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Dear all, with our sincere apologies for both the late update and delay: Unfortunately, and with a heavy heart, we had to decide for a delay for the DCS: F-4E Phantom II release. We prepared a detailed update for you, if you would like you can read up on it here: https://store.heatblur.com/blogs/news/of-delays-and-silence Furthermore we prepared an in depth, regular development update for you all, to bring you up to speed about the state of the module, as is, on what remains to be done, and what is already complete: https://store.heatblur.com/blogs/news/of-delays-and-progress-part-ii Finally, we would like to share the long awaited EPISODE III of our Phantom video introductions, regarding Navigation in the F-4E Phantom II this time. Thank you all for your amazing support and extermely kind patience in these past few weeks. Your Team Heatblur

Thank you all, it was indeed an incredibly tough decision for us to make, specifically because we are this close to full on release ready. Thank you all again for your kind patience, passion and support!

I'm so excited to announce the complete revamp of my Big Show DCS Spitfire IX Campaign to version 2.0. With the recent updates of the DCS Normandy map, the campaign can finally use historically accurate bases and routes in all of the missions. On top of this, more voice overs were added and the visuals completely redone to bring it up to current standards. All clear? Switches on!

DCS World AI Ship Mod Hamina Class Missile Boat has been released. I've decided to create one more Coastal Patrol Boat so stay posted. If you have any major technical issues PLEASE PM me and I will resolve the issues as soon as I can. Thank you all for your support. Please Enjoy the mod.

Security is of course important and we take it seriously. Note however that the UI is run and stored locally, using only files stored on your hard drive unless using the specific internet related features.

@IronMikeThanks for the status update. I am sorry about the health issues your team has faced, and hope they are all through the worst of it, and are continuing towards good health. As much as I am excited by this I am also gravelly concerned about the implications of putting a browser in game, the security implications of that are actually staggering, given that a browser is one of the most significant attack surfaces on a computer today. And keeping a browser up to date is a very difficult and time consuming task even for a full fledged Dev team that is only updating a browser, even if what you are doing is delivering an instance of Chromium based browser you are recompiling (just ask the Microsoft Edge Dev team!) this concern is even higher given that most guidance for dcs suggests excluding it from most anti-malware programs for performance reasons. Chrome and edge both recieve daily updates in some cases to mitigate threats, given that dcs itself only receives updates monthly, how are you mitigating these issues?

Get it right and call me when it’s ready. From what I’ve seen, it will be worth the wait.

Hello Everyone, I hope you are doing well. My back pain is stable at the moment so I'm taking advantage of the moment to create more AI Ship mods. I will be releasing the Hamina Class Missile Boat soon. **Known issues. The RBS-15 Missile Launcher doesn't close after launching all missiles. I created the missile launcher because the 3d model didn't have one built. It's an AI vehicle script used on an AI ship so it doesn't function the same. Missile launch sounds aren't working properly. I will continue to work on the sound until it's resolved. It's a Pain in the 8$$. For some vessels they work fine for others it's trial and lots of error. The Hamina-class missile boat is a class of fast attack craft of the Finnish Navy. They are classified as "missile fast attack craft" or ohjusvene, literally "missile boat" in Finnish. The vessels were built in the late 1990s, early 2000s, and are the fourth generation of Finnish missile craft. The first vessel was ordered in December 1996 and the fourth was handed over on 19 June 2006. Since the launch of the Helsinki-class missile boats, all fast attack craft have been named after Finnish coastal cities. The class was previously known also as Rauma 2000 following its predecessor the Rauma class. Stay Tuned!!

As mentioned; we're cognizant of this and these features will only be available in a manner that is secure. The intent is not to provide a general browser experience, but rather serve safe, appropriate content - strictly and safely. Most importantly, everything needed for the module itself runs locally (manual, UI, etc.) without a single byte of data leaving or entering your computer - and so we can even provide further options to further inhibit any traffic for the users who feel at risk by mistakenly hitting a hotkey.

