DCS has the stupidest replay system of any sim I've ever encountered, other than no replay at all I suppose.

I was running a scenario where I engage 2 MiG-29's, as practice to learn the radar / missiles etc.

I decide to save and replay the mission and not one missile I fire hit anything, unlike when I actually flew the mission.

It is my understanding that DCS doesn't actually record what happens but instead records all the control surface movements and button pushes etc and "recreates" the mission, so with every little tiny difference building on the last eventually nothing happens as it did.

Stupid, just stupid.

Vent over.

What happened to the Migs, did they just fly with their last recorded surface settings until they crashed?

They continued on their merry way. I replayed the original sortie in TacView and everything happened as it did before*

Then I noticed that the replay, in which I never took control, had bene recorded by TacView as well so I replayed it. The two MiGs are headed roughly south, me north. I fire an AIM120 at lead, it misses (it didn't originally) then I fire another a few seconds later at trail MiG. It misses, as it originally did but by a bigger margin this time. By now the MiGs are behind me headed straight south ignoring me as robot replay aircraft should, but my robot replay aircraft still thinks it is in an air battle and climbs, turns etc trying to shoot down the phantom trail MiG firing 2 AIM9, one off into space and another into the sea.

It was pretty comical as well as frustrating.


* like BSG

This replay system was broken at several years - I remember from MiG-21 "heydays" , e.g. record a perfect take-off for see the plane crash in the replay.

Rhetorical question - what not sucks in dcs?

That, is much more accurate and will give a much shorter answer.

I was going to point that out but thought they can continue to bask in their displeasure

There are certainly issues with DCS just as there are with any software but to claim that everything about it sucks is just over the top hyperbole of the highest order.

That's more or less correct. It records your inputs, and if it somehow misses something or whatever could happen to make things non-deterministic sends the replay for a spin. This is done to reduce the track file size. It would be nice if they ran a sync every so often - in the end for the most part they just need to sync up the player's aircraft and weapons, and enemy reactions (mostly airborne targets). It would be preferable to have the track do something weird for 5 seconds than to be rendered useless.