Recursive restarts on Skirmish missions Thread - Vector Thrust

A bit of user error has led me to this discovery of having a Skirmish mission that is essentially never-ending.

When setting up the mission variables, I was treating the goal fields like I would in an Unreal or Unreal Tournament title. Which is to say that I made the assumption that if I put "0" in the mission goal, it would have no limit and thus last as long as I wanted it to.

I kind of got what I wanted. The mission technically never ended until pressing Alt-F4.

With a mission goal of "0" the mission begins in success, and fades to black, restarting shortly after; this repeats to no end.
I tried leaving the mission by pausing and selecting Quit, but this also restarts the mission. This happens to occur only when the mission goal is "0" as I'm able to quit a mission as normal when using any other number.

Thanks for point that out, if was already fixed, after the next update 0 value will mean no limit.

But regarding to the skirmish mode, it really was inspired in Unreal Tournament, but considering that, what are your thoughts about this mode?
Do you have any suggestions you like to add?

How about turning it into a custom mission thing? Putting bombers, ground targets and naval targets would make it very easy to build our own missions.

Would it be possible to have more than two sides on Team Deathmatch?

If I remember the system right, Falcon 4.0 would show four teams and a list on the left side of the screen.
You would select an aircraft on the list and drag it to whichever team you wanted it to be in.

I think this would at least make arranging teams in team-based gamemodes easier than it does to use what Skirmish uses now. The current system is however perfect for free-for-all game modes.

That aside, with the aforementioned UT inspiration, Skirmish is a great way to just jump in and have at a group of aircraft.

Edited by: SpootKnight

A bit OOT, but speaking about UT, I think it's a nice idea to have the 'Mutator' options for skrimish mode (i.e guns only, missiles only, sudden-death/instagib gun mode, homing gun bullet, force Zero-G mode, tiny/huge planes, etc)

MyHatismyFriend wrote: How about turning it into a custom mission thing? Putting bombers, ground targets and naval targets would make it very easy to build our own missions.

I'd suggest custom mission thing becomes something like "Quick Mission Builder" instead (as in the classic Jane's Fighter Anthology, Jane's USAF or even LOMAC); you only need to set the area & time, starting plane, amount/type of friendlies & enemies (and sometimes, AAAs and SAMs as well), starting altitude, distance/heading toward the enemy, etc, after that you're good to go.

Oh, and will it possible to make a proper "Quick Mission", where the game randomly sets the location, enemy, player aircraft, etc?

Edited by: Nergal01

In il2 sturmovik in quickmission you could choose between different types of target (dogfight, ground attack, scramble), then you chose number, types of aircrafts, you could also choose weather and altitude, and if you started from advantage( above enemy), or disadvantage (you started below enemy). It allowed for quick seting up a variety of scenarious. Something along those lines would be nice.

What these guys are saying is good, I'd like to have a quick-mission builder so the game could have some more variety, making for extra missions and the like. I used to play a lot of Aero Elite: Combat Academy, and that game had a similar system to what has been mentioned here: you would choose your plane, the map, the starting condition (flying, landed, on carrier catapult, on hangar and also some enemy-related positions, such as pursuing, intercepting or being pursued). The you'd choose the condition, time of day, number, type and difficulty of enemies, and also if you had or not wingmen, and how were their AI's. In that game we had four different wingmen AI's, with different levels, resulting in either you fighting to keep up to a string pilot, or you having to babysit a nugget trough a mission. Pretty fun if you ask me.

Also, it had a random mission generator, to keep the variety even higher. If somthing like that was to be added to Vector Thrust, I think the replay factor of this game would skyrocket!

There are great Ideas in here.

@ MyHatismyFriend, I assume you are looking for something like a setup wizard.
While it is not as flexible as a full-fledged editor, it certainly it will help making some types of missions.

@ SpootKnight, more than 2 sides can be added right away, the only problem for now it that is not possible do color code teams and they all will appear as “enemy color”.
The aircraft list option will also be improved to be possible to make selections list for every team.

@ V3000TT, yes mutator will give a interesting variety to the possible choices for skirmish matches
(one mutator I’m eager to pay with is the instagib)

Following the idea of MyHatismyFriend, this Quick Mission editor seams a good alternative to the skirmish mode, while the former focus in arcade style gameplay, the latter is more oriented to more realistic type of missions. And while we are at it, might as well add the possibility to save it as mission file, to be able to be manually improved by the user with the additions of story or other events.

The quick mission it is also a great idea, it is already being added in order to be available in the next update.

@ KLOC and @ Varyag, yes I agree in what you are saying. The more controls we have in generating the mission the better.

After seeing all of your suggestions, I already see the addition of two new modes.

Quick mission (or Mission Generator to avoid confusion), with the options to adjust the settings like you mentioned

And Quick Action, that randomly generates an infinite succession of missions based on Skirmish and Mission generator rules.