cfrag

The miz spawns new aircraft every 600-700 seconds (= 10 - 11.5 minutes), as per requirements Of course. The pulser (inside trigger zone "Bogey randomizer") gives the command for a new spawn cycle, the 'zeroPulse' attribute controls if there is a pulse at mission start. it defaults to "yes", so add an attribute, call it "zeroPulse" and set the value to "no" to wait 10-11 mins for the first spawn. The pulser's "time" attribute (currently set 600-700) controls the time between spawn cycles, now set to 600 to 700 (randomized) seconds. Yes, but since that wasn't in the requirements, it would require some changes to the miz Perhaps have a look at the "CESAR in Caucasus" mission on ED's user files. It may give you some ideas.

While I love the idea of having both planes in DCS, I think that it would be good to remember that the idea of trainer aircraft does not translate well into flight-simming. In sim world, there are no downsides attached to training for a Hornet in a Hornet. You crash, you re-start, no loss. Now, for enthusiasts like me, both aircraft would be insta-purchases, even the Tweet, although I'll likely fly it alone, just for myself - probably just because of the side-by-side cockpit.

Well, I fully agree, and I do not understand why ED, owning the entire User Files space, do not integrate mission discovery into DCS, and automatically update any content that you have downloaded when it is updated. Integration could then go one step further and also integrate mission upload to user files into Mission Editor, making that part so much less painful and better. Here's to hoping,

Hmmm. Here's some unsolicited advice: don't get your stock advice from your hairdresser, and don't ask a party novelty for strategic software development insight. I do realize that Betteridge's law of headlines ("if it ends and a question mark, the answer is 'no'") also applies to most forum posts, but still... ChatGPT's answers are - as expected - a low-effort assemblage of truisms and buzzwords, arranged to sound like it affirms your question (it's a "yes"-bot, designed to make you you feel good). I won't go into details because a good deal of me believes that you know all this and are simply trolling.

Yes, and it's not particularly challenging to do so - although it does requires some scripting, and it's easily is covered by most of the available scripting frameworks. The reason why this subject doesn't come up often is a different one: A fully randomized mission as you describe isn't particularly interesting for players, as it places the element of random as its center feature, not strategy. Below, I've thrown together a mission that should match your requirements. Total building time (using a tool called "DML", but any other should do the trick) was some 15 minutes. And yeah, it gets boring fast. That being said, you could use the principles of that mission to add the element of randomization into your more interesting missions. Max Random.miz

Unfortunately, the official documentation for DCS mission scripting is next to non-existent, out of date, and misleading (at best). Hoggit is the best source of information available wrt mission scripting, and we owe @Grimes et al who maintain that site out of the good of their heart an immense debt of gratitude (THANK YOU!). And shame on ED for their continued one-finger salute to the entire mission creation community.

After a full repair of DCS (a rather lengthy process due to the multiple hundreds of gigabytes involved), Win's AV spoke up again, declaring a (probably false positive) null Now, after decades in this business, I have learned to not take warnings like this lightly. Mine is now a zero tolerance policy towards potential malware, and I will not whitelist folders, especially if they contain downloaded content over which I have no control. It's a pity that I lose my F4 for the time being, and I'm hoping that the kind folk at HB, whom I know to deliver stellar work, liaise with with the many AV vendors to have this issue resolved. And yes, my peace of mind is worth the wait - my sincere thanks to HB for making the transition period as short as possible.

Version 1.82 -- chance of fog Changes each time that you start the mission, there is a chance of fog with visibility ranging from 2.5 to 3.5 km Enjoy, and "Guten Rutsch" -ch

Yeah. Like a chainsaw can be used to open beer bottles - one way or the other. Neither elegant, nor efficient, nor very useful. Not really usable, but use-able to a certain extend. "Functional Design" is something that may have to be rediscovered for ME realm. Here's to hoping.