Regarding your second issue, I know I have personally reported that as a bug several years ago at this point, but I honestly cannot be bothered to go that far back into my post history to find that thread. Suffice to say, the issue is that the bore ellipse in the JHMCS should follow true line-of-sight of your radar (this is true for the HUD bore cross as well), however, at the moment in the DCS F-16C the ellipse is simply drawn in the center of the JHMCS irregardless of where the radar is actually pointing. When you TMS UP to slew the radar to your JHMCS, it moves the radar from pointing straight forward to pointing where your head is looking, even though this isn't shown by the ellipse, resulting a lock on whatever is inbetween that path of travel. In the video below you can see the JHMCS in action at 3:29. As you can see, if you step through the video frame by frame using the "." and "," keys, you can see the ellipse instantaneously appear from one frame to the next where the head is looking, indicating that it initially won't lock anything while moving from looking straight in the direction of your aircraft to looking in the direction of your head, and once it's slewed to your head, it follows your head movements as good as it can (you can see how imperfect and laggy the FCR movements are). You can also see the ellipse "stick" to the target aircraft while it attempts to get a lock, and then it transitions to a square once a steady lock has been aquired. In the second video which shows the HUD symbology, right at the very start of the clip, you can see the "NO RAD" disappear right as he slews his radar to his JHMCS. A couple of frames later, the bore cross instantanously appears in the top left of the HUD, indicating the exact same thing as the first video, that the radar will not lock anything while transitioning from pointing in the direction of the aircraft, to pointing in the direction of the JHMCS. After this, the bore cross on the HUD will follow radar line-of-sight from this point onwards, just like the ellipse will follow radar line-of-sight in the JHMCS. As you've probably noticed, neither of these behaviours are present in DCS. If you turn off HUD blanking and look towards your HUD with the JHMCS in dogfight mode with the radar on, the HUD bore cross and JHMCS ellipse should be perfectly overlayed and following each others movements, which currently isn't the case in DCS. Instead, with their current implementation, the HUD bore cross will always point in the direction of your aircraft irregardless of where the radar is actually pointing, and the JHMCS ellipse will always point in the direction of your head, irregardless of where the radar is actually pointing. Also, the radar will lock anything in its path when slewing itself towards your JHMCS LOS, which shouldn't be the case as it makes the radar close to useless in a furball if it just arbritrarily locks anything it may come across, rather than what the pilot actually wants to lock up.

You can also write us directly to support@heatblur.se and we will provide you a refund, no questions asked, paypal buyer protection expiring or not. This has always been and will continue to be our policy. Our sincere apologies for the wait.

Sure, I think everyone would agree more frequent updates would be good. If handled correctly it is probably a net positive. The problem, as is see it, is people feeling like devs have an obligation to do so when they’ve accepted no money.

Who's jerking you around? Someone posts a screenshot and all the sudden its in release phase? Being an uptight tw@ isnt going to speed up the development.

Do you remember the gazelle release or to a lesser extent the F16? The one thing it showed was that the DCS community want it 'now' but will also throw teddies out the cot if there are issues. The bad taste people will get from that would long outlast any disappointment people might get from a delay. We have waited this long, another month or two isn't that big a deal in the long run. Heatblur have provided top of the range, module defining releases in the past and I'm sure this will be another one. These things happen.

This. I hope a lot of devs take advantage of HBs offer, as this would highly improve the multicrew modules we have right now. Same goes for Razbams IFF logic, wich they said will be available for other devs as well, for free IIRC.

It's also amazing how many community members easily manage without while others clearly don't.

Talking about transparence, are you new here?.... you remember with ED and Other 3rd parties build extensive reports years ago, and here some folks convert that reports on a S....storm?, and ED cut all comunicatins with post has turned on a hunt of "torches and pitchforks" with a "Where are my module?".... someone has learn by the hard way, with someone has none interest on "comprensive develop reports" (example Wags Develop reports).

We can stop blaming covid, one can be sick and not have covid.. Said no DCS User ever.

Who, exactly, is jerking you around. They've taken no money; they've made no promises. You and others need to rethink this.

