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SDOE Mission Making Tutorial - Part 1
by Scott VergeIf you set a waypoint to 250 mph and 5000 feet and the one before that is 150 mph at 1000 feet, the plane will try to go from 1000 to 5000 right when it hits that waypoint. You're not telling the plane where and how to be at the waypoint; You’re telling the plane how to ACT until the NEXT waypoint.
This also is true with bombing, sweep, and cap. Set your bombing waypoint a good ways ahead of the target and end it just after; that will set the plane in bombing mode and it will look for any targets in that area to bomb. It is the same with sweep and cap. It is a common mistake for people to just put a short piece of bombing run right over the target, but the bomber won’t have time to line up, open doors and drop that way.
You want to be sure to give a couple waypoints before the bombing run to give it time to get to the altitude you want. You might even have to zig-zag a bit or circle the airfield to give even more time or wait for fighter escort or the rest of the bombers to form up. So send them across to bomb La Touquet. Set up your waypoints like mine below.
A look at the waypoint madness, could have been done better but what can ya do?
Set your Bombing run narrow to keep it on the target you want. I have mine at 0.25 miles wide. Keep the waypoints before and after straight so the aircraft do not get confused in a turn. Click on the 3rd waypoint and use the Nav Tool (the little cross) to measure the bombing run, or while you are laying it out, you can see how far it is from the last waypoint in the lower right corner. Try and make it at least a couple miles. Now right-click on the town and change it to Axis and make it a mission objective at 20% for testing.
Make a new folder called "testing" in the missions folder just to keep everything neat and organized. As you can see, any folder you make in the missions folder will show up in the game for use. This also means that if you ever make a campaign, you can give it a folder to keep it separate from the other missions. Save it as "simple.mis" in the testing folder, and shutdown the mission editor to free-up system memory and CPU cycles.
First let's do a test run. When you get in the mission, hit Shift F6 to give AI control of your plane. The reason for this is to see how the mission plays without any human input and how balanced the mission is with just computer-controlled players.
With Alt-O you can see any objectives to test if you messed up and to see what the damage levels you'll need. Right now it should be showing “La Touquet 20%” the 20% gets crossed out when that much damage is done to the town and if that’s the only objective the game gives the Mission Won message. One more button combo: hit Alt-P to show frame rate so you can get an idea how hard the mission is on your computer (an important practice on large missions to measure the CPU drain).
A mission well done
After the Lanc's do their bombing run on the target, if they destroy or reach the mission objective, a “Mission Won” message will pop up. If you're having trouble, download my mission at this point and compare it to yours. Click HERE to download simple.mis.
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