The mission and flight selection in offline missions is getting crowded and confused. Mission components from different mission.res files are mixed (not sorted together) in the selection screen. You know what I'm talking about if you fly offline and have a dozen or more missions for any given map. This could be easily addressed with some minor functional changes to the Mission / Flight selection screen in the game.
As of patch 2.16 the offline mission selection in the game includes two hierarchy levels:
The missions themselves are designed with four hierarchies, (Five if you count MAP as a level):
- Mission Group
- Mission
- Route
- Flight (display to arena may be "on" or "off")
Three ideas to address this problem:
- Utilize the "display to arena" attribute of a mission to control which flights are presented to the player. This should be done to hide Flight components the designer never intended a player to select.
- Sort the Mission components of a mission.res file together in the Mission/Flight selection. This would at least display together the mission components for a given mission design.
- Add an additional selection panel to the game for the Mission Group level. This would let a player pick a mission.res file to play. The subsequent Mission panel should then show only the mission components for the selected mission.res file.
There are lots of other things going on now at HTC, but these ideas have merit for consideration in the future of the offline missions world in Aces High.
