DCS: Kola Discussion

[VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants]

Some clips of the Norway coast:

There is a bug found -- most noticeable at timestamp 9min 6s, the midnight sun can shine though the hill like Death Star laser (or mega particle launcher if you are into Gundam rather than Star Wars)

Edited May 4, 2024 by VR Flight Guy in PJ Pants

[mikko.1842]

I saw some Russian submarines around Severomorsk 1 and Murmansk, it was nice. They put some Russian Company's names around the peer too, much appreciated.

The map is not "beautiful", but it is not half-bad in my opinion.

Of course, the further you go from the main detailed area, the worse it is (texture-wise).

From mid altitude to up high, Kola does provide a nice view.

I wish they could have started detailed map with the western part, but "it is what it is", I will have to wait.

[Qcumber]

23 minutes ago, mikko.1842 said:

The map is not "beautiful", but it is not half-bad in my opinion.

Of course, the further you go from the main detailed area, the worse it is (texture-wise).

The low texture landscape on the West coast is better than Caucasus mountains so I'm looking forward to high textures in this area when they arrive. 

[Northstar98]

3 hours ago, zerO_crash said:

[snip]

[snip]

This particular screenshot looks very rough - the similarities with the South Atlantic map are quite striking.

The coastline in particular - I'm sorry, but that looks pretty awful. The South Atlantic has the exact same problem. It doesn't look natural at all, I'd say it's fairly immersion breaking and is definitely a bad look for a map in 2024 with the pricetag it has.

To make it worse, a lot of aerodromes in Norway are immediately adjacent to the coast or have their approach paths overflying it, where this is going to be very visible (see the spoiler for the list. Not to mention all the targets that are also along the coastline.

Spoiler

• Alta
• Andøya
• Bodø
• Banak
• Batsfjord
• Berlevåg
• Evenes
• Hammerfest
• Hasvik
• Honningsvåg
• Mehamn
• Rost
• Solvær
• Sørkjosen
• Tromsø
• Vadsø
• Vardø
• Væroy

What a shame, that's very disappointing.

Edited May 4, 2024 by Northstar98

[Schmidtfire]

4 minutes ago, Northstar98 said:

This particular screenshot looks very rough - the similarities with the South Atlantic map are quite striking.

The coastline in particular - I'm sorry, but that looks pretty awful. The South Atlantic has the exact same problem. It doesn't look natural at all, I'd say it's fairly immersion breaking, especially for a map in 2024 with the pricetag it has.

South Atlantic and Kola map credits some of the same development people. So that might count for the similarities between the two maps.

Specter - Technical Lead & Technical artist & 2D/3D Artist
Ripper - Developer & Vector Data Specialist

It's available in DCS World\Mods\terrains\Kola\credits.txt

[Gunfreak]

12 minutes ago, Schmidtfire said:

South Atlantic and Kola map credits some of the same development people. So that might count for the similarities between the two maps.

Specter - Technical Lead & Technical artist & 2D/3D Artist
Ripper - Developer & Vector Data Specialist

It's available in DCS World\Mods\terrains\Kola\credits.txt

I think the main reason they look similar is because they use satellite imaging technology to make the maps. Which the other maps haven't used.

[bfr]

13 hours ago, mikko.1842 said:

ED confirmed Kola woudn't grant you any Miles. As someone already said, Kola is made by 3rd party team, and they chose not to be part of the Miles program. I suppose that Orbx wasn't sure about how good Kola's sales would be, as it is their first DCS product, so it sorta makes sense. Of course, I too wish they would join the Miles program, but it is what it is.

If you plan on flying over Kola frequently, Miles shouldn't be an issue.

 

Also worth noting that Orbx are selling it from their own store and also offer their own loyalty scheme (which admittedly isn't useful for DCS-only fliers as they only do 1 DCS product).

[bfr]

10 hours ago, tempusmurphy said:

How are the destructible features like bridges and other static targets, the subs and other ships 

Most of the scenery buildings seem to come down if you hit them. Tried a moored boat near Murmansk, it burned but didn't seem to sink (haven't tried many others so don't know if that is a universal thing). Tried a large bridge back up-river from it and that definitely sustained damage.  The same kind of stuff that is always indestructible on maps like dams are still indestructible.  Not found a sub yet.

 

EDIT: found a ballistic missile sub in port and like the ship, it burned but didn't sink

Edited May 4, 2024 by bfr

[Silver_Dragon]

Quiestion.... (I not have the map).... Kola icon on module list?

[zerO_crash]

1 hour ago, Northstar98 said:

This particular screenshot looks very rough - the similarities with the South Atlantic map are quite striking.

