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Agreed. I don't have hard numbers, and all I wrote is conjecture/BS. Then again, when you read some books yourself, you may find out what the term "educated guess" means. It's still a guess, yes. The difference is... you'll find out. Not at all. MAC was supposed to be an entire game, similar to, but not DCS. That was the point. Perhaps watch the 2018 'trailer' (link is to a yt commenter, not the trailer). We can argue that with FC 20245 ED re-purposed and salvaged what remained of MAC. I'm not squabbling over details, and usually would have let that slide -- yet you seem to be the one insisting on hard, accurate facts.

That would be nice, yet entirely against gamer social patterns. Behavioral patterns tell us that those who do purchase would probably buy a lower-cost/high return module (e.g. Flaming Cliffs) or iconic FF module, play for a while, and eventually lose interest. That's typically around 50% of those who purchase. A part of the remaining 50% progress to a FF module, and we again face a 50% fall-off after some time. Prime issue here is the - compared to other entertainment titles - relatively high acquisition cost of modules, and dearth of high-quality content (missions, campaigns). To me it's similar to titles with low end-game content: nothing left to do. These are strong gating functions for entertainment titles. From there, the remaining 25% will see a stronger tendency to remain, meaning that those who do remain will be likely to purchase an additional map, and have a good likelihood to slowly acquire more modules. This is also the crowd that is likely to supply on-line players. But indeed, although we may come up with great models for customer distribution, retention, price elasticity and spending habits, I really know nothing, and all I'm writing is purely (mildly educated) conjecture, and a lot of wishful thinking - I want ED to be as successful and around for as long as possible.

You presence here alone virtually guarantees that you are part of the multi-module owning, probably 10+ module-owning crowd. This is a self-selecting group. We are not the majority. We are, however, the connoisseur, so to speak. Those who know and enjoy a good thing.

Yes.

They are now: PlayerScoreTable To use a score table in your mission, you · Place a Trigger Zone on the map (anywhere) · Name that Zone “playerScoreTable” (note: name must match exactly) · Add the names/types and their score to the table The playerScoreTable uses the following format: Name Description <tape or name of Unit / Group / Static Object> Type Exampe: BTR-80 Name Example: Big Kahuna Wildcard examples: BTR* Big K* <Score to award as number> Example: 15 Example: 130 Note: The name is first checked again a unit’s name, and then against the unit’s group. The name//type designation support wildcard ending. A name that ends on an asterisk (“*”) matches all names/types that start the same (anything up to, but not including the asterisk). So, for example, BTR* will match all DCS typeNames that start with “BTR”, e.g. "BTR-80", "BTR-82A" and “BTR_D”. Recall that DCS type names are not their “displayNames”. Type names can be found here: https://github.com/mrSkortch/DCS-miscScripts/tree/master/ObjectDB Note that types/names in the playerScoreTable are case insensitive. “A-10C” is the same as “a-10c”, “Big-K*” will match “BIG-kahoona” @DD_Friar - if you have the time, I welcome you early-testing the new additions and provide some feedback. playerScore.lua

I probably agree. I've never played LSO nor Air Boss, nor have I ever seen that position filled on my servers. The good thing is that we have the option. And yeah, I'd absolutely pay for a "DCS Tower" module. If that's AI only, I don't care as long as it's good.

Thank you BN, that is indeed good to hear.

No - the fix is in the bedrock zones module. It catches this change for all modules that build on 'zones'.

