DCS has spoiled me

[Gorn557]

I just wanted to say thanks to ED for…. everything they do.

I’m part of the “silent majority” of DCS players. I almost never post here, I only pay passing attention to all the detailed ins and outs of what’s happening with development, and just play an hour or two here or there each week as I get those rare blocks of time not taken up with work or family. I spend a lot on various modules, but I don’t have much of an “online presence”, so to speak.

That’s why I wanted to share this thought. As I was playing the multithreading beta in VR this weekend, I looked out from my F-14 in an extremely heavy mission over to the sun rising over the mountains as I was getting 100+ fps with settings maxed out. And it occurred to me: DCS has spoiled me so much that I can hardly play any other games.

I was thinking of firing up one of my old favorites, EECH Comanche vs. Hokum, and I though, “no, it doesn’t have anywhere near the realism of a DCS helicopter. I might as well play an arcade game”. I look at games like IL-2 without the moddability and think “I could be playing all the amazing user-generated content in DCS instead.” I look at MSFS and think “the terrain is nice but the system simulation is so poor relative to DCS, why am I not playing DCS instead?”

DCS is the game we all dreamed we were playing as we squinted at our 320x200 version of Tornado screaming along at 2 fps on DOS in 1993 and declared it the future. DCS is the game we thought we were getting every time a new landmark sim came along – Longbow, Tornado, IL-2, etc.

You take:

1)      The best, most photo-realistic graphics of any sim out there

2)      An enormous library of switch-for-switch accurate jet aircraft, helicopters, piston aircraft, multirole fighters, civilian cargo helicopters, and more

3)      An astoundingly rich database of user-generated missions and other content, including a dynamic campaign generators and all sorts of weird and wonderful aircraft

4)      The best VR compatibility of any game on the market

5)      Constant free core updates plus loads of new aircraft, missions, and campaigns coming all the time;

6)      And oh, by the way, the framerate just doubled this past weekend with multithreading. For free.

 

Only in DCS can you use the real flight manuals as a truly useful guide in-game, or vice versa. Every switch, every obscure radar mode, every rivet is lovingly modeled. And its trump card over the likes of BMS is that it just doesn’t do this for one aircraft- it does it for nearly every major American and Russian postwar fighter, with more being added all the time (plus helicopters, plus civilian aircraft), and even more available via mods.

Are there bugs on page 57 of the MFD when you’re in an inverted flat spin in a rainstorm at that one spot in the map if you press the fire button and open the airbrake at the same time? Aboslutely? Does the AI eagerly find a taxiway full of aircraft to land on at regular intervals? No doubt. Does it make an RTX 4090 look like a PS1 struggling to put frames on the screen sometimes? Sure. But find me another game where I can race over the treetops at Mach 2 in my F-14 in the rain, at night, in virtual reality, trying desperately to avoid that SA-6 as I attempt to reach my target airfield and obliterate it with GBU-12s, sputtering back to the carrier on my last 300 lb of fuel as my HUD winks out due to my engine fire. It is my contention that anyone who does not consider DCS to be the definitive postwar combat aviation sim either hasn’t played it, or is wrong.

I’m going to for the most part recede back into the background here, but keep developing this amazing sim to the standards you’ve held up so successfully over the years, and I’ll keep supporting it and buying pretty much every module that you release.  

So thanks, ED. You’ve spoiled me. I don’t want to play anything else anymore, because I know I could be playing DCS instead. 

 

 

 

 

[Gremlin17]

+1 Ive only been playing DCS since December and am disappointed with myself that I missed out on this for so many years by playing inferior sims.

[Dragon1-1]

3 hours ago, Gorn557 said:

4)      The best VR compatibility of any game on the market

I've played some games which do VR better than DCS does. This will hopefully change, but right now this point isn't really true. For one, DCS still runs on DX11, which means a suboptimal implementation of VR that includes rendering the entire scene twice. This will require Vulkan to fix. VR in DCS is great, but it has a long way to go (although with MT implemented, that way became significantly shorter).

It is good, and can certainly claim its place as the most realistic sim on the market as far as the aircraft we have are concerned, but there's very little in terms of competition.

[Gorn557]

8 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

I've played some games which do VR better than DCS does. This will hopefully change, but right now this point isn't really true. For one, DCS still runs on DX11, which means a suboptimal implementation of VR that includes rendering the entire scene twice. This will require Vulkan to fix. VR in DCS is great, but it has a long way to go (although with MT implemented, that way became significantly shorter).

It is good, and can certainly claim its place as the most realistic sim on the market as far as the aircraft we have are concerned, but there's very little in terms of competition.

Gotta love internet culture... I leave a post of pure gratitude and joy and people immediately start telling you why you're wrong 

[SharpeXB]

3 hours ago, Gorn557 said:

The best VR compatibility of any game on the market

Just curious how you reached this conclusion. The best of any? Really? What does compatibility mean exactly?

DCS is a super game of course but hardly the best at VR. The game really wasn’t designed with this in mind so it’s a struggle.

Edited March 13, 2023 by SharpeXB

[SharpeXB]

35 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

For one, DCS still runs on DX11, which means a suboptimal implementation of VR that includes rendering the entire scene twice. This will require Vulkan to fix.

Isn’t VR by definition, stereoscopic rendering? How is Vulkan different in this regard?

