Show me where a slot will make me spawn when selecting it, on the actual map, before spawning.

[Surfingnet]

Few days ago I spawned on a server in an apache in a FARP which was under heavy enemy fire. Unfortunatly the server counts lost aircrafts for realism reasons. I could have prevented that from happening if I could have seen that the spawn point of the helo on the map was actually surruonded by red armored vehicules. But the spawn point was "ground" so I couldn't figure it out and just look at it in the spectator map. Also some servers don't allow looking at the spectator map. We could have a little square map, on the edge of the screen when selecting a slot, with just a little fraction of the actual F10 map, centered on the current selected slot's spawn position, and it would go away once we click "briefing". Would be very helpful.

[skypickle]

+1

[cfrag]

On 1/6/2023 at 2:36 PM, Surfingnet said:

Few days ago I spawned on a server in an apache in a FARP which was under heavy enemy fire. Unfortunatly the server counts lost aircrafts for realism reasons.

I believe these are two independent points, and they come together to create an unfortunate situation that worsened the situation from the mission's perspective. From what I infer what happened is that the point which you chose to spawn from quickly caused the loss of an additional airframe, and this - as a consequence to the mission parameters - worsened the tactical situation for that side.

While I think it would generally be a great idea if we could get some 'live video feed' or 'tactical view' from the intended airfield that we are about to spawn from (and if we somehow can figure out how this can't me misused), the issue you had is a conflux of two independent events:  a) a mission which counts airframe losses as a tactical item and b) the ability to spawn on contested airfields. 

In this particular case, I think a solution would be if the mission designer took note and disallowed spawns on contested airfields, because it negatively impacts their mission design parameters. It's squarely the responsibility of the mission designer to look out for, and hopefully they are already hard at work correcting this oversight (it's not terribly difficult to selectively block spawn points via script in MP, and good example code abounds)

Now, in addition to that, and completely independent from the issue above, yes - I'd also love to see an optional ability to get a 'live view/tactical view' from the intended spawn point as a DCS feature. Or simply color-code slots: red blocked, amber contested, green clear. On can wish