Civilian Airliners (AI Aircraft)

[Aarnoman]

I strongly support OP's request, it adds immense possibility for mission creators to tell more interesting stories, while also allowing for increased depth and complexity (e.g. IFF/ROE considerations with unknown contacts, more 'false' contacts on radar, intercept/escort missions, and breathing a bit of life to an otherwise sterile sky).

[cfrag]

On 8/25/2021 at 3:02 PM, WobblyFlops said:

The suspected issue at least from ED's perspective with this idea is that it allows people to create less than desirable content and that could have sensitive political connotations. Think about Youtube videos where people shoot down civilian airliners to propagate some kind of political goal, it could lead to some fairly negative press for DCS. 

 

 

While that may be true, this brings up a number of points

• Isn't that a problem with any software? What makes DCS special in this regard? There are games available for years that revolve exclusively around wholesale murder of civilians, and somehow a tangential use of DCS could be a problem? Why? What is different for DCS? 
• Isn't a person creating content responsible and accountable for what they create? Why should ED redact their offering on the off chance that some little s*** uses it to create offensive content? Accountability is at the creator of the offensive material, not a vendor that sells props used in said material. It would be like Ikea deciding not to make beds any more lest someone use them to create illegal, explicit content.  
• If you use DCS to create such content, you aren't using the right tools. Stuff like that can be created much easier, and for much less money, with Unreal, Unity or almost any (free) animation software - at much better quality, lower cost, shorter time, and more precise actor control.  

There may be many reasons for ED being hesitant to add more civ planes (the Yak-40 in DCS is definitely a civ plane), but this one must be near the bottom...

 

 

Edited September 2, 2021 by cfrag

[Nomatic]

+1

[Harker]

+1 Having a selection similar to CAM, in the vanilla game would be most welcome.

[Germane]

+1

[twistking]

+1 it's a low hanging fruit.

 

ideally ED would also add some trigger functionality to the ME to allow mission designers to quickly built simple (!) automated routes between on map airports and off-map spawn/despawn points without the need to use external scripting.

[Jagohu]

The official answer from ED is that it's not possible to package any models, like the civilian airliners in a campaign at the moment. They have to be installed manually. Too bad. I hope someday it'll change or at least they'll consider incorporating these nice models into DCS itself as AI models.

[777coletrain]

Honestly they could just give aircraft sitting at civilian airfields (like McCarren) the flight model of the KC-135 and I would be happy.