[karajorma]

Originally posted by mikhael
I've never seen one of those. I never jump out the goals are completed, I get a failure message or I get killed.

The only time I've ever seen one when playing normally is if I decide I want to hear the mission briefing again rather than just quickstarting the mission.

On the other hand when playtesting missions for people I deliberately go looking for them. If the mission designer hasn't considered what will happen if the player jumps out prematurely then in many cases the player can just jump out at the start of the mission and complete it. For instance in an escort mission the escort will still be alive so the player wins.

Originally posted by Goober5000
Well that was my original intent.  My core concern was relying too much on the boilerplate, yes, but a secondary concern was that jumping out early to save your skin should be tacitly accepted, not punished.  So I was sort of coming from both directions simultaneously, but the secondary concern is a lot harder to satisfy.

The problem, I suppose, is that FS2 isn't dynamic enough to allow that sort of decision on the part of the player.  In a real-life military situation such as in FS2, jumping out when your hull is at 5% should be allowed.  But since FS2 is a story told for the benefit of the player, the player has to jump through a certain number of hoops in order to experience it properly.

Yep. That's the real problem. To be honest I doubt many games could cope with the sort of situation FS2 deals with any better. Most similar games either simply regard the mission as failed in an equally static way or simply avoid the problem by not allowing the player to go AWOL in the first place. Personally I prefer the boilerplate to having [V] deal with the problem by saying that Command lock the jump drives of fighters until the mission is complete

Originally posted by Goober5000
I wonder how many missions you could allow that in.  In other words invisibly authorize an early departure as soon as it becomes clear the GTVA is winning, and then visibly authorize it later on.  You'd get yelled at but still be allowed to continue.

In most missions it would be tricky to decide if the player has done enough to progress because you need to decide if the remaining forces are strong enough. There could be a few situations where that could happen though.

On the flip side of the coin I do have a mission where the player is supposed to depart by docking with a carrier and recieves an AWOL debrief if he decides to jump out (Doesn't lose the player the mission but the CO does make some cutting remarks )

[TrashMan]

Originally posted by karajorma
On the other hand when playtesting missions for people I deliberately go looking for them. If the mission designer hasn't considered what will happen if the player jumps out prematurely then in many cases the player can just jump out at the start of the mission and complete it. For instance in an escort mission the escort will still be alive so the player wins.

This can easily be fixed by checking if hte ships waypoints are done AND if the ship has departed. That way he will fail if he jumps out despite the fact that the ships are still laive.

[karajorma]

Of course it's easily fixed. I never said that it wasn't. You've obviously completely missed the point I was making. If you've put in the check that the waypoints are done then you've obviously considered the fact that the player might leap out before the mission is complete which is the whole point I was making

However your solution is incomplete. If you leap out before the waypoints are done you get a No Debriefing for mission x message which is exactly the kind of poor planning I was on about in the first place.

You have to add the check AND put in a debriefing stage for if the check is failed.

[TrashMan]

Without a specific debriefing it would show the normal misison faliure debrief - nothing wrong with that.

[karajorma]

And yet again you completely miss the point that this means that the mission designer has thought about what happens if the player leaves before the mission is complete.

As for there being nothing wrong with giving the standard debrief have you not been reading the thread? I've posted several thousand words detailing all kinds of things that can go horribly wrong if you simply do that.

[TrashMan]

Just write the appropriate debrief that takes care of everything.. like so:

"You orders were to escort the convoy pilot! And that means following it to it's destination and guardin it from any harm - and you failed to complete your mission!"

See - this doesn't specificly say the convoy was destroyed - only that you failed the escort - which you did if you go away before you are finished.

[karajorma]

That's a standard AWOL debrief!

 All you've done is changed the wording. You give no information on the mission and you don't play any of the other debriefing sections. What's new in that?

[TrashMan]

The difference?

It can be used for both a standdard AWOL and miison faliure - thus a single debrfied stage for 2 things. Less work.

[karajorma]

You'd use that one liner as a failed debrief? Even if you expanded it to make it longer it says absolutely nothing about why the mission failed (not even if the ship you were escorting was destroyed or not!). A good failure debrief should be more than "You failed, try again" It should go into depth on why you failed, which ships were destroyed, what you could have done better.

From what you're saying above it appears that you're sacrificing well thought out, high quality debriefs in order to save yourself from the effort of making a couple more debriefing stages.

I find it ironic that Goober started this thread because he felt that people were producing inferior briefings in a desire to save themselves work and the only person still arguing with me about anything similar to the idea is producing briefings inferior to even the standard FS2 AWOL and failure messages as a result.  

Oh and check you PMs while you're at it.

[TrashMan]

You misunderstood - that line would be the first in the full true mission faliur debrief (in that case there are more stages that go furhter into details), but in case of an AWOL, only this shows.

thus you have one debrief stage less, but you still have practicly 2 different debriefs for AWOL and normal mission faliure

[karajorma]

Don't see much point in doing it that way. All you've really done is make it so that your version of the AWOL debrief plays regardless of whether you fail or go AWOL from a mission.

Personally I would find that the vague language I'd have to use in the AWOL debrief would spoil the flow of the rest of the debrief but fair enough we're down to a difference in style rather than simple laziness or poor understanding of FRED so I can't complain at you for it