dis80786

Great ideas here folks, keep them coming! I’ve added this one to the initial post, nerfed Tilbury Power Station, & Chain Home. I’m watching this thread and will add as the corking ideas come up.

Pass on my respects to Robin. Absolutely outstanding work.

Aren’t there rumours we’re getting the real thing with the Pacific map? Or did I mishear that?

Yup! I've updated my link. Thanks for that :) I can't take all the credit, but thanks. Let's hope this gets read by ED.

Absolutely right, and I included a cracking link to a website detailing these missing airfields. Again, absolutely correct: it is only a game. But Normandy was a resounding miss for me and so, like many others, I was hoping for a better showing for WW2 this time around. My only point is that this map is enjoyable but, with a little more polish, it could be astounding!

Done: https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=277412

Reckon we need the current bits to be improved first, but yes, expansion would be cool and certainly welcome!

Looking at two other threads (here and here) from elsewhere in these forums, I am in complete agreement. I'm sure many of you are too: the Channel Map in Early Access is good, but it NEEDS some work to make it great. At the moment we have a Jack-of-all-trades map, which will be usable by jets and WW2 planes alike. But it's not a WW2 map and it needs refining with both more of some stuff and less of other stuff to make it feel that way. It's worth condensing those two threads into this wishlist for convenience. (I can't comment on northern France, but I should imagine the wishlist is similar! Can any French people shed some light?) In summary, the following: The area of SE England depicted in this map had little heavy industry in the 1940's. It was predominantly horse-and-cart agriculture, with seaside towns catering for London holidaymakers. The huge housing expansion on the South coast which is shown in-map started from the 1950's to house those misplaced by the Blitz, so for WW2 accuracy the vast majority of these houses simply didn't exist, and neither did all those industrial estates. This map is massively over-populated; even modern-day housing estates are represented! Removing post-1950's housing will help us with immersion and may help us with performance as, in most cases, these housing estates would have been open fields in the 1940's, saving GPU cycles. A fantastic reference site full of mapping done in that period can be viewed here. Outside of the towns, Sussex and Kent were then (and are still largely) an agricultural landscape, and the inclusion of huge, random factories in the middle of nowhere, rather than barns, oast houses, churches and windmills, is immersion-destroying when scudding at low level over the trees after a German. But the omission of major landmarks not only renders VMC navigation far harder than it should be, but is frankly astounding when there is so much data available for free in the public domain. Others are a little more nit-picky and nice-to-haves. In no real order: -Add the 16-or-so missing RAF airfields: full map here. -Add Pre-Beeching railways: Cuckoo Line, Uckfield - Lewes, East Grinstead - Lewes,etc. -Add Dover Marine Station (See link, here) -Depopulate the map, nerf industrial estates. -Replace out-of-town industry with farms: add oast house/barn/church/windmill assets, -Add Pevensey/Bodiam/Rochester/Camber/etc. castles. -Add Rochester and Canterbury cathedrals. -Add Seaford Head and cliffs. -Add a few bombed-out house assets (coastal towns suffered greatly from German tip-and-run raids; my grandmother was strafed by a Bf. 109 in Hastings! He missed, thankfully...) as well as pillboxes/emplacements/anti-invasion defenses/Chain Home RADAR stations, etc. -Add anti-invasion defences to the beaches (see picture of Eastbourne beach later in this thread) -Add missing piers, including Eastbourne. -Add Newhaven Breakwater & Fort. Overhaul Port. Remove industrial estates on east bank & replace with carriage works. Add jetties. -Dungeness: Remove Nuclear power station (yes, really...), remove Lydd-on-Sea; -Add Dungeness & Belle Tout lighthouses -Add Whitstable Harbour. -Remove all reservoirs (1970's constructions). -Remove: Sovereign Harbour marina at Eastbourne: not built until 1990's. -Add Coastguard cottages at Birling Gap and Cuckmere Haven -Add famous seafront hotels in Eastbourne -Add Martello Towers. -Add Hastings Bathing Pool, Harbour Arm and net-drying huts at Rock-an-Ore. Perhaps a large majority of people flying over this map have no idea what the south of England actually looks like, and to some of them it doesn’t matter at all. But why is hell raised if every rivet is not present and correct on the aircraft we fly (right down to an unpainted screw on a botched repair on the instrument panel of the new P-47D), yet ignore the terrain it flies over? Have the lessons of the Normandy map been learned? Why not raise the bar slightly for the the maps too? Any other glaring omissions/requests/praise?

