It has been some quite time since I last update this site or the plugin, well main reason was the need to take some time off after "FlightOfImagination" published his fantastic mission "The Ice Chapter One: NZCH to NZIR - Mystery on the Ice" which pretty much raised the bar of what can be achieve with the mission plugin.
During my "absent" I did some internal rework and re-code to better use the "XML" concept not just as a mission file but also internally as away to communicate between the different parts of the mission code. In away the benefit was minimizing the need to parse the XML file and then rebuild it when storing a savepoint.
So does it mean nothing new ?
Mostly not visually, I have done minor modifications to the graphical Cue so a designer can locate where he/she started their event area, that way it should be easier for them to know which way their coordinate where going (clockwise or counter clockwise). '
I have done some extensive tests on this build, but until it will reach designers and other simmers it is hard to know if it works as expected.
What was changed?
- Backward compatibility should not work. Use the new element/attributes naming.
- Old save games won't load since I changed the way the save file is created.
- MXPAD code has been removed.
Designers: Please read the designer guide and see the naming convention changes, it should be a simple find/replace to overcome most of the incompatibility.
Random mission templates should work, since I updated them to the latest naming convention few versions back.
Future plans ?
My plane is to publish the next build as a beta so others could test and use it I also want to give some love to the random mission screen, mainly to add an "option" screen that will allow each simmer to:
- Define the maximum radius to search for a navaid (set of per-defined distances).
- Show/Hide target marker.
- Number of flight legs to build. This is not yet implemented in code since it means that the user will override the template logic so this is still a TBD option.
This is not the final list only some thoughts of what I would like to implement. I have other ideas but the UI is a limiting factor, which means that after the next version will be stable I will try to add some UI buttons/widgets to enhance it.
I wish LR will provide a good SDK with their next graphical API so we could focus on our plugins instead of the UI (this is probably not a day 1 feature that they can publish, but I really think they should define the standard for us).
Until next time
Happy simming
saar