Mission Contest Discussion Thread...

[DarkFire]

I said you depend on AI for immersion, not success. Perhaps it's not obvious. You depend on AI for that. Without it, you are in an empty world. Where you rely on AI is on doing something simple. Like flying from A to B without crashing into a mountain. Or flying with you providing...ermm help, if you are lucky. Or something to shoot at that won't kill you or behave unrealistically. All of these things you have to play test, mostly, whether it will stalk you and ruin your mission. if you don't have AI you can't write a SP mission that goes beyond a navex, it's as simple as that, but because it's got RNG elements it makes you have to run the mission through several times where you interact with it to ensure that it's going to behave consistently. There's nothing to disagree with here, it's part of DCS and it's a huge issue for testing unless you switch AI off, make it stupid and blow it up manually with a trigger.

 

Success of a mission that relies on AI is exactly what you have to avoid, the AI should win if you dont play, lose if you put in some effort and the tuning in between is where the difficulty challenge seperates the good mission from the badly designed.

 

As for your point - allowing for creativity, if a mission doesn't have any triggers then the player can do what they like without penalty. If you require the player to be somewhere to experience or start something interesting you want them to be part of, then your creativity just broke the mission design should they choose not to be there. So by allowing flexibility which we would all enjoy you need to cater for the creative whim of the user, which can include, shooting down his friends, going off the map on autopilot, going to the last phase accidently before the first, or literally anything beyond your imagination which leads to again, more work trying to test.

 

What i'm trying to say is that it's far easier to create an equilibrium with AI, that sits there and doesn't win or lose and is relatively unimaginative then let players tip the balance one way or the other and thus you have a truly dynamic and unpredicatable situation that is as cheap as chips. And by players I mean humans that are still somewhat working deliberately together to beat AI, or to beat each other (since they seem to like that contest and apply much more effort to it). You dont need voice overs. You dont need to roll a dice, it needs minimal playtesting on the small logic you put in. Nice to have a meaningful scenario, but again, players understand the objective and can immerse into it without a massive storyline.

 

Why am i saying this? Well the only thing I was trying to say from the offset was that the NTTR contest excluded multiplayer and this made it a lot harder to design something for, so I went to explain the effort that was required. I'm stil playtesting a SP mission that I argue with myself about the realism in (make siomething unusal and intersting in the worlds biggest aeiral combat training area that doesn't involve UFO's or training or some ridiculous Russian attack on Las Vegas), and so far i'm making slow progress before I even get a voice actor on something people will play once then discard because the cool surprise is over, whereas my previous attempt gives me hours of fun with or without friends to play in and doesn't rely on a tight script. It's just painful and excessive work for little gain.

 

Understood. I think both approaches can be equally valid, and exciting, and I think we'd agree that the more 'open' approach to what the player is expected to do perhaps lends itself more naturally to a co-op or MP mission.

 

On the subject of your mission, when the time comes if you need voice acting I'm always happy to help out, if you can put up with a thick Welsh accent :D

[Wrecking Crew]

An MP mission can certainly be an SP mission. I've made many missions that are examples of the various scenarios listed above. The more complex missions are archived, because IMHO people have more fun with "here is the objective; here are the threats" kind of missions that can be played within 2-3 hours. Random AI placement/activation helps to keep things interesting.