Why did you expect anyone to "have a problem with polished DCS modules"??

EDIT:

If that's the case, what's the difference between DCS and FSX/P3D/XP10/XP11?? Those other sims also give you the "just for the sake of flying" feeling on a MUCH BIGGER MAP with a better selection of "crates" for the fraction of the price DCS is asking for.

The solution to the lack of a dynamic campaign is to get creative with the mission editor. A dynamic campaign is nice, I agree, but it's probably not going to happen.

On the other hand, very replayable missions can be created rather simply in the mission editor, and though I am not a mission editor expert, I imagine that with some scripting a campaign could be created with dozens of different possibilities depending on what happened in past missions. Most mission editors in any simulator created in the past 15 years have this ability.

Those people who feel so upset about the lack of a dynamic campaign should take charge and learn to use scripting and release a freeware campaign to put payware developers to shame. I would love to see this as I tend to play single player offline, as Japan generally has high pings to people in the US or Europe.

The feeling of flight in DCS is far better than almost any other simulator. The only thing that even comes close in my experience is the AccuSim series of aircraft and the Majestic Dash-8 Q400. Those fly like the real deal. Almost everything else is a train with wings in FSX. X-Plane is a little better but not quite. Accusim and Majestic got it right. DCS got it right too. The MiG-21 is wonderful.

I am still of the opinion that if you don't know how to operate the navigation instruments in whatever aircraft you're flying, you don't have much right to complain about lack of functionality of XYZ weapons system, and surely no right to complain about the map size. If you don't even know where you are on a small map like Nevada or Georgia, how can you worry about what's going on outside those areas.

This is one region where DCS falls flat on its face - the navigation systems have been ignored in the core of DCS, and so unfortunately the navigation systems of each module have also suffered. A lot of things like radionavigation are far oversimplified or just plain don't work correctly in DCS, that's too bad considering the high fidelity in other areas. Some fixes or additions should be (and are) easy to implement but I suppose they're at the bottom of the list. None of the airfields in DCS have ILS backcourses, the ILS bars move in the wrong manner in some aircraft, ADF equipment is very sparse (possibly a module choice, but I think most aircraft developed in the 60's-90's would have it).

But as we're all aware, ED don't operate like any other developer and because some facets of the sim has no current competition they think they can get away with as little effort as possible whilst taking customer's money under the guise of an alpha/beta that will get more effort put into it after the payment is taken. As we all know in many cases that isn't really the case and ED jump into the next module leaving the old one unfinished.

I really don't think anyone has the right to view ED in the same light as any other developer given their operating practice, history and library of unfinished content......there is absolutely nothing to suggest that ED will actually do anything regarding a dynamic campaign or even assisting a 3rd party with the creation of additional tools that would help. It's a bit rich to expect a community to 'take charge' of a sim that is still in active development to cover their blushes and shortfalls especially when they still put resources into patching the game just to support payware mission content.

Geez, is it that bad they have to give key's away?

http://www.pchelicopters.com/index.php/polychop-competition

From the post.....

https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?p=3127641#post3127641


Here I was thinking the 'Community News' would be the next installment in the long list of campaigns released by members called "Paying Attention"

Being 11:11pm on a Friday Night (AEST) looks like I have to wait until tomorrow for the 'official update' on the early access to the "Normandy 2.1 Lighting campaign"

**side note, I wouldn't trust a module from the now 'defunct for quite some time' the much hyped Coretex Designs [CTD] E\F hornet bunch who promised a fully functioning aircraft carrier upon release with deck crew etc etc and blah blah blah

hence why I do not care for a free module from another failed 3rd party developer in which their module should join their 'hornet' in the mods section along with the skyhawk and other failed 3rd party devs....Kinney Interactive etc etc cough...cough...IL2 dev....cough....cough

SALE ON GENT'S......Sale as in "it stopped selling so we are now giving it away"

They give ONE free copy away in a contest and you make a post like that?

A product that a separate company produces gets delayed - and people complain about it...I can understand being disappointed, but complaining about it? If you haven't bought it yet, why complain?

The immaturity in this forum is a little unbelievable sometimes. Complaining about free stuff invalidates your opinions as a consumer IMO.

Paradaz, I am not sure what issue you are taking with the mission editor. I have played around with it and have found it to be fully functional and nearly as good as any other editor that you might find in something like ARMA3, Dangerous Waters etc. I have been able to create totally replayable scenarios with it despite my lack of skill with that particular editor. I am absolutely certain though, from the tools I know are included with the editor, that a campaign highly resembling a dynamic campaign COULD be made with the existing editor and DCS world.

