HerrKaputt

No. The poster before me said ED were the only dev which kept their community in the dark, and I said that was being harsh because others do too.

Well, that's being too harsh IMO. There are plenty of developers and publishers who keep their customers in the dark or outright don't care about them, such as EA, Ubisoft, etc. And by the way, my previous post wasn't meant to say that I hate ED or their way of doing things, it was literally meant to warn the previous poster that he should expect no answers from ED.

You might as well ask a brick wall... you'll get zero answers from ED.

I forgot to add something important here. In a DC, when you are on your mission, the world around you is also active. This is very important to convey the feeling that you are a very small cog on a big war machine, and not the savior of the Universe on whose shoulders the war outcome relies. The stories mentioned above are good examples. I don't remember as vividly, but I have one of my own, where I was (in EECH) flying an AH-64D with one wingman, coming back from a SEAD mission. I spot an enemy formation of four Ka-52s. There is no "ask permission to engage" in EECH, so I thought whether I should take them out or not. Sadly, I didn't have much fuel left, and I had two AA missiles while my wingman had three after a previous encounter with another enemy helicopter group, so I decided to just run away. It turns out that those two helicopters then wrecked one of my side's airbases including destroying several parked helicopters and planes, so I should probably have tried to stop them. This isn't a "mission failed, please try again" outcome. It is "for the next few days/weeks/months, this airbase is operating at partial capacity and your war efforts in the region will suffer". This is the really cool part of a DC: sometimes completely independent missions cross paths, and unpredictable stuff can happen. You come back with WAR STORIES (which are of course much less intense than stories from true war), and as you can see from my example and those above me, people remember them rather well.

No, it is indeed about the missions. They may be illogical -- I don't know about F4 but in EECH sometimes they are logical, sometimes they are not -- but it is definitely much better than pre-scripted missions (*). Not only are these missions always different, but more importantly, whatever happens matters in the future. If you were on some mission and for one reason or another you cannot accomplish your goal, you return to base and the war goes on. If you were supposed to destroy grounded planes and they turn out to bomb your home base, tough luck. (*) NOTE: I don't own any DCS product, so I cannot comment on how much scripted its missions are!

I have similar stories from EECH. DC makes a half-decent sim into a very immersive game... (not that F4 is "half-decent", I was talking about EECH)

Demongornot, sorry to break it to you, but Ethereal and GG are right. With a terrain this big, it's simply impossible to make it look as good as Battlefield without sacrificing something. In BF3, they sacrificed mobility: you go where they want you to go.

Which would be answering those calls... :megalol:

I agree with most of your post mattag08, it is a matter of opinion and I share your opinion on this. But I especially agree with the part that I quoted. Deciding that tool X should not be implemented because it can be used to make non-realistic military formations is not a valid reason IMO. Using mattag08's example, a saw can also be used to cut wood into useless ugly shapes, and like these mission editor tools a saw also requires some skill and experience to use. Nevertheless, a saw is a useful tool and any aspiring carpenter likes to have it at his/her disposal.

I hope FSX doesn't get the same fate as Age of Empires. Age of Empires 3 was an awesome game, with brilliant graphics for its time (and for now for that matter), great gameplay, some concern with historical accuracy, and various civilizations you could play with (8 on the original game, 14 with all expansions). I never played AoE2 consistently, but it is rated even higher than AoE3 and multiplayer communities are still going strong on it. Now, Age of Empires Online is free-to-play with cartoonish low-poly graphics, gameplay which reminds me of Farmville, spells to summon allies, and if you want to unlock one full civilization (to get the benefits of paying players), it costs $20, i.e., roughly half of a full game. I wouldn't be surprised if this micro-transaction model was used in Flight as well.

Yep (no sarcasm).

Not to mention that the Force pwns everything else you throw at it. Speaking of which, ED doesn't have to model an AI human co-pilot if they make a sim of a two-seat aircraft. They might as well model an R2-D2! *beep boop blip!" Enemy bogey at two o'clock? OK R2, take him out! *blip bleep boop beep!* <distant explosion sound> Nice job R2! Now sit tight while I get another medal and you get nothing. *booeep booeep*

Since ED are Russian originally, I think they will be quite aware of their market opportunities in Russia.

