A suggestion

[Sandman1330]

G'Day BD,

I'm re-engaging on R1DF now that the Tomcat bugs have been sorted out. While I was on "break", I played Sedlo's excellent (free) campaign, Bold Cheetah. He has a feature built in that allows the player to "jump to the action," so to speak. I would like to request maybe you consider something similar.

I have been very slow to purchase campaigns, and the main reason is DCS lacks the ability to save game. I don't have tons of time to play, so when I can spare 2hrs to play a campaign mission, I do love flying the mission from start to finish (and always do, at least the first time around).

However, this being DCS, things happen. The game crashes (as we all know from recent memory!), and we get killed / mess up. I've now managed to get killed twice on Mission 9, once when the SA3 spawned directly underneath me and shot me down without much chance to evade, and a second time when one of the AAA managed a golden BB shot that took me out on a strafe (I mean, it was REALLY a golden BB. First burst shot right to the pilot. Who trains the gunnery of the optically sighted ground AI? We should hire them). I am really, really trying to find the patience to go through everything, again, a third time to finish the mission. I mean, you're 2 hours in when you get shot down, the game crashes, whatever. Then you have to do those 2 hours again (and maybe again and again) to progress in the mission.

If we could have a "skip ahead" option that skips the administrative stuff - air start over the objective area kind of deal, that would make it much easier to get back on the horse.

I'll be honest, this kind of thing has really reduced the number of campaigns that I buy. It's just not enjoyable when you have to dedicate so much time again and again, going through the same script, same voiceovers, again and again. Until DCS allows us to save games (which they have no plan to do I'm told), this would go a long way towards making the campaigns more approachable.

Thanks for listening! And of course, have a great holiday!

Edit: A second, smaller suggestion: When we are given grids for targets (as you get a lot of in M9), can we also get the elevation? It doesn't auto-populate, so the pod doesn't go to the right area, and one has to go into F10 map to find the elevation.

Edited December 24, 2022 by Sandman1330

[baltic_dragon]

Hey! Thanks for this suggestion, but I am afraid I will keep using such a system only for longer missions. The reason being that this would require me to have twice the number of files per campaign and with any new bug coming out I would need to update them all, which is A LOT of extra work (and ED is keeping me busy with some new things being broken after each update). At that rate I would have to stop working on any new content and just spend time updating older missions.

 

Good way out is just to do an autostart and accelerate time if you don’t want to repeat the whole process (which can be tedious, I agree)…

[Sandman1330]

6 hours ago, baltic_dragon said:

Hey! Thanks for this suggestion, but I am afraid I will keep using such a system only for longer missions. The reason being that this would require me to have twice the number of files per campaign and with any new bug coming out I would need to update them all, which is A LOT of extra work (and ED is keeping me busy with some new things being broken after each update). At that rate I would have to stop working on any new content and just spend time updating older missions.

 

Good way out is just to do an autostart and accelerate time if you don’t want to repeat the whole process (which can be tedious, I agree)…

Thx BD. That is the tactic I do currently use, but it still proves quite tedious. I understand your viewpoint on it, even if it’s not the answer I wanted to hear

[g2k]

I actually like the long missions. It nice that some missions have short cuts for people, but I prefer not to. Great campaign!!!