Dynamic Campaigns require HUGE AI programming talent and a lot of time. They also tend to eat up a lot of CPU resources.

I don't get the fixation some people have with this idea of a dynamic campaign - in the sim world dynamic campaigns have been the exception, NOT the rule. The only major sim I know of with a dynamic campaign is Falcon BMS, and Falcon killed the studio that developed it and only survives because somebody leaked the source code to the public - hundreds of people around the world collaborated for free to develop something over a period of more than 15 years to reach the state it has reached today. What company has that kind of resources?!

Have you created such a mission? Has ED introduced a way to track building destruction now? Has ED introduced a way to model persistent damage? Can you script a mission where your task is to destroy a bridge and the mission can "grade" you depending on how accurate your delivery was? Can you then make a follow-up mission where you fly over said bridge and see it destroyed as you go on your way to bomb a specific building? Can you then make a third mission where you can overfly both the bridge and the building and see it destroyed?

While the idea is simple enough, testing and balancing the scripts takes time and personally, I cannot fly the missions I create. I can only fly as wingman and even then, it's difficult to "play dumb." It's like watching a movie where you wrote the script and directed the cinematography... it's hard to be "surprised" and appreciate the plot twists when you're the one who made the whole thing.



So the solution to ED's shortcomings is for the community to pick up the slack?



Why fly a combat aircraft to play with the navigation systems? Don't get me wrong, I agree with you here regarding learning the systems... just that if that were the point of the exercise, then DCS isn't the place to do such an excercise... nor is combat aircraft the platform to be doing the exercise. VOR/VORTAC/TACAN navigation can be done in civvie sims, then the knowledge just applied to combat sims later on. There's a reason pilots have waypoints plotted in and navigation by instruments is a "backup" system.

Sure, the editor is functional. Granted.



It could be, and I thoroughly respect the individual or group that makes such an effort. Their work should surely be rewarded. However, you missed the point here. The issue isn't the lack of capability regarding the mission editor. Heck, you can even just make a random mission and fly that!! The issue here is replayability. There are many ways to get replayability; ED just chooses to support the one that needs the most work.



Where'd you get that from? How much CPU resources does the Falcon DC take up?



I'm guessing you missed THIS POST

1. The DC is not the "cause of death" of MicroProse. There are a lot of other factors that led to their demise, as well as for other studios that developed simulations with or without a DC.
2. The BMS mods are unpaid modders who do the work in their spare time. BMS itself sits atop work done for Falcon 4.0, Open Falcon, Free Falcon, etc. Even if we say that BMS "development" started 15-17 years ago (around the 1.08 patch time), how long has DCS development started? Does DCS not sit atop work done for Flanker, LOMAC, Flaming Cliffs, etc.? Then factor in the fact that DCS is done by PAID developers who do this as their JOB...
3. Even without factoring in the cost to make a DC, can you honestly say that ED is **NOT** mismanaging their resources with 3 builds, patch after patch after patch? New campaign DLC? New patch to go along with that!!

The lack of a dynamic campaign is not a shortcoming: It was never promised as far as I am aware. DCS was meant as an aerial tactical combat simulator, not a realtime strategy game. We were lucky to get a bit of the strategic element with the Combined Arms module, but DCS is not a strategic simulation.

Try to keep in mind that DCS evolved from the simulator called Flanker and the map has basically been the same for something like 20 years now. Some of the foundation code is probably around that age and it is not easy to do something like change it from a single map system into a round-world, global map using USGS/whatever land data.

Falcon BMS's graphics and optimization are a far cry from DCS. On full graphics settings Falcon BMS still looks old to my eyes, and while I like BMS, we're talking about a graphics engine that was made obsolete in the early 2000's. DCS's graphics push both the GPU and CPU to the limits. There's not a lot of breathing room for adding hundreds of units of AI all doing their own thing in real time while you fly a mission somewhere. If you have ever played a massive mission in ARMA3 you should know what happens when mission creators try to overdo the scale with AI. Things slow down and eventually there is a crash. Falcon can handle this because it was designed to run on Pentium II processors in 1998 and has been gradually updated over time. DCS made huge graphics engine improvements with each major jump from Flanker 2, 2.5, Lomac, etc. They're operating at the limits of current hardware at the moment. As far as how do I know about programming, well, I program stuff in my free time (C++, Java, PHP and Python) and I also have a copy of the source for Falcon 4 that was leaked more than a decade ago.

