Meanwhile mixed feelings

[Rongor]

I understand that we can't expect a map of this size being entirely handcrafted. I also don't see an issue alike "too few" points of interest being modeled. I totally get that the creation of such an enormous map size will require some shortcuts, and templates might be an acceptable thing. Yet for some reason I struggle to not feeling annoyed by such widespread copy pasting of quite the big templates here.

We all value Ugra for their invention of details, of raising the standards for map fidelity and inventing new ideas. Yet this slowly starts to feels like an attempt to use the incredible details on stuff like oil barrels, wall clocks, drawer handles and chairs and monitors in airfield towers, combined harvesters, blue bicycles and hot air balloons to distract us from quite the repetitive use of templates of so far unseen size.

Or in other words, at this point I can't follow why it was deemed necessary to create beautifully detailed interiors of factories and power plants (for any other purpose than nice teasing pictures building up hype and the wow effect when visiting these ingame for the first and second time) while the effort would rather have been a better investment for adding some more building archetypes or increased support for the AI or whatever procedure was used to interpret all the data required for map creation.

Yes, this is early access and I am already happily contributing hints and advise in this forum, to support Ugra and their product.

Yet right now I wish they would have focused on those details responsible for an historically accurate depiction of things which are supposed to make this map a cold war themed map. Adding the Iron curtain and selected models of renown historic landmarks are a good basis. Its sad to see this immersion reduced by dropping ever the same templates of actually big complexes (as beautifully detailed as they may be) across the map.

This is a small compilation. There are many more of these out there. Each of them is as big as several city blocks or a little village. While alone they look beautiful in their detail, the copy pasting has gotten out of control.

[Rudel_chw]

On my case, I'm satisfied with this Map .. of course one can ask for more detail and variety, but keep into account the cost: just a single airport for a well known civil flight sim can cost 20 dollars, so having this Map at around US$ 55 seems entirely reasonable to me.

[Essah]

What I don't understand with this criticism is that every single DCS map has repetitive Tiles, and its far far worse on other maps, Germany is arguably one of the least repetitive looking maps. Take a proper critical look at Syria, Sinai, Caucasus and Persian Gulf and tell me its not repetitive. Perhaps its more visible on Germany because its not just endless sand. nobody notices repetitive tiles when the tiles is all sand anyway, but even the villages are just if not more repetitive on other maps.

Please take a look and tell me that Germany is more repetitive in actuality than any other map.

[v2tec]

Unfortunately, I have to agree - mixed feelings.

The first hours I liked the green map. Berlin looks great with all the famous buildings that we all know.

But some geographical coverage is not correct. I know, we can not expect a map and details like in the MS Flight Simulator, but if the geopraphical quality is to rough, it is just a green map.

Well, it is early access and work is in progress, so I hope things are getting fixed and sure, they will improve over time.

Some points I have noticed (so far):
- There are to much trees. The forest areas are too large
- Hills, mountains and bridges should be correct
- Cities should be recognized (at least) by there size. Some big cities have only a few houses and are looking like small villages, e.g. Wuerzburg (there are also some very nice historical buildings...)
- The street lightning on highways (Autobahnen) looks great, but in Germany, we don't have this lightning. It differs to other countries like the Netherlands or Belgium
- Autobahnen don't have crossroads
- Autobahnen should have some cars (well, it might be a performance thing or it is just war and nobody is using the streets...)
- Many graveyards in East Germany have orthodox crucifix, but only a few People there where orthodox. That is not important for me, but it seems that it was important for the map design and that's why I mention it

I am looking forward for the next updates.

 

[Thamiel]

I suspect, the reason the Autobahn was modelled with street lighting was the relative absence of performance hungry cars / traffic. Otherwise, you would not recognize them at night.

Also observing the countryside these days, I realized that the "size" of forests on the map is very much caused by its monoton green. In RL, forest areas show multiple shades of green because of different types of trees. That breaks monotony and large areas of forests into smaller ones.

We all know and do compare to the real thing. But then again, Ugra should have been aware of that in the first place.

