KennyG

Right, and he says clearly the core work is funded by the pre-release money. "Boyond daily bug fixing, the fundamental issues such as new graphics challenges (Vulkan, effects, mutli-threading etc), network improvements, sound improvements, new damage engine, dynamic campaign, web RTC, new game statistics engine, new weather engine, etc etc are all part of our roadmap and more than 50% of our staff work on these elements which are not directly module related. Without 'early access' few of the these could be done and yes you are right, we only have this avenue to finance ED as well as my personal investment. I wish we had 'office or IOS' to make life easier believe me." GREAT IDEA! I wonder why we get half baked planes then. Hmm... Core subscriptions man, it's the way to fix it. He's sitting on the answer but the community would basically revolt. So sad to see this die an ugly death or at least limp along in its current form. Docs are pretty bad, the better ones written by Chuck. Tutorials are basically non-existent and created by users on YouTube. Help and community is on this ancient vBulletin forum from the 90s. ECommerce site looks rickety, and the marketing is mostly done by the Grim Reapers. I guess this is the way we like it. Keep the free crap and half baked planes coming! We like complaining about that more than shelling pizza money out for real progress. End of rant.

Totally agree again. ED is probably running on fumes, hand to mouth, based on sales of the latest pre-release thing. A well managed campaign server would be a great subscription incentive as well. I don't see why they would want to spend good development resources on the dynamic campaign when they can probably get a couple gaming junkies to manage a big server like that for a pittance and potentially bring in a load of revenue.

I totally agree

Yes I would pay for core updates. My price target would be $10 a month or $99 annually. They deserve the incentive to keep people working on the core. I think people are a little confused about this proposal. There are many ways to do it, some more sensible than others. IMO they should just charge for the core updates. You get some sticky stable version for free. You get the P-51 and Frogfoot and Caucuses free, and you still pay for other modules. All those are still flyable on the latest version of the core you subscribed to. When your subscription ends, your core updates end. I don't think they could ever get away with suddenly giving all their planes and maps away for $20 a month. People paid a lot of money for their modules and they want to keep them even if the subscription runs out. Paying for planes individually makes sense. Not paying for core updates makes no sense to me. We see the results of that. Lots of bugs in the core nobody bothers to fix because there's no incentive. So yes I'd pay because I don't know how they thrive without some recurring revenue. All this talk about money grabbing is insane. Software companies need cash flow guys. Programmers aren't cheap.

If you're new to DCS then I'd definitely recommend it. It's a great trainer aircraft. "Simple" controls, pretty quick startup procedure... it feels complete to me. I enjoy flying it. Works great in VR with the interactive cockpit. If you want all the whiz bang gadgets though, it doesn't have them, and it is not really powerful compared to the Viper, for instance. If you're an experienced DCS person then you might think twice. Depends on what you're looking for. I agree with many of the other posts.

No problem. I just watched it again and indeed I went up another A-A kill. Could be something else I suppose. Enjoy! dogfightwin1.trk

So I was just noting that after I rewatched a track where I killed the F-14 in the F-5 Air-to-air Instant Mission, I was given another A-to-A kill in my logbook. Indeed, it keeps giving me extra kills every time I watch it. Whoops!

I agree. This would be another good option for recurring revenue, and would encourage them to eat their own dogfood and potentially make it better for everyone. They should be able to do a good job of it.

I thought we knew it was the Falkland Islands? No? Was that something different? I saw Stanley airport, which is clearly on the Falklands.

Can we get confirmation that HALF their workforce is actively improving the core? Seems unlikely.

It will frequently not be at the same point in space when I put it back on my head, but that’s what the “center view” button is for, mapped to my HOTAS. If you mean it just continually can’t track your head after you take it off, then no, I don’t get that. Works well for me, and I frequently take the headset off and put it aside, when I pause the game to go do something else.

I could totally get behind that, but I think all the maintenance on the core is probably not practical to distribute as new modules. Normally bug fixes are just going to be changes to existing code. But if you could, would you pay for a Cloud improvement module, but not a better Night Lighting module for instance? What if one improvement was dependent on another? It gets hairy to maintain for them and us. I’d also be fine with them charging reasonable prices for core upgrade versions. Hopefully they could figure out a schedule where you could save some money by waiting and not upgrading every single release. I don’t advocate that planes or maps etc, require subscriptions. If they screw up and underprice a plane and lose money, well, that’s too bad. New version (someday far in the future) new module and new fee. I’m just really concerned that they have no incentive to put developers on the core fixes and improvements.

I'm definitely on board with micro-products or bonus upgrades or something like that. Basically it's clear to me that they need something that gives them incentive to develop the core.

Jesus no! I think the initial post said nothing about denying access to what you bought yesterday or even last year. It's about getting ongoing updates to the core. That's free work you're getting forever.

I think they'd be foolish to shut you off if you didn't pay your subscription, and I hope that nobody endorses that, but you wouldn't be getting the any core fixes until you did.

Amen brother.

