Mission Authoring Tools

[alexanderson1993]

In Thorium Classic, the Timeline core has a button with a banana icon — the "monkey see, monkey do" button. It intends to make it easier to create timelines by having the timeline record all of the actions you take on the core.

Thorium Nova needs something similar. Creating timelines is straightforward but tedious. Here's some requirements for a core component to make it easier:

• The same controls for editing a timeline's steps and blocks that exist in the current timeline config.
• A visualization of the timeline steps, making it easy to jump between steps.
• A button for easily restarting the mission from the beginning.
• Buttons for taking snapshots, and then resetting the mission to those snapshots, allowing the mission author to play through a section of the mission repeatedly without having to go back to the beginning.
• Buttons for triggering events to easily advance through a mission without needing to jump through all of the hoops on the crew stations, basically by clicking through the event/entity/distance conditions set up by each step.
• A "monkey see, monkey do" button for recording actions taken by both the crew and the core into the current timeline step.
• A similar button, but for recording event listeners — you click the button, it starts listing events that happen, and you can pick from the list to create an event listener in the current timeline step that matches the event that just happened.

This will be a pretty hefty side project, but could be incredibly fruitful for future timeline authors, including myself.