King_Hrothgar

Intro cutscenes and menu music don't add immersion for me, what does is the overall feel of the missions themselves and even the interface. For missions, a big part of immersion is creating a living war instead of constructing focused missions. Units unrelated to the player task doing their own thing and possibly getting into significant battles all on their own adds a lot. Similarly, missions shouldn't be "perfect." In war, units aren't at full strength, don't have ideal equipment ratio's and aren't in perfect formation. They certainly don't have all their air defenses ideally arranged along the attackers flight path!:smilewink: When it comes to interface, having a virtual squad helps a lot. I don't mean real people, I mean a virtual squad of AI. RoF does this exceptionally well, the best I've ever seen. In RoF, you start out as a nobody. You aren't in command of anything except the latrine and your own plane when you are in the air. Captain George Lewis (AI) is in command with 11 more randomly generated names below him, then you. These named AI have their own stats independent of you. They fly missions, score kills, get medals/promotions and can even transfer out of the squad. And yes, they also die or get wounded too. They do this on missions you don't even participate in. In RoF as a lowly FNG, you can expect to fly maybe 1 of every 3-4 missions flown by your squad. If your squad loses a bunch of pilots, you will fly more. If they have a whole lot, you will fly less. If you wreck a bunch of planes and survive, you may end up with a dozen pilots sharing 3 airworthy planes. All of that is purely a database tied to the career interface, it doesn't do much of anything inside the individual missions except alter the AI skill levels a bit and in extreme cases, your flight size. But it adds a lot of depth. I care about my AI squaddies in RoF and try to bring them home safely. In BoS, which uses remarkably similar generated missions, I couldn't care less about them. Why? Because not only do those AI not persist mission to mission, I'm not assigned a unit or even a country. And that design choice on the interface makes BoS missions no more immersive than a quick and dirty QMB sortie. So yeah, interface can make or break immersion all on its own, even with great mission design. Hmm, this went wildly off from what I intended. We were talking about maps right?:doh:

Obvious solution is to use a Vikhr!

That F-117 shot down 7 F-117's? :P A flyable F-117 would be an interesting addition, but I also suspect it would be more of a novelty than something people would really dive into. It only had 2 bombs, zero air to air ability and was subsonic. Combine that with DCS's omniscient AI fighters, and I don't think it would have lasting appeal. I'm also fairly certain that it's still heavily classified despite being retired from service.

The main advantage of a helicopter in this type of situation is its ability to hover at a safe distance. It may look cool in movies but the reality is charging into enemy air defenses at full speed is basically suicide in a relatively slow moving helicopter unless there is lots of cover for your approach and egress. Instead of speed/altitude, use your main advantage over fixed wing aircraft and hover at a safe distance. Use this safe location to spot targets and get an overall feel for the battlefield. Once you have that, move up and start sniping the most threatening targets or your primary objective with your vikhrs. The vikhr out ranges most SAM systems and all AAA currently in game. Honestly, the biggest threat to the Ka-50 isn't SAMs currently, it's T-72/80/90's with their ATGM's. They are easy to dodge if you see them coming, but they can be sneaky at times as they don't always give a laser warning. If you are up against the longer ranged SAMs, use terrain masking and pop up attacks or simply go around them. In the case of the very long range SAMs such as Patriots and S-300's, in addition to the other methods, you can also get inside their minimum range to gun them. Neither system is able to track a target within 1-2km.

I agree with him as well. WW2 has been done to death and if you're in the mood for more, I suggest giving IL2:BoS/BoM/XxX a look. Its damage modeling and AI (they use same FM/DM as players) are far superior to what DCS offers. Additionally, it is sold as a complete package instead of as single planes with no relevant ground units or AI planes to go with them. As such, I'd like to see DCS focus on post WW2 combat aircraft. DCS falls a little short on Korean war planes for the same reasons it falls short with WW2, but unlike WW2, there isn't a competing CFS around so I'll take what I can get. But where DCS really shines is in the more modern arena. The graphics, physics and AI work best with various sensors and guided missiles. DCS should stick with what it's good at rather than trying to be everything to everyone. With all that said, I'm fairly certain one of the 2 unannounced planes is from WW2. I just hope they don't fall into the trap of doing a whole lot of WW2 stuff and skipping all the cold war and modern stuff. The WW2 crowd on here maybe vocal, but repeated polls have shown they represent a tiny minority, most want more modern aircraft.

By that logic, we should all still be flying biplanes.

It's hard to compare the F-14 to either of them tbh. The MiG-25 and 31 were built for a single thing, incredible speed. Used properly, that speed advantage should make them effectively invincible in combat against anything else. The F-14 relies on low speed agility and a powerful radar. All three are good aircraft in their own ways, but the F-14 doesn't really compare well to them. It has more in common with an Su-27 or F-15.

Thinking of which, I've read a few places on AI being improved. Anyone know what kinds of improvements?

Of the ones I played, here is a list: 1) Aces of the Pacific (1990) 2) 1942: Pacific Air War (1994) 3) IL2: Pacific Fighters 4) Every MSFS version I ever had. 5) War Thunder, if you want to count it as a sim It's probably one of the most simulated planes in the history of PC flight sims tbh, right up there with the P-51D, Bf-109 series and Cessna 172. It is one of my favorite planes of the period, but it has been done a LOT over the years. Edit: On topic, it's been stated that the map will be small, cold and oceany. The small part could mean either geographically small or small as in not much landmass. The North Atlantic, unless only modeling a tiny sliver of someone's coast, is not a realistic possibility. Somewhere in the Bering Sea or Northern Japan is the most likely spot.