I just recovered from my encounter with the "multi-object selection tool" to trust myself enough to not use too colorful language. In a nutshell: I find it to be really, really bad interface-wise, with marginal added value for real-life mission creation. A squandered opportunity with obvious (but buried) potential. It's as if some alien, with little human GUI experience, and who had never used an object oriented editor, heard about "band selection", and went on to implement something from what little they understood. Whoever implemented what they thought they understood from the requirements does not, so it seems, regularly create missions. Otherwise, I think that tool would work much, much differently. Let's begin with the "Why": Why are mission creators looking for band selection? To quickly select multiple objects, and apply a change to that selection. What did we get? Some modal (impedes workflow) selection thingy, with overly complex handling, non-standard, difficult and unintuitive de-/selection schemes (plural!): something that is ill suited to quickly perform the most common tasks. To engage band selection, you have to activate band selection! For crying out loud, why modality, why the need to activate 'band selection mode'? Look at PowerPoint, any RTS, heck look at the icon display in windows Explorer to see how this most basic interface metaphor works! Band selection activates and deactivates automatically, driven by context -- it is not modal. This isn't 1990 any more. People know how to use a GUI, and they expect standard behavior. Implementing against expectation is sure to create a negative experience, and create worse results. Adding and removing objects to/from the selection is positively alien, convoluted, unpredictable (!) and breaks your workflow (you have to de-/activate more strange modes). Whatever happened to simple, universally-known "shift-clicking" to add/remove from a selection??? Calling this design "Amateurish" would IMHO be unkind to Amateurs. Worse: what is one of the most common use case for multi-object select during real-world mission creation? Change the coalition of the selection. Can we do that? No. That option does not exist. How about a base-name change (like it already happens automatically with copy/paste)? No again. How about moving the selection? Yes, but you first have to engage move mode (another mode within a mode), or press a modifier key. Look at established practice in any object editor to see how it is done, and what everyone expects. And then we have a non-standard, complex group rotation around a new, difficult to understand interface element "anchor" that has little to no additional value. When you select multiple objects, it would be much better to go the established way: draw an outline frame, and rotate around the (marked) center. That's all we need, and it's orders of magnitude easier to use. With introduction of this silly anchor metaphor, I also note that this is yet another UX-breaking non-standard way to rotate objects in ME, after that line art silliness from last year. You did know that you can interactively rotate some line art, right? Not all, and it's just almost non-discoverable, and completely non-standard, and seldom works the way that you expect. Yeah, some, but not all line art in ME switches to rotation mode (instead of resize/reposition) on every other click into the object. Not on the first click, and not the third, but on second, fourth, sixth, ... click. Really, really bad design, yes. IMHO, this entire multi-select thing has complete non-sense UX, it goes against any and all UX best practices published in the last two decades, violates most norms, and it makes ME more difficult to use, not better. Please, please, please let someone with real UX expertise review (better: design) ME interface-related elements before publishing them. And, yes, I'm happy to provide deeper feedback- I wish the kind folk at ED would ask people who have experience in UX design, or showcase their designs before they go live with them. This kind of feedback is trivial to obtain, and I would doubt that the current implementation would have passed muster even for first-year interface design students. And yes, I believe the need for better UX talent at ED is becoming urgent. The MP join dialogs are already really bad UI design, the Hook's cargo dialog abysmal, and now this....? A really bad trend. Please, a quality product like DCS should also have a quality experience to match.

Actually that's phenomenal! That AI soldier is squaring the circle! Heureka!

Same here. Windows has flagged a file in F4 as a Trojan, authorization is blocked.