If I could vote 30x yes on this one I would. Subscriptions for staying up to date with the core just makes sense. Why do people think they should get updates for free? This isn't 1990's shrink wrap software. It's not one-and-done. It's ongoing development. What do y'all think pays for that work? Software development is expensive folks :) Look around at enterprise software and you'll see that's how it's done these days. It's all well and good to have a free entry teaser to generate interest and grow the base, but if you're a long term player, I don't see how you can justify getting this work for nothing.. indefinitely. I hear a lot of complaining about lack of core development and crusty old bugs, but I don't hear many solutions to fixing that. ED is borrowing from their future and making people mad by having them pay for half baked EA modules. Recurring revenue is really important for companies like this. If you don't like this idea, I'd love to hear some other solutions. This product is extremely niche. If we want it to exist in 3-5 years, we either need to make it more popular, or come up with a way to fund improvements...or be happier with EA and slow progress. Or I guess we can wait for Microsoft to implement it all again and I'm sure they won't be giving it ALL away for free. I'm noting paranoia in a lot of the posts that what you've bought would be taken away, which is not the idea at all (at least not how I'd implement it). I'd just suggest that core updates, that I get downloads for every week practically, aren't available without the subscription. If you want fresh core, then you pay something.. and I mean, say $10 a month or $100 a year. If they stop developing core, there's no reason to pay. Simple solution. They really need incentive to develop the core. It'll languish until they start getting something for it. Ok, maybe it's not a subscription, it's a new core "version" that has features x, y and z and you can decide whether you buy it. For planes, unfortunately, devs would be stuck upgrading them forever to keep you happy and they'd always work. Or they'd release a new version, ala the F-15 to be replacing the FC3 edition I guess. I see this is not a popular opinion. I still love you all. LOL. Bring on the flames.

OMG, 56% of you think AI assets should be free!? You'll get what you pay for. Personally I'd rather have someplace that gathers all the good work that people do for the platform and cut everybody in. Sheesh. No wonder this has taken two decades to produce.

I'm in favor of ED creating as many modules as they can think of, or supporting third parties to do so and vetting them efficiently before putting them into the DCS E-Shop. There's a ton of revenue being passed up that ED and others should be benefiting from. Feel free to nickel and dime me for liveries, skins, campaigns, maps, vehicles, whatever. Not everything needs to be a $79 plane or even a complex model. People pay, unsurprisingly, for things that enhance their play in many ways. So yeah, whether they package them as "National" morsels or just very specificly named-addons is fine with me. They're sitting on a potential "App-Store" kind of ecosystem and not making the most of it IMO.

Trying to answer my own question: https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=153020 Reading with great interest :) Is there a LUA extension programming guide for DCS somewhere?

Ok, hold on hold on here... dynamic campaign? It's just a normal DCS campaign that goes from one mission to the next dependent on your results, right? I assume this is some kind of undocumented hacking somebody's done if not? Some special coding here? All this talk of Dynamic Campaigns in the future has me confused. Maybe the techniques used here are no longer necessary for such a campaign with branching paths? This all mostly works in 2.5 I assume? This thread is really aging. DCS World, truly held together by its community I see.

I have so many questions... since I'm new here. Loving the product and learning a lot. I suppose I could scour the forum to understand who you are and how you go about doing this and why you don't ask people to send you some donations at least for your work. Did you just hack the FA-18 Red Flag stuff and switch things around for the F-16? Is this riddled with bugs and issues such that you don't feel good asking for money? Are you an Eagle Dynamics dev or ex-dev or third-party dev? What docs did you use to put this together? Is this just a labor of love for you? Seriously, I knew that Red Flag stuff would come out eventually, along with other mission modules, and wasn't expecting much until systems started maturing. Is this how official stuff develops? I mean will it get cleaned up for sale on the ED website? What's the difference in quality between this and a for-sale product? The ED people don't speak much about campaign/mission development. I guess they hope people will join a MP server and just have random fun there with their pals landing on carriers etc? I don't get how this DCS economy works. Seems a tad dysfunctional to me. Good on ya' for making stuff. I assume this all takes intricate knowledge of stuff that's poorly documented to put together properly. Well, I'll play the campaign before I scratch my head too much. Thanks for the effort! We'll all help you debug it.

Indeed, the tutorial aspect seems really lacking from what I've seen as a noob. You really, really need to want to learn the software and have all the gear. There are personalities that this DCS is perfect for, but I think the difficulty and frustration level does narrow the audience. I could go on about this, but yeah. Could be much more inviting and helpful for learners. The positive feedback cycle should be shorter and less frustrating.

Personally, I don't get that feeling, but I'm new and haven't created a campaign yet. I really like the way it works so far, actually. Lots of opportunity for talented campaign editors to make some good missions and possibly some income. IMO you probably will never want to play a mission more than once or twice once you learn a plane. It's like a newspaper. Read it and throw it away. In real life, you only get to do a mission once. Is it sterile because it seems the same all the time? Do you play the same mission again and again? Perhaps the cure is just lots of fresh, new missions. I seriously doubt that the "dynamic campaign" so many people are craving will actually deliver what they expect. I forecast that it will also eventually seem self-same and predictable in a dynamic kind of way. The missions are where creativity of an author can come into play. Clearly there is infinite room for new twists, and we're getting new equipment all the time, so I predict things will only get better.

Yeah, if he had some cred like being a former military pilot or even a commercial pilot I might pay attention, but frankly, I can't judge. I agree things are probably quirky and not on the money, but I'm happy somebody is actively working to make something this detailed. The energy spent on this kind of criticism would best be directed toward bug reports.