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Mission Pointers and area sensibility

Horst18519

Horst18519

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As I was reading P-12C's blog (sorry, couldn't find your real name;)) I came across the question I asked myself several times allready: Is it unrealistic to use the mission pointer?
I think for beginners the pointer is a great tool, but pros are likely to turn it off.

BUT:

There are a lot of missions, that are practically unflyable without using the mission pointer.

Let's take for example the "lost in the triangle"-mission.

I turned off the pointer and found myself 50 miles east of the target area just because I didn't hit the VOR within the trigger-area and the copilot didn't say anything anymore.
OK, I flew back and hit the VOR, so the Co told me to fly the first leg. But with the directions he gives it's quite impossible to hit the small trigger-area for leg2. Again, if you don't hit that area, you'll gonna fly around the world without being informed that you may have missed something...

For this sort of mission I think we must use "runover"-areas which tell the pilot that he is flying too much east or south - like it is done in tut12 for example.
If we want our missions to be flyable without the pointer we better secure that people are able to hit the trigger-areas without having to fly search patterns for them.

What do you think? Are your missions flyable without the pointer?
 
I agree.

In missions like the search & rescue, I also note that the co-pilot may spot the shipreck before me, and announce it, but I have no idea if it's to port or starboard. He just yells, "There it is"! But MS always leaves things for us to build and improve on, and this is half the fun of it!

Patrick
 
I think you're right that in some scenarios it's extremely difficult to hit the areas without the pointer. I think we got into a bad habit of making the areas to small in general, although if they are too big and you hit them at the ends of the range then the other follow-on areas may be missed...

The solution of on and off track will work, it's just more work to do which is why we failed to provide that in many cases (too many missions to cover all the off course possibilities). You could use a property trigger based on heading or a heading range which would probably be more realistic too.

I don't think a lot of users even know how to turn off the pointer and compass...

Lastly when the co-pilot makes comments on seeing something, we didn't want to overcomplicate the property triggers that would be required to figure out where the user was in relation to the object, so we usually tried to just use cardinal directions (to the East) instead and rely on the user looking at the DG or compass to figure it out. Even with that it's easy to be off by alot if the area definition is big.
 
Thanks for your reply.

I think you could make a trigger for each and every position the user is (looking at), and 20 different wavs for each direction the copilot would have to say ("over there, heading 210, 500f!" :D). I'd say the missions are a good compromise, but for people who put a lot of time in a mission it might be a good idea to get more triggers involved.
 
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