I'd say the problem with that approach is you would get a post of "There's a bit of system/FM coding/debugging done" week after week after week after week after week and after week. The only interesting stuff that can be used for updates and newsletters (of any PC videogame really) is graphics (screenshots and short vids), maybe occasionally some functional feature description like Heatblur's custom UI for upcoming Phantom. We've got some of the former (screenshots posted by Rudel every now and then), all the latter would be tedious and not really "showable" bits and pieces of code. In the end, as mentioned above, as long as money hasn't changed hands yet, nobody owes anything to anyone. And even money isn't a guarantee of succesful outcome. Let's not forget all these nice screens and vids of VEAO P-40F (with pre-purchase!) and Mk XIV Spitfire coming to DCS... until the company flopped and they didn't.

I was afraid you were getting fed up with MT mission flag shenanigans, AI issues and N2 airfield problems to the point of not producing DCS campaigns anymore. I'm glad to see, however, that sweet masochism still drives you to produce the best DLC campaigns available for this platform . And so it drives us to play them! Keep up the good work, mate.

Have you even read their complete statement?

Self entitled, over indulged, petulant “Gimme!” types gonna “Gimme!”, I guess. Quit foaming at the mouth. It’s undignified.

I am pleased that the default state, is to only use local data sources on the device, however, if you allow access to the Internet, then then it must be part of your threat model, and it requires appropriate mitigation in order to manage the risk... And appropriate security testing... And controls... Just saying "don't use a feature" is not a realistic control... As it is prone to user error, or deliberate exploitation. Especially because as I have said we largely have been recommended to turn off security features in windows (Av etc...) on the folders containing dcs, for performance reasons, something that until now made sense, because of the limited attack surface in play. Adding the browser in this way changes that. I remain concerned that a browser is being used here in this way, especially with such a small team, I am less concerned about the use of a chromium based browser , per-say, though I do care what features will be in your build of chrome. And again how you will maintain the integrity of the browser, given dcs's own patch update schedule. Also bearing in mind that any customisation will complicate your ability to patch the browser... I would strongly recommend you consider this approach of allowing browsing access to Internet resources, as it will have consequences that will be difficult for a small Dev team to manage... Ranging from sand box escapes, to custom tab vulnerabilities to Skia, to WebSQL and on...and on...

Before people start sharpening their pitchforks, please consult HBs update : When we began mass testing of the F-4 in January, we found that an estimated 5-10% of users had complete, game breaking, unusable lag with any and all UI elements due to a GPU bottleneck, and despite all-out efforts, truly day and night, to resolve these as soon as possible, we found ourselves at the mercy of a complex onion of PC hardware and OS interactions. Every time we thought we had a breakthrough, we’d run into another set of hardware and software combinations and be right back at step one. Every time this happened, we thought we were back on track, only to find ourselves behind schedule once again. Every time, this forced us back to the drawing board to reassess and try new solutions, and further shifted our timeline, yet disguised itself as something that appeared to be solvable in time. While concerning, we initially approached the issue with confidence. We’ve solved worse in the runup to the release of the F-14 and Viggen. Or so we thought. The core issue causing this turned out to be an incredibly complex, multi-layered onion involving both the Windows GPU scheduler as well as GPU process scheduling in DCS itself, mixed in with some deep, hardware level connections across various technologies, such as HAGS, resizable bar, and even specific GPU drivers. It took us hundreds of hours of debugging and bombarding the affected hardware and individuals with experimental builds, and in the end, despite also reaching out to industry contacts, we found no solution but to rewrite significant parts of our UI layer to solve the issue. Not only did we spend an inordinate amount of time trying every combination of solution we could think of, seemingly at the brink of a breakthrough, but in the end found no reasonable solution other than to go back and rewrite this key piece of the F-4. In summary, this issue has diverted a significant amount of resources to fix. Elusive issues with many elements out of our control can be a nightmare, especially when it comes to features which underpin the entirety of our product, and for the very first time in our entire decade long history… we just couldn’t find a solution except ripping it apart and building it back together. While an “I told you so” retort may be poor form, it has to be repeated: this is an ambitious project. HB is implementing many positive changes with this module, but each new feature requires testing, bug fixing, and retesting to confirm the bugs are fixed. We cannot have our cake and eat it too: the product can be delivered quickly, properly, or within financial and labor cost. We can have any two outcomes on a given project , but not all three at the same time. The same people willing to rip ED a new one for a delay are also the same people who’d rip them a new one if they met the deadline but had a buggy product. Let’s be better than that. Note, every successful aircraft project -yes, that includes the so-called “affordable” F-16 and A-10- completed suffered delays and overruns. Thats part of the game. We aviation fans stand frustrated when ignorant hit piece media gets released tearing down the program at the first sign of obstacles or problems . We groan when Congresscritters and reporters hurl complaints because Aircraft X is behind schedule. It’s the same story, just change the aircraft. The same things being said about the F-35 now were said about the F-15 & F-4. I don’t speak Russian, but I’m sure the Soviets traded similar internal critiques about the MiG-29 and Sukhoi 27 back in the day. We know in the end it’ll pan out, but that doesn’t stop the baloney slinging . Let’s not do that , and extend the same courtesy to HB that we do to Lockheed Martin and other concerns when they too have delays. Give HB the chance to make it right in the end. That may take months, or they may even have to erase the whole thing and start over with a fresh codebase and a 2025 release date. It is what it is, and we’re better off letting HB make it work without pointless bickering, “is it here yet” threads or pointless epithets speculating that a conspiracy with the Illuminati and the Lizard People are secretly embargoing the F-4E release.