[Thamiel]

6 hours ago, Essah said:

Please take a look and tell me that Germany is more repetitive in actuality than any other map.

Its not. Thats the core of the problem.

If it would be repetitive, you would recognize it at once and could simply say "Ah, thats not my region, thats a placeholder they will improve on it."

Instead it could be and looks like the real thing. But you know it isnt, because you know the real thing for sure, because you live in it. It breaks the immersion on a much deeper level if it looks like it could be, but you know it isnt.

[Ebphoto]

Personally I like the map. Its's early access so there are going to be issues. But even in this state of release it looks good.

[Mr_sukebe]

Personally I think it looks brilliant, but then I'm not German and have little experience of time in country.

As for the repetitive buildings, that's true of many maps and also other flight sims.  

Maybe a better question would be whether you'd have been willing to pay more for some additional building types?  If so, then maybe that's a marketing opportunity to create a "building DLC", with templates, allowing users to dump them around maps.

[Rick Mave]

Personally, I'm suuper happy with the map, however there are some points In ouod like to see refinements/improvements applied to:

- SAM site infrastructure: there are 40 in total, but there are only 4 different templates as far as I can tell, which have been placed in the historically accurate locations (HAWK, PATRIOT, SA-3 and SA-5(I think that's it, please correct me if I'm wrong)). I'd have appreciated some NIKE SAM site infrastructure as well even though we do not yet have a NIKE SAM itself (same with the SA-4 which was all over the place in the East).

- Historical Airfield charts and approach/departure documentation is completely missing. I think it is very important to provide these for a map that is not set in the present or recent history, or at least provide sources where one could get these from.

- Shelter types used in East and West Germany looked different, yet on the map there are shelters that are both on the east and west side of the iron curtain (example: Pferdsfeld)

- Some of the terrain can look like it's stitched together with very differing levels of fidelity. Farmlands that look very very nice are bordering others that are just the satellite image with a normal map overlay. I have no doubt this will be improved upon in the future, however at the moment it can look a little distracting in low level flight.

All in all though, fantastic map and very much worth the purchase. I'd rate it.

Edited April 22 by Rick Mave

[MBot]

While the criticism for the use of large templates is fair, I think it should be expected and is acceptable for a map of this size. Especially for things like army bases, barracks or industrial sites. Credit must be given to Ugra for the incredible number of unique airfields with a lot more still to come. I think priorities were weighted correctly here. Also I support the idea that nice generic templates for SA-2/3/5 and Hawk SAM sites are used. But I would expect that these SAM site templates will ultimately be placed on every known position in Germany (the community has provided a lot of references for this).

I absolutely love the map and think Ugra has done a fantastic job. The negative things that stood out most for me yet are the colors and the Autobahns.

The greens seem too bright to me but will probably not change much, as this seems to be a design decision by Ugra (see also Normandy). I am from Switzerland, so while not from the map area it probably looks similar here. If I look outside, I see some light green trees (especially now in spring) but the forests are generally quite dark. There are basically no natural forests left in Switzerland (outside the national park) so all forests are managed with a high degree of conifer, which is very dark. The fall and winter seasons will probably be the solutions for those that take issue with the green tone. We have to wonder though how the spring textures will look like...

The Autobahns are difficult to make out from the air, being too small without a Grünstreifen and emergency lanes. Also there shouldn't be any crossroads, instead overpasses and exits/entries. What is also becoming quite apparent is the blocky nature of roads and especially the Autobahns. This is probably nothing that Ugra can do anything about in the map-SDK. But don't you think in 2025 roads should have smooth curves?

[Northstar98]

I wholeheartedly agree, especially when some of these areas are completely fictional and aren't in the right place, while missing real air defence sites in close-proximity - sites that should have far more influence on what we do in DCS.

I personally don't see the utility in modelling details that aren't really relevant to air combat, when sites that are relevant to air combat are either not present or inaccurate.

I agree with MBot that its expected that there are some locations where a copied and pasted generic template is expected (I even advocated for this myself with air defence sites - most after all have fairly similar layouts). But in some cases the templates are wrong in fairly significant ways (the SA-5 sites for instance have 3 launch battalions, when every site in Germany should only have 2).

