Have been doing a lot of the background work, and started incorporating some of the main memory routines to keep track of what is going on. There is a LOT to be done, but I started doing some parameter passing and decided on the look of the Flight Summary screen. I know it is a bit simplistic for now but I think it will get the job done.
I entered a few flights to test the ability to retain and save information. The visual aids tell you whether you are flying for the Red of Blue team. You can pick any of the 24 available flight Groups, which all of course can be Cloned/Copied. On the Country selection, this simplifies things if you want the mission to have two defined teams, although you will see you are not stuck to your choices.
You can have the defaults which are selected for each plane… for example, a Ki-43 will go to the IJA by default, and if you were editing for the Red team, the default capture team for the Ki-43 would be the French.
Well maybe you want to “force” all red Planes to be of a particular country instead of changing that for each flight group… and wouldn’t it be great if all the enemy teams were of a particular country as well when you are picking planes?
In the case above, it is the RAF vs Germany… maybe you want a Channel or BoB scenario. You can pick a custom country from the full BAT/WAW selection as you can see below…
You can also use the same mission to play for the Blue team. In this case I picked the Bf-109 Escorts for the He-111s…. see below
Note it is the same mission, but now it indicates that the Player flight is Flight Group 2, which has 8 planes… Also note that the Country selection is switched so that it is easier to see the perspective of the player… and just as in the Red example of the same mission, you still have the Germans vs the RAF. It takes a lot of coding to make this work… but it is very satisfying to finally get it to work…
Of course you have the full choice of custom Blue countries from BAT.
OK… Let’s do something BAT/WAW-ish. Say you want to define custom countries instead of the presets you saw so far. You select Pick Country For Each Team. In this case let’s have the Brazilians fighting the Italians (that happened… although most of the enemy engagements were with Germans in Italy).
We pick a flight of 6 Brazilian P-47s… And pick that as the new player flight… so it is in the Red team
The underlying message is that you are not stuck with your choices, you can customize what you want… But say you want a mission with Three USSR flight Groups vs 1 German FG, 1 Hungarian FG, and 1 Romanian FG… you can use the presets to help you select planes faster because they will take the countries you have selected… although you could just have defaults, or you could pick whichever country/regiment you wanted.
Something else I did for good measure, but that was a pain to implement was that if you are in the Flight Editor… say you pick the Royal Navy… then you pick a regiment in the royal navy… but you decide to pick a regiment from the Royal New Zealand Air Force instead… well the country scroll menu will go to the correct RNZAF selection… it is helpful.
Anyway, lots going on, but I am taking a break this weekend to take care of family. Have a great WW2 Aviation Day.
(Note the routine to go through the available Squadron and Flights has not been implemented, so that is why you see the repeat "1/1" flights of the same regiments. That will be fixed. Although I implemented it differently in UQMG classic, I think I'll be able to use an adaptation of the logic in the old code. I Created the routines to save the data from the Flight Editor and Waypoint Editor Flight Groups to memory arrays, this stuff is a few steps beyond prototype. Now the challenge will be to create the loading procedures for the forms so that you can consistently edit the objects in UQMG. I'll start working on that soon. Something that I am avoiding is relying on the text displays like I did in UQMG Classic, which caused me to shoot myself in the foot when trying to update things... it was very hard to do that. So now whenever possible I am using IL-2 codewords, such as Java Class Names, Short name codes for aircraft, weapon codes, etc... that way updates will be easier even if the textual info changes. At least that is the intent.)