by wlbragg » Thu Oct 07, 2021 7:19 am
I haven't had much time to work on the Target Intercept mission generator but I finally made some time.
I just pushed the first round. I have plenty more to do, but I think I have a really good start. Enough to maybe get some critiques from those interested in using it.
There are areas I need to "idiot proof". There are bound to be some bugs in logic and flow. There is plenty of formatting and menu aesthetics to do. Just lots of small details to attend to. I want to add the "range" limiting slider to the logic, right now there is no range limiting other than AI and MP hard coded or LOD limits.
I think I may need to completely separate the different mission types into their own, more stand alone, dialogs? Except, there is a lot of common overlap.
So, the basics are there and you can generate either an instant Target Intercept mission or a time delayed random one. Using either AI or MP aircraft or both. You can limit the Intercept to a target in flight. You can either pick a target from the GUI list or at random and instantly start the mission or ask it to select a random target from the list and start it with the timer.
There are two ways to get to the Target intercept GUI helper. Either through the Mission Generator menu if you want to use the timer or through the main menu bar at the top of the sim through the addon menu if you just want to start a mission instantly, either a chosen target or at random.
Part of why I said I may need to separate the different mission types more clearly with their own GUI's is because some of the options in the Mission Generator "configuration" dialog are not relevant to the Target intercept mission. Really only the timer is relevant to the target Intercept mission. Even the Incident report dialog is not used with the Target Intercept. It has its own canvas popup that appears once the mission is started.
Right now the only way you can close that popup is if you close to within 500 meters of the target or uncheck the "Enable" checkbox in the main Mission Generator config dialog.
I have some work to do yet on the original Incident Report popup. It needs to have a custom control loop to control the data that passes through it. Right now it has the ugly duplicating bug if you try to close it and open it a second or successive times. I know what it takes to fix it but still have to take the time to do it.
I think that is about it. There is quite a lot this little package can do already an it is only going to grow. But I need to get it better organized so it is more intuitive and easily comprehensible.
Anyway, comments, suggestions and critiques welcome. I promise I wont take any offence to any comments if you all understand I do have a vision for this and I am not planning on straying too far from my vision. It is going to be slow going at first, with lots of evolution in style, until the final aesthetics and functionality are adopted.
Let me know what changes in the Intercept reporting might be needed, if any. One thing for sure I plan to do in the Intercept target GUI is add checkboxes for all the reporting parameters so you can limit it to only the parameters you want. The popup would then be limited to what ever was checked. That would be something like a difficulty factor, same as what I did for the S&R and Wildfire portions.
I tested a random AI target in the AirCrane, ha, not a chance of catching the AI. It was at 30000+ feet traveling at some crazy speed. I cheated and used a combination of ctrl+u and the browser app to try to get close. I was able to see it but never did get close enough to end the mission (so that part hasn't actually been tested). One other thing to note, the reported position parameters of the target change color the closer you get to the target.
< 5000 = red, <10000 = yellow, else green. Let me know if a different distance for the changes are better. If there is a flashing switch for the canvas text, maybe I will do that for a few cycles as a notice of identification before ending the mission. I am planning on possibly doing something like that and then updating the canvas parameters to show the aircrafts callsign and a popup asking if you want to close the report popup.
Kansas and Ohio/Midwest scenery development.
KEQA, 3AU, KRCP Airport Layout
Intel i7/GeForce RTX 2070/Max-Q