Mars Exulte

I stand corrected

Never! I logged in for the first time in months just to say this!

Sir, this is the internet. Rumors and rabbit holes are like 85% of everything. Also I see I've missed a bunch of drama the last few months

I've been here since they were individual modules that could not play together. Before DCS World existed. I have seen all the same stuff, and am keenly aware of the issues that have cropped up over the last twenty years with those same ''road maps''. It's been discussed for 10+ years minimum. There are very clear reasons why it hasn't happened yet (and may not ever). See previous comments about the resources required to do it properly vs its actual utility and fun factor when merged together. If you have to separate them into isolated sandboxes that don't play together, it's not worth doing, and mixing them has very real issues to overcome. It has indeed for a lot of it, but technology is not the barrier to doing this. Practicality is. Is directly related to improving the naval flying experience... you're not commanding the ship. It's fancy ATC and ground crews. Combined arms is not and has never been focused on, thus it being so half baked. That can and should be improved, but it doesn't change the fact the core flight Sim environment and people on the ground will not readily mesh together without serious issue. This ain't a WWII environ, these planes have long range optics and guided precision munitions. A tank cannot readily hide in the pushes to escape roving jagers. They get their appetite whetted and come here for more. That doesn't change the fact WT pop vastly outnumbers DCS. It's irrelevant for the topic we're discussing regardless. Arma is infantry centric, but yes, it leans far more into simulation territory than the majority of shooters. Yes, it has. Arma is A example not the only one. It's also irrelevant the fidelity of the simulation, the basic principle doesn't change even if they're all on rails sans physics. Look here: Big flying thing soar overhead. Big flying thing drop many explodey bombs and destroy entire town. Little squishy man on ground rage because no can fight back. Alternatively, big flying thing you can't see rips off missile from 40 miles away. Soft squishy man on ground rage because no can fight back. Fidelity has zero to do with this core experience in the video game, and how few people will enjoy that. Yes, some do and will roll with it. But it is not that simple to monetise a profitable game that 90% of people will not play. Again, it is and has always been possible, it hasn't been done to a large extent because most people won't like that gameplay loop. The question is ''will this work well enough and enough people utilise it to justify pouring tens of millions of dollars into it making assets, infantry physics, vehicle physics, licensing, etc etc etc?'' Because gamers and zealots have a lot in common.

Star Citizen is not something anybody should strive to emulate, and you reaaaaally just lost a lot of credibility there. MMOs with instanced servers (which is what SC does) that communicate with each other is nothing new. Again, nothing new. Ah, you're one of those. And yeah, this is first and foremost a flight sim engine. For evidence I submit the entire game and how ONLY aircraft are remotely fleshed out. Being able to hop into a poorly modeled than and drive it around doesn't change that. It is a flight sim with some really half baked stuff tacked on. CAN that all be expanded? Yes. The question is ''is it likely to be done properly, and will it add significantly enough to what we already have to be worth the effort?'' This is much more of a gray area leaning toward ''no''. Fps and vehicle sims are equally complex as aircraft, requiring large investiture of resources, and at the end of the day these don't mesh well together as part of a video game (which is what this is). In short infantry and vehicles are tactical assets (focused on individual battles and very micro in scope) whereas as aircraft are strategic assets (focused on the wider theater and ranging across hundreds of miles). They do not mesh well as a video game, when a single A-10 can carpet bomb an entire town and kill dozens of players on the ground, or snipe them with Mavericks from beyond effective visual range, the people on the ground will not think that is fun. And yeah yeah ''DCS grognards blah blah'' even in this community the number of people who will not get frustrated getting repeatedly killed by things they can't fight back against is very small. Common sense and prior experience. It's not about failed ventured either. It has been done before and it doesn't end up being FUN for the majority of people. Take Arma, ignoring all other factors, jets are too fast and too powerful and the theater too limited for jets to be involved outside of tightly controlled circumstances because it very quickly starts to suck for everyone there. Even helos have to be rigidly limited in their scope in a given mission to keep it from getting out of whack. That is because thESE are strategic assets with disproportionately large amounts of power and capability compared to what they're fighting. This will always be an issue because ground units cannot start hundreds of miles from the objective and take various routes. The aircraft will ALWAYS know approximately where to look for them. This isn't a church, blind faith has nothing to do with any of this.

MAC appears to be downgraded in scope, and is instead being rolled into Flaming Cliffs. See their YouTube channel announcing MiG-15, F-86, and F-5. Weird, but what they appear to be doing.

Don't forget the T-45 Goshawk by VNAO. These are both basically professional level mods of extremely high caliber. AFAIK they're the only ones, though.