That's an assertion that I strongly question. I posit that the total income from customers who bought 3 modules or less is much higher than the total income generated by customers who buy 4+ modules. DCS is on a one-off payment schedule, only future sales count, past sales are irrelevant. My take on DCS's current portfolio is that 2 planes and one helicopter are in active support (Hornet, Viper, and Apache), and ED now bet the farm on Fat Amy generating massive future income. It must be a success after their past couple of launches faltered. That's the consequence of not having a steady income stream. So, if there are planes that people buy in droves it would be one or two of those three, not much else, and many depart from DCS after a few years. I daresay that the percentage of all ED customers who own less than 4 modules is 80%+. So I assert (without proof) that ED lives on the spur-of-moment buyers, not the loyal customers. TBH, if the latter were the case, I posit that ED'd engage with their long-time customers very differently. Strangely enough, at least to my badly-tuned, non-native English mind, your posts do seem to have a tendency to come across as abrasive. Probably not intentionally, and maybe only to foreigners. Please take this as well-intentioned feedback, not an attack. That's popular democratic Europe for you: all inclusive. In stark contrast to managed-democracy AIM-120s that are very picky whom they interact with One thing I do have to mention: I rather enjoyed the 'leaves reading session' what which word from a post meant in which juxtaposition to other words. Reminds of the good old times "Half-Life 3" divining sessions. Hopefully the Rafale and Typhoon make it some day to DCS. There is no guarantee that they will. One thing is sure, though: no matter how much hassle HB got when they delayed the F4, they need to create excitement from a business perspective, so of course they and ED will hype it up. Nobody will be able to miss the uptick in chatter, should the time approach. And remember: even if these new models are talked up, there's a good 30% chance that they still won't make it. IIRC, that's DCS's current hit/miss ratio with modules (yeah, MAC, I'm looking at you)

And of those 5 perhaps 2 are current in procedures. Definitely a niche product. There is a very interesting ATC/Tower application for DCS available (here) for people who want to become traffic controllers.

Here's an updated cfxZones module that accounts for the silly change in DCS's mission data. cfxZones.lua

Holy CRAP! You did not do anything wrong. There appears to have been an internal, unannounced change to the way that DCS stores mission data. While it used to store numerical zone data as numbers , e.g. ["radius"] = 213.36, it now (for reasons unknown) has changed to store some of these numbers as strings, e.g. ["radius"] = "800", (note the quotes around 800) which throws a big spanner into any method that doesn't guard for this silliness. Goodness, what a mess. Luckily, few methods in DML access zone radius directly, and the LZ module is the first to fall victim to this (and only if the LZ is circular). It's still staggeringly incomprehensible why this happens. I'll have an updated module ready asap.

Except that pushing it forward meant increase path inclination during descent, and pushing it forward during docking meant increase yaw. Yeah, you are trolling. Thank you for engaging with me.

That is very difficult to diagnose from here, as you are using DOSCRIPTFILE instead of DOSCRIPT (DCS makes debugging script files really difficult). From what I see you seem to not have included a pulser nor random module, but that should not generate the error. An error in cfxZones is a rather rare occurance (zones and common are the most battle-tested modules), but still possible. If possible, please remove all mods from the miz, and either PM the miz for analysis to me, or post it here. I'm quite confident that we can resolve this mystery quickly.

Huh. Funny you should say that. And I now posit that unless you use VR and a 4+DOF motion platform, we cannot simulate a flight-like reality, and you must stay on arcade games or, better yet, look at images of flight - bacause that is all you can ever have in non-VR, unmoving space. Some people seem to like flying with keyboard and mouse. More power to them. I certainly don't. But imposing arbitrary standards what constitutes 'proper' flight simming doesn't help. My neighbor is vegan and runs 10 miles each day. She claims to like both. I have no reason to disbelieve her and would never tell her that true taste requires meat and only little exercise, although it seems true to me.