I understand that it would be nicer to have a dynamic campaign - don't get me wrong. I like them a lot, they add a lot of immersion. But for example, the best simulator that exists on the market right now in my opinion, Steel Beasts, has never had a dynamic campaign, yet people have been playing the hell out of it for 17 years now. I still play the same scenarios over and over again but they're never the same because the mission creator properly utilized randomization functions, scripting/whatever to ensure the same thing doesn't happen twice.

Regarding persistent objects / damage, I think that if someone wanted to do it badly enough they could make it happen. It might require a hack or a separate EXE but I am positive it can be done. Proof of this is in sims like Dangerous Waters where external mod teams have added entire platforms that were not meant to be playable into the game - and if they so desired they could just as easily pull the values for a specific object(s), save the state to a file and then use the same state the next time a linked mission is played. That's a clunky workaround, but again, ED never promised a Dynamic Campaign. Besides this fact though, I am not sure that the modding community has actually tried very hard to make something resembling a dynamic campaign with the tools that exist. The last time I browsed around I could only find a few campaigns available for free and the quality of most of the free ones was utterly poor.

As far as knowing the navigation systems when flying a combat aircraft, I figure if you cannot navigate an aircraft, one of the basic skills of flying, why bother doing battle with it. It's like complaining that your Ferrari isn't fast enough when you don't even have a driver's license.

I've built myself a dynamic campaign but in crappy environments like LUA it soon becomes crap.

Also, since I cannot destroy bridges and structures when loading the game again one basically has to fly the whole shebang in one go.
Ground units and available planes in each squadron can be managed in textfiles so the engine only spawns surviving units but this also needs opening disc access that are nullified by DCS scripts (this also needs edited each time you get an update) and asking for a accessable file area gives you a complete frigging no response from Wags.

Debugging this kind of missions are a slap in the face and you soon starts to see mentally defect AI moves.

Runs OK for an evening as a MP-get-together for a few pilots though.

But full scale dynCamp in DCS? I really really do not think so.

Building the same from scratch in ArmA3 SQF files (Warfare/CTI for those who knows) you can have 800 units running all over the place along with as many vehicles no problemo.
With that the server can keep jogging for days.

Wow...all this time of flight simming, I didn't realize that many of the sims I flew below that had a DC...were actually real time strategy games!



I guess instead of realizing the shortcomings of DCS not having a dynamic campaign...and being stuck in a sterile, lifeless, immersion-less battlefield...we are now going to re-define what a flight sim actually is.

Priceless...

Not really. Especially seeing that DCS can't use more than a single thread. My understanding is that games will essentially never see full scaling from each core, but I'm sure an extra core dedicated to AI units and whatnot would lessen the massive frame rate drops when putting a number of units in a mission.

It does use 2 currently (albeit for offloading Audio spatial processing) - but what you describe would be the holy Grail IMO. The benefit has already been demonstrated by offloading the AI onto a 2nd server to increase FPS in single-player. I'd hope that they'd take a direction like moving everything to TCP for communication between components of the sim. Any future Dedicated server could then theoretically double as a separate AI server for single-player too.

Oh and in before the ...."yeah well see it in 2050 hurr durr...."

Nate.

"The lack of a dynamic campaign is not a shortcoming: It was never promised as far as I am aware" Yeah, about that. Wags had stated "It's on the road map, just have more important things to get to." That was at least six years ago, though now we see that it's never really been on the road map. I remember Ross McGregor making a preliminary DC to go along with LOMAC; I'm not sure whether he received any help from ED. I can't recall whether or not he finished it as that was at least eight years ago.

But about no DC not being an issue, I really can't abide by that. Is it really that hard to have persistent damage from mission to mission? No, no it's not. Looking at the list from above, we've had that for a long time. But not with ED. Also, those are flight sims, not real time strategy games - really not sure where you got that idea from. So to sum up: 1) ED keeps lying to it's commercial market customers [us] that they give a hoot about us all the while catering almost exclusively to the military contract/private company market, 2) can't focus to finish a particular project to save their lives, and 3) have a game engine that still can't do some basic things like air-to-ground radar. Actually a third party developer has beaten them to the punch on that with the Viggen. It's basic but still, at least they gave us a plane with that capability. Sad that the original developer is so far behind on their own product.

