Bosun

When sitting on the deck of the carrier, the inside of the cockpit is not being globally illuminated by the aircraft carrier deck lighting. The outside of the aircraft is, but inside the cockpit, the dashes and everything are pitch black. Any word on getting ray-tracing lighting in DCS? Is it already? If so, am I missing something with having no illumination show on the cockpit dash or panels? *Edit - Yes, Global Illumination is ON. But the aircraft carrier deck lighting, lighting from airfields and runways do not affect the inside of the cockpit. So - its only global Illum for the sun, from what I can tell. If my plane spawns beneath a lamp on the tarmac - the lamp lights up my aircraft exterior, but doesn't illuminate any interior cockpit areas.

Well - reviving this thread! @BIGNEWY - Fog's looking really good! Will the team expect to have time to bring in cloud stacking with this tech?

I thought it was my imagination since I didn't see it listed on the notes from the last update - maybe I missed it - but I did notice an improvement in my ability to spot contacts, and thus to remain engaged and participate in online play. Thank you for ongoing work, and I look forward to it continuing to improve. I've noticed in several servers now, that I can actually fly and fight alongside others where I couldn't before, and I've even ventured back into PVP servers after over a year of not feeling like I could play them. Thank you. Please keep these changes as you continue to improve upon them.

Can Jester CRM manage emailing clients and tracking event participation? Does the Jester CRM come with its own payment processor, or can it integrate with other payment processors? Can Jester CRM integrate with Asana, or Quickbooks? I had no idea Jester was a CRM but I'm stoked!

Pretty sure Jester is already editable. Also - any of the callouts that you find offensive can simply be deleted from the voice file folder, if nothing else.

Its that dagblasted TikTok isn't it? Gowl-darnit! Ethel, get my cane! I'm gonna get these rascals off the forum lawn.

::Looks at ice cream discerningly:: ::Looks at lack of sprinkles:: ::Tosses ice cream on ground and stomps away::

I like all the "I'm a grown up!" versions of a kid finding out they have to wait a few more minutes for their ice cream cone because the ice cream man hasn't arrived yet. lol.

I'm learning that this forum as just as many airchair lawyers as it does armchair generals. I propose a new rule. If you want to comment on what ED or RB should or should not do - You must cite the relevant clauses within their contract while also citing your legal authority and permission to share those clauses publicly, in order to have your comment be valid. If you want to share that you're upset - go for it. But that doesn't change how the legal case will progress unless you're the actual lawyer handling the case.

Those clouds were released, actually. They're the ones we currently have. The discussion in this thread is around improving that volumetric system to include 'towers' and other formations outside of spatter-pattern volumetrics like we currently have. So yes - new things. Independent cloud formations were never a part of the original volumetric work referenced here, now released in game. Those independent formations are what we're now discussing, based on the 2024 & Beyond newsletter comment, "towering clouds and fog" work. From what we can tell - fog is being worked on in the background, and the towering clouds have been removed from the 2024 work list, to be picked up perhaps another year when the team has time dedicated for it. For now - this is fairly moot, thread wise, as BigNewy has confirmed no further work will be done on cloud formations for the foreseeable future.

I think it reads, "I can write whatever I want here, it just needs to look a tad different."

I've had a wonderful experience so far with the damage modeling. I've been hit by shrapnel and had fuel leaks. I've had engines fail to damage. Just the other night, I had a Mig-15 just every so gently 'ping' my right wing, and in doing so, must have hit some hydraulic control, because I lost all aileron authority on the right wing and crashed. Another time, I did a run of Durandals on an airfield, took a flak hit, and fought the controls the whole way home, just barely landing it, with no nose wheel. I'd say one of the effects we are seeing right now is the that the fidelity and depth of the various states of components so far exceeds the SKD ability to inform it, and so far exceeds the damage modeling we've come used too from other modules, that when we take damage that is incremental and detailed, it 'feels' broken only because we've been trained to expect that the same hit in another module would simply be a kill, or disabling, because that other module is using 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, or fully destroyed as a status for only 10-12 individual parts of the plane, where is this model is using a range of 1-100% with single-unit increments on thousands of individual components. Its damage model will, once tuned with the SKD and bugs worked out, be far more realistic than any other module currently in DCS. Where other modules might inform that damage is over 50 percent, and so the component is 'destroyed' or just gone - this module is not 'all or nothing' for component damage the way some of the older modules, especially, are.