A good idea, and you're right. I'll try and do a ranking of sorts, but nobody is ever going to agree on what is and isn't important. I'll copy it over on to the wishlist now.

Should we transfer all this to the Wishlist, do your think?

A wee bit of Wee Speck! (Sorry, can't embed from Google docs)

To that, may I add: Historical railways Pevensey/Bodiam/Rochester/Camber etc castles Windmills Sussexmillsgroup.org and oast houses (see why I say so, below) Seafront hotels in Eastbourne Coastguard cottages at Birling Gap and Cuckmere Haven Hastings Bathing Pool, White-Rock gardens, Harbour Arm and net-drying huts at Rock-an-Ore General sea-front fortifications: where are all the pillboxes, barbed wire, hedgehogs on the beaches etc of a country faced with invasion three years prior to this map? Sussex was then, and still is largely, an agricultural landscape, and then inclusion of modern industrial/housing estates and random factories in the middle of nowhere, rather than oast houses and windmills, is immersion-destroying. Yes, perhaps a large majority of people flying over this map have no idea what the south of England actually looks like, and to some of them it doesn’t matter at all. But to a significant group of people, to see such omissions is jarring. View this in the context of the Normandy map. That was a huge missed opportunity and the southeast of England existed only as a green splodge with airfields dotted around, effectively denying the community a third of the map they can legitimately have expected to receive before it launched. I also remember flying a Spitfire Mk. 1 over ‘London’ in IL2 CoD and noting the omission even of St Paul’s Cathedral, that symbol of the Blitz, and being astounded. The Channel map could have been what we were waiting for, but as of now it falls short. Finally, we make damn sure that every rivet is present and correct on the virtual aircraft we fly, right down to an unpainted screw on a botched repair on the instrument panel of the new P-47D. I am not suggesting every single building should be accurately modelled and precisely placed, but between Holbeach’s suggestions and my own, if implemented, would make the DCS Channel Map an industry-leading product and mean that I never leave my PC again! That and these landmarks are vital for easy visual navigation. Would love to hear the views of those who know a northern France well too.

Yes. Hastings Pier burned down in the 00's, and has been completely rebuilt since. The in-game version is exactly how it looked in the 1940's. Almost all other buildings in game are generic.

I agree. I actually live in one of the towns on the map; there would have been a railway which ran through it in the 1940's which isn't there on the map; no sign of Eastbourne Pier although Hastings Pier is looking great; Beachy Head Lighthouse is there but no Belle Tout Lighthouse; Hastings has no net-drying sheds on the seafront; use of generic bridges on Pevensey Levels and Rye Flats which looks terrible; no windmills anywhere (there are heaps IRL) ; I can go on but you get the idea. I might sound a bit gripey, but these are major landmarks by which one navigates around the south-east of England, and to see them missing just jars a bit Obviously I am aware this is early access and there are a great deal more work to be done but all I am saying is that I hope this all gets fleshed out a bit in the future. BTW my FPS is high 30's - low 40's in VR, so it's playable.

Do this. But also, when they drop all of their bombs... well, they just haven't designed the CPU that can compute all that on one core and give decent performance too.

Very true, but as I said above, DCS depends on single core freq and not number of cores. DCS just does not use all those cores, and so Intel still reigns here (and only here) with it's better single core perf. Most other games, yes; DCS no. Throwing cores at DCS just doesn't work. Finally, Ars Technica shouldn't be surprised that software designed by Apple to run on the CPU's that power it's own products to be better optimised for those CPUs than vs everything else at given tasks. That's not apples with apples (hahaha).