This thread (subject "niche", as pertaining to market segment size) talks about popularity. If you state as fact something wildly inaccurate ("big dog in town"), expect to get called on it. If you had cached that in "I feel that" or "IMHO best in xyz", I wouldn't have objected. DCS is a tiny niche product, and I would love if - and invest myself to help - if that changed. Ah. Please be advised that on his 5th birthday, I took my godson with me in a Cherokee and handed him the controls. Yes, 5-years old can fly planes. Just not land. Flying aircraft is not difficult. Being good, precise and predictable is. Flying an exact 2 minute turn without losing or gaining more than 10 ft of alt is. Any kid can fly a plane, so what is your point? Goodness, where to start? How about being able to see when your friends are online in a miz and join them so we don't have to use Discord Invite friends to your server should you host a miz when both players own the same plane, allow one to assume controls and the other to watch and switch at will. This would allow incredible instructor/student sessions being able to pre-brief with your friends in-game using a common, annotatable map and later (during mission) have that map available in cockpit or F10 map view Arrange your and your friend's waypoints during briefing and have them download automatically into your aircraft's nav computer (if it has one), and have them displayed on the F10 map being able to choose your aircraft, position and loadout yourself instead of having only pre-arranged slots (this is slowly changing with the new dynamic spawn, so good!) being able to discover missions (i.e. browse them, and instantly download and play them) from ED's user files, including MP. automatically keep discovered content current (update them automatically should an update to a miz, livery or mod become available on ED's user files) be able to use any livery - and if not installed, have them download (even temporarily) to your computer for the duration of the game when a mission requires mods that you don't use (e.g. CAM), have them installed (and removed thereafter) for the mission on-the fly. This is also a great business-opportunity for ED to sell more packs like WWII (I'd love to see an "Insurgent asset pack" and "rescue asset pack" as well as "airfield asset pack" be able to randomly change missions on your server every n hours (I had to write a 350 line server script for this basic function) Change mission start time and weather on the fly for the server Have weather (and fog) be local -- so we can have light rain and 1000m vis fog in Haifa where we depart, while weather is CAVOK in Amman where the targets are (single and MP) Save a co-op mission and continue it later Look at a MP re-play of a mission, and jump in at any time (yes, multiplayer! Take over any plane that you own, and have the rest behave 'from file'). Have some real ATC (APR, TWR, GND). I want airfields to be active with AI planes, and then to be able to declare an emergency while inbound and have ATC clear a path for me, while deploying rescue vehicles on the ground. For the love of god, invest some resources into the "Communications" atrocity (number-driven menu) that was old in 1990's, and please, please, harmonize the way you talk to your AI (currently each aircraft does their own: Tomcat, Phantom, Apache, Hind, Kiowa - nothing is standardized) and integrate this with MP. When you are at an unfamiliar airfield, be able to request a progressive from GND/TWR, and (icing on the cake) superimpose symbols on the taxiways (maybe like it's now done in supercarrier) so you know where to go. Be able to use helper gates in MP, turn them on and off at will Look at the Hook's cargo UX and try not to cry. And on, and on. This isn't difficult to see. DCS's online experience is IMHO rock bottom. And it's much worse in single-player (note that I did not rag on ME). My point is that DCS's user experience (everything BUT the actual flying) needs a serious touch-up. To keep neophyte players interested so they stay and become long-time players. My word, please add an "IMHO" here and there to indicate that you are not asserting facts. DCS can be downloaded by anyone, and if that is accessible to you, fine. Else I strongly urge you to peruse a book on Human Interface Guidelines. DCS is one of the least accessible software titles from an UX perspective that I know. When I mean "accessible" I mean the amount of work and learning required to discover and do things that are elementary and have been standardized long ago. DCS's is terrible in this regard. For an extra frosting of frustration, enter Mission editor, place a couple of blue scenery objects, and then band-select them to change their affiliation to red. UX? Nowhere to be seen. That's YT's user engagement algorithm for you. You watch videos with DCS content, so you get served up more of the same, because the algorithm thinks that you like them, and YT monetizes that way. It does not mean that DCS content is spiking. It just means that YT knows you like DCS content and sells ads with it. My YT page is filled with vids on vintage car repairs. That doesn't mean the Jag E-Type is making a comeback. The interface designer's, clear and simple. ED want to sell aircraft, so they must make the experience good. You seem to mistake complex/complicated for sophistication. DCS is complex, yes. A good interface designer makes it accessible. A new customer in DCS (of any age) should be led through multiple, elegant stages: first set up your joystick/gear (oh, another godawful UX catastrophe - why can't I have good default settings or import them from one plane to another - inside the interface?), then ask or explain that the plane can be optionally hot-started, and then guide a new player through the first steps. DCS's way is near acrimonious. It should be fun. My apologies for being so unclear. To me it's all about good interface design. DCS's UX IMHO is terrible and should be improved to make your time in the game less a fight, and more of a friendly expedition. Taking off and landing a plane is difficult enough. Why make everything else around it unnecessarily difficult? And that, my friend, ends this exchange of ideas for us. You and I come from very, very different viewpoints, and I won't engage in this discussion over "teaching vs. the hard and manly school of knocks" because everything there has been said. I thank you for your input, and I do see that I will need to improve my communication skills. My point is not to make DCS an arcade, I want the game to become more accessible. There is a big difference, and I seem to be unable to convey this. All the best, -ch

Currently this is not supported in DCS, not even with scripting. Also (nitpick), not all aircraft are equipped with RWR.