Update for anyone following this thread - BIgnewy states they're currently working on fog and dusting effects, however the team has not had time to do any work on towering cloud structures, and currently there is not development time in the cycle dedicated for it - when time frees up for that task, they'll take a look - but no stated expectation of when that would be. from Discord.

lol. Heckin' Jester. Always pullin' the cord.

I use GameGlass for several games, and definitely including DCS. It is how I operate the cockpit. Along with the hotas set up, Gameglass offers an affordable, infinitely configurable way to set up controls without the need for expensive periphery add ons. Where GameGlass excels over other 'tablet touchscreen' solutions? It works in windows browsers, as well....and that means you can have touchscreen monitors in your windows environment - meaning you can run Surface Pro tablet with it, or even an extra monitor with touchscreen ability on your main machine. You can even have multiple connections to the hub at once, so you can have a tablet, and your phone, working at the same time with two different sets of controls going back to your game simultaneously. However - lacking API integration, there's no way to 'sync' these shards, or to have displays set up through it from game. It would be awesome to implement, and allow for a lot of cool things to happen. See below the photo of my 'shard' or page for the F-4. I built this shard from scratch using the tools in their 'forge.' It's super easy to do. I've made one for every plane in DCS I have. They're constantly improving it - and soon they'll have the ability to have sliders, dials, and multi-position switches (currently supported is just toggles 2-way.) The 'Comm Select' toggle will change which controls appear in that panel - radio controls or tacan controls. The 'Shrike Table' brings up a webpage excerpt detailing which Shrike bands track what radar, and toggles on/off for reference - there's a lot you can do with this program - with an API - it would be amazing to have status' of buttons sync, cockpit displays implemented, comms menus incorporated, etc. They just need the API link. null

Yoda summed up the work in DCS on weather best in the Prequels. "Cloudy, the future is. Difficult to see."

Wondering if they're going to utilize any systems similar to MFSF 2024 - the AI-procedurally-generated-from-Satellite-imagery biomes and the like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6riRXgRsCU Watching this tech breakdown, the difference between their 2020 and 2024 terrain modeling is noticeable, and its all AI. They've got sets of assets under each 'biome', and then trained an AI to look at satellite imagery and determine where biomes are, borders, transitions, etc, and then it automatically procedurally generates the trees, bushes, grasses, rocks, and other assets based on that, using the art assets that are categorized for the biome it has identified that terrain tile to be. This is madness. There's nothing to stop us any more. Once quantum computing becomes a thing, we'll look back at the Sinai map, or Afghanistan and say, 'wow, how rudimentary those were!' Having an AI trained to procedurally generate 3d assets on a terrain to fill in based on photo or imagery and a stock of 3d models per type of terrain unlocks the limiteless potential of mapmaking. Instead of artistically or hand-placing thousands of detail assets, the AI can lay down the tiling and detail, and all the mapmaker needs to do is clean up around points of interest. I'm just, continually jaw-to-floor at the technology nowadays. ChatGPT, make me a flight sim. "Making you a flight simp" No ono noo nononono that's not what....dangit.

Just a note to folks - if there are any legal tie-ins with this issue, know that those take time, even if they are 'peaceful' negotiations. Those are also intensely private for prudence's sake, and if you're wondering why there isn't more detail, if legal liability in what is said, stated, or claimed could affect outcomes or influence discussions, than you just have to accept that BigNewy is saying everything he can, and ED is doing everything they can, and unless you're a part of those proceedings, you're just not entitled to more information, and indeed it would legally complicate and potentially implicate you, to become a part of it. So - patience. In the mean time - BigNewy can distract us with shiny fog & cloud pictures /shamelessask

Also interested in this.

