Aapje

On Reddit.

They already said that it is not possible to make the buttons swappable.

Like I said in the second part of the paragraph you quoted, both the negativity and positivity is probably exaggerated, with the reality being in between. But the level of negativity is a lot higher than I see for a lot of other software. I see it as a sign of significant unrest. As for the fog update, my opinion is that DCS needs both visuals and things to do in the game, and it is more lacking with the latter than the former. But of course that doesn't mean that a fog/cloud update is bad.

According to the hotas reddit, it should be released in time for Black Friday. I would also suggest to VKB to make the 5-way hat available for people to buy, as it would probably be quite popular and relatively cheap to ship.

@AeroGator That's great news, as I was holding off on the purchase for a while hoping for exactly this change. But just to be sure, the Black Friday/Week purchases will be the new variant, right?

The new cards are so close by that I would suggest just waiting.

The last "DCS 202x and beyond" video is almost a year old, before the Razbam conflict and before the Kola/Afghanistan/Iraq map releases that also seem to have been poorly received. If I look at the most recent video, on the Iraq map, then there are a huge number of negative comments, and those get a huge number of upvotes as well. Of course, with these things you often see that a certain sentiment becomes dominant, and people don't dare to go against it, but that goes both ways.

There is a way to figure out what most people want to get fixed first, by having a public database of bugs where people can vote for their 'favorite' bugs.

It's not a fair comparison to find fault in the Quest 3 for having a wireless option that the G2 doesn't have. With a powered USB hub, the Quest 2 lasts a very, very long time indeed.

Does it matter if you are not training to actually fly one of these aircraft? I would personally suggest focusing on what feels good. If feeling the undercarriage, flaps, air brakes being deployed puts a smile on your face and makes you feel more connected to the plane, then does it matter that in a real plane it would feel a bit different?

That's actually not true. Typically for every person who complains, there are a lot of people with the same issue who don't bother complaining. And the people who abandon the game will pretty much never complain on the forum, because they have moved on. Of course a company shouldn't make the mistake of trying to solve every complaint, but it's also a mistake to only listen to those who are satisfied. That's one way to look at it. Another way is that a better job might be possible at setting expectations and convincing people that the right decisions are being made. And with the latter, the issue doesn't have to be that the communication is poor, but the decisions can be poor as well, of course. I personally think that flight sim games have been doing a poor job at providing the players with a good single player experience where they have fun things to do. As a result, a lot of players buy games, but not play them as much, or never get into the game in the first place. By growing the consumer base, you can actually have more things (lower prices, more bug fixes and/or more improvements), because more money comes in. I'm seeing some sims respond to this user demand to have more things to do, which at least according to Asobo, is the main thing their players ask for, so the question is whether sims that don't improve on this front, get left behind. What I would do if I was in charge of DCS, would be to invest heavily in a dynamic campaign and somewhat unpredictable AI (in the good way), even if it doesn't get the best return on investment in the short term, but as a way to add value to all modules, and to grow the player base. And I would focus development more on creating a coherent set of aircraft and matching map(s) that fit well together for a certain time period. And I would plan for obsolescence, where either the game engine, or preferably just the plane API's, get frozen and an incompatible game engine or API is introduced. So at that point, one can fix the major outstanding bugs, and then planes should keep working in the same way, albeit without getting improvements. So that would prevent having more and more modules to maintain over time, which doesn't seem sustainable, while players can still enjoy what they bought. But of course ED gets to do what they deem the best and consumers get to choose whether to buy it or not.

This reminds me of the people who paid €3000 for a 3080 during the mining boom, and then expected top dollar on the 2nd hand market later on because they paid so much themselves, completely ignoring how their price compares to other options that buyers have. Ultimately, it doesn't matter how much work you put in. What matters is how much value that product provides to customers compared to other ways they can spend their money. There is never any free dev time. There are only choices what to spend dev time on. You act as if it is out of your hands, but you clearly have a choice to spend more (or less) time on bug fixing versus implementing new features or new modules. What I see a lot of people remark is that they can accept that older modules are built to worse standards, but that there are significant bugs that severely hamper their enjoyment or even cause them to bench the module. In the latter case, those are effectively module-breaking bugs that reduce the value of the module to €0 for them, since they consider it unusable. $50 is a lot of money for new buyers as well, if they discover that they will quickly toss the module aside. Now, I understand that it is probably financially not very rewarding to fix old modules, since the people who complain typically already bought it and won't rebuy it, and you get relatively few new buyers (especially if the price/value proposition is not great anyway). However, I think that you are causing significant harm to your reputation, which seems to typically don't show so much in short term sales, but impact the general willingness of customers to buy things. For example, see the unwillingness by MiG21bisFishbedL to buy WW II modules or the general unwillingness of nessuno0505 to buy new modules. In my view, the best companies make sure that their products match or exceed the expectations caused by the marketing and the price point. From the DCS fanbase I see a lot of disappointment, which at the very least suggests that the expectations are not managed, but also that certain choices may not match what a lot of people want.

Like I said, the option to disable updates doesn't actually disable updates. Microsoft decides what updates they consider critical and they will push them on you regardless of the setting. I would suggest to install the InControl software and locking the windows version to 23H2. Then you can enable automatic updates and let it install all the updates for 23H2. They will continu providing security patches for that version and possibly other fixes until the end of next year. Then once you get the Pimax, you can unlock the version in InControl and let Windows install 24H2 or whatever newer version is then available.

