Inflight messages

There are two types of in-flight briefing messages in TIE Fighter:

the messages that you receive when you complete/fail your primary mission goals, or when you complete your secondary mission goals.
other in-flight messages, like radio chatter, etc

End-of-mission messages

The first category of messages can be used to give the player some information. For example, in the first mission of the game, after you inspect the cargo ships, you get a message saying you did a good job inspecting the first wave of freighters, and a message saying you can return to base, or help with the capture operation. If you forget to inspect any of these ships, it also makes a similar remark.

You can add these messages by clicking on the Mission menu and selecting End of Mission Messages:

Here, you can add a total of six messages: 2 for completing primary goals, 2 for failing them, and 2 for completing the secndary goals. You can use them, but you are not obligated too. Often, I don't use them for failing primary goals, because I want my message to be a bit more specific. If there are two or three ways of failing your primary goals, a message here usually can't be very specific as to what part of the mission you failed.

Other in-flight messages

The second category is used for a lot of different things. You can send messages at the start of the game to alert the player the action is about to start, you can simulate radio chatter between wingmen, or you can alert the player that an important craft has entered the arena, or is taking hits.

You can add up to 16 different in-flight messages, by clicking on the Messages tab of your mission window. There, you can add and delete messages via the New and Delete buttons, or change an existing by double-clicking on it.

When you double-click on a message, you can change just about everything. For starters, you can change the actual message.

WARNING

TFW will let you type very very long messages, but in the game, you are limited to the length of a line. This means you have only about 60 characters available. Also important to know: the game will automatically append a period to your message, so you will not have to type that in yourself. The exception here is when your last character is an exclamation mark (!) or a question mark (?).

The Short Message field is optional. If you leave it empty, your full message will show in the messages window. If you do fill in something, the short message will show on the messages tab, and not the message itself.

You can also specify the Message Color. So radio messages by Rebels can be colored green, and messages by the species with the blue IFF code can be colored blue.

Last of all, you have two conditions avalable. Your in-flight message will appear as soon as both conditions are met. Of course, the second one is optional: you can have just one. If you leave both conditions empty, the message will be triggered as soon as your mission starts. The two conditions are connected via a logical AND or a logical OR, same as with the arrival conditions we saw in the flight group properties.

In both cases, the message will be displayed after the delay time you specify. In the above image, the in-flight message (which hasn't been entered yet), will be displayed in red 10 seconds after the platform D-34 has been destroyed.

Mis-timed radio messages can be quite annoying. It's not good to start a mission and get a message that your ISD has been destroyed, when it hasn't even arrived yet. The two conditions obviously were not set correctly then. Here, same as with briefings, you should always test your in-flight messages, both for spelling errors, as well as for appearing exactly at the time you want them to.