However, there are some examples where their locations are entirely fictional. For example, one of the copied and pasted tank ranges is in an area which should just be a forest. Worse, it's on an approach path to an airbase (Damgarten), so it's not exactly easy to miss (and was even pointed out in a livestream by Wags). Meanwhile, the 2 SA-3 sites (one of which on the airbase itself) aren't present, nor is the the EWR site - ironically being replaced by forests and trees.

10 hours ago, Rudel_chw said:

On my case, I'm satisfied with this Map .. of course one can ask for more detail and variety, but keep into account the cost: just a single airport for a well known civil flight sim can cost 20 dollars, so having this Map at around US$ 55 seems entirely reasonable to me.

Well, that price is only for early access, the full thing is 70 USD, which is as much as entire other flight simulators. 

However, that's not what I want to focus on - what I do want to argue is that the map would've arguably been better and more usable had the effort that went into more irrelevant details (such as combine harvester, the inside of factories, balloons, air racing courses that we already had the ability to make ourselves etc) was instead directed into making military installations more accurate or including more of them. I'm not saying that the inclusion of the former is necessarily a bad thing, but if it's one choice or the other, I'm picking the latter.

10 hours ago, Essah said:

What I don't understand with this criticism is that every single DCS map has repetitive Tiles, and its far far worse on other maps, Germany is arguably one of the least repetitive looking maps.

The fact that this criticism is true of other maps doesn't render this criticism invalid. I'm struggling to see what your point is.

[Beirut]

For the price, what we got, and what we will get, I think it's good. If, on the other hand, we were asked to pay maybe $150 for the map and it weighs about 300 or 400GB, then I would expect more.

 

And just for the record, if a dev wants to make a $150 map that comes in at 400GB, I'm all in. 

[skywalker22]

Thats why we are here, with constructive criticism Ugra can improve the map, I have not a single doubt about it. What we have now its only the 1st early access version.

[Max Thunder]

I agree with a lot of points here. But although the map needs a little more work (too much trees, city’s too small), I would buy it again. Also if the map would stay in its current state it’s worth the money. 

[Whiskey11]

To add to the SAM-tism, the HAWK sites on the map are also wrongly modeled.  They look more like SA-2 sites than HAWK sites.  I'll be doing a bug report for it later, but it was one of the more disappointing things when so many valid examples of the HAWK sites still exist.  Would also be nice to have SA-2 and SA-3 sites like they had in East Germany with the full underground command bunker modeled, but I get the "open top" revetment style sites are what the CIA always showed in their documentation (for new built sites... that makes sense, for the established ones? Naaaah).

 

Overall, I'm happy with the map even though I've only flown around it with the free camera and not actually flown from it.

[markturner1960]

Never understood why people rush to justify things that are pointed out as wrong, inaccurate, below standard etc.....

I am sure Ugra take their products and their reputation very seriously and would be very happy to use these pointers to further improve an ready excellent product. 

Why is there so much fanboi-ism surrounding any criticism of anything in DCS? 

Fully agree regarding the spurious detail included in things that dont really matter at the expense of more important big picture stuff

Its a lovely map though, done extremely well

Edited Thursday at 09:39 AM by markturner1960

[Rudel_chw]

1 hour ago, markturner1960 said:

Why is there so much fanboi-ism surrounding any criticism

because some of it is undeserved? Some people want a perfect moon for 55 bucks 

[Art-J]

2 hours ago, markturner1960 said:

Fully agree regarding the spurious detail included in things that dont really matter at the expense of more important big picture stuff

Heeeey, that's Normandy 2 map in a nutshell (even 2 years after release and lots of historic data provided by the community  ). 

And if I wanted to use it as a reference point, I wouldn't really expect Germany map to evolve much different, phase 2 and 3 included.

Mind you, this isn't to say Ugra guys are lazy. They do specialize, however, in crafting "fps-reasonable" maps which are meant to provide a general feel of the region and period, rather than to be accurate. That's their idea of "big picture stuff" and gotta admit they're very good at it. Some guys here just have to start being aware of it and manage expectations accordingly.

