That interview in PC Pilot Magazine spoke of the Dynamic Campaign... ideas...

[Mr_Blastman]

For those who don't know, Wags was interviewed in PC Pilot this month by C3PO, aka former Lead Pursuit member and they got into details on a number of topics, one of which was the dynamic campaign...

 

Needless to say ED has a fantastic vision for what they want to accomplish.  One item that caught my attention was their desire to not just have theaters, but expand the dynamic campaign so it is global, i.e. the entire planet, where a pilot could fly from one region to the next, and logistics throughout the world would be simulated and one could even interfere or disrupt entire supply chains or industries.  Of course, the entire premise behind this sounded huge and maybe decades away--that's a lot to model!

 

This got me thinking...  Is ED planning on using their existing engine and mapping/terrain, etc. to do this?  Wags explained he wanted Vulkan implemented as a necessary first step for improving performance to make these sorts of things happen.  But how is it possible for them to model the entire globe?  They could use something such as Google Earth like the latest MS Flight Sim uses... or...

 

They could go procedural.

 

Some here may have played Star Citizen.  If you have, then you'll agree that the terrain detail up close is stunning.  The amount of bits one can discern from little rocks and pebbles and broken bits of dirt and crags in slopes and cliffs is jaw-dropping.  Thing is, this technology isn't anything new.  There's another project I have followed for over a decade almost called Outerra Anteworld.  They have basically simulated the entire planet Earth using procedural generation.  I've glided through the Grand Canyon, for instance, and it looks pretty darned good--far better than DCS does up close.  Absent are simple texture shader tricks to simulate nooks in mountain ranges--the nooks are rendered in extreme detail down to almost the grains of dirt.  They have progressed considerably over the years and are now putting in rivers and even roads.  The trees, however, are flat and crummy--nothing as gorgeous as ED trees.  From a hundred feet in DCS in the Caucus mountain range at times I'm convinced that I'm no longer in a game.  They look wonderful.

 

Are ED considering marrying their technology/shaders/trees/objects with procedural terrain generation to take this to the next level?  Perhaps using a global GPS database with a procgen engine to fill in the fine details to pull this off?  I don't think it would be feasible to handcraft an entire planet.  I'd love to know more on how they might go about this, as a built-in Dynamic Campaign is at the very top of my list of things I want to see in DCS.  Liberation is awesome, don't get me wrong, but I want to see a fully integrated system that works both offline and online and is persistent.

 

Edited October 26, 2021 by Mr_Blastman

[LooseSeal]

I'm not sure I would necessarily link the dynamic campaign and this world map idea. Certainly, that's not the away I read it in the interview - they seem very separate things. We'll doubtlessly see the dynamic campaign long before a world map is implemented. I'd be surprised if they even tell us how they're going to do it for a long, long time.

 

4 hours ago, Mr_Blastman said:

I'd love to know more on how they might go about this, as a built-in Dynamic Campaign is at the very top of my list of things I want to see in DCS.  

At the top of mine as well, but as I said - be excited for the dynamic campaign, maybe temper expectations of a world map for the next few or several years.