SneakyPete

Gee, radar? Could that be that electronic device that only scans forward in a 60 degree arc out of 360 degrees around your aircraft? The Mark 1 eyeball is required to see things that your radar can not pick up if your playing a realistic flight sim. Or do you fly all your missions just turning in circles trying to pick up a contact, it's kind of hard to make it to your waypoints that way.

Because you can't build a house on a piece of sky.

OH PLEASE, let's not start that here, you know it's biased for the Argentinian's....... :)

More Please!

Hahaha, I don't mean to tease you, but using wingtip smoke to spot each other on a FULL REAL server strikes me as funny. Wing tip smoke is a nice feature though. Another nice smoke effect to have would be spotter's smoke, either triggered by a waypoint to appear on the map to simulate ground troops signaling for fire, or even better, to have ground units actually aim the smoke at targets and call for fire. That would be great, Jane's USAF had this feature I believe. I don't know if any planes in this sim carried marking rockets, but that would be nice too, the lead could mark targets for his flight to hammer.

It would be very nice to have map/note boards strapped on the legs of the pilots that could have notes from the mission builder on them. You could have one leg with waypoint speed time alt info. taken from the mission builder. On the other leg you could have several different pages bound to a button to scroll through with examples like; 1. Radio/VOR and other nav frequency info you need to tune (if nescessary) 2. A simplified theater map (perhaps with waypoints overlayed if possible and high enough res) 3. A short mission briefing page 4. A checklists page (takeoff, landing) For the most part it would be pretty easy to implement, you just add a placeholder on the 3d model where you can change the texture on the map board to be a text file, or have a small utility that turns text files into whatever texture format you use. For the waypoint info page it would be slick if it automatically took the info from the Mission builder for each plane. I don't know if Jet Thunder is going to use tuning for NAV and Radio frequencies, but that would be great if it did (especially with a clickable radio panel in cockpit). A simple map would be really easy but a dynamically overlayed waypoint on a minimap would be hard to generate I imagine. The easiest of course would be the checklists. Just a few of these features will greatly add to realism in the game. If you were to implement some of the more advanced ideas here or more that I have not thought of that would be awesome. Well thats just some ideas I had, can't wait to see your game!

An input editor is a given, but many of us use HOTAS controllers and it is much easier to leave the default settings alone and modify the HOTAS software to match the games settings. If some keys are left unbound we don't have to start mixing and matching keys.

AH random failures, that's a good one. forgot to add it to my list of mission editor suggestions. Please make it selectable by individual planes though. Or if it's a global setting, make it so it does not effect all planes at the same time with the same fault. Or as a trigger that when the plane crosses the trigger it sets a differnet possible random failure for each plane that crosses the trigger.

I would love to see publishers left out of the loop, and buy it directly from the dev's, even if it meant an electronic manual (preferably of high quality). BTW I recommend you use the CD Key version of copy protection like in Quake style fps games. The Safedisc method does nothing but piss off customers and does nothing to stop warez.

There is another thread on mission editor capabilities, but I thought I would start a new one to submit suggestions for the actual user interface for an editor to make it easy to use and efficient yet powerful. My own suggestions are as follows; The editor supporting high resolutions and working in a window. Custom resolutions, different from the main page would be nice too. It would be great to be able to run the editor in a 3200x1200 window across a multi screen monitor setup. Also this would require scaleable fonts most likely. The editor needs the maximum screen space devoted to the map. In Il2 they do this, but at the expense of having to use a clunky object viewer window, with a small scroll window for objects that is hard to click on with the mouse pointer. Icons placed around the edge of the map screen (with popup descriptors for icon function) with objects on one side, and possibly functions and a status bar across the top or bottom. The status bar with a constant pointer grid location readout and right click enabled distance tool as in LOMAC is nice. The ability to assign colors for all waypoint groups to assist in identification. The theater map having a grid system, that changes it's grid size as the map zooms in and out. The ability to zoom in and out easily, like by using mouse scroll wheel, a max zoom reset button, and being able to highlight an area by dragging a square around an area by holding left click while tracing the square and zoom into it when released.(Or by holding shift while left clicked) An IL2 style 2d/3d map view. 2d map representation when zoomed out for speed, switching to real 3d map when zoomed in. Also the ability to zoom in on a placed unit and view it while panning around using the game graphics engine, once again as in Il2 when pressing enter while highlighting a unit. Hotkeys for common functions like delete, unit properties, or briefing/map conditions menus. Also to be able to copy and paste units/squadrons, and to be able to copy and paste to the briefing windows (big issue for me). The ability to hide briefings and plane type/loadouts from the opposing side when making a mission with clients on both sides. When the mission is played you only see the brief/planes for your country. (yes if they choose to click on the other country they can see it) Also the ability to assign the briefing pic/trak file to a certain side. I really want to thank the dev's for asking for suggestions, and wish them all the best in this endeavour. I am excited to fly the A-4 (as well as the others) as it has been nearly 20 years since I used to work on them.