Hi CH, With the Kola map being added at some point this year, have you considered adding some Finnish or Norwegian assets? Vehicles like Leopard 2A8NOR, BMP-2MD, CV9030N/FIN and K9 Thunder would really compliment your existing Swedish assets and the new map.

I'm confident that the F4 will be released when Heatblur is happy with the sim. Id rather they wait and get things sorted than release a bug ridden and unplayable mess. What Heatblur has set out to make is a huge jump in many areas of sim technology, and these things, understandably, take time, and as I've come to learn, deadline are never truly set in stone. . It saddens me to see people this upset over this.

Drag and drop this into your F-15EX folder and overwrite. That will fix the issue. I'll update it in the mod upload as well. F15EX.lua

its fine stop whining no ones gonna hack ur phantom

Hello @IronMike @Cobra847. HBUI is a powerful tool. I wonder if it's possible to add Google Translator to the manual part so that anyone who doesn't understand English can translate the manual into any language in real time during the flight. I don't know if the Google Translator API is free to use, but if it is, I would like this idea to be considered. Thanks!

if any link is made to any internet based content you cannot make that guarantee... if you are not allowing any access to the internet but only to code/data/lua that is local you need to say so explicitly ... and i will breathe a happy sigh of relief.

Oops, I must have commented out the AIM-260 on that station by mistake. Easy enough to fix, you can expect an micro-patch within a few hours.

On a serious note Speed-of-heat speaks the truth here make no mistake.

if they don't maintain it who will... it wont magically update itself ? certificate pinning could be used to limit access to specific sites, but, then we are in a different world of what is the criteria who maintains it and buys the certs etc..., otherwise it becomes quite difficult to limit actual access for example a suborned link could be used by a motivated attacker, why would they be motivated money typically, ransom ware, vandalisim, the list goes on. in the example they specifically show it going out to an arbitrary website, yes it happens to have DCS content on it and i actually use that site myself ... but what happens when that site links to another and so on ... who is going to maintain the whitelist, most games do not include a live internet browser for a reason ... this is one of them I don't think they thought it was dangerous when in one of the first versions of IE they enabled arbitrary code execution remotely via a URL.. everyone thought it was a great idea until the bad guys started using it... even then i remember some of the more frantic calls begging to keep this functionality enabled... The problem is the implications for "good use" are easy and clear where as the implications for "abuse" are not clear and hard to understand, because of 2nd and 3rd order problems... and hard even for security professionals with 4 decades in the field to understand ... and TBH neither HB or ED are experts in the field of security.. because their exposed threat surface is small ... a browser changes that massively so, hilariously so...

