Tippis

There exists exactly zero evidence to support that stance and an overwhelming amount of evidence to support that the RWR actually functions as an intelligently designed RWR. If those internal doubters have anything to say to try to bolster their case, present it, otherwise it will — entirely correctly — continue to be seen as an inaccurate and bugged implementation. There's an argument to be made that the F-5 has the wrong RWR, but that is something very different. In that case, the proper solution would be to give it the correct and properly functioning RWR, not to keep the wrong and incorrectly modelled one. In a way the same thing goes for this entire IC debacle: is there any actual evidence to support the notion that the supposed problems that this is meant to fix even exist? The simple fact of the matter is that this wholesale banning of much-needed adjustments has broken the game. I hope this was not the intent and that the breakage will be fixed in short order.

Not politically, no, but there are two exceptions: foreign policy and defence.

The problem is that 1) the money doesn't have to come from the asset packs — indeed, doing it that way arguably reduces the money going towards creating assets, and 2) two of the main things that drive cash flow is word-of-mouth recommendations and content. By making asset packs separate modules that fracture the part of the community that is the most into communicating and giving recommendation, the word-of-mouth will always be “nah, don't bother”, which in turn reduces the size of the customer base for people who make content, which reduces the amount of content being made with those assets, which reinforces the “nah, don't bother” word-of-mouth. ED came to understand this dynamic when they reversed their decision to make the Supercarrier client-limited in MP and figured out a different way of letting paying clients use and enjoy the module to separate them from the non-paying ones. The problem is that this doesn't work for assets because… well… they're assets. There is no “use” for them (outside of maybe some CA integration). The best alternative that I've seen being offered is to simply amortise the cost of developing assets over the actual player-used modules: if you make an aircraft from the '80s or '90s, part of the sales price of that module becomes an “asset tax” that goes towards further populating the world surrounding that aircraft with time-appropriate assets.

The last war over UK was in the early 1980s. We're getting a map to cover that. Like with all maps, it will not be possible to realistically recreate that conflict. If you want realism, then none of the modules we have can be used on any of the maps we have, save for a subset of FC3.1 This would be doubly true for an Iraq map. For an Afghanistan map, a tiny handful of modules could be used, but they would have no opposition and it would be no conflict to speak of. So right back at you: if you want that complete lack of opposition, fly FS2020. All conflicts created in DCS are and always will be imaginary — this is a good thing, by the way — and there are plenty of environments in which such conflicts can take place. This includes the no-opposition bombing of mud brick huts, if you're into that. Fighting over undulating hills with temperate forests, or jungles with jagged peaks, or brackish-water archipelagos leading to evergreen forests, or industrialised plains and mountain passes, or any of the myriad of other terrains the planet has to offer — almost all of which have seen conflict take place over them — is no less or more realistic than fighting over yet another mountainous desert with occasional greenery. They'd just be a whole lot more interesting than more of the same sand texture. 1 There is exactly one exception: Normandy, which has a small subset of the right aircraft, a tiny set of decorations, and the right region for the right period for those planes and systems. However, it is also a region and period that saw very little in the way of a proper air war since one side had a 6:1 superiority in sorties, and even larger superiority in aircraft and pilots, and a catastrophically large superiority in pilot training. It's not quite as one-sided as mud-brick-hut bombing, but close.

It's not a bug. It has been folded into the Viggen module and no longer exist as a separate thing.

We really don't. That kind of terrain and those kinds of conflicts are easily covered by the maps we already have. The UK may not be the best option (mainly for reasons of simple size and geometry as previously described), but something else in a similar vein would provide far more, and much needed, variety. The Falklands map offers some promise of relief from the monotony of the mountainous desert map, the half-flat, half-mountainous desert and sea map, and the sparsely green mountain-and-sea desert map. But more diversification can only ever be a good thing at this point.

I'm a glutton for pain and bugs and fancy new things (and also running servers for people with the same proclivities), so for me, there's little other option. That said, my experience is that there's very little benefit to running the stable branch to begin with. It may be “stable”, but commonly not to a degree that separates it from the beta branch in any appreciable way, and the beta branch will have the latest bug fixes, which is often worth more.

Usually yes, at least the latest and greatest ones. It's hard to give a rule of thumb, but stable has at times lagged behind open beta by as much as half a year, so anything that wasn't in the beta at that point is not in stable. Conversely, on the day that a new stable version is released, it is almost always brought in line with the current beta version so both will commonly have the same capability. Even then, though. some of the “earlier-than-normal” access modules will occasionally still be held back because they are just not ready for prime time yet. I'm sure there's some list out there that specifies what is in (and not) the respective stable and beta branches in a clear manner so you don't have to dig through and compare months of patch notes to figure it out yourself, but I unfortunately don't know of one myself. You'll sometimes see it mentioned directly on the store page for a given module that it requires some specific version, and that version is only available on the beta branch at that moment.