The coastline in particular - I'm sorry, but that looks pretty awful. The South Atlantic has the exact same problem. It doesn't look natural at all, I'd say it's fairly immersion breaking and is definitely a bad look for a map in 2024 with the pricetag it has.

To make it worse, a lot of aerodromes in Norway are immediately adjacent to the coast or have their approach paths overflying it, where this is going to be very visible (see the spoiler for the list. Not to mention all the targets that are also along the coastline.

  Reveal hidden contents

• Alta
• Andøya
• Bodø
• Banak
• Batsfjord
• Berlevåg
• Evenes
• Hammerfest
• Hasvik
• Honningsvåg
• Mehamn
• Rost
• Solvær
• Sørkjosen
• Tromsø
• Vadsø
• Vardø
• Væroy

What a shame, that's very disappointing.

 

The similarities come  in the form of satellite imaging being overlaid over the terrain. With that said, there are more differences than similarities. This map is being hand-craft (as opposed to South Atlantic). There are some bug reports in their tracker which target some of the things you mention, chief amongst "chopped" coasts in many places (I saw you commented on the post in question on Orbx's bug tracker). 
 

I will tell you, though, that it doesn't stand out like that when you are flying yourself. Much does look incredibly natural. With that said, it will have to get fixed. Another bug is that buildings load high-textures only when you are relatively close to them (100m or so). There is s glitch with shadows in certain places (relatively few, but still). Overall though, you can see on the rest of my images how it looks - it does look great, esp. in VR. Much depends on how high settings you can run it.
 

There is much that needs to be done, don't get me wrong, but the places which have higher detail, already represent a equal level to other current maps (released way back). 
 

13 minutes ago, Silver_Dragon said:

Quiestion.... (I not have the map).... Kola icon on module list?

Yes, it has it's own icon, theme (wallpaper) and is treated like a separate module.

Edited May 4, 2024 by zerO_crash

[zerO_crash]

28 minutes ago, bfr said:

Most of the scenery buildings seem to come down if you hit them. Tried a moored boat near Murmansk, it burned but didn't seem to sink (haven't tried many others so don't know if that is a universal thing). Tried a large bridge back up-river from it and that definitely sustained damage.  The same kind of stuff that is always indestructible on maps like dams are still indestructible.  Not found a sub yet.

Check Polyarny and Gadzhievo. You'll find Delta 4s at the piers and in dry docks (maintenance). You'll also find Akulas. I barely skimmed that area, but there is a lot there.

Edited May 4, 2024 by zerO_crash

[Northstar98]

12 minutes ago, zerO_crash said:

The similarities come  in the form of satellite imaging being overlaid over the terrain.

I'm just comparing what I'm seeing on the coastline on the Kola map, with what I see on the South Atlantic map - the chopped off coastline is exactly what happens around the SA map.

13 minutes ago, zerO_crash said:

I will tell you, though, that it doesn't stand out like that when you are flying yourself.

Personally, I'm speaking from experience here - flying low and slow in a helicopter this stood out to me like a sore thumb on the South Atlantic map. Of course mileage may vary and there's definitely a non-zero probability that I am being pedantic about this.

Obviously I don't own the map, so I'm going purely off of what I see, but unfortunately I'm not quite with you on the assessment, particularly with the coastlines. Don't get me wrong, I have seen stuff I like, but right now there's enough I don't like to put me off, which is quite a shame.

[zerO_crash]

2 minutes ago, Northstar98 said:

I'm just comparing what I'm seeing on the coastline on the Kola map, with what I see on the South Atlantic map - the chopped off coastline is exactly what happens around the SA map.

Personally, I'm speaking from experience here - flying low and slow in a helicopter this stood out to me like a sore thumb on the South Atlantic map. Of course mileage may vary and there's definitely a non-zero probability that I am being pedantic about this.

Obviously I don't own the map, so I'm going purely off of what I see, but unfortunately I'm not quite with you on the assessment, particularly with the coastlines. Don't get me wrong, I have seen stuff I like, but right now there's enough I don't like to put me off, which is quite a shame.

No worries. A purchase, is s personal choice. South Atlantic has glitches in the satellite imagery that never got touched. That was, and is a problem. Besides, what I still report about it, is that some rivers are pure textures, no physical water is flowing through them whatsoever. On Kola, all rivers are physical ones. Besides that, on South Atlantic, you can be flying out of a valley, and suddenly see a zig-zag with purple/pink glitches for a couple of miles. That's the problem of building a map purely on overlaid satellite imagery, with little handcraft to adjust the terrain. I have seen streched textures here, albeit few. It also does look a lot better down low, than what you'll find in the best modelled parts of South Atlantic. 
 

What I'm saying is; time will show what this evolves into, however the starting point is much better than other maps. Now, it's up to Orbx to keep the pace, and work on further modelling and handcraft. 
 

