Here is what I think happened to Leatherneck Simulations.

It's not military but the fidelity of the DCS engine makes it a good platform for training. I think it is a nice thing to have more high fidelity options for people that want it for training purposes.

The DCS engine is better than the likes of P3D or XP11?

After seeing the recent screenshots of the corsair and that weird civilian plane and the hilariously bad trailers and promotional material I was wondering what happened to LN.
Here is what I think:

1.Nicolas Dackard says he wants to do a viggen. all swedish crew on the team would like it too. However everyone not swedish wants to do something else. Let's be real, the viggen is an obscure plane and not that interesting for non-swedish players. The production quality of the module is very good, but who cares about a viggen.
2. LN splits up into 2 factions: the heatblur crew does the viggen and f14, the rest takes the mig21 and forms mag3.
3. Mag3 is desperate for money so they postpone the corsair for some obscure civilian prop plane. If they were not desperate, they would continue on the corsair, but they dont, and the only logical reason is that they need money fast.
4. Turns out all the slick promotional material people ended up with heatblur, because all promotional material for magnitude 3 looks like trash. Seriously, the trailers and screenshots look like a photoshop newbie intern was allowed to play with filters. VEAO-level incompetence. The promotional material is so bad it is revolting and if it were not for the mig21 I would assume mag3 is a bunch of 3rd rate devs trying to cash in quick, like veao and razbam.

Perspective is important, I know people on this forum love to do nothing but b1tch and moan, but for all your moaning, there is no other simulator that simulates any of these aircraft with even close to the same fidelity, and that's just a fact.

Geez...I don't want to just simulate "aircraft" I want to feel like a combat pilot. You know...with believable AI in an immersive battlefield...like they used to achieve back in the 90's. What's the point of learning these "high fidelity airframes" if you can't
employ them in a realistic battle scenario with good AI and period units and terrain? IMO...ED will never get there...too much emphisis on cranking out unfinished airframes while things like AI and immersion fall by the wayside.

Geez...I don't want to just simulate "aircraft" I want to feel like a combat pilot. You know...with believable AI in an immersive battlefield...like they used to achieve back in the 90's. What's the point of learning these "high fidelity airframes" if you can't
employ them in a realistic battle scenario with good AI and period units and terrain? IMO...ED will never get there...too much emphisis on cranking out unfinished airframes while things like AI and immersion fall by the wayside.

Agreed, the only high fidelity you get out of DCS and where all the polish seems to go is the manual start-up of each module.......after that it's all so stale and pointless.

Geez...I don't want to just simulate "aircraft" I want to feel like a combat pilot. You know...with believable AI in an immersive battlefield...like they used to achieve back in the 90's. What's the point of learning these "high fidelity airframes" if you can't
employ them in a realistic battle scenario with good AI and period units and terrain? IMO...ED will never get there...too much emphisis on cranking out unfinished airframes while things like AI and immersion fall by the wayside.

The DCS engine is better than the likes of P3D or XP11?

For an aerobatic aircraft, I could see that being the case, as the AFM likely offers the greatest flexibility of all those platforms, although XPX has lots of untapped potential there as well. I've always felt the flight models in FSX and it's derivative versions were very "robotic", and to build around that apparently a lot of sim-connect magic is required (citing top tier projects like A2As Captain of the ship packages).

If it were me, I'd lean toward XPX for flight model focused sims, and FSX (or P3D) for systems and flight environment focused sim aspects (the best application of desktop simming as a training tool, IMO), if only because these platforms clearly have a much easier and more professional developer base to work with.

I am neither an FM programmer nor an aerodynamics specialist in any way, but I believe blade element theory is not only perfectly applicable to ED's AFM, but is in fact only one aspect of it. In other words what we describe as AFM includes blade element theory, but also other modeling approaches that combine to make the entire aircraft model.

We break the aircraft down into sub-elements (including breaking the rotor blades/propeller blades/wings/stabilizers into sub-elements like the root, mid-section, trailing edge) and apply physics equations to each element in real time to determine the forces and moments acting on it at any point in time. These are summed together to produce the total velocity of the aircraft. In addition each element affects other elements of the model, such as the wings affecting the airflow over the tail section, or the propwash effects on the fuselage of the P-51, etc.



Where I would say ED's AFM takes it a step further is in applying the same principles to primary aircraft systems modeling, like the engine, fuel, hydraulics, and most recently electrics. Obviously you can increase the level of depth in real-time modeling endlessly and the limit only depends on time available and computing power, but generally I would say that our AFM models probably feature the deepest and widest real time (what we call "honest") calculated factors of such aircraft systems you would see on the PC, at least at the consumer level. To give you an idea, when you run the starter in the P-51D and see the landing gear warning lights dim, it isn't because there is a specific script for this to happen, but because you're actually pulling virtual juice from the virtual battery that is virtually running in real time and supplying the instruments and systems with virtual power through a virtual bus, to which the lights are connected. The same applies to the engine model with its main elements like cylinder pressures, temperature and lubrication factors, the various mechanical components like the RPM governor, supercharger, radiator doors, etc. And the same applies to other mechanical systems like the flight controls and their operation between the cockpit and the control surfaces, the trim mechanisms, the landing gear. Again, it's ultimately a model and cannot be completely correct or account for every physical phenomenon, but we try to go as deep as possible in terms of real-time modeling and as wide as possible in terms of covering physical effects within reasonable limits of time and money. Otherwise we could work on any one model endlessly, which is probably what some of the devs would like to do.

To be short, AFM is built from the ground up. We don't build behaviors to match desired performance. We build a physical model as correctly as possible and then check it against known performance characteristics. If the model is built correctly, it should match the performance characteristics closely by itself without requiring any "top-down" scripting to do so. Of course some miscalculations or oversimplifications or just plain errors happen along the way, so testing, tuning and adjusting is always necessary.

Here's a description of the Ka-50 model:
http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/products/black_shark/#22728

Similar for the Huey:
http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/products/huey/#340494

Exactly. I fail to see how "plugging in the values" and getting a flight model would be getting better fidelity than the likes of XP11 where the actual flight model is taken from the actual model of the aircraft.

You would want this to be accurate, when ED builds the F16, it's only a matter of time,

...when ED builds the F16, it's only a matter of time...

Homo sapiens will have evolved into another species by then.

Great post Steve. You have captured what I was trying to say perfectly.

Majestic's Q400 is fantastic however even it performs badly in unusual attitudes and speeds. Try inverted flight. It's just not meant for it - not that the Q400 should ever be inverted, but the engine is just not designed to operate outside normal "bus driver" type conditions.

DCS shines here. While people just want to moan and moan, they are overlooking a lot of the unbelievable detail that HAS made it into the sim already. They take it for granted because they're not using those features to the maximum potential.

I dunno folks, I have a lot of fun with DCS. Have you ever tried it with VR? Have you ever felt the "ground rush" effect when bringing something like the MiG-21 in for a landing? That is not an easy aircraft to land, and when the ground is whizzing by your face at 270+ kph while only a few meters above the ground, it is hard for me to say that DCS is a bad sim. Not perfect, and their marketing leaves a lot to be desired (Unfinished modules) But most of the modules we do have a pretty damned good. I wonder if those who are so dissatisfied have actually tried some of the well done modules such as the M2000, the Huey, Mi-8 or Mig-21. There are of course lots of frustrating things such as missile behavior, but recent engagements in the real world show us that even in real combat sometimes things don't act as we expect them to (See recent Aim9 failure incident)