Except, of course, for a joystick in flight sim mode (as opposed to 2D navigation mode as it's used in CAT scanners or many other medical and engineering appliances that I know). Or an Apple Mouse wheel. "Natural Response" isn't natural at all, just what the predominant culture where you grew up in conditioned you to accept as 'normal'. Drive in England when you are conditioned to drive on the right side of the road, and see that your "natural" response is simply wrong (glancing left first when crossing the street can kill you there). Work with people who naturally read and write from right to left (and who use their left hand "naturally" to write) and then re-evaluate what you just thought of as "natural". It's not. It's just your conditioning. You (as I) probably grew up in a western-culture dominated society, and are conditioned to those norms. There is nothing natural nor innate about it. It just cultural convention. And: Remember Ender's "The enemy gate is down" ("Ender's Game"). Directionality is merely a point of view. In he cultural sphere where you are, probably. Except when it's not (Apple Mouse Wheel). But usually all the things that you mentioned above are produced, marketed and sold for your cultural sphere. And in different set-ups for other, ... in that market, perhaps. And because you can get an upsell premium for devices that do allow customization, so there is a business impetus to upsell. I wish you would assert less and reflect more. Maybe you really can't change your conditioning, and that would be that. I have no trouble switching between forward = down and forward = up in different (very similar) contexts when I go from my Windows machine to my Mac (multiple times each day). Humans can effortlessly train muscle memory, especially if it is accompanied by aural and visual stimuli. Motorcyclists know that they have to invert left/right steering when they exceed some 10 mph. It happens 'naturally' (automatically), you do it without thinking. I highly recommend that you read up or research these things instead of (what I think you are doing) extrapolating from your beliefs how things may work. I recommend that you add the occasional "IMHO" or "I believe" to your writings. It softens your assertions of fact into what I surmise they are: statements of belief. I think that "Its too frustrating to me, and I see no reason" would have been a much more accurate reflection of your thoughts. There was nothing wrong with the Apollo controller. The problem was that it was constructed for landing vertically, so looking forward and down was 'forward', and the controls where calibrated for that. When docking, however, the Lunar Module moved in the opposite direction, and the pilots looked up as their forward, cycling all control directions. Yeah, they trained for that. No, nothing about that was natural. All was convention. And human adaptability.

Currently, static objects ignore the tail number unless it's part of the livery. When SG allocates the static object it passes exactly the same information at it would for the real thing, so any differences are part of DCS's inner workings that are currently undocumented.

Why put any effort into anything? Some people - who obviously aren't you - have different preferences, different from yours. Please believe me when I tell you that there is variety out there, and not everyone agrees with your proclivities. Theirs are as valid or invalid as yours. If a vendor decides to cater to more than one, that's valid too. Somehow I feel like feeding a troll. Hopefully I'm not.

Expansion already uses DML modules for that, and they are in DML - just not officially documented, and announced. They are still undergoing testing. If you feel lucky, and are a glutton for punishment, try and experiment with the milHelo, milWings, launchPlatform, camp (and some other I don't remember) modules. They provide the services for flights, missile attacks etc, but currently do not have their own bank nor menu integration. Once I get around to doing that, they'll become official DML modules.

Well, I guess it would be easier to simply have 'tunnel' zones that send signals if aircraft break floor or ceiling. The next request will be for zones that detect when planes are below or above some arbitrary speed, the next would want a signal when a unit deviates from a certain heading, as less than 50% fuel etc. Yes, all that can be done. The checks are computationally expensive, though. Each and every aircraft in the mission must be checked regularly against all zones, so performance can quickly tank for such a feature -- which is why I'm so hesitant to implement it. Maybe limit this to player aircraft, and we could cut down on the impact. But before we talk about solutions, let's talk about requirements: What do you want to achieve in your mission? Force players to remain below a ceiling in certain areas?

