I was thinking about some sort of improvement to campaign engine, but a bit more complex. Kinda killing (at least maiming) three birds with one stone: briefing, recon and ground targeting.
Here's my crazy idea of how a strike misson should be arranged...
Recon flights go over possible targets and take actual pictures. Not necessarily player's flight - they could be doing something else at the time. The important thing is that the game loads terrain and objects rendering - they're not rendered while we're browsing through menus.
Various flights are assigned strike missions against photographed targets. If this is the first day of campaign some pre-made pictures could come in handy. The idea is that once the campaign engine gets the picture of target zone it remains valid for some time or until any strike is performed against the target.
If player is assigned a strike mission a briefing comes up. A picture of target zone is shown with primary (and secondary?) targets marked. Any AAA or parked planes caught in sight should also be marked (with ID?). Note, that to make it possible a "recon picture" taken by game engine sould also be supplied with a file (simple text will do) storing data about relative coordinates of objects caught in picture frame. The pic itself should be taken with such zoom level to place a target zone entirely within frame, so that situations, when a building that should be attacked is not on the pic, were impossible. Well, maybe AAA is not that important to stretch the pic. Everyone knows it's there :yes:
Strike mission. Every object in target zone is targetable (an extra button to select buildings?) You find primary target as you remember the from pic (maybe a cropped image of target as an overlay on map screen for reference).
The whole thing will require additional modeling of recon planes and creation of recon squadrons, I guess.
Oh, and if no recon pics are available (recce flight shot down) armed recon option into "fog of war" seems like an option.
Maybe I'll drop it at TK forums as soon as they're back... Just want to hear a Word from the Man.
Normal-sized screen but the rest of description fits. Use padlock to keep track of some targets but TrackIR makes it not that necessary.