twistking

fingers crossed.

Maybe the TU-22s flightplan results in a speed lower than minimum speed and thus they cannot fly slow enough?

Will both aircraft receive a damage model comparable to the other warbirds?

Will the newsletter images get uploaded in the screenshot section? ( https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/downloads/screenshots/ ) Would like to have a look at them in higher res. ...

Maybe a native english speaker can help me here, because i'm lost again. I feel ED staff are masters of ambiguity. What might @NineLine mean with weather cells? Different cells containing weather presets moving around, or does weather cells mean high/low pressure areas and thereby imply a more sophisticated simulation of weather systems with actual weather resulting from the interplay between said systems?

Is a "true" weather simulation also still planned for later? I mean something like the legacy dynamic weather with high/low pressure area simulation (but improved of course, because the legacy model was a bit rubbish)?

The La-7 is a nice surprise. Will it have a damage-model comparable to the other warbirds? I'm asking because the I-16 doesn't have one still - if i'm not mistaken.

True. I thought hoewever that from a technical and gameplay perspective it might make sense to have an iteration that is not a full blown simulation but a scripted system that would allow for different presets in the same mission. The clips posted by nineline look a bit like there are two different presets at play. But maybe they have just changed the presets to allow more diversity within them...

@BIGNEWY can we get a new newsletter thread, please? Need to vent my joy about weather and tone-mapping improvments.

From today's newsletter. That makes me so happy. The weird nature of DCS tonemapping that asked you to change the gamma value to something different than standard gamma for a good image was one of my pet peeves. Looking forward to the improved tone-mapping, but more importantly i'm looking forward to not having to engage in nonsensical discussions about monitor calibration when critiquing lighting and art issues in DCS. Hooray! My other pet peeve is visibility and brightness of ext ac lighting, but once we are all on gamma 2.2 these discussions will be so productive. Hooray!

That's exactly what i was trying to find out yesterday by harassing the ED staff on discord. Of course i did not get a clear-cut answer, but i understood that they are at least working on weather that is more sophisticated than only clouds moving (but that was already hinted some years ago in a newsletter i think - so no surprise really). The big question is, how "dynamic" will the upcoming 2.8 dynamic weather iteration be. I feel that the word dynamic promises a bit more than just moving clouds but unfortunately today's newsletter did not really clear that up. I'll just continue my herassment here then: @NineLine can you give us a hint how "dynamic" the next iteration will be? Pretty please!

right now they are still held back a bit by their static nature. good to know that changes are rolling in...

The third clip looks like there is more going on than just clouds moving within a single preset.

ED already said, that they would investigate DLSS. So from my understanding it's not ruled out completely even if it's proprietary tech. I'm all for it, but i also understand the big drawback of it being vendor-locked... I agree with your statement about DLSS 3.0. It's not supported for VR anyway and even if it would be, it does come with it's own bucket of issues. DLSS 2.0 however would probably work well for DCS as it can improve clarity compared to native res rendering for games that suffer from aliasing and lack high-end anti-aliasing solutions. DCS absolutely qualifies for a game that struggles with aliasing, as it does not support high-end temporal AA. I'm quite sure that DLSS would bring tangible benefits for owners of Nvidia cards. Imho the only strong argument against DLSS is that it's vendor-locked.

@Rapierarch i see. thanks for the heads-up. let's hope ED takes a look at it then.

Did you check if the lua precache tweak has a different effect than the precache slider in the game clients graphics setting menu? I would suspect that those do the same. I always advice people to set precache (in the options) as low as they can get away with. Only when still running DCS from an HDD did i experience occasional stutter with low precache settings.

I agree, that this would be the only way to archieve true compatiblity, but i absolutely hope that they don't do it that way. There are huge areas in N1 that just look bad. And this is from someone who actually likes the N1 map quite a lot. But areas that are not near particular POIs look very bland and while they are fine for flying over, they don't hold up to serving as a mission area for everything but high altitude combat. My biggest issue are the endless - ever repeating - fields, that are lying over any type of topo like a blanket. Sometimes they hard intersect with rivers, soemtiems they cover steep inclines... These areas are absolutely in need of improvment and they need more detail but more importantly they need some variety injected. This would then change the layout of the land and would require mission designers to adjust their missions. I also thought about leaving the ALGs without any buldings and objects and offering templates to add full built-ups sites with assets from the ME. Of course the required assets would need to be provided. For me it would be acceptable to have simple grass fields in these locations - even when they were ahistoric for a specific mission. They would not catch the eye at least. The big problem is however, how to change the grass runway and parking to that particular style of PBS/dirt for the mid 44 setting. I think it's particularly these material that make the ALG stick out so much. This would require a material change on the map. Maybe it can be done in the same way winter textures are loaded by mission date, but it would have to be not only texture but material including sound and physic attributes....