Make sure that the Binding Layer is COMMON, not Author as it is right now. "Author" means that only the mission designer can see it in ME view. COMMON means that anyone in the game can see it.

I believe this to be universally true: more players, more business for ED, better for ED. Whether that's better for the current user base will likely be an eternal point of debate, as a broader user base usually comes with some tangible changes, and people hate change. Well, adding a super-tiny sliver of specialty flying to DCS's current niche IMHO will not broaden it perceptibly. Please be advised that in conflicted zones, airspace is closed to civil aviation, for obvious reasons - no one wants a repeat of IA Flight 655. Driving heavies for mil purposes is fine, and hopefully the Herc and perhaps some other cargo planes will make it to DCS. Seeing flying heavy tin is already possible in other FS I do not fully understand how this could much broaden DCS's pull, especially looking at DCS's currently lamentable state of APR/TWR/GND procedures. Better not to put a lantern on that. Until then, what would those new arrivals do in a mil sim with no procedural support nor weapons? Start and shut down their A300? Fly racetrack over Elbrus? Be target practice for SAM and/or other players? That might get old fast. Say, what is the color of the sky in your world? DCS is the big dog in study-level, military, non-certified, multiplayer capable, 1940-2020 era flight gaming that excludes most radio procedures, and encompasses less than 50 airframes. It's a highly specific niche, and other (more gaming-oriented) aerial combat sims' daily on-line slice can eat DCS's entire player base for lunch (the game that rhymes with "War Blunder" has some 160'00-250'000 concurrent online players. DCS has somewhere around 500-1000 players concurrently online (remember to subtract 1 player per server to get at the real number of players). DCS isn't an online-primary game, but the number differential is still staggering. So yes, DCS has a lot of room for improvement, and I would love for DCS to become more competitive in the online arena. So please, please, please make DCS a better online experience. What does that even mean? Some YT like DCS because if outputs cool imagery that drivers their income. So some kid watches a YouTube or tiktok or whatever, marvels at the cool graphics, and then...? Ten minutes and a download later, they sit in the free Su-25T at Batumi. Twelve minutes later, the engines still not running, the game gets wiped, and kiddo goes to look for an air combat game that rhymes with "Plunder". DCS has a long road to become more accessible ahead of it. It's King Of the Hill in VR -- but that, too, is unfortunately very niche (man, how much do I wish VR would become more mainstream. DCS helicopters absolutely kill in VR). Perhaps you could take another, closer look at the gaming world. Combat games outnumber civil by 100 to 1 and more, including air. DCS is niche because of it's focus on avionics and (to a limited amount) procedures and mixes in a decent flight model [please don't anybody fall into the 'DCS is a sim, not game' fallacy. We are all too mature for that, right?] So yes, DCS is niche, and I hope that ED manage to broaden its appeal. There's a lot of uncovered ground there, so here's hoping. I'm not convinced that civil aviation could be the ticket right now, but it could serve to deepen the experience for some players. Once DCS better supports cargo and infrastructure to give those flights some meaning.

I feel that you should never assume that ED invests any talent, knowledge, nor engineering when they create something related to MSE API or in-game UX. To me it looks as if the cheapest, spur-of-moment idea is enough to make it into production. Look at the trigger singleton and marvel at how getUserFlag and setUserFlag are in different branches. Try to wrap your head around why its action branch mirrors some, but not all methods from missionCommands, and in an incompatible way that does not integrate. Too much of the API looks like un-skilled amateur work, and it is inconceivable to me that anyone with even the barest minimum of engineering knowledge green-lit something this unprofessional. I feel that DCS's MSE API is in a really, really bad state. I hope that it will improve someday. The cruel joke that's our current warehouse API doesn't make me optimistic, though. So don't complain too vociferously (you are likely to be awarded warnings for your trouble), and try to make the best of it, try and create fun missions despite the obstacles thrown in your way by the API and/or ME.

