Varis

Well put! When you take money from the customers in advance in the model you also need to engage them as partners that are along for the ride. Request and gather the right kind of feedback so you have a chance to make your software better. Much of the issues have to do with the whole EA model being fairly new in the business, and it's not well known what customers should expect or what a company should get away with. Once the typical gamer has had a few bad and a few good experiences, they can form a reasonable range of expectations. Am I an optimist? :D What I would like ED to do would be to offer deeper discounts for the first EA customers (or pre-purchase), to compensate for the time value of money and the risk (and frustration) involved. Or would that make the modules too popular, attract too many new customers and build too much hype? :P

JHMCS, IRST, HARM, the new AA radar, ECM. Guess pretty much anything A2A centric. Not so picky, just along to enjoy the ride ;)

From the PoV of scenario writing the Baltic sea area could be fascinating because you can spin it in so many directions, thanks to the political and historical variety. Look first at Nordic countries during the Cold War and their different security solutions: NATO (Denmark and Norway) - well armed neutrality (Sweden) - strict neutrality with friendship and special arrangements with the Sovietu Union (Finland) - not to mention the Warsaw Pact countries. Or the political changes in Finland, going from a de facto ally of the Nazi Germany (WW2) to neutrality (Cold War) to NATO peace partnership/EU (modern day). (And a similar development for the Baltic states.) You get strange things like the Åland islands being demilitarized - the principal achievement of the League of Nations being the resolution of that dispute between Sweden and Finland some 100 years back, before disbanding when WW2 started. Also Finland operating both the Mig-21 and the Draken and so on. You are probably right in the aspect that the F-14 and JAS/AJS-.37 are birds for very different ponds. A Baltic map would fit the Viggen like a glove as it's its natural environment. Come to think of it the map could have great variety with the sea and at least 3 world class elaborate island systems, the Chydonian Spit in Lithuania, grain plains in Denmark, Poland and Belorussia, hills, mountains and great lakes around Sweden, lake infested environments in Finland (IF you stretch to the Saimaa lake system, otherwise only on the very northern edge of the map) and huge swamps in Estonia (and Belorussia? Check Operation Bagration). Not sure if we have construction projects like Dubai but there are high rise buildings at least in modern Riga. This map could be well much more varied than PG and could be very interesting for Combined Arms or helicopters.

Wonder about the thing that an aircraft carrier would be inoperable on the Baltic sea. Just getting it in via the tight Danish straits is a challenge - once there you cannot drive it off the shore, because it's such a small pond... :huh: The Baltic sea is an intense geopolitical hotspot though. WW2, Cold War or present day. The Gulf of Finland is the most trafficked seaway in the world and obviously Russia's #1 commercial sea connection. Would you go north there's Murmansk which would be more on the military side. WW2 there were some dramatic moments in the Baltics though most of the areas around the Baltic sea basically got steamrolled both ways, Fi+Sw land area basically untouched in that conflict. Cold War, the latest Soviet fighter jets like Su-27 or Mig-29 were first seen and photographed by any Western nation over the Gulf of Finland. Soviet first strike scenarios from Baltics or Poland versus Sweden/Denmark are a wargaming classic too. If you'd believe assertive Swedish neutrality you'd get threeway scenarios as well (think Air Superiority had one of those as the biggest furballs). Modern day, tensions are rising but not sure what kind of scenario you would roll. Both Sweden and Russia have a strong presence around the sea. Lots of people living here would love a map covering the Nordics or the Baltics, there's quite a few possibilities. My problem with a Baltic sea map is that most of the land around it is just lowlands - you'd have to go inland Sweden or Norway to get some really big and nice mountains & hills. Distance from St. Petersburg (Leningrad) to Oslo is a mere 1086km, so one of the best map ideas could come from that. Make it East-West as the basic setup. Helsinki to Gdynia is 737km (NNE-SSW) so with a little strectching and much of the lowlands being low-fidelity areas you could cram in the suburbs of Moscow, small parts of Finland and Poland, much interesting land in Sweden and even include parts of Norway and the North Sea - so you can plausibly fly in your tomcats from long range - not to mention pretty much the whole of Denmark. A little bit of a grandiose undertaking perhaps :D Another possibility for the Nordics would be Lapland and the Ice sea. That would be something different although parties in a potential conflict would probably be more limited. There would be a workable if monotonous alteration of terrain with fjells+plains going to real mountains and then the big sea. Trying to do the whole of Sweden wouldn't make sense as it's a very long country. Going north from Stockholm it's also fairly monotonous with the sea on the right and hills to the left. Besides the neighbors being Norway and Finland there's a bit of a lack of obvious aggressors.

