there.
• Vehicles that drive: "an APC that comes out of the depot when the alarm goes off and circles the yard".

The end of a request: what it built, and what it cost

Versions and campaigns

• Design, Easy, normal and hard versions... makes easier and harder copies of a mission in your library: fewer or more guards, shorter or longer sight, more or less time, and so on. The guards the objectives and events name are kept.
• Design, Make a campaign... puts missions in order under a name and a briefing, and exports them as one file. Importing it adds them in order.

The AI designer can do both for you too.

A draft without the AI

Design, A draft from a description... reads a plain description with a few rules on your own computer, and nothing is sent anywhere. For example: "Two snipers near the radar dome, four Spetnaz guards at the barracks and two cameras by the control tower. Hack the terminal, grab the Dragunov at the watchtower, then escape by the north gate. Snow, a 15 minute time limit, don't raise the alarm." Read it lists what it understood; Add to the mission places it, as one step you can undo.

Chats

Each mission keeps its own conversations, as many as you like. The chat's name at the top of the panel opens the list: open one to carry on where it stopped, rename it, or delete it (click twice). + starts a new chat. A new chat is named from its first message, and the light model gives it a better name after the first answer.

Settings

Open Settings (the gear at the foot of the side panel, or Game, Settings), AI models:

Settings, AI models

• Saved models: as many as you like. Add a model asks for a name, the provider, the model, how much it thinks (off to high), whether it reads pictures, the longest answer it may give, and an API key of its own. Each saved model has Edit, Test (one short request to it) and Delete (click twice; a model in use can't be deleted).
• Provider: OpenAI, or OpenAI-compatible, for any server that speaks OpenAI's API. For a compatible server, also its address (LM Studio's is http://localhost:1234/v1) and its context window: how much the model can read at once, in tokens, as the server loaded it (LM Studio calls it Context Length). The studio fits every request into it: in a long chat the oldest parts are left out first, never the newest. Once a model is saved, the models its server offers are listed as you type.
• The API key is encrypted for your Windows account and kept by the studio, never in its settings file, and the page never sees it again: it only shows the last four characters. Forget removes it. A compatible server needs one only if it asks.
• The AI designer uses and The light model uses: which saved model does each job. Use a light model turns the second one on or off.
• Pace: how long each step stays before the next, so you can watch it build. Steps per run: the most steps one request may take.

The light model is a quick, cheap or local one for the chores: naming chats, reading pictures, and looking things up for the designer, which saves it time and tokens. Keep its thinking off.

Switching: the model's name at the top of the AI panel opens a menu, to run this chat on the designer's model or the light one, and to change which saved model each of them uses, without opening Settings.

It uses your account

Requests go from the studio to your provider with your key, and your provider charges for them. A build of about twenty steps takes around 40 seconds and 100 to 170 thousand tokens, half of them usually from the cache. A whole mission from the Mission builder is several such requests, one an area. A model on your own computer costs nothing but time.

Next: the community.