CommandT

I appreciate the update but have to say - very very disspointed with the lack of attention to detail with almost all of the road bases. Almost all of them have obstacles on the 3 degree approach glide path to the tocuhdown zones - one has giant power lines, another has bridges and another has trees or light poles sticking out of the bridge which would never pass in real life for acceptable clearance. Some bases have trees very close to the edges of the strip too which would have been cut down in real life without any hesitation. Could you please amend all these obtacles? It's quite immersion-breaking There's also radars spinning somehere in the bushes, the East German road bases, just as is the case with airbases, have NATO ground equipment on them - GPU carts, loaders ect. I don't understand why there was a need to include these objects when they are so clearly out of place. One of the Polish bases has a NATO flag too, I think someone else pointed this out before. Also, for some reason I have missing ground textures around all of the new northern part of the map around Denmark and Sweden. Don't know if it's just me but I shouldn't have any conflicting mods so not sure if anyone else has the same issue?

This look fantastic! So so glad to see that Ugra listened to our concers about the width of the road bases - they look so much more realistic now, and about the airbase grass textures - good improvements there. Excellent Ugra, thank you for taking on feedback. Maybe I'm wrong, but it also appears from the screenshots that airbases have a lot less random equipment scattered around them? This is probably for the best as there was a lot of overlap between the ground equipment on the East and West sides that was somehwat immersion-breaking. It's best to have no equipment than the wrong equipment for sure. @MAESTR0 Would there be any way of having all the small bushes around the runway not "pop" into view so abruptly when flying low level? As they seem to only appear into view at very close distance it always looks a bit silly. You could also just remove the bushes completely around runways since they wouldn't be there 99% of the time in real life anyway. Another thought - I know your team is busy with developing the map itself but since you've gone to such efforts in creating such a detailed and realistic environment with this map, and given that it's a Cold War map, do you think you could make some low-poly Static Aircraft assets (similar to your current IL-62/ Tu-134) available for mission makers to use within the mission editor to populate the bases? We could really really do with things like An-2, An-12, An-22, IL-18/20, MiG-27, Mi-6 and maybe make the IL-62, Tu-134, B747 and B727 that you have already available to us as static objects? Thanks for the superb work anyway and thanks for taking on board community feedback! Best map in DCS for sure at this point.

Got you, thanks for the explanation. Perhaps you should contact ED and help them develop the weather engine and somehow make all your current work as part of DCS core somehow. Either way, thanks again, looking forward to the next update

@bandit648 FANTASTIC work Sir! You are the unsung hero of DCS for sure. Really looking forward to the release! Are you able to implement a feature to have different weather conditions/ presets in different parts of the map somehow (for example splitting the map into 4 weather sections) ? Even if keeping the wind the same acorss the entire map (which I assume is the ED limitation). And also, could explain what exactly are the limitations of the core ED engine with regards to weather at the moment? I understand wind is not something you can touch, and also there was no way of doing towering cumulus and CBs? And presumable no way of having the weather change from one preset to another preset as time goes by? Sorry, just really curious. Can't imagine DCS without your weather work! Thanks again! Keep up the awesome work!

That looks phenomenal. Would be great to get some more realistic-looking lightning

+1 here for the wider and more realistic road bases. MAESTR0, would it be possible to replace or remove all the NATO equipment from East German bases? There's lots of NATO GPUs, tow bars, loaders and various equipment scattered all around the East German airbases which is slightly immersion-breaking. But otherwise, also big thanks for working on the map, and despite some of the above shortcomings, it continuous to be the best map in DCS for me atm!

Let's hope they up their game for the Balkans. It would be a great shame for all of us otherwise. Such a beautiful part of the World and would offer such a wide veriety for both NATO and Redfor ops. I also sincerely hope they don't do a copy and paste job like they did in a lot of locations on the Sinai map.

Are you planning on releasing any of these textures? They look fantastic!

It's super great to get highway landing strips finally but I do agree - the realism of them is somewhat hampered by the rather narrow obtacle clearence and the width of the highways use for these strips. At the very least the trees need to be offset by some safety margin on the sides to make them feel a bit more realistic. Hope this can be rectified. Otherwise looking great and thanks for working hard on expanding the map

Interesting. I guess like you say the main issue at the end is still cost. Though I would be curious what sort of budgets we are talking here... multiple millions $? I do still feel strongly that there's a proper sim that is totally missing on the market. DCS is fantastic with aircraft fidelity and flight phyisics but sucks in gameplay and obviously offers little to no non-military missions and flying. MSFS is somwhat better in gameplay (still far off what it could be) but sucks with aircraft fidelity / physics and just isn't that well-optimised and offers zero military stuff. Would be great to have a sim that could have excellent physics and great gameplay whether it was civilian or military all in one. Hypothetically-speaking, how difficult and expensive would it be to create a small realistic map (lets say 50x50km) with say a city plus some countryside/ surrounding area, and have one or two helicopters such as the OH-6 as a starting point? Lets pretend that integrating a driving sim as part of the game is something to be done further down the line. The weather engine can also wait along with all the other assets as well. Let's just say a map plus a helicopter with great physics and that's it as a starting point. Using some sort of modern graphics engine (Unreal engine maybe)?

Interesting. Just thinking out loud here so feel free to shoot me down but couldn't you technically load a slightly different version of the world depending on whether you are flying or driving? I mean both players could be in the same game world but the driver will have all the additional ground textures, perhaps some additional roadside objects, signs etc, with simplified textures for the weather/ sky, whilst the person flying will have a simplified version of the same terrain whilst retaining the basic shape of the road the car is driving on without additional ground features and obviously have the complicated weather/ clouds ect? The draw distance could also be loaded totally differently for ground vehicles since there is no need for buildings to be rendered 10km away. The only things that would remain identical between both are the physics and the general shape of the terrain (obviously only around the areas where drivers could drive - otherwise simplified ground mesh could be used in all other locations where only flying can take place). Would this technically not be possible? The only real issue with this idea is that if the driver has more additional ground objects, how does the pilot interact with said objects - can he fly through them ect. But maybe there could be a solution here too? For example still having all the additional big items sticking out of the ground like light poles and signs with reduced LODs and textures whilst ignoring anything extra like branches on the side of the road ect?

Yeah but unfortunately firing at max range, they will still a) descend to low level even if you tell them to fly at 55,000ft, and b) still continue to drive forward and engage in BFM. I mean the max range launch doesn't really solve the fundamental probelm of how they fly or fight in DCS

Thanks Wags!! For anyone who is still struggling the view.lua file is in Eagle Dynamics - DCS World - Config - View Line 49 says: ExternalKeyboardAccelerationSlow = 0.1 But you can also edit the next line to save time and just reduce the rate to whatever you need.

That's super cool. What we need is is a driiving sim and a flight sim all in the same "game" (sort of like war thunder but a sim)... make a rally/ racing/ driving sim game and a flight sim using the same platform. That could open up the door for a huge veriety of flying missions - rally/ race car chasing, police chases ect. If I could get the right people and money together I'd be pretty keen on building a sim like that! Though I suspect the resources involved to make it happen would be fairly astronomical

Oh it appears I may have been almost a little bit too tame with my chasing! Need to get those close ups on the next one!