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Triggers are probably the most important feature in making well working missions. You can set a trigger to set off from pre-defined conditions. If this trigger is activated, anything linked to it will then continue. The perfect example of this is a counter-attack.
Having a trigger set to detected when the East aren't present in a town, and having it linked to waypoints for other East groups out of the town will allow the units to move in and re-capture the town.
. A trigger can be placed in the same way as any other object. Press F3 and double click on the map. You will be presented with a dialogue filled with all sorts of bountiful joys.
The first section is the dimensions of the trigger area. Axis a & b are the X & Y axis for the trigger area. You can set it to be a square or an ellipse (wonky circle). The angle is the degrees the trigger is rotated around.
You are then able to set what activates a trigger. The drop down box is fairly self-explanatory apart from Game Logic, which I have no idea what it does. Never used it. Radio Alpha etc., will activate the radio in game. It will appear on a player's map and they can click on the command to activate the trigger or open up the command menu (backspace) and press 0 to select.
Being able to select a waypoint to activate repeatedly is handy for various situations, such as setting off an alarm when a unit enters an area.
The click boxes allow you to specify what the activation select (East, West, Anybody, etc) has to be doing in relation to the trigger to activate. For example: If you select West, and then check the present box, the trigger will only activate when a West unit is present in it's area.
For an interesting side note. You can group (F2) a trigger to a group of units, and the options change. This is generally not that safe to use on human controllable characters as it screws up if the linked unit is not present. But, on AI it's handy. You can set it to see if a particular unit/vehicle/group is present. Take note that if you want to check for an entire group not present (e.g. dead) then you need to select "Any Group Member" and "Not Present". Not "Entire Group". Entire group will be not present as soon as one of them dies. So you need to check if anybody is left.
The Type for the trigger should normally either be None of Switch. If you set it to End1 it will end the mission when activated and load the up the End1 debriefing. See the briefing section for details of how to set this.
Text will give the trigger a visible name. This will change it's name from TRIGGER on your mission editor screen, and if you are using Radio Alpha etc it will give the command a name on the radio selection in game.
Name is used in scripting, if you need to define a name to the trigger this will be it's unique name, it cannot conflict with any other named object.
Condition should be "this" to activate on what you have set previously. Alternatively if you don't want to activate on the above, but want to use a boolean variable to activate it you can change this to the name of the variable and it will activate when the variable becomes true.
Activation and Deactivation are script lines that will run when the trigger is activated and deactivated. For example:
Activate: hint "West has entered the area"
Decativate: hint "West have left the area"
As with all script lines, you can separate commands with a semi-colon ';'.