Always good to catch some bugs before release to paying customers :smilewink:

Interesting! Well that explains it then :smartass:

What exact information do you get from the version for each module in the main menu view? Eg. we have AJS37 - 2.5.3 [the ED shop says it's Early Access] AV8BNA - Beta 2.5.1 [sic] F/A-18C - 2.5.3 WIP F15C - 2.5.3 Beta [the ED shop doesn't say anything about Early Access] M-2000C 2.0.0 Beta [the ED shop doesn't say anything about Early Access] Persian Gulf - 2.5.2 [the ED shop says it's Early Access] SA342 - 2.5.3 PS. I recently updated to DCS Open Beta but as of today the Beta has become Stable again

Probably the benefit depends on your network speed. I've been a week on the ED standalone version and so far it hasn't felt like I need to actually wait for anything. It's a bit of a bummer with the different DRM systems (think we have at least 3-4 different policies applied!) so do some research before you go shopping crazy. Sometimes you will have an option of migrating between the two platforms but for some modules it's no longer there - and it seems in the ED store all modules are now Steam-incompatible. Corporate business decisions :helpsmilie: but I can understand both sides of the digital curtain.

Indeed it looks like it's the strange combination of choosing a workable learning approach with suitable sub-goals and the level and kind of motivation that gets you to complete it. I have a bit of a background in flight sims, and enjoyed the excellent HIND back in the mid-90s. But something started happening in the 90s: the sims got more complex and detailed, the aircraft modeled were newer with more avionics and so... Enemies being just a radar blip or the IL-2 taking 4-5 steps just to get the engine running and not able to gain any altitude once airborne... there were some lighter sims like Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, certainly nice but WW2 stuff - sims were not for me any more at that time. I read about the precursors of DCS and was intrigued, especially of the Flanker by that time but I was into different kind of gaming. Gaming is much about instant gratification and sims with ever harder and more extensive learning curves may be a hard sell to gamers. I wasn't back until DCS: Black Shark 2 came around in the early 2010s. Yet the experience was still much the same - too much avionics and systems to make it a fun and easy game, and missions too difficult unless you make your own with the editor. Flying around was fun due to my helicopter specialization but that was it and finally the game ended up collecting dust on my shelf. The Combined Arms module was there and sounded like a very interesting concept but again I ended up sitting on a fence due to past experiences. Fast forward a few years and there's some new things on the motivation side. I bumped into some air warfare issues in another gaming project and wanted to check out how things work in an authoritative simulation - when a steam sale came around I finally picked up that CA module plus the Gazelle, just one pick out of the many possible - whoa the selection has expanded! Also the workability of DCS has improved as it offers just so much more with way better performance, improved visuals (air combat is beautiful and feels authentic!). In a summary my motivation today has multiple sources and multiple targets. The gazelle was easy to learn (AND I had that old base, things like already knowing the view system in DCS made it much easier to just enjoy looking at your aircraft/flying...), the hornet is quite a fixed wing blast after a break of 25 years, probably I'll very soon continue working on the Ka-50 for real... to me it's a benefit that I can switch platforms to suit the mood of the day and the variety is a reward in itself. Also the PG is just stunning to look at and inspiring, then of course doing more experiments on CA whether it can bring something to the gamer. Youtube (haven't really needed it yet... well only for figuring out the Gazelle autopilot when I got stuck) and online communities can be great additional resources nowadays. I've been taking it fun and slow with the hornet and flew it for a couple of days without even opening the manual besides using it as a reference to understand the fuel gauges. (Now I'm learning with unlimited fuel & ammo turned on.) The manuals are my main source for learning. DCS Finland is a nice and newbie friendly community, somehow the hornet turns out to be a good learning platform when it's the only fighter jet that's operated in this country :D Just try and keep it all nice and fun, enjoy the ride and the sights and keep an open mind... the fun in DCS is a little bit different (it's kind of a relaxing experience, actually) from your regular games and it just takes a bit longer before you can enjoy blowing up things and getting shot at. Pick your battles. Learning to learn in DCS and how to motivate yourself is also essential.