First of all, by “final version”, do you mean installing the latest stable branch or do you just mean updating the latest build, period? Second, the easiest way of doing either is to get the DCS Updater GUI, which lets you pick branch and build fairly easily. The GUI itself is at times a bit clunky, but it is still a massive improvement over having to do it via the command line. If you still want to do it manually, the full instruction of the updater functions and parameters can be found here. Just note that doing it that way means you have to research exactly which build number is the latest one for the branch (beta or stable) you want to run. In practice, you can pick the wrong one without issue but that will, obviously, give you the wrong version. As a general rule, doing this will not have any effect on your modules or missions, short of if you go back to a stable release that does not yet support one of the modules you have installed. If you have any mods installed in the base directory (and you really shouldn't — there are better places for that in most cases), those will be “repaired” (read: wiped) in the process like with any update. Apply whatever mod management tools and methods you'd usually employ for any regular update.

Quite. The new weather system makes for more reasons to actually venture into those engagement zones, but even then, that presumes that the weather system is used at all (clear skies is still a far too common default) and that threats — and possibly even targets — are not precisely known beforehand (the amount of information displayed by default unless you go out of your way to hide it is… excessive). It really is more of an ecosystem of issues, where if you use every tool in the toolbox and put a ton of effort in, you can eke out some kind of threatening(ish) environment(esque), but you are constantly fighting against the basic design of the game to make that happen. If that were reversed, or at least skewed more towards some half-way option between the two, they'd probably be more useful and more used.

You realise, of course, that the training features is the very reason why DCS exists to begin with, right? That that's why modules (and yes, they are indeed modules) like the A-10 and M2k are used in actual training: because those features exist. That the big-paying, future-proofing customer base — training institutions contracting out work to use DCS as a teaching tool — come to DCS because this particular simulator has tools that allow for the creation of training scenarios. I know that you are proudly ignorant and break out in rashes and hives at the mere thought of learning something or doing research, but even you should know this. This is just painfully confused. What do you think “features” are?! What do you think it is that sells the modules? You previously went on this whole useless tangent about how most players are SP only. Have you considered what this means for what players actually do in the game? When there aren't other players around to generate the dynamics of the world you're flying in, what do you think the source is for the single-player's entertainment? Yes they do. They're called “campaigns”, which rely on features being used by the modules. You know, that thing that your much-vaunted majority of SP-only customers rely on to have a game to play. The modules alone are meaningless without the content. The features you are so confused by are what makes that content possible. They also get paid for features — those being created to support some fancy new module and give it any reason to exist. Not “necessarily”, no. The correct word is “automatically” or possibly “inherently”.

More specifically, it doesn't do that because it has no backseat — it's just a (largely inaccurate and incomplete) decoration on the 3D model. The TF-51 is meant to be a trainer aircraft, but its DCS incarnation doesn't work like that because it's missing even the most basic thing a trainer needs: a place for the training instructor to sit (and, of course, the functionality to let him sit there, hence this entire thread). Sure, it's free, and sure you can use it to train with, but that's exactly as true for the Su-25T, and that obviously doesn't make the Frog a training aircraft for much the same reason. If “you can train yourself” was a valid qualifier, then the Spitfire is also a training aircraft module, and as anyone who has tried it will tell you, it is not a good learning environment. Welcome to sharpeville. Your opinion is noted and discarded as irrelevant to the topic at hand. The mods have explained this to you already.

Well, there's the obvious one… Every image I've seen of the actual TF-51 also has that, except for the DCS one, which only has a passenger/observation seat. Dual-control trainers were a thing back then in much the same way (and for the same reasons) as now.

…and? By that logic, nothing can ever be made for DCS. So that's a completely vapid observation. The point is, no matter how much you aren't interested and wish it were otherwise, these modules exist. They sell enough to keep being made. There is no cost except opportunity cost and that holds true for everything so, again, that's not a sensible argument against doing it for WWII as well.

So in other words, it makes all the sense in the world to add this kind of simulation because that would actually make the game more realistic. I know that consistency is not your strong suit but you're offering a really confusing stance here, where you will constantly shift and contradict your argumentation to ensure that things other people enjoy, and especially things that would be helpful to new players and in any kind of teaching scenario, never sees the light of day. I've asked it before, and I must ask it again: what do you have against realism and new players? It really isn't since DCS already provides multiple means to convey that. You should know this already.

