It has been some time since I wrote here, its not that nothing was not brewing and going with Mission-X it was concentrating work on the Mission Generator part of the plugin, some vacations and the fun of VR flying, which I haven't done for quite some time.
So what is going on
Well, I decided to start writing my crazy and long Alaska Adventure. My idea to write it has been many years back but only now I'm writing it. Currently it is just in its skeleton part but at least the first adventure will be a long one that you will need to finish in days.
This adventure is meant to fly from Vancouver Alaska to Anchorage in a bush plane (yes you heard me right) but you can pick other prop type plane if you so choose.
The main idea is to enjoy the flight and the sites. I strongly suggest to use Ortho-photo Scenery to increase the visual part of the flight.
While working on the mission file, I came across the word "Leg" which in my case means "part of a track or course". Then I thought of the <goal> element which defines "something that needs to be done", but when I thought of it over, I begin to think that "<legs>" and "<leg>"
might be more appropriate to describe the "main goal" we need to do. So instead describing goal-A and goal-B, we should describe Leg-A and Leg-B that eventually will lead to the final Goal. I also hope that using these elements to describe the mission will make it simpler to comprehend when dealing first time with the plugins concepts.
In order not to break compatibility The plugin will support the <legs> and <leg> elements, hopefully in the next build.
More changes
The next build will allow you to order the mission file as you wish (well almost), you will be able to create one or more elements like:
<goals>
<legs>
<objectives>
<triggers>
<messages>
By doing so, you could design each "Leg" sequentially to make focusing on specific content much easier.
Here is an example of how we did it so far, there is only one root element for each type, one <goals> one <triggers> one <objectives> and so on. This makes life hard while designing a mission, it just hard to keep track of the changes and modifications.
As opposed to the old way, In the next screen shot you can see I defined three Legs (Goals) sequentially, that way I could focus only on one part of the adventure each time. The content was easier to track and fix if needed.
Until next time
Saar