Guys, you STILL haven't explained what BMS is! Those among us who are ignorant (like myself) would appreciate it :)

+1

Well, I don't get why people want 100% accuracy instead of having fun through a dynamic campaign or, naturally, flying a helicopter which is immensely more fun than flying a jet. Different tastes my friend :)

I remember once in EECH going for a mission in an Apache (CAS mission I think), and when I came back... my last waypoint (a FARP) was now controlled by the enemy! I ended up having to go through a considerable amount of enemy territory, with few weapons, in an attempt to reach the second nearest landing site. I failed by the way; I was too busy scanning for air threats that a SAM shot me down :D

A single aircraft having a huge impact on a war? Hmmm... Enola Gay? ;) (but I do agree that such occurrences are exceptions to the rule)

Actually, flying those missions over and over is very realistic, but it becomes very boring to those like you (and me) who are into flying sims not so much for the uber-realistic avionics and flight models but for some fun as well. But they are right when they say that a DC cannot make missions as realistic as scripted human-made missions.

Yeah, the values might be completely off. It's just an illustration analysis.

Found the post I was looking for. This is the type of financial analysis I was talking about.

To everyone (like me) who is of the opinion that a DC would add tremendous immersion to a flight sim, unlike Ethereal's opinion: I think you're wasting your breath trying to convince these guys that a DC is worth thinking about. It's not that they won't listen. They probably would like it as much as we do! The thing is, it has to be financially viable. Several pages ago myself and Ethereal had a nice discussion about this, it all comes down to how many man-hours are needed to develop, test, and debug the whole thing versus the value it adds to the product. To me, the fact that A-10 made a small step in that direction is a good sign. Oh and let me tell you one thing (also already mentioned a few pages back): I had a look at the EECH source code for the dynamic campaign, and although it's not as complex as F4's, the code is still HUGE. Also, as a nearly-doctored guy in Machine Learning, Optimization and that sort of topic, let me tell you that optimizing something like a dynamic campaign engine would require, at the very minimum, some serious tuning to find the good values for the model parameters. Such parameters are stuff like the probability that an enemy plane will engage vs. retreat vs. try to avoid detection upon noticing your presence. Models can behave in drastically different ways depending on these parameters. And we're not even factoring in an assessment on how well equipped you are to deal with the enemy, etc. This is a very common thing in Optimization and Modeling: making a model for a phenomenon is usually fairly easy. The difficulty of tuning it's parameters is usually exponential on the number of parameters, and usually complex phenomenons like wars need LOTS of parameters to be accurately modeled. This means that merely determining what the values of such probabilities should be would take an enormous time from the testers, let alone the time to write the code and to debug it. This is why F4 required a player bubble whereas computers were already able, for example, of real-time processing of human brain EEG. Instead of modeling the whole combat area, you model only a neighborhood of the player, which involves a much smaller number of parameters. All in all, there's no doubt in my mind that a pretty good DC is doable. IMO even an EECH-level DC would add tremendous value to DCS (please note the IMO at the start), let alone one of the quality of F4. I also don't buy Ethereal's argument that "it would degrade the ultra-realism trademark of DCS". As long as there are still scripted missions as well as a DC, the showcase for ultra-realism remains. I'm also a bit divided on using Microprose's and Razorworks's demise as an argument against writing a DC, there are many more reasons that can explain that. But I DO buy his argument that a decent DC is a pretty big undertaking that needs to be carefully considered. It's definitely NOT a matter of having or lacking "balls".

Nevertheless it's worth a shot. I'll look into Micro Air War to get a feeling of how the software works... By the way, even if I do understand it, I definitely can NOT be a part of that possible team that would really tackle the problem. I'd love to, and I know how to program quite well, but I don't have enough time for it (plus I don't own any DCS modules which would make things even harder).

Yuya, I think that by now the creators of DCS are well aware that some people would like a dynamic campaign. It's a big undertaking... we'll just have to wait. Maybe the next module already has a sort-of dynamic campaign, maybe not.

Yoshi beating Liu Kang? :D