Yes, but just like having healthy bones doesn't mean your body is healthy, DCS needs more than a framework of systems and flight models to be successful.

By comparison, there were more successful sims in the past with lower fidelity. Why? Because the rest of the sim more than compensated. You don't get so annoyed with little mistakes when the overall package is good. If it's not, people start getting irritated about things like inner engine temperatures. When systems modeling is all you have, you better not make any mistakes with it.

Older sims were created with a top-down approach. Start with the game you're trying to make, add in details of plane modeling and systems later. DCS is a bottoms-up approach. Start with the planes and then build a game around them. Yet when the plane-building aspect is never finished, how much time is there to make the game? How can you build a forest when you keep going back to improve the same 4 trees? There are issues like air to air missiles and stupid accurate ground fire that have been a problem for literally a decade.

I don't see how anyone can believe that top-down isn't the better way to go. BMS proved you can take a game like F4 and bolt on the more realistic stuff later. After over 20 years of development starting with Flanker 1, I think it has been shown that bottoms-up is a flawed process for sim development. Back to Baghdad was the epitome of that, an awesome F-16 systems simulator with the world's worst game attached to it.



The Jedi Master