"No force from mission" not respected by campaign

[Nealius]

Revisiting the campaign to unpleasently find that "No force from mission" isn't working on Fear the Bones--perhaps other campaigns as well. Blackouts on cat launches are occuring due to G-effects being enforced on by the campaign, but I have them off in my user settings.

Labels may be affected as well. I can't see squat in VR until within 3nm and need to use dot labels, which may also be enforced off by the campaign missions.

[Reflected]

None of these can be addressed within the mission editor. It's all core DCS stuff.

Labels are not enforced by the mission BTW.

[Nealius]

@Reflected I checked mission options in Mission 4 and G-effects is set to "Enforce--Simulation." This should be unchecked so the user can select G-effects of their preference, which at the moment is off due to the cat-shot GLOC bug. 

EDIT: Out of curiosity I just checked missions 2, 3, and 5. Those have G-effects not enforced in the mission options, so it looks like it's only a Mission 4 (so far) issue.

Edited June 4, 2023 by Nealius

[Reflected]

Yeah, but why there is a cat shot blackout bug in the first place, and why isn’t the override box working?

[Nealius]

The override box may have been created from the viewpoint of still allowing mission creators to override the user's override via the "enforce" box in the mission options. Makes sense for multiplayer but not for singleplayer.

Edited June 4, 2023 by Nealius

[wowbagger]

I guess the point is that ED has no interest in this. I have raised it a couple of times and it has been 100% ignored. So the answer would be for campaigns to come with settings they should  be played with, but not enforced. Players can always set their settings to how they want to play, but not if they are enforced. It's really that simple.

Another campaign maker responded with something like 'well, some players say they can't help themselves from cheating <sic>, so I force those settings', which is so ridiculous that I have stopped buying their campaigns altogether.

There has to be a way forwards so that campaign makers can produce the experience they want to create, but players can get what they want from the campaign they have bought.

Overall, in my experience, Reflected takes a sensible approach with respect to labels and such. The blackout thing is a stupid bug that should have been squashed a while ago. But that's another point. More flexible options in the settings allow us to better work around the multitude of bugs which campaign makers and player have to routinely deal with.

Edited June 28, 2023 by wowbagger

[Reflected]

SOME settings NEED to be enforced otherwise the missions may be broken. But I don’t understand why ED would give us an override option if it doesn’t override. 

a setting is either enforced by the mission or if not it uses theuser’s setting. There is no middle ground. 

i’m gonna start updating my missions’ settings but with so many out there it’s gonna take a while. 

Edited June 28, 2023 by Reflected

[wowbagger]

30 minutes ago, Reflected said:

SOME settings NEED to be enforced otherwise the missions may be broken. But I don’t understand why ED would give us an override option if it doesn’t override.

Totally agree. Look at how much confusion and frustration it causes. If it does nothing, at least remove it from the settings page.

[Reflected]

Long train of thought to follow, not aimed at anyome here specifically, I just feel like I have to share this based on some recent experience:

I do understand why e.g. Labels should never be enforced. Or padlock.  Everyone has different displays, gear, etc. And to a point, everyone should be able to customize the experience to their preference, I agree. 

but I get a feeling that these days people forget there is a limit. I mean how much can you expect a campaign, - which is basically a story - to be customizeable? I can’t AAR, so I don’t want to. I love AAR. I wanna start in the air because I’m busy. I want a full cold start. I want an easy campaign and lots of banter. I hate banter, I want a realistic experience. I’m a noob I want easy enemies. These enemies are not challenging enough. I wanna fly with a hooman friend. I don’t havee friends.  I could go on. Damned if I’ll try to please everyone, because that’s impossible. 