The one thing I am generally not a fan of, is the proprietary bug tracker. It should be a demand of ED to have 3rd parties use ED forums for clarity and transparency. Also, access to everything from one source. Turning a customer to separate systems/websites, is really not the way, to be honest. We'll see if it works better than Mantis though...

[Northstar98]

6 minutes ago, zerO_crash said:

No worries. A purchase, is s personal choice. South Atlantic has glitches in the satellite imagery that never got touched. That was, and is a problem. Besides, what I still report about it, is that some rivers are pure textures, no physical water is flowing through them whatsoever. On Kola, all rivers are physical ones. Besides that, on South Atlantic, you can be flying out of a valley, and suddenly see a zig-zag with purple/pink glitches for a couple of miles. That's the problem of building a map purely on overlaid satellite imagery, with little handcraft to adjust the terrain. I have seen streched textures here, albeit few. It also does look a lot better down low, than what you'll find in the best modelled parts of South Atlantic.

What I'm saying is; time will show what this evolves into, however the starting point is much better than other maps. Now, it's up to Orbx to keep the pace, and work on further modelling and handcraft. 

Fair enough, this is early days yet, we'll see what happens

7 minutes ago, zerO_crash said:

The one thing I am generally not a fan of, is the proprietary bug tracker. It should be a demand of ED to have 3rd parties use ED forums for clarity and transparency. Also, access to everything from one source. Turning a customer to separate systems/websites, is really not the way, to be honest.

Yeah, the main problem for me there is that it's difficult to add extra detail while maintaining readability as some formatting options (unless there's something I'm massively overlooking) isn't present. Though I do agree that it would be better if it was here instead of somewhere else.

[BuzzLine]

35 minutes ago, Northstar98 said:

Personally, I'm speaking from experience here - flying low and slow in a helicopter this stood out to me like a sore thumb on the South Atlantic map. Of course mileage may vary and there's definitely a non-zero probability that I am being pedantic about this.

I had the exact same feeling flying low and fast around Bodo as well as Murmansk. Those sharp coastlines were very visible and made the whole stuff look very artificial. Then you start to see the limited texturing and variability in buildings and the result for me was a very mediocre first impression.

It does start to look ok, sometimes even good, at medium altitude, say at least 5000ft. But if you want to fly at treetop level over the Kola peninsula, over the lakes and through fjords, the best experience you can find on the market is not by DCS. And that's a shame because this map is custom-made and quite expensive.

[zerO_crash]

Here is a good example showing the map at maximum settings in VR (basically what I see). If anyone claims that this doesn't look good, then I suppose the problem is with them. Granted, everything mentioned above needs to be fixed, but you'll see in the video that it doesn't stand out as much in flight, as it does on a still image.

 

To me it seems that most who complain, are people having to run it on very low settings. Yes, it does look worse then, no doubt. Notice that it looks pretty good down low as well.

Edited May 4, 2024 by zerO_crash

[BuzzLine]

10 minutes ago, zerO_crash said:

If anyone claims that this doesn't look good, then I suppose the problem is with them.

Thanks for sharing it ! I guess we don't have the same expectations because everything I mentioned earlier is very visible in your video, at least to me. The water/land border, the featureless grass and tarmac, the lack of variability in buildings, the walls and roofs that are still very "flat", etc. Good choices of lighting and weather conditions also help, good job with that.  

Still, I am frustrated by what I perceive as limitations of ED's rendering engine, as well as some areas that I hope OrbX will improve over time. Maybe I was expecting too much from this map.

(Concerning settings, I have the joy of flying both in 2D and in VR with all settings at maximum and 1:1 resolution. )

[zerO_crash]

1 hour ago, BuzzLine said:

Thanks for sharing it ! I guess we don't have the same expectations because everything I mentioned earlier is very visible in your video, at least to me. The water/land border, the featureless grass and tarmac, the lack of variability in buildings, the walls and roofs that are still very "flat", etc. Good choices of lighting and weather conditions also help, good job with that.  

Still, I am frustrated by what I perceive as limitations of ED's rendering engine, as well as some areas that I hope OrbX will improve over time. Maybe I was expecting too much from this map.

(Concerning settings, I have the joy of flying both in 2D and in VR with all settings at maximum and 1:1 resolution. )

It's good that you are pedantic, I'm saying that as a natural. It's even better that you are demanding. However, when it comes to expectations, one has to be realistic. DCS being as complex of a ecosystem as it is (in every possible aspect, starting from physics), means that we will not be able to have the focus on graphics that e.g. MS2020 has (that's by the way the only thing it does well). We have to be realistic about current hardware, and the implications concerning its limitations. It ought to be pointed out, that our maps have destruction modelled, something the aforementioned doesn't. 
 