+1 For security and privacy reasons all my systems are configured to deny traffic for Google products and with all Google servers, so CEF is in the block list.

@IronMike Just read through the whole explanation. Whilst very welcome, I feel you went much more in depth as anyone could have asked for. So thanks to the Heatblur team for that. One thing that came to my mind while reading about the nature of the issue, is the the obvious similarity in quality and nature of the problem to the performance problems some people face with DCS in general. (Hard to pin down and replicate problems and so one) I trust and hope that Heatblur is working hand in hand with ED and any findings will benefit DCS as a whole.

Thanks for the update! Don‘t crunch your people to badly though. No deadline is worth sacrificing health and family! Looking forward to the release.

Yes and that is a huge problem. Buying a 60-80 dollar soviet aircraft and hope that sometime before the heat death of the universe, We might get a eatern front map and a few eatern front ground units. In the 10 years since the MiG15 and F86 was released nobody has even bothered making a single T34 tank.

And that's the problem for DCS, no Eastern Front content, 2 Easter Front planes with no context except flying them around as show ponies, as much as I love the LA7 its a pass for me at what will be a possible $69 USD purchase, I doubt DCS will ever have a Easter Front map of the AI units to go with it to flesh out a good WW2 scenario.

On develop La-7 Octopus-G, On final Stages. Develop pics

This is a first world problem, there are far greater issues going on in the world than to worry about a delay in a module. just use the time time to read up on the various manuals available.

@Daemoc Here is a simple working example of what I think you might be trying to achieve. 1. AI Helo takes-off from home base empty. 2. Helo flys to a field collection point LZ1 and picks up Special Forces troops. 3. Helo flys to LZ2 and drops troops off. (Insertion) 4. Helo takes off and orbits in the area and troops make their way to LZ3. 5. Troops request pick up at LZ3 and helo obliges.(Extraction) 6. Helo flys back to base and disembarks Special Forces troops. 7. Helo then lands on the airfield pan. It’s not a simple process but it does only require 2 triggers to work and a couple of flags. Look closely at the setup for the units. I hope this helps. Cheers. helospecialforces.trk 2heloUH60.miz

Haha.... well I would prefer to fly the bird and have Magnum on the Co-Pilot seat Just kidding - its awful lot of work.

Not everything worked:

I’m always amazed at how so many users can fly DCS only as a reproduction of historic events, and need a historic map and historic AI units in order to fly and enjoy a new aircraft module. On my case, I like DCS mostly to experience and learn to fly a given aircraft, I have no problem with a fictional scenario, say a La-7 flying on the Normandy map on 1944, Ijust imagine a coop program between the allies, where in exchange for some US units sent to the URSS, a squadron of La-7 gets to participate on the D-day. Limiting oneself to only historic re-enactments is … well, limiting

That's it in a nutshell

honestly I'm surprised this wasn't patched yet, let alone acknowledged in a weekly newsletter or some way the casual player can see it. It left a really bad impression on me and on my will to continue investing in new DCS modules as well as continuing the upgrade path for VR. I'm not angry at Meta or ED, but rather about how inflexible they are towards each other: Meta for not allowing official rollbacks and ED for not releasing a hotfix. The Rift, Q2, Q3, and QPro are some of the most popular VR headsets in the world. They're essentially the Thrustmaster of VR. Imagine if one morning all the Thrustmaster devices stopped working natively with DCS, and you would need an emulator or new software to make them work with degraded performance. that would be completely unacceptable, and that's exactly what happens with the Meta headsets at the moment. I'm one of the players who was affected by this. In the end I managed to come up with a v62 rollback method that still works in my system, but many players are not as fortunate. Still, I can't help but think: I bought the most high-end PC available, invested in HOTAS and pedals, invested in a VR headset, bought modules in hundreds of dollars and I woke up to a non-working setup with no official date on when it will be fixed. That's really frustrating.

Plans on a future, to redome de Su-25