Away missions: when and how
Created by: ComicIronic
Having looked over the code, away missions are surprisingly close to being completed. The biggest obstacles are a lack of compatible maps and no clear implementation.
Here's hoping we can fix one of those.
Questions
When
Away missions have a good chance of emptying the station. This means that they'd ideally involve the whole crew, but that they'll also interfere massively with gamemodes, particularly those tied to the station like Nuke Ops or Malf. One solution to this is to limit missions to a certain set of modes - ling, traitor, extended, etc. - but that opens avenues for metagaming, and also fails to solve the underlying issue of how the missions are meant to interact with the regular round.
Admin intervention is also an issue. A human element would make handling when missions are allowed to happen a lot easier, but it would limit away missions to the times when an admin is online and cooperative, and I don't like tying game features to admin use generally because we'd like player action to be independent.
How
Missions should also ideally come at the end of some progression. Charging up the gateway would be a good example, and a manual delay less so: it should be a rarer achievement to be able to go off-station using the gateway, and how this would be set up is important.
Where the mission goes is another matter. An admin could set a manual mission, but again, we don't want to have heavy-handing in the whole process. Randomness would potentially increase the fun, but remove the possibility of preparing for a specific mission, like colonising a planet. We could have a random selection of maps decided when the gateway is activated, and then have the user pick from those, but this would have to be discussed further.