Tippis

Unfortunately, no. He might be trolling, but he most definitely isn't jesting. He has long since proven that he strongly wishes to keep DCS back and not let it see any kind of improvement in any way, unless maybe it specifically, directly, and only benefits him — in case it benefits anyone else, that's purely by accident and is more likely to make him change his mind and suddenly make him argue against the improvement he was in favour of just a few minutes earlier.

In other words, what you said earlier that this is not something that exist in modern games was complete bunk, and you said it know that what you said was complete bunk. You are effectively admitting that you're trolling now. You realise that, right? Your guesses have a long-standing tradition of being so wildly off the mark that I'm frankly amazed that even you, yourself, trust them at this point. Good thing that ED disagrees with you. “Taking time away” to make the game inherently and unquestionably better and more approachable is among the most important things a developer can ever do, and given that you have never in all your trolling been able to articulate what this ”more important thing” is that you always use as an excuse to keep the game unappealing, bad, and constantly falling behind the rest of the industry, you need to really come up with something more intelligent and insightful than that tripe. What else should they spend time on? Can you come up with a single thing that would improve the game for literally everyone that would be a better use of their time?

Again, argument from ignorance is a fallacy for a reason. Finding games that determine some sort of “best” setting depending on detected hardware is utterly trivial. Finding ones that come with a built-in 3DMark-style benchmarking mode, while a bit less common, is still pretty darn easy. There are even games that were, or over time became, a kind of benchmark standard because of this (think the likes of Crysis or Serious Sam or even good old Unreal, just to span a decade or two of different testing suites). So maybe you should stop being so focused on just this supposed track and the supposed ability to cook your own, then, and join the actual conversation about a tool that does actually set your graphics (and other settings) depending on the benchmark, hmm…? You know, the topic of the thread? Just because you've chosen to not discuss the topic and instead want to only talk about some very tiny subset of the feature doesn't mean that the feature cannot exist or that games haven't done this since forever. It just means you're not really qualified to participate in the discussion because of your lack of experience with the genre.

…so you understand why your previous notion that it would be hard to make it work across modules was… ehm… less than informed? Alienating new players is not the same thing as helping them. What would help new players is to… [drum roll] help them in various ways. Using modern UX and UI design principles to get them on board and to realise that elitism and game snobbery went out of style in the early 1990s.

Yes, especially since the third-party tools have a nasty tendency of going out of date, no longer being maintained, and becoming trickier to get your hands on as they get abandoned. It would also help avoid the possible situation where tools simply no longer work because they base game changes its structure and/or restrictions (cf. last year's changes to the database and to the IC mechanism), where any obsolescent mod manager that is built on the assumption that files can be replaced willy-nilly will simply no longer be viable and from one day to the next have no replacement. A built-in tool, using the game's own mechanisms for altering game data, would by necessity have to follow along and be compliant with any such game changes.

Only if said “grown-ups” are immature, insecure, and deathly afraid of having their catastrophic levels of lingering “nuh-uh, I'm actually five and a half and not a baby!”-type childishness exposed to the world. Only they would suffer from the delusion that being helpful is “kiddie”. Everyone else will be entirely capable of understanding how dummy helpers… you know… help, and why being helpful is good for any and all entertainment products — especially the more complicated ones. They understand that more people means more funding means more fun, for everyone. There's a reason why the entire genre has moved away from that kind of self-defeating and narrow-minded elitism and instead embraced what sims have always been: learning tools for those who don't know how to something yet. They let you recapture that fun time when you had to study and learn things. The whole “new module” craze can quite easily be traced back to exactly that: something new to discover with close to child-like curiosity. Now, guess what it is that drives the entire continued existence of DCS…?

So not only are you saying that ED shouldn't improve the game — they should go so far as to stop doing things that make it a good platform to begin with. This is… a wild take.

Good thing, then, that no-one suggested that it is. But it is the point of a benchmark tool to stress the system and to find where it is lacking — you won't achieve that if you allow for too great an overhead. No. No-one would be discourage from downloading the game for free just because it comes with a built in tool to help optimise settings. Quite the opposite. And the reason you can't just do it in the ME is because as you have demonstrated, you have no idea what additions, actions, and in-game events (in the plethora of meanings that word holds in DCS) stress what components, or why, or how. You also don't know what settings are at your disposal to alleviate those stress points. ED, thankfully, clearly disagrees with you, and it's no surprise seeing as how it would be hugely beneficial to everyone and a significant improvement to the game to have that kind of universally available and applicable analytical tool. No wonder, then, that you're dead set against it.

They already do, and they do so for a very good reason. It would be incomprehensibly stupid for them to stop given the significant mod ecosystem that has sprung up around the game, to its great benefit.

