Dynamic Campaign Discussion Thread

[EtherealN]

Active Sky Evo here...

 

Forgot about this one: so you're using a payware addon?

 

Well then, as I said: make a payware addon for a DC with DCS. There literally is nothing stopping you from making it, just prove that you're serious and I'm sure TFC/ED might be persuaded to consider offering a licensing agreement. (It's more money for their investors if you succeed, after all...)

 

Your business plan could easily get between 14 and 20k dollars from Y Combinator as an easy start to prove your tech, and I'm sure there's more investors stacking up for your fantastic business opportunity to make wads of cash with a DC.

 

It's always fascinating how people are so much more prepared to tell others what they should do with their money than they are to do the same thing with their own money. There's this thing called voting with your wallet, and as long as you don't put up some money on what you yourself claim is a good business you have actually voted AGAINST it with your wallet. ;)

 

Now make it happen. :)

[Speed]

Eth, the old Falcon 4 DC does give an immersion into a dynamic battlefield feeling. You have to have felt that! As far as immersion into a realistic environment- that's not the same. A really, really, really well done DC could give you realistic immersion to the same level as the first time you fly a really good scripted mission, but obviously that is very tough to do...

 

Scripted missions, on the other hand, offer a better opportunity for immersion into a realistic environment, if the right tools exist and are utilized by the mission designer. However, they only offer immersion a few times till that mission gets old. So not only do missions have to be incredibly detailed and immersive, but there have to be A LOT of them. Those two are very very hard to achieve together.

 

However, there is a kind of middle ground, but it's only available in multiplayer. When competent multiplayer clients do the AFAC, JTAC, ground forces command, are your wingmen/flight leads, then you can offer a level of immersion beyond what either a DC or scripted missions can ever offer. This could be combined with certain forms of DC and then you can get the best of both worlds. Even when full human control is combined with just scripted missions, you can get scenarios that are not very repetitive at all, which don't take a lot of time to make, and which are very realistic. It all depends on how the folks fly them.

 

But I guess my end point is that I think that segments of the community would be better served by a return of a battle commander mode rather than a dynamic campaign. Most of the community, however, would probably be better served by a dynamic campaign unless ED releases some new way to generate realistic missions faster. The fact is, folks just get bored of flying the same missions over and over again. It doesn't matter how realistic and awesome they feel the first time, there are just not enough mission makers to keep them coming out fast enough. A dynamic campaign may not offer the most realistic missions, in theory, but how realistic is it to know exactly what is going to happen because you have already flown the mission 3 times???!!! Variety and a dynamic battlefield has a different kind of realism that purely scripted missions can never have- the unknown.

 

I remember trying to tell a guy new to Falcon 4, before we went up on a BARCAP, that "you never know- we might not see any enemy aircraft at all." He said, "Well then why would the mission have been assigned?". I told him (he was a friend of mine IRL so I can speak to him like this) "Dumbass, it's not called a dynamic campaign for nothing." He finally got it, and it blew his mind :) Ever heard of a scripted CAP mission where you never see any enemy aircraft at all? ;)

 

So anyway, yea, I'd prefer to have a Battlefield Commander mode first, while ED slowly builds up their DC engine. You would have extremely dynamic scenarios if ground forces were under human control too... some retort that "well who would want to do that?" There is someone, or multiple people, in every MP squad that would love being the ground forces commander. I was that guy in the 16th. Back in Beta 3 days, I rarely flew the bird. I was usually popping smoke, positioning/driving my tanks, and calling in coordinates of enemy armor from my binoculars view.

Edited August 9, 2011 by Speed

[GGTharos]

but how realistic is it to know exactly what is going to happen because you have already flown the mission 3 times???!!!

 

Potentially quite realistic because as a real pilot, you'd have likely 'flown' this mission at least once before the sortie, and at minimum you have pretty good intelligence as to what'll happen, which is why you're positioned where you're positioned.

 

Variety and a dynamic battlefield has a different kind of realism that purely scripted missions can never have- the unknown.

 

Variety isn't necessarily realistic. It might even be on the very infrequent spectrum of realism, at least from a medium-level view.

 

Ever heard of a scripted CAP mission where you never see any enemy aircraft at all? ;)

 

Yes, but we don't execute them very often since they don't suit our training purposes.

 

 

So anyway, yea, I'd prefer to have a Battlefield Commander mode first, while ED slowly builds up their DC engine. You would have extremely dynamic scenarios if ground forces were under human control too... some retort that "well who would want to do that?" There is someone, or multiple people, in every MP squad that would love being the ground forces commander. I was that guy in the 16th. Back in Beta 3 days, I rarely flew the bird. I was usually popping smoke, positioning/driving my tanks, and calling in coordinates of enemy armor from my binoculars view.

 

Hopefully the BC will return better and more powerful than before ... inside a multi-station vehicle. :)

[EtherealN]

Yes, I felt the same kind of immersion I get from playing Bad Company 2. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it's just not what I look for in a sim. It's totally awesome to have that kind of immersion of a dynamic battlefield, but a simulator like DCS relies on offering realism, and that type of DC doesn't offer that. (Again, personal opinion.)