I too was thinking they'd announce at least one of the other two planes in the update last week but instead it was all F-14 and very general stuff. I do find it a bit strange that they are holding the other two a secret. Unless I read their announcements wrong, they plan to release the F-14 after these other two projects. The lack of hints combined with lack of solid info makes it appear almost as if they plan to hold them a secret until release day.

I'd be interested in this too.

I don't think LNS is trying to revamp DCS's core AI like that. More likely, it will be an addition to the existing DCS AI. The existing DCS AI is omniscient within a set visibility ring and does not use systems or player flight models. With that in mind, I think LNS's AI thing will be a series of macros (such as the auto startups for most DCS planes) and audio calls on what the AI has spotted, similar to how AWACS interacts with players currently. Doing that is still a substantial task and will add a lot to the game, but I don't think it's what you're thinking. In any case, the A-6 seems unlikely given the comment on the HUD.

About as well as the MiG-21bis. There were some BVR planes in the 1970's, but their BVR ability was generally of questionable effectiveness. The exception to that was the F-14A, which went rather nuts with BVR ability.

First thing I thought when I saw that hint was something in the vicinity of the Aleutians. It's certainly cold and oceany there, has very few towns of any significance and allows for land bases on both US and Russian territory. It has the other advantage of being absolutely huge and yet still have very little land to model. I don't see any good options in the Atlantic unless it's going to be Greenland vs Iceland or some such scenario.

The A-6 would be a welcome addition but I doubt that's it. The HUD was added very late in it's life and was relatively rare. If they did an A-6, I would think they'd do the "standard issue" A-6 instead of an exotic type. The standard issue A-6 never had a HUD. My guess is it's something else.

Very nice update, thanks!

It isn't about raw numbers, it's about type, period and capability. Looking at the confirmed list of aircraft, this is what we will have in the next year or two assuming plans are kept: Eastern fighters: MiG-15bis, MiG-21bis, MiG-29A/S, Su-27S Eastern mudmovers: Su-25A, Su-25T, Ka-50, Mi-24P Eastern other: Mi-8, L-39 Western fighters: F-86F, F-15C, F/A-18C, F-14A/B, Typhoon, Mirage F1, Mirage 2000C Western mudmovers: A-10A, A-10C, AH-1W Western other: UH-1H, C-101, Hawk The core problem here is in the fighters. In the next year or two, we will have four DCS level 4th gen western fighters vs ***zero*** DCS level 4th gen eastern block fighters. In third generation, we will have the MiG-21bis vs Mirage F1 assuming Aviodev doesn't go belly up. Edit: I should also point out that US + western European should be counted as the same since they are attached at the hip. If you want to count them separate, then let's count China too to be fair. Currently planned Chinese planes add up to none.

That's only two versions as the A+ and the B are the same thing, it was a naming system change. In any case, I would assume the reasoning is that making those two specific versions adds only a small amount of overall work to the project while also opening up a lot more mission possibilities. I'm glad they did it that way and if they hadn't, I would have preferred the F-14A rather than the B. Why? The F-14A was exported and saw extensive air to air combat. The F-14B sat around and looked pretty for 20 years without doing much else. How close are the two from a video game standpoint? To turn an F-14A into an F-14B, add an RWR screen and move a handful of switches to make it fit. Then alter the various engine values to match the new engines. The rest of the flight model, damage model, systems model and so on should be identical or nearly identical. You might break your ctrl, c and v keys making it, but it isn't a terribly cerebral task.

The L-39 should be an interesting addition. It's been widely used not only as a trainer but also as a COIN plane and handled the latter role far better than anyone could reasonably expect a trainer to. I'm glad to see it's the next plane release by ED and approaching completion. I probably won't pick it up day 1 for $50, but I'm sure I'll grab it at some point during a sale. As for the other trainers, my view is if you don't have a high fidelity flight model, then you don't have anything. I know I'm not alone in that opinion.

Going to be an interesting day. A rather nice update (despite my pessimism) from ED and at 11:59PM Hawaii time, LNS's update. That is, of course, assuming we don't crash the forums and their own website again by spamming F5.

Agreed. The newsletter is nice, don't get me wrong. But I really do think they need to focus their efforts a bit more and actually release some of it. I'd much rather a series of smaller updates focusing on individual elements than wait indefinitely for a single big update that covers everything. That said, the videos are a nice touch. The sense of speed down low is very good. Can't wait to fly down the strip in a Ka-50. :P

March update: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=141046 It's a 19 page threadnaught.

We had the March newsletter. The only one we are missing is the April one and April isn't over yet.

I assumed the system was mostly mechanical thus not requiring anything but battery power. The test itself isn't actually relevant, the OP and I are only trying to find out if the synchronizer's effect on weapon rate of fire is modeled or not. The lua code suggests it is but doesn't confirm.

It doesn't necessarily fire at every propeller opening. That would depend on how the gear is setup. Even if it were, that still doesn't mean the weapon fires at max RoF. If the weapon misses the firing chance on a blade pass by even a tiny fraction of a second, it must wait for the next one. In any case, this couldn't be simpler to test in game for anyone who has the module. Simply switch the engine off after running it and as the prop winds down, fire the synchronized guns. It will either fire at the full rate of fire, or it will be visibly synchronized with the propeller.