I play on a 57-inch ultrawide, UHD monitor at 4k (7,000 x 2,000). I have DLAA, and Anistropic on. I have graphical settings maxed out to make the game pretty. However - in doing those, it is still impossible to spot contacts unless they're less than 2,000 ft from you. Physically, they aren't rendering in a way that, even if you were looking at them, they would show. The larger craft are spotted at sometimes 20 miles. But fighter craft, on the other hand - I *could* lower the resolution, lower the vis distance, lower the anistropic..... But why? I don't feel we should have to sacrifice the capability of the game to pre-2010 graphical settings in order to experience the game on a fair and equal footing. So I still think, even with the recent 4k changes to spotting, there is still work that needs to be done to make contacts spottable in multiplayer. Because at the end of the day, we're in a game, and as much as I love a good sim, I also want to compete against other players, and I just can't do that when I'm getting calls from a friend that he's formed up on my high 3 oclock, and I can't see him because he is just over 1,000 ft from me, and his jet's rendering the same color as the sky....or a bogey call for a mile, merged, directly in front co alt of me, and there's nothing on the screen I can discern. It's not fun. So I guess, to /rant, I think there's still work to be done on spotting and I encourage and support the ongoing work on it. *Edit - to be fair - spotting against the sky is actually easier than it was...for sure. Positive gains there, but still not up the level of being able to engage in online play in a fun way against folks who just run minimum settings.

@BIGNEWY Can you just blink twice if towering clouds are still planned for this year? I know they won't let ya say anything - but, just, like, blink twice if we're gonna cumulo some nimbus up in here.

https://www.wingman-ai.com

I'm thinking you likely need a subscription (even the base one) to call the APIs for the AI to parse. But maybe not - I have the pro so I'm not worried. As for resource heavy - no. I use it both in DCS and Star Citizen and can play both fine with it running.

Fun times: You can build keybind commands in Shipbit's Wingman AI, have the TTS turned off, and talk to Jester like a normal dude. Rather than issuing specific, set phrases for commands like 'Jester, lock forward target', you can just idly be like, "Jester, 12 oclock, paint him" or "Jester, he's off the nose, give me a lock" etc and all those phrases would be recognized, parsed, commands matched, and trigger a keybind that would then trigger a Jester in-game response. This isn't seamless yet - there is a second or two of delay - but it'll get faster as development goes on likely. This tool allows you to 'speak' to Jester, really, like a normal human using dynamic phrasing for situations. Then - you can go into the Jester 2.0 files and delete the phrases you don't like from the voice files Boom - you've got Jester 3.0. And when Heatblur/ED can get an API share going with Shipbit/Wingman AI.... hooo boy. You'll have Jester 4.0. And he'll just talk back to you like a normal human. In whatever voice you wish.

I understand that DCS core will not be going anywhere. I do have questions around the 3rd-party development model as a business though. While the DCS Core may not go anywhere - can you tell us about the protections that ED puts in place, to ensure that we don't wind up with a long laundry list of outdated, unsupported modules? in 10 years, DCS may be here - but what if something happened to Heatblur, for example? If they sold, or shuttered for unrelated causes? Would their modules be transferred to ED ownership because they were made for that product specifically and cannot exist outside that product, allowing them to be maintained by someone who could keep them working within the core? (This means the DCS versions cannot exist without DCS). I think we're just now seeing the growing line up of outdated, non-working or malfunctioning modules from developers that have delivered, yes - but have also transformed or moved on. 15 years is a long time for any developer in the software world, and I'd like to know that there is intentional planning from the very beginning in making sure that modules that are developed for this game have a fall-back of ownership plan to ensure they can be kept updated. While I doubt Heatblur would ever have legal disputes - there's nothing to say they'll be in business in another 10 years (I would bet so - but anything can happen). If DCS is still around...can you confirm that those modules would be maintained by to work by someone. Even if new features are not added - it is imperative to the line up of the game itself that existing modules continue to work. So I guess - detailing that there is a process for these eventualities might ease some of the concern. If there is no process - I think I'd recommend that ED look into contracts which stipulate what happens to a functioning module, should the developer come unable to maintain it.