One also has to understand why the evolution in graphics, is exactly that, and evolution, not a leap. While we have hardware to run DCS maxed at acceptable framerate, you don't want to go much lower due to the need of such performance for combat. More importantly, we are not the mainstream. If ED/3rd parties focused only on us, they would be out of business long ago. Notice how much compaint the current map generated already, based on lower average performance. Even the introduction of new and supposedly more efficient technologies, is a stress-upper for ED, as it risks established customers leaving the shebang alltogether due to frustrations. 
 

Finally, onto a topic touched indirectly by the first paragraph, the graphics engine. The current engine is not a photrealistic one. It is really good, in many ways, but it isn't natural in its output. Before we see photorealism, we'll hear of a) either a new engine in making, or b) the global map being a completely new construct (this has been hinted as, most of all due to performance concerns). Fact of the matter remains; we are limited on hardware most of all, followed by poorly optimized software, finishing with customer pockets. You can imagine how detached the expectations are on visuals, when looking at how serious the discussions regarding storage are on this forum...  Essentially, there are complaints on DCS taking up too much storage. This, due to e.g. Mi-8MTV2 having too many liveries (yeah...), maps being too big and ultimately individuals being poor. ED gets requests to put time and money into "chose-what's-in-the-basket"-solutions, such that individuals flying with cardboard-VR on graphic calculators, don't have to purchase a new 2TB NVME for a miserable 100 quid. This should give you an idea of just how astronomical the expectations here are, compared to... Sadly, in a business, ED has to respect even the above-mentioned requests...

 

Therefore, trust me, for now, Kola is more than good enough. Should we be demanding? Absolutely! Having realistic expectations however, is preferred.

Edited May 5, 2024 by zerO_crash

[BuzzLine]

36 minutes ago, zerO_crash said:

Therefore, trust me, for now, Kola is more than good enough. Should we be demanding? Absolutely! Having realistic expectations however, is preferred.

Words of wisdom. Anyways, I look forward to what the campaign makers will make of it. And future evolutions of the map and the engine with multithreading activated.

Fly safe and enjoy the map.

[zerO_crash]

24 minutes ago, BuzzLine said:

Words of wisdom. Anyways, I look forward to what the campaign makers will make of it. And future evolutions of the map and the engine with multithreading activated.

Fly safe and enjoy the map.

Likewise

[Raisuli]

4 hours ago, zerO_crash said:

The one thing I am generally not a fan of, is the proprietary bug tracker. It should be a demand of ED to have 3rd parties use ED forums for clarity and transparency. Also, access to everything from one source. Turning a customer to separate systems/websites, is really not the way, to be honest. We'll see if it works better than Mantis though...

This.  I've spent most of my time over in those low detail areas so maybe they already know the aircraft shelters are transparent to landing lights at Bodo, but it's not worth figuring out their site to tell them about it.

Even if they don't touch it again this is a step up from Caucus and it's the one I'm going to use for a while.  With a bit of work (and a few more airfields) it could be epic.

[zerO_crash]

38 minutes ago, Raisuli said:

This.  I've spent most of my time over in those low detail areas so maybe they already know the aircraft shelters are transparent to landing lights at Bodo, but it's not worth figuring out their site to tell them about it.

Even if they don't touch it again this is a step up from Caucus and it's the one I'm going to use for a while.  With a bit of work (and a few more airfields) it could be epic.

I believe it was mentioned.

 

Amen, brother!

[Stanlesuper]

Kola is the first map without old school repetitive texture. Good point !

Looks very realistic at high altitude, msfs is not better at this point.

Finaly, sorry but trees are ugly. I own Aerofly 4 wich is very immersive at some point and looks photorealistical sometimes. Trees are only made of blur low res texturing, and guest what, it is perfectly integrated to the land scape !

Maybe something to work on !?

What you think ?

 

AFS 4 screenshoot below for trees example at mid altitude. 

 

 

 

[MBot]

I am very disappointed by the look of the submarine bases near Murmansk. The area should by rocky and barren. The coloring is wrong, even disregarding seasonal differences in the photos. The vegetation is completely off. They got to topography, but it is not looking like the real place at all. Is this supposed to be the fleshed out high-fidelity area?

All screenshots were taken at maximum graphics settings.

Polyarny:

Gadzhiyevo:

Nerpa Shipyard:

[Kiwi_Viper]

theres two major upsides its got huge potential an its not a bloody desert lol, performance is good overall only framtimes need improving (which im sure Orbix will work on)

as i only fly in VR its totally useable as is , its awesome flyin the Mossie up them fjords at wave top height.

i say nice job Orbix its a damn good start.