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Mission system overhaul (ME) for Training-specific features and static missions


Worrazen

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This idea came from my would-be response to this thread: https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=285021

I decided it fits into it's own thread.

 

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It was announced a while ago, classic campaigns will not be the focus by ED anymore, due to all the busy core improvements and due to the "Dynamic Campaign" in the future probably becoming the primary campaign experience. Recently we've seen announced 3rd-party campaigns and missions while supervised and Q&A'ed by ED which is very much appreciated, to fill the gaps.

 

Speaking of core improvements, and the fact that classic static campaigns and missions may become less common, there's one field that actually needs them and that is training.

You want to be able to have a repeatable training mission right, for all players, without any factors messing up the guide and practice, that means either disabled or quite limited "dynamic campaign".

Part of core overhaul, the mission editor overhaul, think it's not unreasonable to also give the training-specific features and capabilities it's attention.

 

But I think there should be some kind of a standardized way to make training missions that is well covered by the mission editor, so that a new developer would instantly get the toolset and featureset visible instead of having to dig down into triggers and manually figure out how to configure a mission suitable for training. A global option to disable "dynamic campaign", among other thing I can't think of right now.

 

There is another method I see on my mind right now, via mission editor templates, without this "let's put everything useful for training into one place" (but that would be shortcuts, not actually moving anything) so that when you load that template it auto-sets some initial defaults, even triggers, standard initial messages, some help text perhaps, more stuff that I can't recall in this moment, etc.

 

The mission file it self could get support for some kind of extra metadata bit in there to indicate it properly as a training mission, or single mission, or campaign mission, etc, perhaps DCS could apply some defaults to a mission depending on the value of the "MissionType" bit, and do things that way.

 

Honestly I'm not that familiar with mission building as much, I think there is probably much I don't know about (hunch) so I may be talking about something that's already possible, I would if I had more time, so this is just ideas throwing by half, I feel the need to remind the context of this post, that I'm not an expert mission creator right now.

 

But also, this isn't that of a clear-cut either, I'm still exploring myself in my mind if this makes sense, what if majority of the people want the training missions to also be dynamic? Perhaps I'm not seeing an obvious reason? If you think so please let me know below :)


Edited by Worrazen

Modules: A-10C I/II, F/A-18C, Mig-21Bis, M-2000C, AJS-37, Spitfire LF Mk. IX, P-47, FC3, SC, CA, WW2AP, CE2. Terrains: NTTR, Normandy, Persian Gulf, Syria

 

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Some separate training specific ideas:

 

The ability to jump between training steps as if they were pages, skip, rewind, fast forward them universally across any kind of proper training-mission built with the new feature set. You could go back and redo the instructor's step in it's whole, the text, the voice and the cockpit indications (all of these form a "step"),

 

An overhaul to the event-scripting system to better detect user changes in cockpit and button state so that the training procedure is more robust and doesn't get stuck due to a trigger not firing to continue the step. Perhaps the training-mission internal event trigger scripts could be smart enough to tap into each of the module's aircraft state via some kind of API, they would detect user change by monitoring that under-the-hood changes and perhaps that should work 100% every time, instead of what I perhaps speculate right now it's tracking user's button and mouse presses in the cockpit at a higher-level IMO, I may be completely wrong on this one ofcourse.

 

Third, right now the standard message box in top-right screen is being used for I think pretty much everything including training transcript text from the instructor. It could be cool to have some kind of training-specific GUI applied to such training-type missions by default, not anything too drastic of a difference, but a agreeable theme to it. Or an extension to that idea, that you would see a specific themed message box depending on which type/group is the source. For example when the "training instructor" is talking you would see a training-specific message box theme/color, in addition all the other groups/sources could have their own, squadron, allies, ATC, unknown's (enemy, etc); which I think would make it feel better and more immersive like you're really there and you get this unique looking folder with the briefing in it and flipping through pages hehe and so forth. Kinda like a spin on the fact that you get a differently colored MFD text when switching to training/sim mode in some aircraft (A-10C).

Modules: A-10C I/II, F/A-18C, Mig-21Bis, M-2000C, AJS-37, Spitfire LF Mk. IX, P-47, FC3, SC, CA, WW2AP, CE2. Terrains: NTTR, Normandy, Persian Gulf, Syria

 

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However, I meant this more in the type of configuration, not that they would build a mission for you with all the units.

 

Unit templates is a separate case, and yes, there was some more movement besides that and sure I'm not opposed to that, complex SAM sites, bases, outposts, misc cargo site templates like that would be nice. We'll see what kind of improvement in entity placement the new mission editor will have.

Modules: A-10C I/II, F/A-18C, Mig-21Bis, M-2000C, AJS-37, Spitfire LF Mk. IX, P-47, FC3, SC, CA, WW2AP, CE2. Terrains: NTTR, Normandy, Persian Gulf, Syria

 

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