No, automatic updates has not been disabled on your machine. Windows will still do automatic updates even if you choose the setting that pretends to disable them. But for now, these automatic updates should only be security updates, not 24H2. And you should still install those security updates. But Windows will probably get increasingly aggressive over time in forcing 24h2 onto you. You can try modifying registry keys or use Gibson's InControl application to try to prevent 24H2 from installing, while still getting the security updates that you should install.

@sirrah The F-86F is still being sold for $50 today and on the shop page there is absolutely no indication that you are buying something that is built to poorer standards and is not getting updates. So how would a random consumer who looks at the store know that some modules are built to lower standards? And it may also be off putting to consumers of new (early access) modules to see that some significant bugs never get fixed in those older modules, which raises questions about what state newer modules will be left in. Isn't the entire marketing claim by ED that DCS World is not a game that has a limited shelf life, but a modular platform that will keep getting more and more modules and updates? Anyway, I argued before that I think that DCS is painting themselves into a corner by adopting this strategy of adding more and more things, while it seems impossible for them to maintain it all. And I also think that all the weight of having to keep the existing modules working and somewhat up to date, will slow down development on the game engine greatly. It's the job of ED to manage expectations. Otherwise they create their own critics.

@Rifter Even fairly limited contact between the motors and the outer shell can result in a decent amount of heat transfer if the main issue is a relatively slow build-up of heat. This is not a CPU or GPU where immense amounts of heat get output for potentially very long consecutive periods, and the CPU and GPU chips have little mass of their own, so they very quickly get overwhelmed with heat if not cooled in a very efficient way. These motors have way more mass than a chip and thus can buffer way more heat.

I think that this is really a feature request that should be split up into a different topic.

@trev5150 A few chords is different to copying an entire software package. Your personal preferences/morals simply don't reflect the legal reality, and that poses a risk to buyers of the product. We are not a hive mind and you do not speak for 'we'. Everyone gets to make up their own mind whether they support this ethically and consider the legal risks to Moza.

It's going to sell like hotcakes. I'd just wait a few months if you can control yourself.

What I know is that the more code/modules are in a project, the more work it is to maintain everything. And it's worse when the platform is getting changed, since that tends to require fixes in other code/modules. And the state of the art moves on too, so older modules either fall out of favor or need to be brought up to modern standards. But if modules will not generate enough sales if you bring them up to the state of the art, but you also can't abandon them, because the people who bought them expect to be able to keep using them, then the project will forever have modules that cost effort to maintain, but have low sales and reflect poorly on the product. So I have a hard time seeing it as a sustainable model to keep making modules, creating more and more work in maintenance and making it harder and harder to improve the game engine, without causing tons of rework in existing modules. Then the project is likely to run out of developers to maintain the standards they started with and certain features will never be implemented, because they require an excessive amount of (re)work. There is a reason why certain competitor products are releasing new game engines, either leaving old content behind on the old engine, or demoting old content to second tier status, and adding ways to get income from upgrading old modules. I personally think that a pivot will need to be made in the next few years, in a way that will anger many people, but that is needed for the long-term viability of DCS.

Another video on the subject.

Nevertheless, there are better and worse moments to upgrade. But of course it is your choice. I myself also picked a suboptimal moment to upgrade my platform because I had other reasons.

I think that you have a peculiar definition of popular. There are zero new WMR-headsets getting produced. And in the SteamVR survey, 4% of headsets are WMR. And with only some Windows users being gamers, and only a small percentage of gamers engaging in PCVR, and only 4% of those gamers using WMR, that makes for a very small percentage of Windows users that use it. I fully understand that MS doesn't want to take all the effort to validate that it keeps working, and to do bug fixes if it breaks, for each release. It sucks for Reverb users, but this is the way of the world. When new technology comes around you typically have competing standards. If you buy into a standard that loses out, your hardware is not going to stand the test of time. 'twas the same for Betamax vs VHS.

EU prices (have to) include sales tax, and the tax is higher in EU countries anyway than in the US.

If they took the code and translated it into a different programming language, then this is no more legal than if I translate Harry Potter to a different language and sell it as my own. That's obviously not legal. By default, copyright law doesn't grant permission to distribute someone else's code (or derivations of such), but the GPL gives permission, as long as you follow the rules. Moza didn't follow the rules, so then they don't have permission to distribute. Easy as. The only real question I see is whether the evidence presented so far is sufficient in a court of law, but copying variable names that refer to VPForce seems like it has a good chance of being regarded slam-dunk evidence. And it's likely that with a little digging, far more evidence can be found. Anyway, this is a big legal risk to Moza and buyers of the base, since at any point, Walmis can sue and force Moza to stop providing their software, as well as ask for a substantial claim. And the courts are unlikely to see this as an accident, and willful copyright infringement can result in a $150k claim in the US alone. And Walmis can sue in the EU and other places as well. Even if Walmis doesn't want to run the risk or put in the effort, any other FFB competitor can at any point take on all the risk & effort of a court case, if they team up with Walmis to run Moza out of town with tar and feathers. PS. All of this has been known for a long time, and there is already an established method to copy the functionality of existing code, without running the risk of getting sued.