You honestly believe that they don't simulate two-seat aircraft using two-seat simulators? In spite of being shown that they have two-seat simulators for two-seat aircraft? Well, you do you — after all, what else can you do. Not indefinitely. Only until someone offers a good and relevant counter-argument or manages to actually prove their point. But if you'd like to get back on the topic of the thread, that would be swell regardless.

The F-15E is not a jetliner. And they're still jet aircraft. If that doesn't strike your fancy, you can try this. Or maybe this. Or just accept that by not wanting to spend the few seconds worth of googling it took to find these examples, you accidentally let slip a categorical statement that wasn't… well… all that accurate. “Categorical statements are categorically false” is a saying for a reason, you know.

See edit above.

At least one for anything built on a wide-body or tubeliner platform, most likely. Oh, and stuff like this. Not that it is in any way relevant to the topic at hand.

That's kind of the point, though. You can't actually use those numbers to tell you anything because that's total playtime across everyone. For a free game, this includes the N% that got it and never played it; the M% players who got it, started it once, and ran for the woods at the first sight of the TF-51 cockpit to save their sanity. Average and median values are already just bare minimum to tell you anything about… well… anything, and it's very little that can be deduced. For a free game, the problem of stickiness and retention completely blows away any ability to even that kind of deduction without knowing far more parameters.

Oh sure. As the very first plane to ever fly, it's perfect. Even the engine management is largely optional (although that might be more due to a gap in the simulation). That's a bit different than what seems to be asked for here: a warbird trainer — i.e. something that has similar characteristics, although perhaps not quite as… ehm… temperamental as a Spit or P-whatever. It's a long way to go from perhaps the most trivial thing with wings available in DCS to the pogo-flip-overheat-loveliness of the real warbirds. The TF-51 is already a whole lot easier to fly than just about anything else in that general selection, except maybe the regular P-51, so it would be a good candidate.

First, have you checked that it is not listed among your licenses: https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/personal/licensing/licenses/ Second. unless I'm mistaken and it has changed again, that campaign was removed as a stand-alone product and was rolled into the Viggen module. It could be that you're still running some traces of the old version and the back-end no longer recognises it as a valid module that even can be licensed. So the module itself asks “am I licensed?” and the server goes “who the bleep are you? no! go away!” and you get that error. Has it been installed all this time, or have you recently done any reinstalls with third-party tools that may have fetched the wrong version? e:f;b.

There's also the standard caution on average values, especially time periods. Given how even a hot start will have some inherent downtime before you get to the action (to say nothing of getting back, if that's your jam) it quickly starts sounding awfully low, unless the number of airquake/right-into-the-dogfight-action servers has been massively underestimated. There's a better than average (ha!) chance that those session times don't follow a standard distribution., but rather more of a bath tub curve: on the one hand, lots of sessions where the player just logs in, checks his settings, tries that single thing he needed to look up, checks the map state, checks the user list for who else is flying and logs off after all of 5 minutes; on the other hand, the “full package” player who, when he logs in, stays for the full 1–2 hours of a mission (or two). As always, averages are rather anaemic without at least an accompanying median value to at least give a hint of the overall skew of the statistics.

This is true enough, but I wonder how much of a limitation that would be for the intended audience. Or perhaps rather, what would the audience actually be to begin with? The whole idea sounds a whole lot more like something you'd see promoted (or even gifted) within existing communities. Of course, that goes right back to the question of price point — if it's a low threshold, they'd be sprinkled over any newbie even daring to mention the number 14, even partially, and irrespective of context. If it's a higher one, it would still probably rank pretty highly on all kinds of “get these modules first” lists. Of course there is. It's like in every other multi-crewed module. It was actually hilarious to listen to that segment of the video, when they made the comparison with how you could flip between stations in other games and then said “that's not the DCS way”. So presumably, they are saying that half the modules — in particular the more thoroughly simulated ones — should be removed from the DCS store page since that's exactly how they do it.

…and it should be mention that this is with a few performance perks that have been given to them, such as adding various levels of countermeasure immunity to (in particular) IR missiles. Even then, just about all of them can be spoofed in DCS by just adding more spam since that simply triggers more die rolls for confusing the missiles. Barring absolute immunity, one of them will cause a miss sooner or later. As such, the only thing that really causes a hit is if the target doesn't have time to react, usually by not seeing or being warned of the launch. Even that part has proven to be under-modelled and underperforming for a number of SAMs for the longest time (looking at you SA-2), so… yeah. Anit-air in DCS is often not treated with the respect it deserves from pilots because they don't need to. So on the few occasions when that need actually comes up, a DCS regular is quite likely not to be fully prepared.