Of course it can. Trivially. A number of the ones suggested already do — they're just not tied into a single universal bind option like they probably should be so you have to do them all manually for no sensible reason if you ever want to change them across the board. If you look at the bind sheet on any module, you will near instantly come across three, four (five?) dozen binds that already work the way you don't think they can work. This is why you should probably check with the game before you rely on your own thinking assumptions. Once again, the more you argue against these QoL improvements to the game, the more your arguments give off the impression that you have next to no experience with DCS at all…

…except that it would not actually test the different aspects that go into determining what settings make a difference. You would be vastly better served with a standardised script and corresponding analysis tool that is directly linked to the existing in-game settings in a way that only an in-depth understanding (and profiling) of the engine would allow for. You can always roll your own, of course, but it doesn't offer what is being requested here. Another advantage would be that it would let players troubleshoot performance problems, and with a bit of help even target specific settings that would alleviate the specific problem the player has given their setup. So that's two benefits, and zero downsides. Arguments from incredulity are fallacies for a reason. Your lack of imagination does not provide any intelligent or logical reason why a benchmarking tool should not exist or why it would not help identify optimised settings.

The track replay system works just fine as long as you record it properly — doubly so if you record it with very controlled circumstances, and for a benchmark, you want circumstances to be very controlled indeed so that pretty much solves itself. The “reason” here is your universal unfamiliarity with how DCS works. Live gameplay is not a factor. It wouldn't be a sane, sensible, or working benchmark if that kind of uncontrolled chaos were to be included. The point is that you run through the benchmark to get a specific score on a known scale, and then (auto)adjust settings depending on where on that scale you end up. It doesn't matter if live gameplay is more demanding — that is factored in when you construct the benchmark and create a correlation between the benchmark score and what the corresponding settings will be. It does not produce a specific frame rate in a live setting, but rather a suggested set of settings that will ensure a suitably smooth experience as defined by the empirical testing that generates the correlation data., Of course, at that point you will immediately disagree with what the devs qualify as “suitably”, “smooth”, and “experience”. The “reason” here is actually backwards to how a benchmark inherently needs to work in order to be an actual benchmark. So “all the reasons” amount to zero so far. Doesn't matter. What matters is that enough of a graphics and system processing workload is forced onto the game to test its various bottlenecks — this is trivial to do. The modules don't matter. Again, we absolutely do not want to test a live setting, but a highly scripted one, and as such, it will be all AI all the time to have a specific known quantity. For the same reason, the unit pick simply comes down to one of experimentation: are there any specifically taxing ones from a processing standpoint? Are there any that can be added en masse, where they will just add graphics workload. You pick and choose. Actually, that is exactly what it is. Well, standardized with a few extra scripting tricks that most player-made tracks never use because they're made by… well… players, and not generated by a scripting system. And no, it does not follow that it would already be in the game. There are quite a few reasons (that you love to use as arguments against improvements to the game) why they would not have bothered, and any one of those could have kept it from happening. Of course, there are indeed a few benchmark tracks out there if you go look for them — they are used to test things already, after all… Ehm… that is exactly what benchmarks help with: if properly constructed, they can specifically target those situations and give you a good idea of where there problem is and what measures need to be taken (if any) to ameliorate those issues. The whole point is that the game is a fixed, known, and closed set of options with known effects — the “outcome space” is a known entity. You are not meant to determine anything; the tool does it for you, which is easier than usual if it's something that is built into the very software you're tweaking. The require knowledge needed is encapsulated within the tool itself.

The benefit is that you set them once, and they apply everywhere. That saves time every time you get a new module and every time you want to tweak one of the basic settings. They're common for a reason, and as such, all that little time quickly adds up. No. Because the controls aren't common so loading one module's profile into a different module will cause all kinds of funny business and — if it doesn't just break outright — will increase the amount of time spent. So once again, you're just trolling around here trying to keep improvements to the game from happening, and your laughable and utterly pathetic attempt (and abysmal failure) at an argument is entirely based on a profound ignorance of how the game works, both in general and in the specifics related to the suggestion at hand.

This is very obviously false. Don't generalise from your irrelevant and uninformed opinion. Also, why is it a waste of development resources? You use that argument a lot but you never mange to make a cogent, coherent, or even remotely intelligent case for it. Is it just that you wouldn't use this feature, whereas those efforts you deem not wasteful are the ones you'd benefit from? Because if so, your line of reasoning for wasteful resource allocation is also incoherent, irrelevant, and uninformed.

