Just thought to drop some words regarding progress and future features.
As you all know by now, if you read my previous post, I'm working on the next build of "Mission-X" which will be focused on the Designer. This is not a bad thing, since if a designer has easier time to construct and test his missions, this will lead to more missions that will be uploaded to x-plane.org (hopefully) !!!
So lets see how the progress status so far:
- Debug Widget: Displays on going status of main mission info. This feature works quite well so the next phase will be feedback from designers.
- Cue Info: In a nutshell, these are simple OpenGL Lines/Circle that highlights the placement of special Events or targets.
For a designer this should be one of the better features, since he sees where key points in the mission are in the mission-x world, and anticipate the mission behavior. - Steps/Goto: Until version v1.20 every phase of the mission was named Objective, but the next revision will alter this to "Step".
Though this sounds like a syntax change, there is more to this than meets the eye.
One of the main things I also altered is the flow of the mission. From the next build you must name the Step and also give it an id ( so far ).
The flow will use the naming of the steps, and the id is for older flow to work until I'll revise their code too.
So now, when you define a mission you must have a Step by the names:
> start and end.
> Each step will have a nextStep attribute that will point to the next step the mission should continue when the current one is accomplished.
> GotoStep element allows you to alter the course of the mission while you are in the middle of the Step. This can be done inside an Event element, which means, you can define this at the "Step" level, or inside an AreaEvent zone (former AreaZone).
> Repeat attribute, defines how many time can a simmer loop over this step, before mission aborts.
This mechanism allow the designer a higher flexibility when designing a mission. The designer can:
- Loop over a certain Step until the step is achieved or mission aborts.
- Re-Use a step and then define a new nextStep of course from it.
This need much more testing by other designers, though I had done some tests on my own. More eyes in this case will make it bug free.
- Param & Expressions: There is a way now to define a parameter or expression that uses a parameter info or dataref info to calculate.
For example:
Dtaref: max_weight
Param: p1 = 300
EXP: exp1= #max_weight - #p1
The plugin will evaluate the expression when it is being called by a logical expression.
The weight defined in exp1 will be changed dynamically, according to the aircraft max weight allowed dataref.
You can also use exp inside expression, but no recursion is allowed, and there is a limit of five level of recursion, if the designer can pull this off.
I believe that after patching the mission data for almost two years, it is time to "normalized" it to a better structure that will be more readable and make better sense. What it wont do, is make the designer write less, the opposite is true in some cases.
This structure re-definition is a technical work that may take around a week or so, but first I need to finalize how each part of the data file should look like, what should be altered and what can be leave in peace.
I'll publish the new structure when I'll have more info about it, and it should be soon.
Oh, and another thing, I need to re-write the document from scratch, more or less, but this time the document will have less explaining and will be focused on the elements themselves with a short explanations.
Until Next time
Have a great simming.
Snagar