Reserved

Didn't find anything on this with a quick google & forum search so here we go with a new thread. Would appreciate if you can point me to previous discussion (I'm sure there's some). In the recent Wags interview he states that ED is planning (I guess that's a few years before we see it) to add a dynamic multiplayer* campaign. With capturing bases it sounds like a spec similar to what's running in current community based persistent warfare modes (don't know these personally yet). My preferred gaming tradition being the PvP multiplayer combination of action and strategy, this could be the bee's knees for DCS if implemented properly. This would imply making it user extendable and with better Combined Arms elements. Why these requirements? For starters, persistent warfare is already a thing in community MP in DCS and people coming from other titles can bring their knowledge and vision about this style of gameplay to best flesh it out. The final value proposition to the DCS gaming community will come from user created modifications on the game mode. What I read between the lines is that ED is seeking primarily to develop an engine that can algorithmically create missions (obviously there's already some rudimentary capacity in this direction) and they could well create extensive APIs for users to customize this at various levels. The combined arms aspect is more tricky because it's outside of ED's current core areas and a segment (module) where they somewhat underdeliver at the time being. Some people say that better CA is necessary to extend the user base towards larger populations (in the PC gaming mainstream) but from my point of view the CA aspect is necessary to provide a rich and believable context to the air arm. You could maybe label it authenticy over realism. What do you think? Where can DCS go with this kind of a game mode? *) Wags didn't state 100% explicitly it's for multiplayer but it was very apparent from the context

Wags in response to F-16 questions:

Just flying and learning the F-18 a bit and we'll see later as I'll skip the F-14 initially. Depends on if it's in some nice bundle deals down the road ;) Nice briefer and interesting stories, thanks! :)

In a well balanced multiplayer scenario one could expect a Mig-23 to be much more readily available than a tomcat, which might have several limitations like higher cost, longer spawn times, no Aim-54, Aim-120 and so on... (you'd think say Iran has a big store of those?).

One aspect people missed is that much of the value in the module comes from the core platform itself. If you cannot employ the aircraft in meaningful scenarios and against other players after you (hopefully) learn it eventually, the gaming experience is not there. It's something I'd like ED to address but it seems the focus nowadays is getting new sales and revenue by pushing out more and more modules. Actually if you look at DCS today you can see that ED has done a splendid job with performance and visuals, much more than what people usually give any credit for. It's the combined arms, multiplayer, mission editor and dynamic campaign aspects where they need more work to be able to provide competitive value for computer gamers.

In any case the development of F-18 could take a very long time (several years), that's just the usual time span of modules and the plane is a rather big one. I agree that if ED didn't at least believe that they can sources much of the required information in the future, their move to release the module would be a bad one. IF there is difficulty in obtaining some materials I would imagine ED has alternative sources for information, or methods of piecing up some missing parts. It's mostly empty speculation unless you can give us details on how different kinds of military information are kept under wraps and how various details tend to surface to the public sphere. It can be surprising how much you can glean from public sources (there were some episodes with Tom Clancy's work that touched the issue). And intelligence gathering from public sources like computer games could be a thing - a DCS module could even help as a reference if you expect to go against or acquire a given aircraft. The F-18 is one of the few that is still flying although many nations probably are looking to replace it. Things might be somewhat different in say 5 years. For now it's more likely that other modules are suffering somewhat because there is pressure on completing the F-18. When the F-16 comes around things will of course change: people will be clamoring for updates on F-16, there will be much more attention on the aircraft, new sales prospects etc. It would be reasonable that some developers are moved to the F-16 project at that time and F-18 put more on a regular/backburner status. I can't see a reason why F-18 would stop, mind you. My reading of ED's practices is that they like to keep small teams working in parallel somewhat independently and usually not move resources around as that can be somewhat counterproductive. But there is some pressure to do so time to time. Taking in account the long development time you'd be well advised to consider the F-18 for what it is today. What I hear it can already perform an air to air role in multiplayer but is somewhat gimped due to a few radar features missing. The flight model is good and much of the cockpit functionality is there.

