waiting for resolution ED/RAZBAM Situation Info & Discussion

[MiG21bisFishbedL]

1 minute ago, Mike Force Team said:

Can ED just offer to buy out Razbam's full-fidelty modules? I am saying ED pays an agreed upon price to Razbam, receives the licenses, coding, and everything else related to the transaction. 

Who will work on them? Those are several modules that need teams and ED is working on several modules with more in the pipe. That just leaves them with a possible deficit in resources, the need to hire more staff, or lengthens the update cycles of ALL modules which is something they're often criticized for.

And, would it even provide worth? F-15E, sure, but what about ones like the MiG-19?

It's not so easy as just buying them.

[Tank50us]

22 minutes ago, MiG21bisFishbedL said:

It's not so easy as just buying them.

no, it's not.

That being said, it's not impossible to do either, and yeah, they COULD bring on some more people to keep the modules working. It would take a while to get the people needed, and we would have to be ok with the modules only being maintained (bug fixes, patch compatibility, etc) for a year or two before we start seeing major updates (For example F-15E SDBs, Maverick Compatibility, AI WSO etc).

But, right now, it's all in the hands of the Mosquitos with briefcases.

[rob10]

1 hour ago, Mike Force Team said:

Can ED just offer to buy out Razbam's full-fidelty modules? I am saying ED pays an agreed upon price to Razbam, receives the licenses, coding, and everything else related to the transaction. 

Come on Mike.  It's been explained before (and once again here) when you suggested this why it's (realistically) not an option.  Unfortunately there's no easy solutions.

Edited May 4 by rob10

[Tank50us]

1 hour ago, rob10 said:

Come on Mike.  It's been explained before (and once again here) when you suggested this why it's (realistically) not an option.  Unfortunately there's no easy solutions.

technically speaking, it IS an option. However, what's questionable is:
1. How much it would cost
2. What happens next if ED does that.

That's why I made my comment on the subject. Sure, they could do it, and it would be a good middle ground (RB gets paid, and the modules become available again once they have new homes). The question then becomes who works on it, and how long until we start seeing more than bug fixes.

But as I also said... it's all in the hands of the lawyers right now.

[Ironious]

Would it be considered government use if a nation's air force encouraged its members to purchase with their own personal funds and practice a specific aircraft in DCS World?

[AndyJWest]

14 minutes ago, Ironious said:

Would it be considered government use if a nation's air force encouraged its members to purchase with their own personal funds and practice a specific aircraft in DCS World?

Laws don't apply to imaginary entities.

[Ironious]

There was apparently some dispute as to the license obligations. If it's not a violation for a government employed trainee to purchase and use DCS World on their personally owned computer might their government condone this and save big bucks by not buying the professional product? Especially if that aircraft were designed to exacting specifications. 

[Aapje]

Governments are going to have carefully organized training programs, not going to tell their pilots to play a bit of DCS on their home system.

[Ironious]

So then where's the problem?

[Ignition]

21 hours ago, MiG21bisFishbedL said:

It's pretty clear why ED has not done the Su-25 yet. This is because they have outright said why.

They require publicly and legally available resources. If they can't get those, then it's no bueno. Those resources probably exist for the Su-25, realistically, but they need to find the correct entities to provide them.

Then, it's a matter of the allocations of resources.

In all, we will get one eventually, I reckon. Also, offtopic, so that's the last I'll comment on it.

It's crazy ED can make the F-35 full fidelity but they can't do an aircraft of 1975.

[AndyJWest]

1 hour ago, Ironious said:

There was apparently some dispute as to the license obligations. If it's not a violation for a government employed trainee to purchase and use DCS World on their personally owned computer might their government condone this and save big bucks by not buying the professional product? Especially if that aircraft were designed to exacting specifications. 

End-user license agreements, even if applied to real entities rather than imaginary air forces, aren't relevant to the ED-Razbam dispute since Razbam isn't an end user.

Edited May 4 by AndyJWest

[Dragon1-1]

1 hour ago, Aapje said:

Governments are going to have carefully organized training programs, not going to tell their pilots to play a bit of DCS on their home system.