Have you tried reading the thread? Or just tried understanding the issue at hand in general? So your idea of a solution is to just shut down the user file section entirely, then, seeing as how you've declared the way users interact with it (by necessity and by design) is a waste of time. Just because you have no interest in this particular part of the community interaction doesn't mean that others feel the same — it only means that your opinion and input is inherently pointless, worthless, and irrelevant. This is a spectacularly silly derail, even by your standards.

Nope.

Even free things have customers.

Yes, really. Because that needs to happen no matter what. In fact, it is already happening, just through the worst means possible — popularity and downloads, which tell you nothing about the actual quality of the piece or even if it works. In fact, given the long history of the archives, how long some things have been in there to rack up those stats, and how much has changed in all that time, it is often more likely that anything with a high download count does not actually work any more. There are tools available that will try to automate the process of figuring out how to make obsolete downloads work with the current livery mechanisms, but the fact that a tool is even needed for that is a good sign that the cleanup should happen sooner rather than later. The longer you wait, the more horrid the cleaning process will become. …and nothing of value would be lost and no-one would care. If you cannot take the 0.5s to tick a box, and be willing to have someone (individual or via crowd mechanics) decide whether or not that tick was accurate or not, then your work is massively likely to be a shoddy rushjob made by some diva with no capability of improvement and/or being critiqued. If you do good work, take pride in that work, and want as many as possible to find and enjoy it without having to wade through all kinds of uncontrolled and uncurated random noise, you'd be happy that those mechanics exist to help your customer base find your stuff.

They do if you require them to and subject them to even the slightest bit of curating.

Having to download more junk skins you don't use or ever need is not strictly speaking better than having to download fewer of them.

+1 Fog of war is sort of supposed to sort of do that, but it breaks down in MP where everything being in range of anything shows up for everyone, and the exact limits and mechanisms for determining what is “know“ are themselves unknown (and uncontrollable). This would be more like an individual, controllable fog of war option and that would help a ton with a lot of mission designs.

The biggest problem with the sparkvark is that ECM — and electronic warfare in general — is just not something that really exist or work in any meaningful capacity in DCS. It would require the development of, not just a single variant module, but an entire revamp of large portions of the sensor mechancs in the entire game. Ultimately, there's an argument to be had that it could be a worth-while effort, but we also need to be realistic about just the hugeness of that effort, and for what would ultimately be rather uncertain results. In particular, it would run face-first into a solid brick wall of secrecy and lack of information, to the point where the whole thing couldn't really be simulated — only speculatively approximated through massive simplifications. With that, would an ewar bird really serve any useful purpose? It's a very attractive and interesting proposition, but it's unfortunately very likely that it wouldn't yield anything particularly satisfying for a bunch of (largely unavoidable) reasons.

#1 applies equally to the other control schemes. It's a choice, remember? #2 is just blatantly untrue. Less so, probably, but given the unparalleled speed and precision they offer as an advantage, absolutely, if you're looking at it from the perspective of the control options that don't have that. …and if you feel it gives the player some advantage (hint: it doesn't), you can choose to use it. Just because you choose not to doesn't make it cheating. If you're going to use that logic, then we can once again trivially reverse it: choosing to play with TrackIR is your choice — that doesn't mean its cheats suddenly become acceptable, and it would be right to implement limits to remove those cheats. But here you are, arguing in favour of keeping those (because they're your cheats), but definitely removing some other cheat (that you don't even know how it affects anything because you have no experience with it). You understand that this is exactly what you're doing, right? And far more literally than the facetious counter-example he's offering to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the complaint. You've come to the conclusion that your unsubstantiated whinging is unreasonable. Maybe you should stop it, then, hmmm…?

Sure it is. If you can look behind you by turning your just head 5°, that's clearly unrealistic and a “cheat” in exactly the same way that going through the glass is. Just because you're using it as your baseline doesn't mean it's suddenly “correct” to any larger degree than any other means of manipulating your viewport — it comes with its own limitations and accommodations, and from the point of view of a different choice, those are just as unrealistic and cheat:y. It makes all the sense in the world, and it's more that you don't like to acknowledge the fact that your preferred method of control can be judged by the same standards for the same conclusion as the one you want to see nerfed for no intelligent or cogent reason. You're a cheater. Accept it. Or don't, but then you also don't get to label other people as cheaters either. Again, works both ways: if you feel that TrackIR puts you at a disadvantage, that doesn't justify cheating by ignoring the limits of body mechanics. Just choose VR instead if you want its advantages and its higher level of realism. It's a choice, after all. But above all, your most important choice is whether or not you want to be a hypocrite about it and judge the different methods unequally.

That's a pretty neat idea as a compromise. The only worry I can think of is the rendering workload on something that is already pushing the limits of performance. Do you happen to know off the top of your head how much this effect (especially if it needs to be applied in a limited fashion along a geometry boundary like that), would cost in terms of processing power?