Campaign Distinction on In-Game Downloader

[jaxa]

nb mentioned that Bikerdude should package his St. Alban's missions together, and that led to me wonder whether the in-game downloader should have filters and labels (metadata = solo/campaign) to distinguish packaged campaigns from individual missions once they become available.

 

1. Lets you find campaigns when you are looking for them exclusively.

2. Lets you know ahead of time (if that info wasn't in the description) that the download is a campaign.

3. Possibly associates contained missions with individual missions, see below.

 

Here's another consideration. Will mission authors intend for campaigns to replace individual missions as updates or generate some sort of alert? The downloader already fetches updates for pre-existing FMs and displays them for download. Perhaps campaign package downloads could point to all the individual missions contained within in order to facilitate some sort of action. On the other hand, Bikerdude and others have created missions not necessarily intended to be played in a specific order.

 

All of this (screenshots, descriptions, metadata) is handled on the server/mirror side, so it shouldn't have an impact on mappers unless they did something weird like drop/merge missions, right?

 

Edit: Presumably mappers give their consent for missions to be hosted over the in-game downloader mirrors, so it's up to them to choose whether to replace missions with campaigns or have them all uploaded.

Edited August 13, 2011 by jaxa

[grayman]

Excellent idea.

 

Players need to know which missions are part of a campaign, so they don't play them out of order.

[Bikerdude]

Here's another consideration. Will mission authors intend for campaigns to replace individual missions as updates or generate some sort of alert?

I would expect if I combine mine into a campaign it would replace the original single missions.