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Heaven forbid people point out the history of missed dates and previous actions/statements of a highly regarded company in an effort to shed light on why some people might be fed up. But no, any criticism of how a company runs their business is to be met with the loyal defense brigade and instant hyperbolic exagerations and accusations of calling Heatblur "evil, money grubbing, corporate slime of the worst kind" (which no one but them ever has) or direct attacks against the consumers calling them "whiny children who don't understand money". It's laughable how childish, whiny, and completely condescending the response is from the complainers of complaining. It's straight to character attacks, stereotypes, and baseless assumptions about people they have never met nor will ever likely meet. "Oh they aren't real men because I just know they'll all complain about how hard the Phantom is to fly, and real men don't want a challenge or ever complain about things they don't like." Please, you're complaining about how others are choosing to spend their own time and money. Doesn't seem very manly to me, but what do I know, I'm just a random guy on the internet.

I'm not just talking about the F-4 though, I don't remember an extensive writeup on why the F-14A early was delayed. Or the A-6 AI apart from some comments about all the data being on one guy's computer that got lost. Why it wasn't backed up anywhere else, idk small company I guess. I do remember a reddit post where Cobra said that an AI to HB standards shouldn't take more than a year and he's very disappointed in their progress on that front, so the people complaining here aren't the only ones irritated by that. You don't have to preorder to have an opinion on product development however misinformed it may or may not be. Telling someone that something is coming within a certain timeframe and then not delivering may be a normal business practice for government contractors and flightsim developers, but that doesn't mean it should be or that we just have to take it lying down. For instance, I haven't preordered the F-4 because there is no product yet. No real reason to buy early except the discount unless you wanted the shirt and vinyls. It's also hyperbolic. Being the best means the expectations for you are higher and subsequently you have farther to fall if something goes wrong. It also means you get passionate fans who will give you extra patience and grace because they know your quality. But even passion and support has its limits, and the delays have exceeded some people's tolerances, good for you that it hasn't exceeded yours. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Probably for the best, although I will say the Discord gets much worse, so if people think this is bad, well, welcome to the Internet... Happy flying whenever it comes out anyways.

In other news, in case anyone hasn't seen, Heatblur updated the manual yesterday and we're getting more new weapons! The CBU-1 and CBU-2 (SUU-7A) cluster dispensers like those found on the A-4 mod are officially coming into DCS!

You said complaining solves nothing. There's a hundreds if not thousands of different movements and laws that were made due to people complaining which completely invalidates your point about that. This forum is one of the only ways we can interact with the developers, and so people will interact for good or bad. Complaining will not make the module come faster unless it's the F-16, which did release to EA early due to customer requests. And that release was terrible from what I hear. On the otherhand, complaining may in fact get the company to make an effort to be better at communicating things like delays and to stop overestimating their ability to defeat Murphy's Law and actually release a product. They won't know we don't like something unless we tell them.

So do these responses defending poor planning/customer relation decisions. Wow who hurt you and who ever said that? I certainly didn't, I only pointed out (with examples) that Heatblur has next to no idea how to properly manage expectations or make estimates as to when they will actually release a product. No more. No less. Yeah, because complaining has never resulted in changes being made... If complaining solves nothing, and we should all just be content with what we have, then why don't YOU stop complaining about the complaining and do something other than read this forum. You're feeding into it just as much as everyone else and are doing no more than complaining yourself.

This. They seem to have no concept of how to properly manage expectations of their customers (or themselves) or create reasonable estimates for completion times. Let's go back to July 2022 where they said Early F-14A by the end of the summer. And then pretty much exactly a year ago in May of 2023 we get told the A-6E AI model would be released during the summer. And that's not even all the times they said the F-4 was still scheduled for 2022 all the way into October of 2022(8 months after the war in Ukraine started, they would known they couldn't make it)! Silence till late January 2023 where they finally admitted they missed 2022. Then it was coming in 2023, but they allowed feature creep due to the delays with the F-15E which caused the F-4 to be delayed even further. Finally we start seeing videos and a preorder is dropped in October. Having previously been told the F-4 would have one of the shortest preorder periods of a DCS module, we were given a winter 2023-24 release window which did not adhere to the accepted standard definition of winter and which was subsequently missed. Then we get told release in April, worst scenario May. Then it becomes no later than May 31st or Cobra gets hit by a meteor. So by Heatblur's own set definition, we are now in the worst case scenario for the F-4 release. If they fail to make May... we'll still probably all buy it and nothing will change because their isn't anything to compete with DCS, they basically have a monopoly on this niche part of the flight sim community. There's no alternative. They can say that all they want but until they put their releases where their mouth is, I'll remain increasingly skeptical.

