Mission Editor - missions on layers - spawn areas with planes and assets to choose from a menu

[zaelu]

One of the biggest points that holds DCS back in sales, usability and reusability is its way overdue to revamp mission Editor and planner interface.

We all older players got used to scrolling through a insipid table and squinting for "our" plane of choice or even being more profi and use a F10 radio menu (rofl, can't believe it's a thing) to bring more stuff to the mission. But most of new players want to have nothing to do with that. The few that stick just either fly some prebuild missions for a while or go online and their creative potential might never be tapped.

That table has to at least as an option be replaced with a spawn system where you just chose and airbase then from available plane set you chose a plane, reg number and loadout. Mission designer should be able to lock airbases, planes, loadouts but this cumbersome way of getting into the game should be let go. In complex missions a lot of time is wasted as a mission designer on placing individual planes on airbases, with loadouts, reg numbers and skins. Then detailed description have to be written in briefing or... as in most cases are not written because the system is so cumbersome that it is often almost impossible to do it without wasting a lot of time as mission designer or from the potential player that has to scroll to his mission through a ton of extra text that is not concerning him/his mission. And all this... only to have to take it from scratch on next mission just because the planeset is changed a little bit or more. 
Tasks should be possible also to split into airbases and flights etc. 

And finally. Sometimes squads play a set of missions that have a common core and basically progress from one to the next after a certain part of the first mission is done or when players decide is time to move over to next sequence. In current  model a server operator has to stop the mission and load a next one... provided all the tedious work of re prepping it and modeling it was done. Everybody is despawned and has to restart fresh regardless if it was or not necessary. This adds clunkiness in mission design and mission execution.
To alleviate some of these drawbacks the new layer system should be expanded in such manner that the mission designer should be able to assign part of the mission objects/flights/assets to a section/sequence of his own choosing to different layers. Meaning not only labels and text but mission objects altogether. And these layers should be toggleable as in view or not during mission creation this way the design process would be streamlined (currently you have to show/hide all units that are set hidden and this is not exactly what is needed. You need to see or not see just a part of the mission and also that operation should not have to do anything to the actual mission execution. Think of it as layers in photoshop! More of it, these layers could be set as activable during the mission execution or prohibited to be activated unless ordered by Game Master or certain conditions. Much like triggers but more comprehensive. 


For example, I have a very complex mission that I play with my friends when we have the time. Inside the mission we have several airbases where we usually hang out for basic general type training. If at some point we want to start an intercept mission or an attack on ground mission... such missions are available via F10 menu. Some of the missions are connected, some are not. Some require a certain era of aircraft to proceed some are more general. Not only that is a tedious work to maintain those missions but there is no way to tune them to the needs of the moment. And no... making a new mission for each small idea would be crazy and everyone would leave for making french fries or playing other game.

Another BIG problem is impossibility to despawn or switch assets for people that don't have WW2 asset pack or maybe a mod. Game master should be able to command such simple tasks. If they would be placed on toggle-able layers it would be easy.
I know it might sound as too much and "hey, we are selling complex planes mostly" but the reality is you (ED) are trying!! to sell complex planes and you are struggling more than necessary because "it is not about just the planes" it is about what you do with them and how interesting and easy to learn to ply with them is. And I am sure that a lot of people tried DCS, went to multiplayer and when they saw the table they just uninstall the game and moved over. That is a lost sale with several other ramifications which I won't get into as already this post is too long

One another example is the work of the community that made huge leaps in this regard but still is held back by a lot of the core features of ME. The latest is Mission Enhancer package. an absolute piece of art which is perplexing since the game is EDs game. How come such features are not available already in a GUI interface?? Why wasn't this a priority? Having people able to interact with a mission visually is a feature like only the creators of 3dMax couldn't see but users of 3DStudio Max could. IE sometimes the tool maker doesn't know what his tool is actually good for until he modifies it in an apparent useless way for somebody else.


 

Edited January 20, 2022 by zaelu