You may want to take a rain check on that. Tankers train using War Thunder, of all things. Why? It's free (so no need to go through the headache of official procurement, as with a proper sim like Steel Beasts or VBS), a good chunk of them would likely be players anyway, and the general armored warfare tactics still apply. The EULA might forbid that, but preventing a military officer from procuring a bunch of DCS modules for the unit and using them to train would be rather tough. If the penny pinchers up high won't buy you proper simulators nor give you the amount of flying hours you need, using DCS would actually be the sensible thing to do, just as long as you have some kind of discretionary budget you could use for this.

Government entities are not always as organized or professional as we'd like to believe, and that goes double for those of smaller nations. If you can get carefully organized training programs, great. If you can't... well, it's time for duct tape, baling wire, ad-hockery and "off the shelf procurement" of commercial products to misuse.

20 hours ago, Tank50us said:

technically speaking, it IS an option.

It is not an option because a certain Ron Zambrano had declared that he'll never hand over the RAZBAM stuff to ED. For ED to buy out the modules, RAZBAM would have to be willing to sell them. We saw no indication of that. No amount of money will buy you something that's not on sale.

[AndyJWest]

I suspect that the potential for government entities to strongarm their way around end-user agreements may be a further incentive to ED to clamp down hard on anything that infringes the intellectual property rights protection their contract with third-party developers mandates. 

[DragonSoulkin]

4 hours ago, Ignition said:

It's crazy ED can make the F-35 full fidelity but they can't do an aircraft of 1975.

That's what I keep thinking about the MiG-23/25/31 and Su-25/27/30, and a Ka-52 & Mi-28 for that matter. Heck with the F-35 we might as well be getting a F-117, F-22, and Su-57 while we're at it.

[bfr]

5 hours ago, DragonSoulkin said:

That's what I keep thinking about the MiG-23/25/31 and Su-25/27/30, and a Ka-52 & Mi-28 for that matter. Heck with the F-35 we might as well be getting a F-117, F-22, and Su-57 while we're at it.

The 23 was supposedly happening, but under Razbam so now its not happening. The Mig 25 I suspect would be a tough pick given its very niche and I doubt it'd sell or sit within the game particularly well.

Su-17 might've been a good call for someone to do now we have CWG.

[draconus]

10 hours ago, Ignition said:

It's crazy ED can make the F-35 full fidelity but they can't do an aircraft of 1975.

Nothing crazy about it. To make full fidelity module for DCS a lot of factors are taken into consideration: popularity, expected return of investment, availability of docs, SMEs and other publically available data, real aircraft availability for scanning and reference, possible manufacturer cooperation, licensing, governments related agreements/risks, aircraft role and features and how it fits into DCS, etc. You won't know all the reasons why ED have choosen or not certain modules.

[jeventy26]

2 hours ago, draconus said:

Nothing crazy about it. To make full fidelity module for DCS a lot of factors are taken into consideration: popularity, expected return of investment, availability of docs, SMEs and other publically available data, real aircraft availability for scanning and reference, possible manufacturer cooperation, licensing, governments related agreements/risks, aircraft role and features and how it fits into DCS, etc. You won't know all the reasons why ED have choosen or not certain modules.

No.  It is crazy.  It's like being able to make an F-14 full fidelity simulation in 1975 but can't do a Curtis P-1 Hawk from 1925....

[draconus]

7 minutes ago, jeventy26 said:

No.  It is crazy.  It's like being able to make an F-14 full fidelity simulation in 1975 but can't do a Curtis P-1 Hawk from 1925....

You have to understand the reasons I mentioned above and also know the difference if the devs can't or just won't do a module. That the aircraft is old can make it much harder to do because there may not be many (or at all) real aircraft to choose from to get scanned and referenced, they may be very poorly documented, docs may be even all lost, most (or all) pilots may already be deceased.

[deadghostjt]

8 hours ago, DragonSoulkin said:

That's what I keep thinking about the MiG-23/25/31 and Su-25/27/30, and a Ka-52 & Mi-28 for that matter. Heck with the F-35 we might as well be getting a F-117, F-22, and Su-57 while we're at it.

There's actually no good reason why some or many more low fidelity Flaming Cliffs versions of current High fidelity opponents are not being included in game while waiting for zecret documents to open. I'm hoping they add at least couple of Japanese planes like Zero, Frank and Tony low fidelity planes to counter Hellcat and Corsair when these planes march in. Would be quite empty Pacific theater without them or historically pointless just flying against European planes. But otherwise I would guess current on-going war is not helping the situation of getting high fidelity red force planes into the game.