With DCS there are a million small things one can do to improve FPS. It's annoying AF that we have to do all that and it isn't automatically done by ED (it should be optimised out of the box FFS!), but there it is. New shaders, hyperthreading disabled, etc etc etc, just search these forums and find what works for your system, but significant gains can be had by tinkering. In VR at least, I am sure that the frame rate cap has a large effect on the performance of DCS (it's easy to find, just search for the DCS autoexec posts on this forum) due to super-sampling vs the FPS trigger for upgrading/downgrading the dynamic resolution, and so on. All I will say is, that one can be too quick to blame one's hardware. An overclocked 2600K with a 2080Ti is all one really needs to get decent performance out of DCS, since DCS does not take full advantage of extra cores and single core frequency is king. Implement the settings which need to be implemented, disable those which drain your performance for no real gain (looking at you, wake vortices) and you may be able to eek another year or two out of your current hardware whilst you wait for Intel's 10nm to go HEDT. And in the meantime, spend what you would have spent on a new system on beer.

Not so fast! I have an OC'd 2080Ti FE and a 5960x OC'd to 4.6GHZ and (in VR) I still return around 40FPS in VR with at least some visual acuity preserved. Now, your choice depends somewhat on what you do in DCS. For example, if you fly the P-51D in the Blue Nosed Bastards of Bodney campaign, they have not yet created the CPU that can cope with calculating the wake vortices or bomb trajectories of a massed B-17 formation no matter what GPU you have it all slows down to 8 FPS. However, if you like to bimble around Dubai with no enemies at 4k you'll be GPU limited no matter what hardware you have. Given you and I have the same GPU (more or less) cpu.userbenchmark states that my system is a mere 11% faster than yours, or that you are 29% slower than a 9900K (all at stock). Given that you are clearly good at overclocking, and that 29% will be far less My point is simply that you should consider closely what you are about to splash out your hard-earned bucks on, and the role you set for that system: all that money for an improvement of a mere third (at stock) may not be worth it when you could just buy a new GPU. For example, whilst you currently have an 4C/8T processor, it has been demonstrated elsewhere (Gamer's Nexus et al on YouTube) that 6 cores is the minimum for today's gaming demands, and modern games benefit from up to 8 cores (more than that is, apparently, overkill). However, DCS is not a modern game, and it may well be that a 2600K is sufficient for the workload DCS demands of it; after all, DCS utilises two parallel cores at most. In fact, if you turn of hyperthreading and allow those 4C to access their full quota of cache etc, it actually improves performance in games (and only in games). In applications like DCS, it is clock speed which matters above all else, and the high the clock speed the more data that one core can crunch. You could go out and buy a 16C/32T Ryzen 9 and actually lose performance in DCS vs your 2600K if the clock speed is considerably lower! Enough. My advice is: do nothing. Wait until the 3080TI is released, tested to destruction, and we have hard, empirical benchmarks to go on. Also consider you RAM: OCing your memory so it has the lowest possible latency (freq/timings) also gives decent performance gains. Then, if a 3080Ti doesn't look like it'll do much to help you out, then decision is made: new system.

I have a overclocked 5960x and 2080ti FE, and it STILL runs like a dog in VR. 38fps with all the options turned down? Really... So no, I can safely say it's nothing to do with the power of one's system. Further, it's at most two thirds of a map anyway: one third sea, one third an acceptable-if-slow representation of Normandy, and one third a down right embarrassing representation of south-east England. I live there, and to see randomly-placed woodland, no rivers, no railways or roads, and even major settlements completely omitted from the map... And what on earth are these random cliffs mid terrain (see screenshot)?! Unnacceptably sh12 for a paid-for product. No, buy the Kurfürst and wait for the DCS Channel map to come out. I know I've written a bit of a sh12post here and I apologise, but seriously, compare this with any competitor's products (even those outside of DCS) and it's a bit of a joke to charge for a map of this quality.