Tirak

Maybe Cobra's just all excited about Macross Delta... Oh, and for those trying to figure out how it relates to the F-14, that's Macross Zero 3iD94oyGv88

Dream bigger. Imagine if you will, a mercenary campaign where you got to select your starting country and aircraft and select from several different wars going on at any one time. Home base management to upkeep your fleet. Contracts and bidding for when you purchase new aircraft or enter a war. A detailed contract system to help influence offers and bonuses depending on which faction you aligned with. Someone needs to make that , i would spend more than a full module's worth on a detailed merc mode like that...

Think of it as a balancing consideration. Also, the FC3 aircraft don't count as they're from the arcade days, the KA-50 was one of the first modules made, and the A-10C has the full align time. There's not really a precedent in favor of either way since this is the third aircraft in DCS to actually have a functioning INS system. Besides, an 8min align is pretty good for 1980s tech, about the same for early Vipers...

Um, multiplayer should be an important concern, we're not playing Strike Fighters 2 after all :noexpression:

Remember DCS's roots, it came from LOMAC, which is rather arcadey, and a contract with the USANG, high fidelity simulation was spawned from the government contract, not market pressure, and it was an aside that the A-10C was then given to the gaming market, it wasn't the gaming market that spawned it and gave it to the ANG as a bonus. The WWII market is overly saturated, between IL-2 and more arcadey games like War Thunder, the WWII aircraft market is well served, WWII games are on the decline because people have been bombarded with WWII themes over and over, making them less palatable for the consumer, limiting market share.

No, the worst case isn't everyone drops and moves on, that would be rediculous, it will be gradule. Companies will take on civilian projects to help their bottom line, they'll couch it as, 'we're doing this so we can make the military side profitable'. But more and more resources will go towards that side as it makes them more money. It'll be easily justified as they're a company and they need to make money, but military projects will start getting pushed back. The need to keep the civilian side up to date will drag out fixes for the military side, resources needed for producing new military aircraft will go to supporting and creating the more profitible wider spread modules. The military modules will jsut keep getting pushed back further and further, always still "Being worked on" but never coming out, not even hitting the beta releases we're getting depressingly used to seeing. A 747, while a complex beast on its own, is nothing compared to the highly stressed and refined complexity of a Tomcat or F-15E. It doesn't have a fire control radar, electronic countermeasures, weapon guidance systems, afterburners, radar warning receivers, ect. ect. ect. And, they're an open book, no hunting through obscure data files to source out information about how it works, it's all right there, easily availible to replicate. Civilian passenger aircraft simply aren't in the same league.

I disagree, why make military modules if you can cut your overhead to a fraction of what it is now? The only reason military modules are currently the norm is because that's all that's accepted by DCS at the moment, open the floodgates to civil aircraft, there is no reason to continue making military ones. You gain market share and cut overhead. Demand will stay the same, but supply will fall as companies turn away from less profitable military modules, or increase costs because they compare their profits to those of companies doing only civilian modules.

DCS is virgin ground for new companies, FSX has already achieved market saturation. The only way to get profits from a relatively small demand selling something that costs you greatly to make, is to charge exorbitant amounts of money for the product. High demand low supply is a poor position for a consumer to be in, and prices part of the community out of their hobby, which lowers player base, which means less of a varied combat environment as fewer and fewer pilots can fight because they can't afford the game.

Cost value proposition. Civilian aircraft are simpler, and easier to model. More information about them is available so fewer hurdles to their creation. And, has been pointed out, there is a much larger market for civilian flight sims, than military ones (god only knows why). So if a company looking to make a module looks at it, he sees this: I can spend years of effort, researching difficult to obtain information, modeling incredibly complex systems, and selling them to a smaller audience by making a military module, or i can spend a quarter of that time making simpler modules and selling them to a larger audience by doing a civilian one. It's a no brainer.

Oh it's no different technically, but the difference in experience is I've never run into that 12 year old playing DCS, I ran into versions him all four times I tried to play FSX online, twice ironically as "Air Force One".

Because listening to a 12 year old scream about how you can't shoot down the president on VOIP is exactly what DCS has been missing...

