Jib,
As the mission designer, Microsoft gave you many options when it comes to Points of Interest. You can activate them all at the beginning of a mission if that is appropriate for the mission. You can also activate them in sequence if that is important to the plot of your mission.
Because you have so many options, it is somewhat more complicated to have Points of Interest do EXACTLY what you want, when you want.
If it is your desire to have Points of Interest activate only at certain times during your mission, there is a fairly easy way to do this, but it does require some additional setup.
Essentially, there are two elements to a POI:
* the POI icon itself (its location, name, its size, its type, its order in the rotation etc.)
* the activation of that POI (deciding when and how it appears)
(You don't need any waypoints for POI's, because they don't move. Once the POI becomes activated, the Mission Compass will automagically provide the user with a vector to it and tell them how far they are from it.)
Here's an example: Let's say that you want two Points of Interest. Let's say further that you want to control exactly when they appear; and that they won't appear at the beginning of your mission.
The first step would be to create the two individual Points of Interest; set them where you want them to point; and ensure that they are not activated.
For the next step, you need to create a PointofInterestActivation action for each POI that will turn on the Points of Interest when you decide. (Don't confuse PointofInterestActivation actions with ordinary ObjectActivation actions. They serve two slightly different purposes ... with the benefit that a PointofInterestActivation action is slightly easier to set up.)
One way to "turn on" a second POI when a user reaches the first POI is to create an AreaRectangle around your first Point of Interest, and then create a ProximityTrigger bound to that area that has as one of its actions the activation of the second point of interest whenever the player enters that Area.
In this example, the sequence of the mission elements you would create would be as folllows:
1) Create POI #1 in its location, give it a Target Name and cycle order
2) Create POI #2, give it a Target Name and cycle order
3) Create the first PointofInterestActivation action and set the ObjectReference to POI #1 (this allows you to turn on POI #1 whenever you want based on any trigger you decide ... you will usually turn on POI #1 at the beginning of your mission. Not always, but usually.)
4) Create the second PointofInterestActivation action and set the ObjectRefernce to POI #2 (this allows you to turn on POI #2 whenever you want, using any trigger you decide).
5) If you want to turn on POI #2 when the player reaches POI #1, create an Area Rectangle around POI #1 as large as you want (the goal here is simply to detect when the player has reached POI #1)
6) Lastly, create a ProximityTrigger for that Area Rectangle that has as one of its actions the activation of POI #2 that you created in step 4.
This is one way you could do it - but there are also other ways. You could, for example, activate the second POI with a Property Trigger that detects when the user reaches a certain altitude ... or reaches a certain airspeed. It's totally up to you how and when you decide to activate POI #2. Use any type of trigger that you decide makes the most sense for the given scenario in your mission.
You have several other options as well. For example ... with Points of Interest and the Mission Compass, it is possible to allow (and conversely to not allow) the user to cycle through all currently activated Points of Interest by pressing the K key. There will be times when you want the user to be able to cycle through them. There may also be times when you decide that whenever a Player reaches a Point of Interest ... that POI should "go away" forever and is never needed again and for whatever reason, you don't want the user to cycle through it again. That is also possible (by de-activating it using an ordinary ObjectActivation action).
As a practical matter, I usually don't add POI's until my mission design work is almost complete. I don't create The POI's and the other elements associated with them until I am certain that the plot of my mission isn't likely to be further changed (this cuts down on the editing of them if you later decide to change the mission.)
There is a lot of flexibility with POI's - so, naturally, there are many decisions that you have to make with respect to them, and if you decide that you want total control over every aspect of the POI, then it's a little more complicated to set up.
One additional note: In testing Microsoft Flight Simulator X with users before the game was released, many users provided feedback to Microsoft that they were often confused about where to go and what to do during some missions and that this detracted from their experience. It was for this reason that Microsoft "invented" the Mission Compass. Every mission should have a Mission Compass and Points of Interest (the users who do not want this help can always turn it off.)
I hope this has been helpful. Good luck with your mission.
Kevin D. Greene
http://fsxmissions.blogspot.com
