AndrewDCS2005

@Raptor9 thank you for looking into this and keeping the discussion going - really appreciate it, and I'd like to get to the root of it. However, your response is a bit puzzling. There are no questions or concerns on the time and range to have radar tracks. Of course, reducing scan volume and bars speeds it up, of course higher RCS leads to higher detection range, etc. This is all good and no issues here. The discussion is only about what happens after that, in TWS mode where radar tracks correlate with TNDL-provided tracks. In the repro track above, I waited for FCR to build solid track targets (using official F-16 doc terminology), and then I waited a bit more (ignore the time, will wait as long as needed). You've mentioned these tracks due to TNDL correlation automatically upgrade to system targets, fine. FCR and HSD pages both show me as the pilot the tracks and targets are already there. Targets stayed within scan volume, and didn't go outside of it at all. At this point, with FCR in TWS submode, cycling through these targets via TMS right and shooting simultaneously must work. There are only 2 targets, with radar tracks established - meets the criteria in your bolded quote above. And yet it doesn't work as shown in track above. This is a bug in the baseline scenario. And what makes it weird is exactly the same setup and conditions and TWS works well without TNDL donors. Donor tracks do not alter physical ownship FCR capabilities and does not suddenly prevent FCR from detecting and building target tracks.

@Raptor9 thank you for your elaborate explanation! All clear and all makes sense. Just a small step back to reestablish the context of this thread and discussion, which is pretty simple - use TWS to shoot at multiple targets simultaneously, where targets first came from TNDL donor, before being detected by FCR as radar tracks. This maps to some real-world CAP scenario where AWACS detects hostile targets at greater distance than F-16 APG-68 FCR. Let's look at a repro reduced down to very simple case - two targets, 12h, hot, picked up by E-2D as donor, then FCR. Targets stay within 30-degree FCR scan bars and volume while in TWS, no maneuvering. You've mentioned the following: Okay, let's say this was the case and for a moment put aside colors and shapes. I waited a bit for the targets to stay in this state, then pressed TMS right once. Nothing happened. Waited a sec or two, pressed TMS right again. Nothing happened. Waited few more seconds, pressed TMS right again. Now the right target became bugged. Okay, lets say I need to shoot at the left one first. Pressed TMS right to switch the target - nothing happened. Pressed TMS right three more times - no result. Stopped and saved the track, attached below. Now, there are two options here: - TWS worked fine, and these two radar tracks were upgraded to system tracks automatically after TNDL correlation. But TMS right did nothing. So there is a bug in TMS. - FCR/HSD showed the same visual shape/color indication for both targets as TWS system tracks, but this was incorrect due to known issue mentioned in shapes/colors. In either case, shooting at two targets in TWS is not happening and the pilot has no indication why. F16-TWS-TNDL-broken.trk

-camera -151.671563 9.923674 -1030.832497 -cameradir 0.301538 -0.926752 -0.224066

-camera -133.193226 1.859866 -1047.311145 -cameradir -0.722285 -0.552042 0.416598

-camera -124.430027 4.841960 -1048.344868 -cameradir -0.222352 -0.880134 -0.419433

Dear fellows, if ED would be given money for next 5 years and work exclusively on Dynamic Campaign and nothing, absolutely nothing else, it still might not land. As was shared in earlier comments and videos by ED staff, they have highly fragmented skillsets and single-digit number of employees per topic, and tough challenges to hire professionals in the niche field of flight simulation. 1-2 folks specialized in missiles. 1-2 persons specialized in PFMs. Few people visual modeling. Few people in AI. DCE would need 10 times ED to work out, with all the deep and complex dependencies in AI units behavior, precise state persistence down to milliseconds of entire mission and every single unit and their actions. And heck, lets imagine Santa is real and DCE lands. How much money it will bring to ED? In today's pricing model, near zero - very unlikely net new users will show up and start buying paid modules just because of DCE. This is the very ugly elephant in the room. In current model, DCE is net negative - taking time and money from the business already stretched thin. Created separate thread to discuss and vote on alternative pricing proposal, and keep this thread to DCE dreaming and venting