That rather depends on how the rendering engine works and its built-in optimization. If we assume DCS's rendering engine and in your hypothetical case a city is user-built (in ME) by adding one object (building, street, lamp, car, fence, whatever) after the other, then the result will be orders of magnitude worse than if that same conglomeration of objects was created in a 3D app (like 3ds Max or Maya), processed, optimized (!!!) and added as a single object (that's how it's usually done). The reason for this is that the latter requires only a single call to GPU draw: fully scale the draw call over all available GPU cores (with many single smaller objects this doesn't scale well), with all vertices having to be camera-transformed just once (especially those that are shared: if two buildings touch walls there are a number of vertices that can be eliminated during optimization - in cities that happens a lot), all textures loaded once, all LOD texture calculations being done once, and the entire thing is then z-transformed and drawn once. For thousands of little objects, there'd be next to no scale effect on transformations, millions if not billions of pixel double-processing (the same pixel being dawn over and over by different objects), same for texture buffering and LOD, making the result greatly less efficient and a much greater drain on performance. Note that this is only true for scenes rendered with painter's algorithm (almost all are, ray-tracing as main algorithm as in RTX isn't standard yet because of its highly inefficient method). IIRC, DCS uses the painter's algorithm. So, I expect that a city built from individually placed objects in ME would have an exponentially worse (by number of objects) performance curve compared to exactly the same set of source objects, pre-optimized and professionally pre-processed into a single object.

Indeed. They have not made it into the API yet. As soon as they do, I'll try and get them into DML as well.

Yes. At least you still have the source, though. Anything from 3rd party vendors like Razbam, and you are SOL when they leave.

Ummm. You are trawling Lua's _G - the environment's global table. And yes, DCS's countries are a mess. Have been since Flanker days. To add fun to this, you'll notice that there is no country with ID=14 when you look at the country enum. Doubtfully. ED aren't exactly known for their code engineering prowess, at least not when it comes to MSE's API.

1. select object outside of line drawing mode (ME's UX is abysmal, I know) 2. press 'del' key (note: NOT backspace, repeat above's snide comment on ME's UX)

I believe that if I learned anything in the past years, I recommend that people only focus on the first part: if people are happy with what is released, that's good. I now tend to disregard anything else -- be it announced, promised, alluded to, inferred, suggested, mentioned or otherwise indicated that might be delivered by the kind people at ED as irrelevant until the point in time that they actually deliver. Case in point: I'm still waiting (after 7 years) for the delivery of a damage model for the YAK. It wasn't promised, I know. It was acknowledged that it's missing. Agreed. And as a customer expect that whatever you get will be the near-final state if sales numbers don't allow for a clear progress path after EA release. So, buy what is available now, not what has potential to come later. Unless you are an perennial optimist like me.

After more than 3 decades of suffering through management fads, let's hope that ED are kind enough to spare us and their hard-working employees this one. Truth is: there is exactly one Minimum Requirement that makes a product qualify as WVP: find someone who purchases it. Everything else is marketing talk from some consulting know-it-all who want to sell their particular brand of methodology. How do I know? I was one of them. RUP, Agile, SevenSigma, Lean, Prometh, CPM, Prince, Kanban, Xtreme - you name it, I sold it. I'm certified (and literally certifiable ) in all of them. A good project manager can do waterfall in any methodology. MVP is merely marketing gobbledygook, designed to shield incompetent managers from accountability. So, realistically, what's an MVP to ED? Whatever they can sell. Looking at the past decade, EA is what ED sell (with a single one of them limping across the finish line) - a minimalistic approach to both quality and completeness. I think that ED know what 'viable' means to their customers because their EA products sell well enough. The "minimal" term may be debatable, and I do not want to find out how much less quality us customers would be willing to accept. Let's hope and see if ED's approach of min-maxing products keeps them and us alive for the coming years. And I'm still hoping for a damage model to arrive for my EA YAK that I purchased 7 years ago.

IIRC the upgrade to from FC3 to FC24 was the inclusion of the Sabre and Mig 15 as lo-complexity versions of the FF planes. The visual update to the existing FC3 planes happened some time before that. Perhaps you mixed up those two events?