My GPU gets to about 68C at full load. It’s a 1080ti and from what I understand it runs at that temp under full load. I don’t see how your gpu can run slightly above room temp at full load. It doesn't - mine seems to be about 65C with ~full load in DSC. But then again the GPU fan speed is only around 30%. Motherboard is 28C at idle/desktop load and without a thermometer it's a bit hard to measure while running high loads (don't have any soft that would do that in Windows). The point is that given the temperatures, the interpretation is a little different if your room temperature is 16C than if it was 36C. Mine is 23-24C (pretty much standard in Finland). When just running without a load my gpu is below room temp. That's probably a measurement error ;) If your system had a liquid nitrogen setup or peltier elements or something exotic like that it would be expected :smilewink: My cpu with a water cooler runs at 32c all the time. Obviously something is doing its work in the system :D Under 50-60% load per core my CPU cores seem to peak just above 50C then fall back a bit. I could probably lower fan RPM a little bit - there's 5 case fans, bordering on laughable overkill. Intel CPUs should tolerate quite a bit more and I'm not planning on overclocking for a bit. Cooling performance could improve slightly if I bothered to clean the dust out of the intake grilles this year as well.

It's GPU bottlenecked with spikes to around 96-97%. CPU seems to be around 50-60% - interestingly for all four cores! Bear in mind there could be shorter spikes than every 100 or even 10ms. Physical RAM is not capped. And I don't run heavy browsers or such in addition to DCS while measuring, MSI Afterburner takes a few CPU cycles now and then. Over the sea or a bit off the coastline, FPS is around 120 Over land, it seems to hover around 90-100 FPS Approaching land was between the two above, I think The figures are quite staggering with a mere GTX1070. ED have done a lot to optimize this game, much of which they neither take nor receive credit for.

Was flying over/in dubai with the hornet for several minutes while running a quite light mission. Frame rates do occasionally drop down to 40-45, most easily happens when turning and flying towards a new set of skyscrapers. Looking around doesn't seem to affect my FPS that much. Saw framerates between 36 and 96 while flying in dubai. Tends to cluster around 60-70fps. Have to agree with Helisimmer that the performance is good on this map. Will double check for the Iran side / over the sea. Also didn't monitor cpu & gpu & memory load. DCS is installed on a regular SATA SSD, Samsung 860 EVO.

Lol, wouldn't be too worried about manpads when in a fast mover. But what about a complete and realistic air warfare scenario where you pit a fully implemented Air Defense Network against the opposing air force, equipped with stealth planes, anti-radiation missiles and attack helicopters? DCS could go a long way in that direction and could well be the best offering with that style of gameplay if it can get it implemented in say the next 5 years. You do realize that if the players are given a free hand with the mission editor, the gameplay can in principle be anything you want? You could make it a ground heavy scenario where you move your mechanized, armored elements supported by field artillery and the occasional air unit in a grand breakthrough operation - air assets being limited and surgical with plenty of counters - to the typical DCS where fast movers are king and anybody at ground level is targets to blow up. From experiencing and modifying well implemented combined arms scenarios it's plain obvious to me. The economy and the way the mission limits the availability of equipment allows players great liberties in setting the scenario. The only thing you cannot do is kiss up to all the four winds and have everyone think you're just great. The balance vision is fundamental to the player experience and nobody enjoys being just a helpless target from start to finish. Also what makes a really good combined arms game is how the elements interact with each other and how they are integrated. Some competitors have done a really good job with what and how they decided to include and I believe DCS has had some limited success as well. You may want to check out the thread https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=167893 - we asked a slightly different question but already went to a bit more detail. This one seems to be a bit more in the spirit of let your fantasies run wild and see where they end up to :D

Also in games with steep learning curves new players are typically better off if they join groups with more experienced players. DCS Finland runs servers where new players can learn advanced aircraft at their own pace in a supportive environment. There's even an option to insta-spawn mid-air with a full AA loadout and I guess nothing stops ED from running official servers like that. It would be best to set the scene for newbies before people from Steam sales start flowing in. Draconus is spot on I think. Also the aspect of fleshing out the tactical environment with a wider selection of aircraft and the simplified versions being a soft of a demo for the full high fidelity modules. By this point ED&partners are doing a lot of development that doesn't suit everyone's tastes. Modern planes, training planes, WW2, helicopters, legacy jets, desert maps, ground warfare and even civilian planes, which some players have 0 interest in. More customers grows the franchise and leads to more funding and motivation for the core engine development, addressing multiplayer issues, making combined arms workable... aspects which you can't buy in the store but which make every module more valuable.