I highly respect Eagle Dynamics and think it is a great company of professionals, doing tremendous job in a very specialized and complex field, for 33 years and counting. I love DCS and think it is absolutely amazing flight simulator, a world class product with users ranging from students to professional militaries across the globe. It lets me get closer to the dream of flying high-energy aircraft with high fidelity, the one I'd not be able to do IRL. Dreams are priceless and I've spent 15 years with it, promoting it whenever I can and bringing my friends and their teenage kids into DCS too I want both to succeed, be great for next 15 years or more, and maybe one day see a totally unbelievable next-generation flight sim we can't imagine possible today. And to achieve this, ED needs to scale its revenue and funding to next level, 10x. Current model with fixed-price modules paid once by each user has reached its limits and won't support long-term success. Here's some data to back up this statement: ED is mostly focused on cranking out new modules as fast as they possibly can (because money need to come every month), leading to half-baked releases. We've already seen this happening. Flagship modules remain in "Early Availability" for 5+ years and are not getting finished. Because everyone interested has already bought them 5y ago, and they no longer generate substantial new revenue. We've already seen this happening. Quality takes a hit, with high-impact bugs in important areas gets introduced every few updates or stay non-fixed for years. Because earlier released modules were already bought by users and do not generate new revenue but only take precious capacity from very small team overburdened by a lot of very complex work in so many areas. We've already seen this happening. Highly wanted major new capabilities (Dynamic Campaign, GFM, etc) have been talked about for 5, sometimes 10 years, with nothing actually shipped. Because none of these would generate revenue, or maybe only very indirectly, in very limited amounts (not being sold as separate modules or products), since they are not real game-changers and have some alternatives. We've already seen this happening. Some very passionate, devoted contributors to DCS success, who have put many years and ton of money to make it better, resign and stop contributing. Because they get tired by fighting all the issues, missing capabilities, and creating make-believe setups with ton of very fragile scripting down to the seconds, which breaks every now and then. We've already seen this happening. Some long-term and passionate users, who has bought anything they can, now say "not buying EA stuff anymore". Because they start losing trust in ED to deliver on its promises, and this is very, very dangerous to ED as a business, since this does not expand the userbase (and revenue) but shrinks it. To address the monthly revenue problem, to pay for existing and new work, to scale the team, and to invest into the future-looking R&D, the proposal is for ED to change the pricing model. Instead of charging 80$ once per module, charge 5$ monthly for DCSW itself (which needs to pay for all the weather, sea land and air simulations and shared features such as DCE), and charge somewhere in few USD range monthly per module (assuming average lifespan of user engagement at 5 years, or maybe more?). Say 15$ monthly per user with 10 modules. This might be unpopular, but the numbers above are just back-of-the-napkin estimates and can be adjusted for local market/regional purchasing power, based on more precise business math by ED. And what are the alternative funding sources? Doubling ED MAU every year? I do my best but in a very niche product and high time investments needed, this is unlikely. Finding some rich person/charity donate 10M+ USD every year to ED? That would be nice but more of a dream than practical reality. Please vote and comment.

@sirrah and 60 people voted yes, which is 73% and counts as majority. This forum as a wishlist has representation by many different users passionate about anything from WWII land units to shape of panels on F-16 to naval missile models, and the resulting votes represent that too. But if you have ideas to get more votes - please go ahead. And if anyone has more suggestions, comments or feedback on getting answers from Nick Grey where he sees DCS and ED in 3-5 years, please share.

Poll results on this thread are clear: 75% are expecting Q&A with Nick Grey on the future vision for DCS. @BIGNEWY please let me ask if you would be able to relay this to Nick?

@cfrag's thoughtful, empathetic and heartfelt take has really nailed it (and seems to resonate well with others here). Everyone at ED and its subcontractors works really hard on so many, many, many things. And this is a problem. Continuing to add more stuff on already significantly overloaded team only makes the problem worse. ED has customers who are doing so much for ED and DCS success - very loyal and very engaged paying customers, spending years of hard unpaid work to enrich the otherwise near-sterile world with missions and mods and environment and scenarios which make sense and help create a purposeful story. Thousands of people making their best efforts over more than decade of contributions, repeatedly called out by Nick Grey himself in yearly videos, clearly stating ED and DCS won't be where it is without this community. And yet, we keep hearing about priorities not aligned to the paying customer base. This is really puzzling and makes many of us concerned about future of DCS as a product and ED as a business. And so, it would be great to hear from Nick directly what are the ultimate top priorities and future of the company - is it going towards next generation awesomeness of flight simulation, or towards yet another dusty bazaar of half-broken stuff.

Nick Grey's interview for VIAF 2023 (from mid-Dec 2023) was good. However, it was mostly tactical (upcoming modules and maps, current state of the world) and only briefly touched on three business-impacting topics: - ED will continue to charge fixed price per module, since it doesnt see DCS as "content" platform (which can be debated but this is beyond the point) - DCS feels empty and there is no story - this is mostly intentional, and users need to come up with "their own fun" - hiring professionals for flight simulators is really hard, and requires rare combo of very specific skills The question is whether current approach of pumping out more half-baked modules does ED+DCS any good, and where is the next-generation of "the best flight simulation" would come from (spherical earth and FPS optimizations aren't game changers either).