They've addressed this already. Performance wasn't great with the trees they wanted so they ended up using DCS's default speedtrees.

You must be new here...

Makes sense. On a slightly different topic but the same page, is Heatblur plannign to fix the CBU-52 textures like you all did for the Shrike, Aim-7E, etc? Them still being full gloss finish with blue stripes and the "CBU-24HB" text is very much at odds with all your other redone munitions. I've bug reported this under the F-5E, but since you've redone other ED weapon models would you all consider looking at this one too?

Yay! Didn't see them the first time I looked through the manual!

Any chance these make it on our F-4E at some point? I've had lots of fun with them using the A-4 mod, and there's at least one picture out there that has them loaded on an E which looks to be over Vietnam on a combat flight.

Maybe HB will change their mind about adding it. They're already doing a strobe RWR for the Tomcat and have gone back on changes to that they said they weren't gonna do. Or maybe they'll give us a Vietnam era navy F-4.

We're getting the M but not the P

Sure, you can wait till then. I'll buy it and fly it when they release it.

Earlier today, Cobra said they have an actual release date that is currently pending.

For future reference it's A6M. Would be nice to know which exact version, but I don't believe they've said. The A6M5 would make sense since the plan seems to be 1944 for Marianas WWII, the Hellcat, and Corsair. Coincidentally, the A6M5 is the model Planes of Fame has (https://planesoffame.org/aircraft/plane-A6M5) in flyable condition. As usual we play the waiting game, maybe we see some Pacific stuff release this fall or more likely next year. Time will tell.

So, I've been trying to figure out what the lua callout for the B-52 bort numbers is so I can either edit or remove them entirely. Currently and to no effect I have these lines in the description: {"low_B-52H_bort_nose", 0,"low_B-52H_Main_1_DIFF",false}; {"low_B-52H_bort_nose", DECAL,"low_B-52H_bort_numbers",false}; {"low_B-52H_bort_tail", 0,"low_B-52H_Main_3_DIFF",false}; {"low_B-52H_bort_tail", DECAL,"low_B-52H_bort_numbers",false}; Any help would be appreciated because the current black text outlined in gray on a black background is not the desired effect.

Don't forget how at certain view distances the light effect turns on even if the landing light is still turned off.

Wonder how far along the Hellcat is compared to the Chinook. It feels to me like we've gotten more info on the Hellcat and yet the Chinook is already up for preorder. Wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the Enterprise is missing all of its gun turrets...

That means 90% of the users can run it. That may not be enough for you, but 90% success is still pretty darn high given that some users are on lower end computers that may have trouble running DCS in the first place. My opinion on EA is that it sucks in general because we are paying for an unfinished product(yes, willingly I know), with no guarantee of when it will be considered complete(or even that it will be because stuff happens) and in some cases major systems or weapons are just flat missing on launch or reliant on another party to get its act together.

No problem. Yeah, I'm talking max G turns which can damage stuff unless you vertically adjusted the airplane symbol as seen in the screenshot where it is adjusted above the outer horizon marks causing the deviation. In normal flight with a centered symbol, it should never leave the pitch ladder. There's some nuances to be sure with wear of the internal components actually being a factor for the first time in DCS which can lead to things like slop, sticking, or other innacuraccies to any of the mchanical instruments. It will for sure be interesting to see how it all plays out.

They'll probably use everything but the cockpit since the external model also just got an update last patch.

I wonder how the work progresses

Agreed. I'm excited for the Corsair, but would also really like the F-8J they say they're doing after. You know, when they finish it in 2 weeks

I mean that's the second person to come in here and say, "MiG-29 before F-4." with no evidence whatsoever. We got ONE appearance of the MiG-29 in ONE newsletter and suddenly it's coming out before the F-4 like there's no other factors that matter. Like for instance, the preorder period the MiG-29 will likely get that has yet to start or the fact that ED modules get a heck of a lot more than one newsletter appearance before they get released. The F-4 could come with the next patch for all anyone knows, we're due for one in April, and if the F-4 is tied closely to it, then they may delay the whole patch till May if it isn't ready. Or something random on ED's end could delay the patch as has happened mulitple times before.