The battle map is one of the topics I have not thought of yet because I didn't find an immediate solution to it.
The goal list, message log, and even the damage control screen are simple lists that you can scroll up or down and you barely need any interaction with them.
The map, on the other hand, is a 3D representation of the battlefield where you can move around, rotate, focus on different targets, etc. It has more involved controls.
While in TIE Fighter, the map paused the game, in XvT, and XWA it didn't.
I am not sure if there is much use for a map in one of the screens that you cannot control very well.

I could think on some "smart map" that requires minimal interaction:
- When on a screen, the map shows they whole battle. That means that it zooms out to show all ships involved.
- When an event happens, the map quickly zooms in to show the involved ship, stays there for a couple of seconds, then zooms out again.
- It could have a couple of buttons on top. Watch and General. The General button puts the map in the mode I just described. The Watch button puts the map in a mode that follows your current target, or yourself if you have no target.
- In watch mode, the map zooms in to those events that are related with the ship being watched. For example, if it is being attacked, it zooms on the attacking ship. If a new enemy ship enters the sector and has orders to destroy the watched target, the map zooms on that ship.

Alternatively, the M key would lead to a full screen Map with all the controls from the TIE Fighter game.

What do you think?

I like it. I don't see why those screens can't be like modern MFDs, and you can simply toggle between different functionality for them (or just turn them off if you don't like them). If you don't like the mission goals, switch that screen to a map. Or turn it off. Maybe a little bit more work coding up, but very likely worth it in the long run as far as pleasing a wider audience.

Yeah, you raise a good point - I hadn't thought about the controls.

In the original games, this isn't an issue because the map is it's own separate mode, so the same controls can be reused to move and zoom, etc.

If using an embedded screen, it would be virtually impossible to control from a conventional controller setup (for couch gamers or VR users) - I already had to jump through various hoops to try and map the existing control scheme to a theoretical system a few pages back; adding the map into something like that would be quite difficult. If someone is using the keyboard and mouse, it's less of an issue - I could imagine a scenario using direct mouse control for scrolling, for example.

I really like your idea of a smart map, though. It would address this situation for the controller-toting players by maintaining the map as a useful tool, and it would bring an extra dynamic element to the cockpit experience. I could imagine something like the in-flight map shown in Otaking's excellent TIE Fighter short film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN_CP4SuoTU, screenshot attached), with the briefing icons for most ships, and capital ships represented by some kind of wireframe. (I realise that he was inspired by the X-Wing series of games when creating the film.) Come to think of it, that's also quite similar to the editing view in Allied.

I like that map. It's basically like that on XvT, right? Small ships show icons, big ships show their models.

What would happen if shuttles' rear facing turret were actually functional?

Nothing good, that for sure... Geez!

Don't worry. It was just a test. :)

Ouch. That seems to hurt a lot. :D

There are two particularly cool things I love about that screenshot:

- Flying into a hail of laser fire always looks dramatic!

- The Nebulon B frigate off in the distance is tiny, and utterly dwarfed by the planet - gives the whole thing a really amazing sense of scale.

Yes. I like how the 3D planet backdrops add to the atmosphere of the mission. It kind of gives a context to the whole thing.

This mission, in the original, involves a frigate and 5 shuttles in the middle nowhere, in deep dark space. The "Grey world with two moons" sprite is barely noticeable in the original game. Even less in the XW98 version, where the higher resolution makes the planet sprite even smaller.
When you actual place a 3D planet there, with two actual moons that orbit it, some rotation movement and some interesting lighting effect, it actually makes the mission feel less generic and more urgent.

Indeed, the frigate is dwarfed by the planet. At the beginning you barely distinguish the ship from the ominous world behind it and its atmosphere. Then you see the shuttles rushing there. Now it feels like that planet is some kind of prison planet where they are taking Ackbar to, and the frigate is just the first stop.

Anyway, it's a first test. The planet shape could be rounder (you can distinguish now the vertices in its geometry in those screenshots), and we could probably do something more interesting with its shading. Perhaps even giving it a "night lights" texture for the night half of it, if it makes sense.

Now I really want to do interesting things with all planets that should appear during the missions, and randomize them a bit so that they don't repeat so much. In some mission you could have a ring world just shown far as background, while in another, you could be fighting just above its rings.
In missions involving asteroids (there are a few of them), I think we should really extend the asteroid field into the horizon, to give the impression that the asteroid isn't made up of just a dozen rocks, but millions of them (unreachable, but visible).

There is just so many cool things that we could do...

So I was thinking about what you were saying about randomisation of the planets, and revisited some previous comments I made in this area, and think I might have a solution that would benefit original missions as well as new ones developed specifically for XWVM - would welcome any thoughts on this.

When planets are created in the original game, they are given a display type (gray world, etc..) and can also be given an object name. If we took the object name, and compare it to a list of pre-defined planets (e.g. Tatooine or Alderaan), we could then give the planet the appropriate texture and properties at level load time. This would mean that where a planet has a defined canonical appearance (e.g. we know Tatooine is a desert, Coruscant and Nar Shadda are giant cities, etc...), then the appearance will be consistent with what the player would expect.

Alternatively, if the given object name doesn't match an existing planet name, then the object name string could be used as the seed for a random texture generator at level load time, which could then create the texture to be used in the mission.

If the missions are consistently defined and the planet names are carried forward between missions, the same texture will be generated each time, since the seed would be the same - so the planet isn't going to suddenly morph from a desert into a water world over the space of a mission. And, for planets given a unique name, they would automatically have a unique texture and give some variety when playing through campaigns.

This is also how pilot portraits are assigned in the DOS-Versions.

Didn't the assault shuttles that were introduced in TIE Fighter have a rear turret? Those things were a royal pain.

Very clever. We definitely need to do that! :)

Is anyone keeping track of all these features? Do you have a tracking repository or mantis/bugzilla/whatever set up? That might be a good idea, so lots of these great ideas don't get lost. When you're ready to open up the source for other contributors, that would make it much easier for them to jump right in, as well.

We will open the issue tracker as soon as the repository goes public. It is currently private, in BitBucket, until we get rid of all XWAU models we have in it, because we don't have permission to redistribute them.
Also, most of these issues and features belong to the "full game" project, that will start once the demo project ends with a release that is as polished as we can make.

There is still a while until that is done. I will be happy if once we release the first version of the demo, we can solve most of the avalanche of bugs that are going to be likely reported. :)
Once the most critical bugs are fixed and the most important features from the original games are implemented, we'll move onto adding brand new features.

I hope that made sense.

Yep, makes sense. I was just hoping you were keeping track of all this information somewhere other than just having to dig back through the forum thread again, even if it's for the full-game project that will come later.