@SharpeXB thanks, that was 4 years ago.

Imho, for reasons below, it is time for Q&A with Nick Grey and time to hear from him about ED priorities, product quality, future vision, 3rd party projects, etc. ED is privately owned, and there's no reason whatsoever for Mr. Grey to do this, but I'm curious what the community thinks. In either case, results of the poll might provide good feedback for ED. Thank you! EDIT Nov.3 - reasons for this ask are the following. The problem is DCS significantly overgrew ED. The magnificent, amazing, wonderful, superb DCS (and its modules, terrains, tech, etc) can no longer be efficiently managed by ED due to mismatch in grand scale of DCS vs very limited ED capacity and capabilities. The sheer number of air, ground and naval assets including player-drivable, ground and atmosphere simulation, weapons and sensors, multiplied by their depth and nuances from WWII era piston engines small caliber ammo and control surfaces moved by rods and cables, to modern precision strike weapons and flight management computers, intermixed with bots/AI flying these in various types of missions, all on the shoulders of very small team (say 100+ people?) with highly fragmented and specialized skills (few modern era radar devs, few modelers, few weapon devs, few weather devs if any, etc etc) with each engineer/artist/tester/etc needing to handle a lot of "features" or "projects" or modules or whatever we want to call them. There are multiple direct indications supporting this and very few indications to contrary. Textbook examples are mission-critical bugs routinely breaking already released modules and systems, which ED itself declares most important (see subforums on F-16 bugs and F-18 bugs on very basic radar and weapon issues); 5+ years with no demonstrable progress on ED declared upcoming features such as Dynamic Campaign; prime products such as F-16 labeled as "Early Access" and unfinished for many years. These are just few examples, not my wishlist, and examples are many more. At this point the question is not when proper ATC or AI will be done (most probably never), but if ED can continue to carry the increasing weight of DCS world on its shoulders and remain viable business delivering quality product. And this would be great to hear from ED business owners, to understand what future is there for us - paying customers and highly devoted DCS community.

What does this mean please? Which missiles have been tweaked (not everyone knows which are legacy vs new), and what is the practical outcome of this - how does missile behavior change?

Requested official documentation on fuzes back in May (when it was released) in the following thread. However, it seems that short blurbs which are shown on mouse hover over the fuze (and copied by Muchocracker in this thread), is all we'll ever get - which is mostly useless anyway as it describes self-evident technical params, not their purpose or best use. I would not expect more than that.

@Wild Wolves VFW great to see European time friendly squadron with variety of aircraft. What are the typical days/times VFW gets together to fly and what is the expected number of mission/flight hours per week?

@ZuluThreeZero your track has no action - Harrier flying around the coast, no weapons release. Below is what I get using Mk-20 Rockeye via CCIP in F/A-18 - hits nicely as designated. fa18-bomb-mk20-ccip.trk

@PawlaczGMD please see attached tracks - Hornet, armed with Mk 20 Rockeye CBUs, fuzed with Mk 339 Mod 1, arm delay 1.1s, function delay PRI 2s, OPT 4s Configured to use MFUZ=PRI, QTY=2, INT=50ft CCIP visual designation, hit 5 of 9 targets (closely placed to show spread/hit pattern) CCRP designated with ATFLIR, hit 5 of 9 targets on the first run, then another 2. CCRP compute seems to put the very first hit on target (slowest and lowest Mk 118?), while the rest goes forward by velocity vector at release. So, when using CCRP need to designate closest target first, the rest will be hit by ongoing spread of bomblets fa18-bomb-mk20-ccip.trk fa18-bomb-mk20-ccrp.trk

Requested fuze documentation back in May after 2.9.5 release. Overlay in bomb settings panel is just basic type/arming text which is better than nothing but doesn't really help much

Understood, and thank you again!

Hi @Minsky thank you so much for your work, the kneeboard suite is great. Please let me ask if you'd plan to add HOTAS table for F/A-18 similar to what you have created for A-10C - this is super useful for folks like me who fly 2-3 multiple aircraft in DCS and switching between them might not always remember every HOTAS combo.

@bandit648 you absolutely rock! I always fly pristine DCS and yours is the only mod I enjoy so much to make an exception. Thank you for fantastic work!

@Kurnass1977 please see comment below, with track attached for GBUs hitting the targets as expected.