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Most anarchy levels that were not created originally by Outrage share the same bug. They show up when you start a new game, no matter whether you would like to jump in a quick single-player mission or host an in-game co-op server.

The reason for this is that the level designers left the "SP" flag in the Descent 3 level editor ticked when they released the mission, although it is not meant for single-player. They needed this flag all the time when testing the mission (otherwise it would have taken more effort to test-ride) but then forgot to uncheck it again before the final release. This applies to almost every anarchy level currently available.

For someone who'd like to play one of the single-player missions or host an in-game co-op server this falsely set flag is rather annoying, if not even a nightmare. Whenever you want to start a new game you see all these (in this case useless) missions in the list.

How many of the above missions do you think are really missions you can play in single-player? By "play in single-player" I think of a bit more than just flying around in an empty mine which was built for some anarchy fun where you need playing opponents and whose designers have not placed anything challenging if you are alone. I'm thinking of "playable" as in a real single-player mission with lots of bots, goals, and a mission ending.

This article provides technical background information for the software Hide Descent 3 Multi-Player Missions. If you're only interested in the software that can hide/unhide multi-player-only missions you can directly go to Hide Descent 3 Multi-Player Missions' home page and download it from there.

Before we go and rigurously remove all missions that are not meant for single or co-op games from the Descent 3 missions directory, and before we start emailing all those level designers and fuss at them for accidently leaving the "SP" flag in, it's a good time to investigate the background a bit more.

Why did they leave this flag in the mission file?

• It was convenient for the designer to test-fly the level.

• It is convenient for players to making themselves familiar with the level before joining a real multi-player (anarchy and siblings) game.

• Thy simply forgot to remove it.

This suggests that we better leave the mission files on the hard drive, but what else can we do with them?

One idea is to create a list with all files that are only meant for anarchy or single games, hack together some software that handles them properly depending on what we want to do, and then start Descent 3.

Although there could be other approaches, this one sounds quite reasonable. The files that should not show up in the "New Game" list will somehow be hidden from Descent 3.

Creating the list of levels and tag them according to what they really are, SP or MP, looks like the biggest effort. The rest is only a matter of implementation.

To save some work, we should only tag one kind of missions, either SP/co-op or anarchy (MP) games but not both of them. It goes without saying that there shouldn't be any "false-positives" either, meaning that it is more sensible to tag the anarchy games instead of the SP/co-op ones. We rather have a few missions shown in the games list that should probably not be there instead of vice versa (missions disappeared although we might want to see and play them in SP).