A question by hack-wizard brought up an interesting question in mission design. How should you present choices to a player?
To be honest, maybe I'm rather old school but I'm not a fan of using the promptbox to present a choice to the player. I tend to feel it's too easy to end up in a situation where you're giving the player a dialogue like this....
What do you want to do?
1. Save tech transport.
2. Save refugees.
Which I don't much like. Yeah you can change the dialogue so that it's not so obvious what you're doing but you have rather obviously given the player two choices. I would handle things in different ways.
1. Make it an SOC style loop choice. - We have the controls already to offer the player a choice between two missions. You'd simply write a briefing that allows you to volunteer for a mission to save the refugees. If the player didn't, then they'd go to save the tech transport.
2. Give the player a choice where to in-mission jump / autopilot to, the location of the refugees or the tech transport. You could easily use the WCS style autopilot code to do this.
Anyway, if I'm wrong and there are some good ways to do this sort of thing using the scriptbox, I'd be interested in hearing them. Especially since it was the method that everyone seemed to suggest. I'm always worried about making things look too much like "Press X to pay respects" so I tend to base mission branching on player actions rather than choices. So how would the other mission designers present choices?