Let’s be fair, when you buy a ticket to watch Titanic, you don’t complain that the director forced a sad ending on you, you would have preferred it to reach the USA safely and you’re entitled to your own preferred way of entertainment. It was a very extreme example but you get my point. 

some triggers count how many bombs you dropped. If you have unlimited weapons it’s all broken. Some missions are built in a way to force the player into a low fuel situation, otherwise the situation wouldn’t make sense at all. Easy comms make a complete mess of custom voice overs and custom atc because all of a sudden you can hear all freqs at once. Chaos. Civilian traffic can also mess with road targets because the player wouldn’t be able to tell which one is the real target and which one is a ghost.  The F10 map is the only detailed map available in order to navigate by dead reckoning, if I see the icons there it’s all ruined. And yes it takes an extra bit of effort to find your way home like real pilots did, but according to user feedback this has given people more enjoyment and sense of accomplishment than the actual shooting down of enemy aircraft. Not to mention you can still locate yourself using the kneeboard marker. 

and none of these has absolutely anything to do with AI shortcomings or the user’s gear. I will definitely allow immortality though, because THAT can be a good workaround for the AI’s occasional lapse in judgement. But the rest? Please. 

If some people made as much effort to actually accept the challenge as they make fighting for things they think they’re entitled to, God forbid, they’d actually realize fun can be had slighty outside of their comfort zone.

I mean we’re in a study sim where it took me over half a year to learn how to fly the Viper…and people complain they can’t fly back to England without F10 icons? Fly northwest, there will be some water, and then land again  Congrats, you’re in England  

bottom line is, the more I try to please everyone at the same time, the deeper I get into a rabbit hole. I need to draw a line in the sand. Figure out what kind of story I want to tell, what kind of experience I want to build and stick to that. Then do it giving it a 110%.  Then it’s everyone else’s right to decide whether they want to see ‘Jurassic Park’ or they’d rather enjoy a romantic comedy. I’m not doing this for the money and my aim is not to make every single DCS player buy my campaigns. There are absolutely no hard feelings if someone says it’s not their cup of tea. I can only hope there are a few like-minded people who’d enjoy the experiences I create. 
 

PS: if you read all of it, wow…thanks!

Edited June 28, 2023 by Reflected

[wowbagger]

Quick question about the F10 map. With the changes over the past year, do you know if it is possible to mark flight plan waypoints on the map (should someone want to do so) so that they are still visible when the mission is being played? Didn't they add the ability to draw and write on the F10 map? I haven't tried that yet. The kneeboard map is essentially useless and for whatever reason, even with no restrictions, the player's flight plan is the only one that won't show up on the F10 map - and ED have confirmed this is by design  .

 

edit: And just to clarify, the things I think should be up to the discretion of the player are labels and external views. Those impact the experience more than any others and I don't see how they can break missions. And if they do break a particular mission, then lock them for that one, but not all. Again this is TOTALLY not directed at Reflected. But others have been insistent on these settings, which baffles me.

Edited June 28, 2023 by wowbagger

[Reflected]

Agreed, those should definitely not be enforced. Good question about the F-10 map, let me look into it.  Maybe the mission maker can draw on ot. 

[Reflected]

@wowbagger you gave me an idea. I tried the new drawing tools to draw the flight plan on the F10 map - so even if you don't see your icons, you can still see the route and zoom in and out.

Well, it doesn't look so good. I can draw the lines fine, but every textbox remains the same size as I zoom, so it looks pretty messy.

I can contact ED to give us an option to automatically display the flight plan on the F10 map though. Like a native support. I think that would be best, rather than manually drawing lines in 80 missions.

This is mainly for WW2, for modern day missions you don't really need this, you have INS, HSD, you name it. Easy.

 

[wowbagger]

Thanks for looking into it.

Good luck with ED. We raised the issue of the player's flight plan not being visible on the F10 map (even though you can see all the AI flight plans) a while ago and were told it is supposed to be this way.   Despite the fact that it is inconsistent and some of the older missions definitely show the player's flight plan.

On 11/11/2020 at 2:48 PM, wowbagger said:

Sorry, could you please expound on that a bit? It doesn't show our own waypoints by design?

cheers

On 11/11/2020 at 2:58 PM, BIGNEWY said:

Correct, it only shows for AI

 

Edited June 30, 2023 by wowbagger