I agree that a main part of the problem is giving chronological references. As late as Dec 2017 I see ED giving or at least strongly implying release schedules in the calendar for 2018. Most of what they list is yet not completed and will probably not be for this year... not a good situation :( I would prefer more information of course, but for me just a generic dashboard with all modules/items that are expected in like the next 1-2 years could be splendid already. Update at least every 3 months with some generic status info like "on hold", "ongoing", "preparing release" and so... not much details necessary and we can make our own inferences what's the expected timetable. It's just a plus if they give a bit more details like "We've completed the AFM but most systems are still pretty much a WIP here's a couple of teaser pictures though" and I could handle MUCH more information than that and I know how software projects can bump into unexpected difficulties (for Hornet they mentioned one of the coders leaving, just one possibility out of a vast space of potential project problems). I have severe doubts if the average gamer or guys on reddit can handle it though. Most people around this forum seem fairly understanding though and problems are mostly with vocal minorities I think.

Has there been any update on F-16 or the Cobra? Could be that the focus has pretty much been on the Hornet and they may even have had to move some resources around. At least in July it sounded like Mi-24 is still at least medium priority. Apparently ED has been taking a lot of pressure on the Hornet which also is the flagship, but I'd think they are also aware that the fans of upcoming med priority modules have been left hanging. Would make a lot of sense to give updates/teasers on the status of the other modules before the holiday period. That said I'd be more interested on news on the Afghanistan map... would love to see some Mi-24s in the authentic setting :D TBH I think we're going to get the helicopter first.

Good communications can be a great asset but be careful what you wish or ask for. What I hear ED used to share their plans a lot more but that ended up building unrealistic expectations - the source of much evil around the community. Many game developers keep you in the dark until it's almost release time. ED have tons of things on their hands and maybe for the time being it's best if they concentrate on keeping the projects under control and progressing rather than posting on instagram whenever there are new decals for the pilot's helmet and so... while an actual release is still several months if not years away. I just read an old Newsletter from March 2013 where they mention the Hind. There was plenty of other stuff too, much of that actually released by now. The hornet was "upcoming" at that time, ie. apparently actively worked on - it can just take an incredible amount of time and effort to get some of these modules up. The reason they released the hornet in an incomplete state was because the users kept asking and pleading (and I guess, the development had taken much longer than they expected). Just guess how painful that is for the "true fans" who are aiming at the "full spec"... there's already some commotion on the forums by people who don't understand what's really going on. At least we have the great job from Silver_Dragon in the form of an unofficial/tentative roadmap. Although based on incomplete nuggets of information it's still a quite nice (and very comprehensive) list of what's possibly coming and being worked on. There's lots to be (prematurely) excited about and wait on... even for Hind pilots.

In that case I have misinterpreted the roadmap, in particular the year figures - I had no history information and most of the stuff listed in years gone is marked as released. The "planned" and "in progress" terminology might be misleading when we're talking a very long-term and tentative roadmap. To me it conjures up images of agile dashboards where "in progress" is stuff in this sprint and "planned" is more items in the backlog that will be worked in in future (and foreseeable) two week sprints. DONE/"released" is stuff from the previous and earlier sprints. What method do you usually use to assign the year for a feature? It could be an idea to add a few notes/disclaimers on the methodology of compiling and updating the roadmap to the first message. What I understand ED has been giving us a lot of information about their ideas and goals concerning the roadmap. But plans and schedules can change all the time and the playerbase doesn't understand that, hence there has been much emotional exchange and ED has now reduced the flow of information. It's strange how many players refuse to understand game development and how it works.