Surely, within each release phase, there will be improvements coming and if German players or foreign guys who served there want to give feedback for further development, by all means please do. But, based on Normandy 2 example again, I'd say be prepared for only a part of that feedback being used. Maybe dozen or so extra landmarks added, handful of generic hangars or buildings replaced/removed, maybe a texture colour tweak or two, but really not much beyond that. 

The map is still gonna sell like hot cakes, especially when majority of players not that intimately familiar with German civvy and military infrastructure won't be able to tell what's 1980's-accurate anyway.

[Northstar98]

1 hour ago, Art-J said:

And if I wanted to use it as a reference point, I wouldn't really expect Germany map to evolve much different, phase 2 and 3 included.

Mind you, this isn't to say Ugra guys are lazy. They do specialize, however, in crafting "fps-reasonable" maps which are meant to provide a general feel of the region and period, rather than to be accurate. That's their idea of "big picture stuff" and gotta admit they're very good at it. Some guys here just have to start being aware of it and manage expectations accordingly.

I think Ugra are far from being anywhere remotely "lazy". 

However, accuracy is something that's quite important to me and it's something most DCS maps fail quite badly on, especially when it comes to sites I will be interacting with and sites that either influence air combat or are significant targets.

Do I care about getting every building correct, absolutely not - I personally couldn't care less that some building in some village or town isn't 1:1 with the real place, so long as the layout of the place is accurate and the buildings are roughly the right size, I don't really care if it's copied and pasted throughout the map. Of course some variety would be nice, but I'm perfectly happy if villages and towns had purely generic, copied and pasted buildings. The only exceptions I'd make are prominent buildings and landmarks, especially those clearly distinguishable from the air, though Ugra has already done a pretty fantastic job of that already.

Airbases though? I'm expecting those to be as 1:1 as possible, even if assets are repeated where they make sense. Gütersloh for instance has the wrong shelters, there's no ramparts/revetments in parking areas near shelters, the Ems is in the wrong place etc. Then there's fields like Beinenfarm, which looks almost nothing like how it really does. I am not a fan of the dug up look airbases have though and no it doesn't look like dry grass, especially when you compare to the surrounding green grass. The Germany map also has the same issue when it comes to airbase warehouses, with ammunition particularly being quite bad - with warehouses assigned to seemingly random objects instead of the actual WSAs present (and modelled, at least in some cases).

Similarly for other military installations, these I'm expecting to be as 1:1 as possible, especially air defence sites (with exceptions where it makes sense - SA-2 sites for instance follow a very similar layout for each site - there it makes perfect sense for them to be copied and pasted). Ugra seems to have done well (SA-3 site for instance looks pretty much perfect for that particularly layout, it would be nice to get another but more than happy with it as-is), much better than most maps (apart from Sinai and a tad of Syria, the bar is on the floor though) - but there's still loads missing, the HAWK and SA-5 sites are inaccurate and in some cases fictional tank ranges have been placed, while real military sites in the vicinity are omitted (ironically what should be a forest has one of the tank ranges in it, meanwhile 2 SA-3 sites and an EWR site in the vicinity are omitted and replaced by trees).

I so far haven't seen major tank ranges like the Altmark range just north of Magdeburg and Grafenwöhr - the current tank range objects look like neither and it'll be disappointing if they're just placed where those 2 ranges are, especially given how prominent these sites are.

For static aircraft, tanks etc and other similar scenery objects - those I'd rather be actual assets I can interact with, they'd be much more useful as functional units, than they would as static scenery objects, which are only good for eye-candy alone. The Aist we saw for instance is armed and would go well into fleshing out Soviet amphibious units, alongside the Ropucha.

[Art-J]

^ All very fair points and I agree with them on principle, I just don't think these recommendations will be followed by the devs. Some of them - maybe.

The best that knowledgeable guys like you can do is to post any extra info about these sites and ranges you can find, maps, coordinates, period photos if available. Then hope they'll be used in phase 2 and 3.