18 if you don't bring drop tanks

Don't even get me started on that :mad:

Yeah but it was tested and mounted. Sadly I agree we probably won't get it due to Brimstone being too new.

Hmmmm, this has potential :smilewink:

To name a high profile example of a company in a similar situation that does not use steam, I point out Star Citizen, a game with constant build updates that has absolutely nothing to do with Steam. Just because Steam is the most popular platform, does not mean that all developers should switch to that being their sole method of distribution. Quite the opposite in fact, and I find the monopolistic nature of steam to be rather concerning, though that's a rant for another day. Yet it can be argued that the things most likely to cause the biggest disruption, i.e. new module releases, can take upwards of two weeks to come to steam. The current Mirage issue is merely further complicated by the fact that ED is on headlong tilt to finish up the 2.0 update, and is rolling many things into that before bringing it over to steam. It becomes considerably more difficult to do so if you disband your other methods of distribution. Steam is a component of the ED distribution plan, but not the whole, nor even the primary supported method. Regardless that it may be the most common platform DCS is distributed on, maintaining developer independence of a third party is merely prudent practice. I don't think anyone has concerns of DCS becoming "gameified" by Steam, though I haven't read significantly into the subject. I would however agree that there is reason to be distrustful of monopolies, they don't have a great track record.

I don't think you're quite understanding what I'm saying. There is no inherent advantage to an ED sale over a Steam sale, both of them have separate sales that come around fairly often, allowing you to get modules for cheap. The advantage however does crop up, in that Steam does not allow you to use ED keys, while ED allows you to use Steam keys, for what it's worth. An additional layer of red tape and coding compatibility, loss of independence from any practices or requirements Steam may decide to enforce. No thank you, I'll keep my developer independence any day.

Additional work for frankly no extra gain. Remember, any update needs to be compatible with the Steam update system, which is time not well spent for interim builds, and ED has had a long standing policy of only providing full release builds to the Steam client. You misunderstand. Steam runs its own sales, the discount sales. These are completely separate from any sales that ED runs. The point is, right now there is no major full release, the next one will be 2.0 proper, not the current Alpha being run.

Sure you're a customer, and you get the finished builds just like everyone else. Because you've chosen to throw in a third party middleman, it takes a little longer to get those builds, and you don't get the alphas unless you get into their launcher. Makes perfect sense to me. You want access to the latest Test and Beta builds, the most up to date stuff? Well you got to go through the ED launcher. These aren't full release builds, it would be irresponsible in fact for them to toss up the latest, potentially broken test build onto steam. As to pricing, like I said, Steam runs its own sales totally independent of them, and it's Steam that doesn't accept ED product codes, not the other way around. If you've got a problem with pricing, take it up with Steam, not ED.

By my count that's 3 reasons and a "wish i'd done it" right there in your own post. Steam is a different distribution system, there are other things that need to be done to be made compatible with their update system. As such, alphas are not uploaded to Steam, too much work for too little gain, and steam takes a cut and runs its own sales, so why offer discount preorder bonuses to Steam?

Unfortunately our fundamental beliefs on how DCS should be done are completely at odds on this.

Seems to me LN has pushed their Tomcat back into 2017, a wise decision.

The problem is that the very act of creating the 747 module would be resources away from other modules that can actually interact with each other to fight. The 747 module would be a big target and nothing else, for that we have AI planes, no need for the full module treatment. If someone wants to throw out a whole bunch of SFM AI Airlines, more power to them, but I don't want to see precious resource time go into something that is so incompatible with combat modules, and couldn't be used to its full extent anyway.

So... you want to either do check rides or play "Mayday" the game? It may just be me, but I enjoy fighting things that at least potentially can shoot back, flying up to fly next to a 747 and flying in formation with it while the 'terrorists' are 'subdued' doesn't exactly sound like a lot of fun when compared to doing pop up bombing attacks on SAMs. Like I said before, if civvy only companies want to come over and produce jets, fine, but if there's ever any question between the Learjet flight model getting tweaked versus the Crusader's cannon jam logic getting fixed, not a moment should be delayed on that Crusader.