WOW, thanks for responding in such detail. I will try to respond to your queries and clarify some of my earlier statements. IL2's mission editor is pretty good, one major disadvantage is it's lack of triggers for events, like random airplane generation, or mission goals, or even random equipment failures (random gen. of aircraft was impossible in IL2 multiplay until they fixed the late sspawning of aircraft in a FB patch, since only the host would see the late spawning craft). Il2 also does not support the insertion of wav/mp3 files into a mission or screenshots for the briefing.Jane's WW2 Fighters was great for its triggers and Jane's F18 map builder was also pretty good with the ability to add sound files. Also in IL2 I can only put 4 planes in a squad which is a normal squadron size, but when I want a formation of 20 planes it gets tedious making 5 waypoints routes. As I mentioned earlier making waypoints a separate entity any plane or squadron could follow (with time offsets allowed, and possibly even alt/speed offsets) would make large mission generation so much easier. This might pose AI problems though from many planes sharing a common waypoint, and mission targeting would have to be set in a squadrons properties (although their targeting objectives could be triggered by the waypoint) In squadron play a pilot would be booted from the squad for pulling cheats. On online servers I can see this being exploited possibly. Generally though in the example you gave I'd much rather go against most AI planes than a decent pilot. You could make this a variable that can be enabled by server, if this is even possible, and perhaps also bind the ip of the client to that plane for the mission, although this might increase precious bandwidth. Hahaha that's great. By this I meant that the custom loadout would be for the same plane type. (I just wanted to be sure you understood that part) LOMAC has this feature but it is badly broken, overwriting previously saved files, and not saving properly quite often. The LOMAC arming screen is quite inefficient too, one more like Jane's F18 with a drag and drop interface of weapons onto valid pylon stations is much quicker. I am pretty sure F/18 had the briefing pic too as well as a couple others over the years, it's really nice having an idea what the target looks like. A trak file could accomplish this to an even greater extent and remain a small file. Both an after mission report after exiting the mission and a log file in the games root dir that can be parsed if someone so desires. Quite often squad members think they scored a kill in the heat of battle when it was someone else or the plane actually escaped. It makes for interesting reading and helps for compiling squad stats. _________________________________________________________________________ Anything that can be done to reduce the number of steps it takes to make a mission would be welcome. Like the earlier request I mentioned for saved loadouts, or possibly my suggestion to assign multiple flights to a waypoint entity, instead of the waypoints set being an integral part of a particular plane/squadron's stats. One other thing that makes using an editor better is when it remembers and defaults to whichever side and type of unit you are placing. It is really annoying (like in LOMAC once again) when everytime I add a unit, it defaults to the Russian side, and I have to reset every stat on each plane every time I add one. You generally build a mission by doing one side at a time, and flight by flight, so it makes sense that the editor should remember what the last side you picked was and default to that side for the next object. If the last object was a certain type of plane, their is a good chance the next one will be the same type, so it should remember. When the editor does not become tedious, you can spend more time adding things to a mission that increase the immersion (within the graphical limits of the game engine). The more I think about it, the more things pop into my head so I ought to just stop writing since this is a ton of stuff already, but I though I would also mention an auto save feature that saves to a separate file name (like Autosave/date). It is so aggravating to lose a mission due to a a crash, or hitting the wrong button and overwriting your work. (I've done this three times in LOMAC already :( )

Could you think about leaving keys F9 - F12 unbound in this game. Many of us use TrackIr and voice comms, and need some buttons to tie the commands for these gaming supplements to. Thanks!

please think about the same approach to flaps, gear, and possibly even other items like nav lights.

Toggles are ok but I prefer specific up down commands so you dont forget what position your flaps/speedbrakes are in without looking. For instance F for flaps toggle, shift F for flaps down, alt F for flaps up. Only one key is used and yet you can have it both ways. Personally I erase the toggle key in the key editor as I have shift, alt, and ctl bound to buttons on my HOTAS, allowing easy multi button combos.

Fair enough, thanks for the reply. Maybe it could be just a a few panels in the cockpit, like the weapons control panel if you have the time, although I imagine clickable items in a 3d cockpit is much harder to implement.