Happy Birthday Vaicom Pro Community Edition

[PeneCruz]

UPDATE 03 November 2023

One year ago today a group of us met on Discord to discuss a way forward when the source code appeared on Github, uploaded by the original developer of Vaicom Pro. Could we make it fully functional again in DCS World 2.8.6? 

For VR pilots that had become reliant on the ability to simply talk to the Ai in DCS rather than use a mouse and menu structure, the loss of Vaicom Pro was a real blow. We were super motivated to just get it working again.  Given the complexity of the code and it's extension based functions, with no developer insight or understanding of how it was built we set on 48 hour patching binge and created the first community version that sort of worked for most modules.

One year on we have kept refining and simplifying the code to try and reduce the workload of keeping it functioning with each new DCS build. We have had a few hurdles placed in front of us along the way, the introduction of pure client scripts, the reindexing of airfield names on many maps, changes to the comms layer behavior, the list goes on. But overall the plugin has become stable again.

Some milestones:

- Create a solution based development environment.
- Establish a Beta Test team (thank you for your hard work).
- Move Vaicom Pro interactions to the DX layer.
- Add 3rd party missing modules to the list of supported Aircraft.
- Make AIRIO and Chatter dependents of the main VAICOMPRO.dll
- Add many of the Community Mod modules to Vaicom pro.
- Flesh out Carrier Comms and supported carriers.
- Remove redundant UI options and add extension control via the UI.
- Establishing an Auto Update function for vaicom Pro with no ongoing costs.
- Passing 3000 members on this Discord and 20K downloads on GitHub. (Thanks to our Community Fixers for the endless support to the user base)
- New friendships and many laughs amongst the team.

The future: 

- Version 2.9.0.5 is currently in Beta Test This will add more Community Aircraft and fix some bugs.
- Work has begun on trying to fully understand the AIRIO extension to allow us to better adapt to changes we might need to make with Jester 2.0
- Try to stay keyboard free!

Happy Birthday Vaicom Pro Community Edition, it's been a blast  

Edited November 8, 2023 by PeneCruz

[speed-of-heat]

Thanks guys! its is very much appreciated!

[sthompson]

I'm very appreciative to all who contributed to the Community Edition. Thanks and let's hope VAICOM can stay relevant for DCS for many years.

However you might want to check the spelling in the title of this thread. VAICOM and VIACOM are two different things!

 

[Magoa]

A very big thanks from france at the community for the job