Sorry, but i think it's pointless to discuss pricing to that extend. The pricing seems fair (when you generally accept that maps are payware). Saying anything else is splitting hairs. Of course it sucks that for customers in some regions dcs is prohibitly expensive due to exchange rates etc., but that's a problem of regional pricing (or lack thereof). Arguing about single digit dollar differences between different upgrade paths seems to miss the mark here. There are other concerns that were raised here, that have more merit, i think. Normandy 2.0 should be the map that ends the DCS WWII western front kerfuffle, but as of now people are rightfully worried, that it might add to it. ED, Ugra, get rid of the L, give us a fair square!

I remember that ED once said tgey were working on - or at least considering - tech that could change aspects of maps. This would come in really handy here to hide those advanced landing grounds in France giving the map much more credibility for pre-invasion missions. The history buffs will of course always find a thousand more things to be ahistoric, but i think for the general playerbase, the advanced landing grounds are THE giveaway that the map is mid/late 1944.

i also see a problem in with the L shape of the detailed area. i don't like the idea tof planning your missions around not hitting the map borders. i really hope that the north-eastern part could be filled at least a little bit, to lessen the chance of crossing the low-detail border when doing longer range flights...

Hi, i see. It does indeed make sense in that regard. I did not consider this aspect for some reason...

@Rapierarch i appreciate your effort, but i feel you've fallen a bit into a logical trap with the texture thing. I agree that current situation is not good, but i don't think that more options would be the most direct solution. The most direct solution would be for ED to revamp how texture sizes are handled in DCS and how the options affect textures. I'd think it could even be enough to have only one single texture option. I don't think that the user's all want different thing and fine-tune every texture aspect. In my mind everyone simply wants to set the textures size in accordance to their vram and/or dispaly resolution and/or fps target. Of course texture detail have to scale in a way that makes sense. A crisp cockpit texture is more important than the details on a tank many miles away. But i think that this is universal. I don't see that any player would set "object textures" high, but "cockpit textures" low. So the problem is not the missing options, but the lack of optimization of texture settings and texture handling in teh engine. In fact this is a massive issue in DCS and i think i've already made threads about it: You basically have to run high textures, because all other settings give really inconsistent results: Even on "medium" select textures look like they are from 1998. It's a lack of care and optimization and not a lack of missing options. That said, i do not mind having more options. Options are optional i guess, so there is nothing to loose, but i feel we miss the point, if we call for more options. We need ED to revise all texture sizes and i fear that this is a much bigger task.

@NineLine will the new Normandy map borrow from and build upon the channel map's topo and assets (where they overlap), or will new Normandy's rendition be a completely new re-imagination of the area so to speak? Will The Channel still be sold after Normandy 2 releases? If the quality of the topo and assets were the same for both maps, there would be no reason to pick the smaller one. If the topo and assets were different, it would lead to the extremely akward situation of having the same area depicted in different levels of quality.

Wow, reading the Normandy 2 announcement was a rolelrcoaster of emotions. First i was mildly dissapointed, because i thought the update was free, but then reading about the size of the project, a price tag seemed fair again. Then i noticed that both legacy normandy and the channel map will be kinda obsolete with the new map, but seeing the relatively fair upgrade path it seemed ok again. Then there is the aspect of community fragmentation with legacy map vs old, but the new map tech seems to solve that as well. So all in all, good news i think. It however surely begs the question what drove the decision to do the channel map in the first place. I think ED must get better at plannign those things through and delivering on them! That said, i'm looking forward to the new Normandy. Ps: Since the map would allow for many historic scenarios, it would be good to have the option to disable (or hide) the allied landing grounds in France. They are very visible and will always remind the player that the map's date is post invasion.

When can we expect the promised sale to hit steam?