Well, they didn't call it "Warmland". Even Erik the Red (who wasn't squeamish when it came to the truth by a long shot) knew that people wouldn't let that slide (on top of his banishment for murder). So in a bit of shrewd middle-age marketing, he called it "Greenland". Which also makes a nice contrast to his previous home, Iceland. None of this is relevant to DCS (until we get a GIUK map, that is), so I'll now shut up. You are welcome

Version 2.4.2 -- 20250129 -- functional update Quite unexpectedly (and a day early) -- and definitely not a result of planning -- this update to DML turns out to be much more significant than I anticipated. It all started, innocently enough, with a request to add a small boost to PlayerScore's functionality: allow players in Combined Arms roles to score. This resulted in a major re-write of the entire kill-tracking mechanism, now includes a full 're-threading of the needle' ability to attribute last-hit when the unit is lost later (required because of a breaking, unannounced change in DCS from a couple of months ago) and other, minor additions (including to PlayerScoreUI). So now, PlayerScore not only supports CA players (even though I still think that the CA module is one of ED's low points in terms of quality and fidelity), but it now again correctly attributes 'indirect' kills, i.e. hits that result in the 'cooking-off' of vehicles. Then there was a comment I received that sparked an idea for additional abilities in GuardianAngel that has been marinating in the back of my mind ever since I watched 'Shirtless in the Navy' AKA 'Top Gun II' with my godson: the ability to place 'SAM safe' zones - zones where aircraft are safe from SAMs as long as they are inside the zone, and observe floor and ceiling. So you now can have a tunnel through the danger zone in your missions, just like Geriatrick. If that wasn't enough, I got hit up on a gloomy Sunday morning (well, I was gloomy and a bit hung over, the weather, admittedly, was fine) with a request from 61st Griff's @bitboy to help ease the suffering of mission creators when they want to embellish a mission with helicopters on plane guard duty. Anyone who has ever done this knows just how hostile Mission Editor's already lamentably inadequate UX becomes in this case, especially if the naval unit is a) not the first in the group or b) doesn't travel due North (0°). Some Alka-Seltzers and a re-read of an (elementary) 2D vector algebra chapter later, DML now puts a stop to your suffering: drop a trigger zone near any naval unit, tell it which helicopter is on duty, and presto! plane guard. It makes you wonder why this is so hard in vanilla DCS, as the difficulty is purely some busy-work math that could be entirely hidden from mission creators with a 'plane guard' waypoint action and a link to the target unit. And as always, there are some modules that received code hardening and some outright bug fixes (I kind of goofed last time I updated the pulser module). To top it off, I also updated some old demo mission, plus added a couple of new one, all documented fully, pushing the shock block over the 900 pages mark. Last time, I took out 200 pages and tried to simplify DML by dropping Lua support. This time, you won't be so lucky. All changes: Documentation Main - Playerscore (update) - Guardian Angel (update) - PlaneGuard (new) - Many small changes and updates QuickRef - PlaneGuard (new) Demos - follow me! (update) - Guardian Angel Reloaded (update) - Guardians and Sanctuaries (new) - missile evasion (update) - yes you CAn (new) - bottled messages (update) - Plane Guard (new) Modules - cfxMX 3.0.1 - new getClosestUnitToPoint() - delayFlags 2.1.0 - deprecated old attributes - guardianAngel 4.0.0 - New sanctuary zones - heloTroops 4.2.1 - fixed typo in attribute - planeGuard 1.0.0 - Initial version - playerScore 5.1.0 - CA immediate scoring - threading the needle (cooking off) - playerScoreUI 3.1.0 - support for config zones - support for 'attachTo:' - pulseFlag 2.0.2 - fixed a bug in persistence code - spawnZones 3.0.1 - increased verbosity - unitZone 2.0.1 - code hardening Enjoy, -ch

It is neither, and can be trained. Remember the Lunar Lander? For docking, the axes were reversed from the pilot’s point of view. On a Mac, the scroll wheel works opposite to Windows. When I use a trackball, I have set it to reverse Y (roll down to move up, and left to move left). UX studies have shown that humans can train this in hours, same as different keyboard layouts (Dvorak vs English). If you can’t relearn simple motoric responses to thought stimuli, that would be a you problem.

Your players might

I'm sure that I can find a way. In the mean time, you could try and use the group name as a stopgap Hmmm. Obviously, should we add wildcarded names that should be trivial. Let me see what I can come up with.