ED is only a partial company (at least with the way they're run) that's been proffering a partially completed product to us for quite a while now. They've done some nice things, but have yet to really finish them, so don't expect all of us here to miss the forest for the trees.

Actually, I was just looking for their latest newsletter and found April's. It talked about getting Nevada out of Alpha, the Crimean map up to 2.0 standards, doing the bulk of the F/A-18's air-to-ground radar, dedicated server, and improving the AI's landing logic. "Wow, they're finally making progress," I thought. Then I checked the post date - April 30, 2015. Sigh. . .

I'm sorry, Longbow, but if you are going to go down this route, I'm going to have to respond to it.


Promised or not, it **IS** a shortcoming of the product that is called DCS. Planned or not, they DID make a poll asking what their customers wanted.... and proceeded to ignore the results of the said poll. "Aerial tactical combat simulator"??? With what aircraft? With what weapons systems? Are their FMs really "tactical combat simulator" level? Are their A-A missiles "tactical combat simulator" level??? Please let's not kid ourselves here.

Also, since when does a DC make a "simulation" into "strategic simulation"??



Yet here we have a sim modded by people who work for free and do so on their spare time.... and have gotten a fully-working, 6DoF cockpit with TrackIR... concepts that did not exists in 1998. Additional theatres with photorealistic tiles like Balkans, Ostsee (spell check on that), and Israel. See where I'm going with this?



I'm sorry, but you're losing me here... are we talking about a COMBAT FLIGHT SIMULATOR or are we talking about taking pretty pictures with combat aircraft? Also, DCS does not push "GPU and CPU to the limits"... not when you have crappy code that limits draw distance and gives micro-stutters whenever bombs go off on a sim where one of the best modules is a FRIKKING GROUND POUNDER.

I had the same stance as you did when I started with Falcon... damn, the cockpit looks old, the terrain looks terrible, the shadows in the cockpit... well, let's not even go there!! Are you kidding me? Then I learned how to fight in the F-16 again and the immersion just kicks in and you don't even SEE the graphics in as much as you just get INFORMATION from the graphics to build up SA around you. You don't see the nasty-ass shadows in the cockpit, you only notice it and use that to get INFORMATION as to your orientation.... are you inverted? Are you turning? You don't see the ugly terrain, you only notice it and use that to get INFORMATION as to your altitude... are you about to smack into that mountainside? Can you adjust your turn to take advantage of G? Should you be worried about low AAA and flak?

If you have time to admire the scenery, there's not much COMBAT in that combat flight simulator.

If you see a lake nearby and think to yourself "wow, that's a lovely lake... I wonder what the fishing is like there? I must visit that lake sometime or take a closer look in one of my next flights," then you're probably flying a civilian sim. If you see a lake nearby and think to yourself "I gotta get to that lake to get away from ground fire and AAA... also won't have to worry about IR SAMs over that lake!!", then you're probably flying a COMBAT flight simulation



Simply put, ARMA units =/= Falcon units. Just because ARMA can't handle it doesn't mean other games can't. If a game that's designed to run on Pentium IIs in 1998 can "out-unit" a modern-day title, then the modern-day title is doing something very, very wrong.



Um, yeah. I bet Steel Beasts doesn't have half-finished tanks that nobody asked for either. And have you seen their pricing scheme? Much much cheaper than DCS! Also interesting you mentioned immersion... funny how old-looking sims seems to rely on something other than eye candy huh?



OH
MY
GOD

A sim from 1998 can do this. A lot of other sims can do this. But DCS needs a 3rd party hack? Can't you **SEE** the FLAW in your logic there???
Also, for a COMBAT FLIGHT SIMULATOR, they didn't think it was **NECESSARY** to model persistent damage??



Persistent damage doesn't even have anything to do with a DC!! You're flying over war-torn Georgia... you expect all buildings to be pristine and all bridges to be intact? What, are all missions set on Day 1 of the war?



Maybe because it's not the community's job to make a DC? Maybe the tools available are not fit for making a proper DC? Interestingly enough, the Israel theatre in BMS has a DC....



I'm sorry, but if I wanted to hone up on my old-school navigation skills, I'd fire up FSX or XP11. For COMBAT flight simulation, navigation is simply following your waypoints to the target, and then hopefully back home. You do not fire up a COMBAT flight simulation to follow VORs around the map, you fire up a COMBAT flight simulation to drop bombs and fire missiles.