[Dragon1-1]

22 minutes ago, Gorn557 said:

Gotta love internet culture... I leave a post of pure gratitude and joy and people immediately start telling you why you're wrong 

I see it as kind of important to avoid rose-colored glasses, because when you decide you have reached perfection, you stop improving. DCS had not reached perfection, and is, in fact, far from it. Yes, perfect can be the enemy of good, but at the same time, "good enough" is often the enemy of better, and in many areas, that's where DCS is. VR support, specifically, is good, but far from great, and far from modern standard. Several games are much superior in that regard.

If we don't push for continued improvement, it won't come. I'll start heaping on praise once BalticDragon's campaigns stop breaking through no fault of his own (if there's a good reason for DCS scripting to be so brittle, I'd love to hear it), when AI gets through a basic check ride with anything other than a zero (they fight pretty well, but still fly like morons outside combat), when we get actual ATC (current one is extremely basic) and when the rendering engine leaves ancient DX11 architecture behind. The latter three are in the works, and I hope missions can be made less brittle as a result of those changes.

Just now, SharpeXB said:

Isn’t VR by definition, stereoscopic rendering? How is Vulkan different in this regard?

It renders the scene once and displays it from two different angles, essentially. It can be made (remember, low level API, so devs have to do some legwork) to take advantage of the fact that VR doesn't need two completely different scenes for each eye, it needs the same scene shown in a slightly different way. As such, there's a smarter way to do this than the brute force way of doing it all twice. For example, objects are lit the same in both eyes, shadows are cast on the same surfaces, and so on. Both DX12 and Vulkan can take advantage of this, DX11 can't. 

[Oceandar]

+ 1
My FPS is almost double now with most of all on max setting.

Thank you ED.

Sent from my SM-A536E using Tapatalk

[wilbur81]

4 hours ago, Gorn557 said:

I just wanted to say thanks to ED for…. everything they do.

I’m part of the “silent majority” of DCS players. I almost never post here, I only pay passing attention to all the detailed ins and outs of what’s happening with development, and just play an hour or two here or there each week as I get those rare blocks of time not taken up with work or family. I spend a lot on various modules, but I don’t have much of an “online presence”, so to speak.

That’s why I wanted to share this thought. As I was playing the multithreading beta in VR this weekend, I looked out from my F-14 in an extremely heavy mission over to the sun rising over the mountains as I was getting 100+ fps with settings maxed out. And it occurred to me: DCS has spoiled me so much that I can hardly play any other games.

I was thinking of firing up one of my old favorites, EECH Comanche vs. Hokum, and I though, “no, it doesn’t have anywhere near the realism of a DCS helicopter. I might as well play an arcade game”. I look at games like IL-2 without the moddability and think “I could be playing all the amazing user-generated content in DCS instead.” I look at MSFS and think “the terrain is nice but the system simulation is so poor relative to DCS, why am I not playing DCS instead?”

DCS is the game we all dreamed we were playing as we squinted at our 320x200 version of Tornado screaming along at 2 fps on DOS in 1993 and declared it the future. DCS is the game we thought we were getting every time a new landmark sim came along – Longbow, Tornado, IL-2, etc.

You take:

1)      The best, most photo-realistic graphics of any sim out there

2)      An enormous library of switch-for-switch accurate jet aircraft, helicopters, piston aircraft, multirole fighters, civilian cargo helicopters, and more

3)      An astoundingly rich database of user-generated missions and other content, including a dynamic campaign generators and all sorts of weird and wonderful aircraft

4)      The best VR compatibility of any game on the market

5)      Constant free core updates plus loads of new aircraft, missions, and campaigns coming all the time;

6)      And oh, by the way, the framerate just doubled this past weekend with multithreading. For free.

 

Only in DCS can you use the real flight manuals as a truly useful guide in-game, or vice versa. Every switch, every obscure radar mode, every rivet is lovingly modeled. And its trump card over the likes of BMS is that it just doesn’t do this for one aircraft- it does it for nearly every major American and Russian postwar fighter, with more being added all the time (plus helicopters, plus civilian aircraft), and even more available via mods.

Are there bugs on page 57 of the MFD when you’re in an inverted flat spin in a rainstorm at that one spot in the map if you press the fire button and open the airbrake at the same time? Aboslutely? Does the AI eagerly find a taxiway full of aircraft to land on at regular intervals? No doubt. Does it make an RTX 4090 look like a PS1 struggling to put frames on the screen sometimes? Sure. But find me another game where I can race over the treetops at Mach 2 in my F-14 in the rain, at night, in virtual reality, trying desperately to avoid that SA-6 as I attempt to reach my target airfield and obliterate it with GBU-12s, sputtering back to the carrier on my last 300 lb of fuel as my HUD winks out due to my engine fire. It is my contention that anyone who does not consider DCS to be the definitive postwar combat aviation sim either hasn’t played it, or is wrong.

I’m going to for the most part recede back into the background here, but keep developing this amazing sim to the standards you’ve held up so successfully over the years, and I’ll keep supporting it and buying pretty much every module that you release.  

So thanks, ED. You’ve spoiled me. I don’t want to play anything else anymore, because I know I could be playing DCS instead. 

 

Hear, hear! What ED has done is absolutely stunning! I know this is a gross oversimplification, but it almost feels as if they've recreated a whole industry: Would we have the peripheral hardware options of Virpil, VKB, WinWing, etc., without DCS? They single-handedly saved the military flight sim genre...and then made it spectacular. I've always said and thought that ED bit off WAY more than they can chew with DCS World... so glad they took that bite!  

[Beirut]

I think the main thing as loyal customers is to be honest and at least balance out the occasionally deserved bitching and whining we do when things aren't perfect, with appreciation and acknowledgement of things very well done, and even surpassing expectations. Like this latest update. 

 

This remains the best flightsim ever.