The Georgia terrain seems a little flat and featureless for good land based gameplay. But i imagine the Nevada terrain will be a different story. Even the version included in the Beta seemed to have a much more detailed terrain mesh. And besides that, the flat openness is consistent with desert environments. Should be pretty good!

Great shots,

Im really looking forward to this!

Rob

Nice!

Here's a thought. (and i'm sure i'm not the first one to have it)....

Is it possible to have different elements (land, sea and air) running different versions of the same environments (higher res for ground units, lower res for air units) but interacting with each other in the same game?

For instance, take a small map with a high level of detail (similar to what you'd see in say, BF3, or CoD), then put that town or village down inside the larger DCS map, only with a much lower resolution - one that's suitable for that type of play.

If you took, for example, a village from BF3 as an example (but not actually a BF3 map, i'm not suggesting combining maps across different titles to be clear), you could easily place a village like that in DCS, only with a fraction of the detail provided. Same number and placement of buildings, walls and large objects, just that the buildings are hollow, there's no micro-terrain on the ground, and no small ambient objects. What i mean to say is, you could represent a higher or lower resolution version of the same environment for different players using different roles. And the land based players load up the higher-res version when they play, but are restricted to that particular AO when they play online.

I think that's been the limiting factor in ALL combined arms games thus far. Environments that are detailed enough for infantry are inherently too small for aircraft to play realistically in, and environments that are big enough to accommodate realistic aviation gameplay are far too low-res for land based gameplay. I mean, the aircraft gameplay in BF3, and even ArmA2 is far too restrictive. Likewise, you wouldn't want to play as infantry in DCS given the huge, low detailed environment.


I think the problem is that developers have been trying to do multiple things at the same level of detail when different levels of detail are called for. The world is much smaller to a fighter pilot than it is to an infantryman, and this fact isn't addressed by current all arms sims. The fighter pilot doesn't need to see park benches and empty soda cans, so why not have players using different versions of the same environment based on what they're doing? Is there any reason why players can't be represented in each others environments even though they're running different versions?

Here's my wallet....just take whatever you need out of it and give me this now!

Someone tell me that StarForce or whatever the company has become is not infecting this thing. I still have a dead Plextor from that waste of a DRM.

I so want this, but StarForce has left a bad taste in my mouth.

-X

Amazing screenies.. What supercomputer I need to run this sim with that kind of graphic quality without having a slideshow?

A nugget of purest green!

You forgot to count all the combined arms simulations that have NOT been done to date, because of this. Achieving terrain correlation with different terrain geometries is by definition impossible. Working with variable terrain geometry would probably require an engine tailor made for this purpose. Not saying that it is impossible, but typically you develop an engine of your own, you do it for a specific application case that you have in mind. If that first application is commercially successful you expand it. But then you're already boxed in, due to the implicit design decisions that you made years before when developing the engine itself.
So the challenge is to find a way to finance the development of at least two, better three titles with fundamentally different scope that share the engine, (parts of) the terrain, weapon effects, and network code.

The PC market isn't lucrative enough for such a massive investment (thank you, pirates!), and simulation games aren't popular on consoles. There goes your commercial motivation to try it.

This leaves the military as a possible source for such an engine. But the demand for true combined arms virtual simulations there is limited. It might work as a DARPA project - but then you won't get to see the results on the computer game market, I guess.

i believe this is all private.
outerra
cant wait for DCS to be placed in something like this.