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Comment on Campaign design


Brainfreeze

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Hi Baltic dragon.  Been playing your M2000 campaigns and Av8b.  Really gr8 experience, immersive, nice to have a story line and realistic scenarios etc so big thumbs up and thank you.

 

We all experience bugs of course and with no experience in mission design myself but with my careers experience in system and product design it seems to me (might be awfully wrong here) that a lot of the quirks are due to triggers.  Seems they may be too precise or specific in many cases and end up not triggering thus leaving the mission stranded or skipping parts.  I hardly ever get through a mission where I get all the radio calls or have all the sections working as expected.  Might be too complex or too precise, I don't know.

 

The reality is players will do everything you expect them not to do and thus ultra generic fallbacks / safeguards could help get back on track in the story (like the plane is not where it should be, fired a missile instead of dropping a bomb etc).   Might be that the mission builder is not flexible enough (if plane is not there then display a new message and get the player back on track...) and of course these things are easier said than done but if it is possible with the mission engine then I think it is worth spending time on this as it will considerably strenghten the missions and take player satisfaction  to a new high 🙂  

 

Good luck and I'll buy every mission you do for the planes I fly!

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Thanks Brainfreeze for your feedback.

 

You are absolutely right: the triggers are specific and there are a lot of them, which can lead to bugs and problems. 

 

However, this is the only way to achieve what I want in my campaigns. I could dumb them down of course, but then they would loose a lot, and I just won't do that - as my goals is to deliver experience I expect from the campaign myself. And I am building in a lot of different safeguards into them. 

 

Trust me, when I submit a campaign it is usually very carefully tested and the bug report list from beta testers is super long each time - mostly these are cosmetic issues or some suggestions from their side, but the missions work perfectly well - provided that players do what they are expected to.

 

Which brings me to the second point: this is a military sim and I assume that players - just as real life pilots would - follow their orders. If there is a flight plan, they shouldn't cut directly to WP 3 because it is faster (sometimes there is no other way to start the action than by placing a zone which player needs to enter to fire up a flag). If ROE says not to shoot, well - they shouldn't (in real life pilots could loose their wings or worse for something like that). In other words I trust players to  be smart and responsible and I feel this is a trust well placed, judging by the feedback I get and the level of foregiveness for the bugs they encounter.

 

And that brings me to the third part: bugs themselves. Most of  them appear after updates and break missions I didn't even touch. This is something frustrating for everyone (and - trust me - mostly for us, campaign devs), but it is inevitable in the project of such a magnitude as DCS. We just need to learn how to live with it and how to react quickly and quick whatever we can (sometimes we need to ask ED for help, as in some cases there just is no walkaround).

 

And finally - looking at all my campaigns, I have to say that if you look at all the  triggers and voiceovers in each mission, the number of reported bugs is really not that high. And I do all I can to make it even smaller - while maintaining the quality of  the missions I am striving for. 

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