More Options for Communicating Mission Information

[Exorcet]

This topic comes from my experience creating missions. DCS has a powerful flag system that can be used for many things, but I keep finding that I need scripts to trigger flags for specific things.

One example is signaling that the AI has completed its mission. Take for example AI on a strike mission being escorted by the player. It would be ideal for the AI to communicate the completion of its mission to the player so the player knows to leave. You can do this with triggers but the options for doing so aren't ideal:

-Target destroyed > requires strikers survive, attack target, and hit target. If this is not triggered there is no message to indicate that something went wrong

-Bombs in zone > Can be falsely triggered by bombs from other aircraft (and possibly jettisonned bombs, I don't remember now) is also finicky when you need to evaluate multiple bombs (and you need to consider what happens if a plane is destroyed and a different number of bombs than expected enter the zone).

-Group in zone > You can check that the AI is close to target, but then this will go off even if the AI fails to engage its mission

The solution that is best is to write an event handler that looks at multiple things. It's great that this is an option and it works well, though sometimes there are debugging issues and even with a library of scripts it seems like I somehow always find a need for something new.

An alternative would be to add some additional AI communication options to missions and flag triggers:

Message on Task start/end - Tell the AI to send a message (or use the text messages) when a task is started or finished, or a certain amount of time after the start/finish

Message when under attack - AI (or text message) announcement that they are under attack or even just being tracked by hostiles.

Message when unable to perform mission - Message when losses are too great to continue mission. Might also apply to fuel or weapons.

Ideally these would have their own prerecorded radio messages so they would be played by the AI naturally. Some emotion would also help from just having these messages fade into background radio chatter. For example when taking losses they should sound concerned and not speak in a flat tone. Tying to radio would also allow the messages to be tied to frequency properly, enhancing realism and immersion.

Additions like this would be a huge improvement for complex missions where the result isn't scripted and there is some intentional ambiguity in the design of the mission itself. The player can't be expected to work in a vacuum and needs to help from allies to build a picture of what is happening in order to respond correctly.