[AndyJWest]

Have we run out of ill-informed things to say about the ED-Razbam dispute? Or is this diversion into generic why-don't-they-make-this ramblings some sort of cunning tactic to lure the mods into complacency?

[Aapje]

12 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

You may want to take a rain check on that. Tankers train using War Thunder, of all things. Why? It's free (so no need to go through the headache of official procurement, as with a proper sim like Steel Beasts or VBS), a good chunk of them would likely be players anyway, and the general armored warfare tactics still apply. The EULA might forbid that, but preventing a military officer from procuring a bunch of DCS modules for the unit and using them to train would be rather tough. If the penny pinchers up high won't buy you proper simulators nor give you the amount of flying hours you need, using DCS would actually be the sensible thing to do, just as long as you have some kind of discretionary budget you could use for this.

It's a bit strange that you act as if you disagree with me, but what you state does not go against what I said at all.

I never said that militaries wouldn't use consumer games, but that they wouldn't use them without an organized training structure, which would make it impossible for them to go: "these pilots just play the game in their own time on their own PC, nothing to do with us, we didn't violate any EULAs"

Operation Flashpoint/ArmA is another example next to DCS of a game with a military variant. In general, the military has a limited budget and scope that often cannot compete with mass market software and hardware, and it's not uncommon for the military to lean into that, or to simply have individual solders replace their official kit with mass market products.

[BIGNEWY]

Last warning for this thread, we have been pretty lenient here with the rules. 

Keep it to the thread topic and to DCS. 

thank you  

[cfrag]

30 minutes ago, deadghostjt said:

There's actually no good reason why some or many more low fidelity Flaming Cliffs versions of current High fidelity opponents are not being included in game while waiting for zecret documents to open.

There's one, and it's the only one that counts: nobody invests money into them to make them. Every other reason is irrelevant. No business case, no plane. A module looks promising financially, an no data available? No problem, it'll be made. ED is business. DCS is business. Nobody in this business makes a plane for any other reason except to make money. Deal with it. And please, don't tell me 'if that was true, plane xxx would be made'. Go ahead, finance it and do it - and I'd love to be proven wrong. Everyone else is 'put up or shut up'. Deal with it. The F-35 is being made because it's a promising business endeavour.  RZ didn't make planes out of the kindness of their hearts. The reason the entire ED/RZ dustup happened is because of money, not artistical disputes over colour schemes. Let's try and keep it real.

Edited May 5 by cfrag

[deadghostjt]

1 minute ago, cfrag said:

There's one, and it's the only one that counts: nobody invests money into them to make them. Every other reason is irrelevant. No business case, no plane. A module looks promising financially, an no data available? No problem, it'll be made. ED is business. DCS is business. Nobody in this business makes a plane for any other reason except to make money. Deal with it. And please, don't tell me 'if that was true, plane xxx would be made'. Go ahead, finance it and do it - and I'd love to be proven wrong. Everyone else is 'put up or shut up'. Deal with it. The F-35 is being made because it's a promising business endeavour.  RZ didn't make planes out of the kindness of their hearts. The reason the entire ED/RZ dustup happened is because of money, not artistical disputes over colour schemes. Let's try and keep it real.

Maybe the money is in there people would not buy so many Hellcats and Corsairs if there is no historical opponents for them. You could say that for anything: "theres no money in making more AI assets so let's only use current two sam systems and couple of generic tanks..., theres no money in making clouds look better...". Of course there is the money making the ecosystem more rich and lifelike and it's comes usually from secondary sources than the ecosystem improvements themselves when people buy the high fidelity stuff when they have their environment looking like the real deal. Although u can also always charge 10$ more for current FC+++ update. I bet Eurofighter and F-35 sold better if they can oppose their current rivals even if low fidelity. Not just dominating cold war servers like a boss. If someone doesn't realize this he has no business skills whatsoever. If someone looked at the revenues like this: "this is our best selling plane, we got to ditch the others and only sell these planes and these planes only for maximizing the profits" this business mastermind would go out of business in a few minutes. I hope this attitude is not included in current RZ/ED fight.

[draconus]

7 minutes ago, deadghostjt said:

Maybe the money is in there people would not buy so many Hellcats and Corsairs if there is no historical opponents for them.

But there will be more opponents for F6F and F4U: