Briefing questions

 

Briefings are where your mission begins and ends. The briefing tells the player what the mission is all about. Briefings can be provided by the Flight Officer, or the Cloaked Figure or by both. In TIE Fighter, the assignment the Flight Officer gives you define the primary mission goals, and the assignment by the Cloaked Figure relates to the secondary goals. The Cloaked Figure is also referred to as Secret Order Officer. Alternatively, these people provide you with hints and tips in the debriefing should you have failed your mission assignment, and provide you with information about what you did if you succeeded.

In the game, these briefings follow a format, that is the same for all missions:

Flight Officer briefing questions:

  • What are the mission objectives?
  • What craft will I be flying?
  • What opposition will there be?
  • What did we accomplish? (primary goals pass)
  • Any special instructions? (primary goals fail)

    Cloaked Figure briefing questions:

  • How may I serve the Emperor?
  • What did I accomplish? (secondary goals pass)
  • Any special instructions? (secondary goals fail)

    Personally I like to stick close to these, but you have absolute freedom in what you do with your briefing questions. The ony limitations you have to worry about are the maximum number of characters in a briefing question (which is about 950 including the question), and the maximum number of questions available (which is 5 per officer).

    IMPORTANT

    Note that TFW will not prevent you from creating messages a lot longer than what is possible. You should also note, that TFW will not do any word-wrapping. If you don't word-wrap your messages yourself, the text will run off the screen in the game. Testing to make sure you have it right is of paramount importance here.
     

     

    Setting questions

    If you go to the menu Briefing and select the option Briefing Questions you will see the window below.

    This window has 4 parts to it. In the top selection box marked Question Category, you can choose between four categories: flight officer and cloaked figure, pre-mission and post-mission. In Question Properties, you can select which question you wish to be editing. Next, you enter the question, and in the big box you enter the text for the question. The other two fields, Display When: and are are only available for post-mission questions. There you can select if the question is supposed to show up when the primary or secndary goals fail or pass. The unnamed items are irrelevant here.

    By default, the message text is displayed in a blue color. You can highlight certain words or set of words in a green color, by surrounding them with square brackets. In the following line, the words Victory Star Destroyer Redemption will be displayed in green:

    The [Victory Star Destroyer Redemption] will be on patrol in the Karron cluster.

    IMPORTANT

    There are a lot of missions in the Compendium, where there are empty lines between questions, so-called empty questions. Each time you select a question, a new line in the briefing is created, whether you actually fill the line with a question or not. These empty questions cannot be deleted with TFW, so be careful what you select. You can see the effect here:

    Should you accidentally click/create one anyway, you can either fill it with a question, leave it be (this will not affect the game in any way, it just looks less appealing), or you can delete the question using another editor such as TIEd.
     

    Good briefings are important to your mission. Not just the pre-mission briefing, but also the post-mission briefing if you failed the mission. Sometimes, that's the player's own fault for flying his T/F into an ISD or something, but sometimes the player would like some tips on how to win the mission. If then the post-mission briefing just says something like "You suck!" (and yes, I have seen this...) people will get annoyed with your mission, and you can kiss that nice review goodbye. Now of course you don't have to reveal every little detail about the mission, people still have to do something for themselves, but a hint or two won't hurt. You can point out a specific flight group they need to keep their eyes on, or suggest they go after a specific target first. Just fly lots of missions, and watch the post-mission briefings. Judge for yourself which you find to be useful, and which you find to be garbage you wouldn't feed a dianooga.

    IMPORTANT

    By default, in a new mission, TFW defines that no briefing officers will show up in the mission. You have to manually select which of the two figures shows up, by using the Options in the Briefing menu. Under Officers Present at Briefing you can select either the Flight Officer, the Cloaked Figure (Secret Order), or both. The other options in this menu have to do with animated briefings, we will get to those in due time.