I second the interest for level bombing and reconnaisance missions. It's not something we need on release, but it would be nice to have the pieces ready for later inclusion into the sim, through updates or community efforts.
The way i think about it is that you could press the camera key and a jpg is taken, according to where the camera is located in your aircraft. If the new online mode they are talking about is a campaign mode, this would be vey nice to have.
As long as the sim is moddable, it could be done by the community as well. The way i'm envisioning it is something like this. You have the online dynamic campaign manager, which keeps track of important parametes in the server. These things could be few or many and i guess that just like IL2's server managing tools, we'd be seeing more and more complexity added by the community. For example, it could start out as simply monitoring available aircraft for each team and gradually evolve to take into account serviceable or written off aircraft, maybe even aircraft under repairs and available ammo and fuel. I used to play an MMO game that was very complex and a load of things like that are kept in check via XML databases. Of course, this means increased data and bandwidth but not by much, since you don't need this kind of data to actually fly. It would only be useful for the campaign planning menu where you post sorties for the team to fly and for determining if you can use a certain aircraft or loadout, depending on availability.
So, instead of coordinating with your fellow flyers on how to fly a single, objective based DF map, you could coordinate on a bigger scale and plan sorties in sequence for an entire multiplayer campaign. For example, the blue team is giving you trouble by raiding your ports and you lose a lot of supplies because of those Ju88s. Some pilots decide to follow them back from a distance and they spot their airfield, but they can't go too close because of the flak. They tell you about it on voice comms so that the rest of the team can prepare a strike. Being a risk-taker, you decide to fly the recon mission. You get in your recon spitfire or mosquito, take off, climb to 30000ft and head for the airport. Snapping the photos you turn for home as the flak starts zeroing in on you.
Landing back at the base, the film is finally available. You load the planning screen,type a title for the mission and fill in the rest of the details. Number of aircraft needed, type, loadouts, fuel and waypoints, it's like a simplified mission builder. Opening up the jpg photos you snapped on your recon run, you mark the compass points in the corner of the picture for reference, as well as the target's main areas interest, like parked aircraft, runways and fuel dumps in white (the photo is black and white). You also mark the flak guns in red.Finally, you type a briefing and press "post". At this point, the mission is visible to your entire team and anyone can choose to fly it. The system is free-form, so people might choose to spawn on the correct airfields or use alternate ones. What they do get by clicking "accept mission" is the anotated map, photos and briefing in their kneepad. They can also add notes of their own if they want or delete existing ones and re-distribute it among themselves, so that for example a bomber pilot can mark known flak concentrations as red circles in the map, a fighter pilot can delete the information he doesn't need and keep only the essentials and if more people decide to participate they can add their own waypoints to rendezvous with the strike from an alternate airfield, in order not to overcrowd the primary base. For bombers, having a detailed map and a set of navigation tools like those found in the Silent Hunter titles would be very useful and they would be able to make adjustments to their flight plan while flying. For fighters this is not very realistic and maybe the amount of tools and the accuracy of maps should be limited, but i guess that even a single-seater pilot has a pen, a ruler and maybe an angle measuring tool to help him keep notes on his kneepad.
If such a campaign front-end could be coded and moded into the sim at some point for multiplayer, it would be awesome. It's like having a 24/7 DF server that you can join whenever you like plus the realism of coops in one gameplay mode.
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