As you maybe already know when I first created Mission-X it was to allow any simmer share their adventures with others. As the plugin got maturer I have added more and more features and today I see the plugin as away to let simmers have fun and reason to fly with their X-Plane planes.
The features that the plugin boasts so far are:
- Share your custom made adventure. This can be as simple or complex as the mission designer envision
- Takes long time to create.
- Higher production value.
- Constraint to specific locations. - Mission created from custom templates: The idea of a template is to let the designer define the outlines of the mission and a "Random Mission Engine" will create a mission file based on the template rules
- Shorter time to create a template
- High repeatability.
- In most cases, not restricted to specific location.
- Lower production level in terms of flexibility, sound and embedded code support.
- [subjective] satisfying for short adventures. - User automatic mission creation: This option allow the user to define set of rules that will create a template in memory and from it a mission.
- Immediate mission creation.
- Shorter missions will benefit the most.
- Low production quality.
- [subjective] very satisfying for short adventures.
My next goal for the plugin is to allow it to connect to the web and fetch flight plans from sites that supports free flight plan sharing. One such site is flightplandatabase.com.
The integration idea is to create a very simple mission based on the flight plan waypoints with minimal interaction with the simmer. The plugin will load the flight plan to the plane's FMS and the simmer can fly the route how they choose to, no string attached, no limitations... nothing. The last waypoint is the target, so mission will conclude when plane reaches the end location (which is marked by a 3D marker, so don't disable it in the setup).
- There is only one flight leg in this mission and the idea is to fly the route that others shared into "flightplandatabase.com" . It might be based on real routes or fictional ones, I have no idea.
- Duplication in flight plan is handled by the external site, so currently what you see is what we get from the site. I might add basic filtering ahead of time.
- In the mission there are minimal messages to the simmer. In fact there is only one message when you start the mission.
- There should be a visual marker only at the last waypoint, which is the destination ramp.
- Plugin does not interfere or grade your flight, it is up to you to fly it as intended.
- Waypoints are loaded automatically to the FMS.
- Date,time and weather defined by simmer, it is not in the database.
If you use this feature, please consider contributing routes to its database in "flightplandatabase.com", in a way it is a returned investment.
Known issue
Sadly, on X-Plane v11.41 in Windows OS, when I try to fetch flight plans from external site, I receive protocol error. To workaround this you will have to reload all plugins. It is an ugly workaround, which I'm not proud of, but it fixes the issue.
This did not occur on xp115x but this version is not final yet so who knows. This is why I think it is a conflict with other plugins or my x-plane settings. Strange.
A side effect for reloading all plugins is that "Fly With Lua" will need a manual "script reload" from its menu. This is a one time per X-Plane session, therefore I suggest to do it first thing if you want to use this feature.
Cheers
Saar