Do you use your Ferrari on the racetrack to practice sticking to city-streets speed limits? Do you take your Ford Focus downtown to practice your cornering skills?

Interesting...oh please don't exaggerate your self.

Why would I want to pay for something that has the flight dynamics of 'Janes Longbow'
Hey, don't take my word for it.....
Let's hear from those who actually spent money on this worthless piece of hard drive space and nothing is fixed more than 12 months after release.

Source for reference: Here and Here

03-13-2017, 07:01 PM



Yet, 12 months prior from the same person......

05-02-2016, 10:41 AM



And the official response, which mind you was posted on behalf of the community manager???

03-13-2017, 07:38 PM



So the concerns at release are still present now with no light at the end of the pixel? I complained because the module is so useless that Poly are giving away a 'free' key

Seems like repeating cycle of failed 3rd party devs who rorted the consumers out of hard earned cash and now they can't be bothered completing the module [VEAO, AVIO,].....

Thinking about it, the pattern of 3rd party devs splitting before a module is complete seems to be the norm in 3rd party land...Leatherneck split, Cortex [devs behind the gazelle] split....VPJT....split......the list grows....

hate the bandwidth, not the player.

Rather than saving destroyed building, I think implementing feature, mission plannable while mission running ("Create flight" in falcon4) is better solution for DCS.

As automatic territory contestation is already possible with script.

I don't disagree that a Dynamic Campaign is an awesome feature. I would like DCS to have a dynamic campaign for sure, I'm just saying that it is a tall order considering the market and the resources ED probably has at their disposal.

Someone posted a list of all the sims that came out with dynamic campaigns, but I think that it proved my point - out of all those Dynamic Campaign sims only 2 or 3 of them are still alive, the rest have been put out to pasture. Flanker and DCS have been going strong for more than 20 years now, I think they have figured out the most important thing - staying in business. I also have a tendency to give Wags some leeway because he has been a part of the development of a good number of the simulators we all enjoyed the most in the golden days. If he has made a decision to do or not to do something, he's probably got a reason for it, and his judgment is probably correct - even if it's not a popular decision.

I'm happier having DCS as a platform that needs improvement rather than having a disbanded DCS with no future.

Some people have talked about putting AI onto a second server, and adding multi-threading to DCS. This definitely should be on ED's priority list but multithreading is probably difficult to achieve without huge rewrites of the core engine. Not likely to happen soon, I would guess.

I like BMS too, and I am not a stickler for graphics either - I did play steel beasts gold (MS Dos style graphics) for 15 years or so. Immersion is everything, I believe that as well. But DCS gives us the opportunity to fly a huge variety of different platforms from ground vehicles to helicopters to jets. There is a tradeoff. Falcon was designed from the base up to be an F-16 sim ONLY. All of the aerodynamics coding is likely greatly simplified since it only has to work perfectly for one platform. Back in the old days, people cried for graphics improvements to Flanker and LOMAC so those were prioritized. Advanced Flight Models were the rage and ED focused on those things. Now they've subcontracted modules out to other developers and have their hands full fixing myriads of other tasks. I have a feeling that their military clients take high priority over the commercially distributed edition of DCS.

I think we also have to give ED a break when it comes to certain technologies like missile behavior - who knows what kind of government pressure or danger they may face if they publish / produce weapons systems that perfectly replicate the real deal. Remember two of ED's guys were put in prison for taking photos of Greek air bases. There are all kinds of problems they have to deal with that most of us take for granted since we don't have a responsibility to military clients and most of us live in countries where freedom of information is a guaranteed right.

I'm not trying to be an ED fanboy, I just think that we should enjoy the stuff we have gotten so far, play with the tools we have, and keep gently nudging ED to adjust and fix areas we're not happy with. The improvements WILL come, but it might take some time. In the meantime, go take a flight and enjoy things a bit. If your platform feels unflyable or is not fun for you, sell it to someone else or just don't fly it until it's fixed. I shelved the M2000 for 2 months after purchase and the next time I flew it, it was a completely different beast. The MI-8 was a similar story.

Those were Bohemia Interactive (ARMA) guys.

Woops, my mistake, but the point stands - there are issues that a lot of us probably don't hear about. I wonder if the ED guys want to fix XYZ problem but the Russian government has told them "stay away from XYZ technology in your commercial simulator"