Yeah, a vehicle Sim module, very possible. FPS full on shooter? Nah. Not really plausible in any reasonable timeframe, certainly not for anything worth playing. It's a monumental task similar to making a whole separate game from scratch again. Remember how many years it took to get mutlithreading and what have you? Then the scale of ops is a further issue. As limited as Arma is in scale and scope, it still struggles with having all these components working together in a reasonable fashion and timescale. It really only works if you effectively separate these sections of gameplay altogether (like having FPS minI maps/servers) that merely reuse assets from the base game. And if you're going to do that, then what's even the point? Firmly in the realm of ''something that sounds really cool in theory but is not remotely feasbile in a practical sense''.

No, because your approximate perspective with a monitor, field of view, and the level of detail you can perceive, are not even remotely close to accurate (barring certain extreme examples or VR). ''Zooming'' is effectively adjusting to a more realistic fov temporarily so you can see, unfortunately this has the effect of looking at the world through a cardboard tube with no peripheral vision or fine control and thus impractical for ''normal usage''. If you have a 180 degree projector setup, or perhaps multiple very large monitors carefully positioned and a fine tuned FoV, then your view is ''realistic''. Otherwise, you have to bounce between ''greater detail'' and ''greater awareness''. Itself also a skill, technically, as if you spend too much time in one over the other you're apt to miss critical moments. Gaming is a matter of balancing compromises and workarounds in acknowledgment that what you are doing, is in fact not real, nor are your means of interacting with the virtual world.

No AV here except Windows Defender if you want to count that. AV is helpful if you do something to get infected (usually something stupid) but there's no substitute for simply not getting infected in the first place, ie good browsing habits, avoiding sketchy sites, good email habits, good security habits (passwords etc), etc. No antivirus in the world can protect somebody with bad habits, meanwhile somebody with good habits doesn't really need an AV at all.

Damn casuals.

In RL aircraft do not fly around with 10,000lbs of bombs to level an entire city single-handedly. That's why they fly in groups. A single aircraft of any type is not expected or asked to stop an entire formation. There would not be "one" of anything. There would be dozens of them, just like there was in Desert Storm and every other major conflict. The difference being A-10s would be getting swatted out of the sky whereas stealth aircraft would not. In the real world "flying under the radar" is not a magical cutoff whenever you're below a certain altitude. No, it won't either. You're describing an environment that the A-10 has literally never been asked to operate in. In Desert Storm, nobody was "flying in under the radar" to strafe SAMs with an A-10. Even if true, that's... completely irrelevant. A helicopter could probably do the same thing, that is irrelevant. Outside of canned scenarios ala Growling Sidewinder, that A-10 would never know the F-35 was around nor be expected to "dogfight" with it. Everything you keep typing just further emphasises you are using video game logic and don't really have any idea what you're talking about, no offense. It is not realistic to keep flying a 50 year old platform whose usefulness even when it was new is debatable. It has had a successful career due to operating in environments of overwhelming air supremacy where it could do its thing unimpeded. In a contested environment, A-10s would not last very long, and that includes the 1980s when they were designed with a Fulda Gap scenario in mind. It was expected then that they would all get destroyed relatively quickly, they were just a hammer to slow the Soviets down.

It will not get shot nearly as frequently as an A-10 either, which is kind of the point. You're not going to be loitering in a major contested airspace anyway, so the importance of that specifically is debatable. As above, B-1s provided more close support than just about anything else. A-10s are slow, which also is a factor to consider. If it's not in the immediate area, it's going to be a wait. There is no sense in arguing in favor of an antiquated, obsolete platform that cannot realistically be expected to operate in a modern theater. For low intensity stuff like Afghanistan, you do not need a ''massive payload'' and you don't need a high tech fighter jet in the first place. That's why they have been looking at stuff like the T-6 and Super Tucano as low cost, high loiter time alternatives for low intensity operations.

The only thing the A-10 has over anything else is the gun, a weapon which it would never live long enough to use in an actual contested airspace. Everything else it can do, everything else can do as well or better. CAS? You can do CAS from a B-52 dropping small precision smart bombs from 35,000ft as far as that goes. Most CAS missions in the last thirty years were NOT provided by A-10s. ''It's cheaper!'' Not if the plane gets shot down. A F-35 can roam freely over contested airspace. An A-10 cannot, period. The A-10 is a 50+ year old airframe designed to an outdated concept, and expected to operate in an environment where it would be exceptionally vulnerable. That is why it's being phased out, along with all the other airframes designed in the 1970s, although many of them can still operate effectively due to the nature of the roles they fill.

Unfortunately, I *do* remember that. Well, I am a colonial, yes! But more practically... also, yes! They are fussy about these topics. It is an unarmed trainer jet widely exported. Also, beside the point. They can be negotiated with, that doesn't mean those negotiations are as painless as with some other countries. ''Hard to work with'' does not mean ''impossible''.