 

I totally agree with the comments in MP though, which after all is where most of my non-testing flying happens. (And a majority of my testing flying as well, actually.) I was as heartbroken as those of you who were in the open beta when the commander mode had to be removed. I am also a proponent of implementing a GCI mode as a playable position in MP (sort of like some mods that are available for FC1).

 

The DC scenario you describe also mirrors things I've done in FC2 MP - I think it was me and GG that spend a whole evening escorting the AWACS on the 104th. I launched a weapon once during the course of the whole evening, but it was still an intense experience. But the this is all very hard to do, and it has to be done well to make it worth it, which causes the whole value thing.

 

Battlefield Commander would be a sweet thing for the middle, but as I'm sure you understand I cannot comment on whether it'll make it in beyond that "I don't know". I'm just a peon and it's all need-to-know for me.

 

I will add though that I do understand the issue with playing the same mission several times. For me personally this isn't that much of an issue since I'm mainly about MP, and in that case there's some added elements that add replayability simply through trying out different ways of co-operating between several human pilots, trying to figure out the best way to tackle a tactical problem. (The whole "mission rehearsal" thing.)

Edited August 9, 2011 by EtherealN

[GGTharos]

Yep ... some guy loaded with R-77's (before they were permitted) on his flanker rocketed in to take out the AWACs. Suffice it to say, his rocketing got slammered :D

 

The DC scenario you describe also mirrors things I've done in FC2 MP - I think it was me and GG that spend a whole evening escorting the AWACS on the 104th. I launched a weapon once during the course of the whole evening, but it was still an intense experience. But the this is all very hard to do, and it has to be done well to make it worth it, which causes the whole value thing.

[Bucic]

It's kind of frustrating that ED says no to gimmicks like player bubble. It's simply shuts down the door to rich mission environment for 5 years or so. *

AFAIK DCS starts crawling as soon as there's a higher, although reasonable, number of units in the scenario. It's even more painful with ATC operations in DCS practically non-existent.

 

 

*For the sake of military contracts? Understandable. If it's not related to mil then it has to be for the sake of being "only true campaign or nothing" nazi ;)

Edited August 9, 2011 by Bucic

[Grimes]

Multiplayer is about the only place where you get dynamic situations out of the gameplay. Not just through the missions created for MP, but because you won't always join a mission at the same time like you do in singleplayer. Just joining 10 minutes into a mission can substantially change your overall experience of the mission. Generally the more time that passes the greater a difference you will have. Admittedly this can also have a negative effect because you have no idea what state the mission is in.

 

Actually, triggers are the thing that governs mission outcome. You use triggers to assign scores based on whatever you like, and this score can then be used to assign a "success" or "fail"

 

As a whole very few things are needed to the ME to start making semi-scripted dynamic missions.

 

-The ability to save and load flag states between missions so we can create a "guided" cause and effect between missions that is desperately lacking.

-Allow multiple flight paths for aircraft/landed AI to respawn(or reactivate)

-Allow land units to switch waypoints.

[HerrKaputt]

To everyone (like me) who is of the opinion that a DC would add tremendous immersion to a flight sim, unlike Ethereal's opinion:

 

I think you're wasting your breath trying to convince these guys that a DC is worth thinking about. It's not that they won't listen. They probably would like it as much as we do! The thing is, it has to be financially viable. Several pages ago myself and Ethereal had a nice discussion about this, it all comes down to how many man-hours are needed to develop, test, and debug the whole thing versus the value it adds to the product.

 

To me, the fact that A-10 made a small step in that direction is a good sign.

 

Oh and let me tell you one thing (also already mentioned a few pages back): I had a look at the EECH source code for the dynamic campaign, and although it's not as complex as F4's, the code is still HUGE.

 

Also, as a nearly-doctored guy in Machine Learning, Optimization and that sort of topic, let me tell you that optimizing something like a dynamic campaign engine would require, at the very minimum, some serious tuning to find the good values for the model parameters. Such parameters are stuff like the probability that an enemy plane will engage vs. retreat vs. try to avoid detection upon noticing your presence. Models can behave in drastically different ways depending on these parameters. And we're not even factoring in an assessment on how well equipped you are to deal with the enemy, etc. This is a very common thing in Optimization and Modeling: making a model for a phenomenon is usually fairly easy. The difficulty of tuning it's parameters is usually exponential on the number of parameters, and usually complex phenomenons like wars need LOTS of parameters to be accurately modeled. This means that merely determining what the values of such probabilities should be would take an enormous time from the testers, let alone the time to write the code and to debug it. This is why F4 required a player bubble whereas computers were already able, for example, of real-time processing of human brain EEG. Instead of modeling the whole combat area, you model only a neighborhood of the player, which involves a much smaller number of parameters.

 

All in all, there's no doubt in my mind that a pretty good DC is doable. IMO even an EECH-level DC would add tremendous value to DCS (please note the IMO at the start), let alone one of the quality of F4. I also don't buy Ethereal's argument that "it would degrade the ultra-realism trademark of DCS". As long as there are still scripted missions as well as a DC, the showcase for ultra-realism remains. I'm also a bit divided on using Microprose's and Razorworks's demise as an argument against writing a DC, there are many more reasons that can explain that.

 

But I DO buy his argument that a decent DC is a pretty big undertaking that needs to be carefully considered. It's definitely NOT a matter of having or lacking "balls".

Edited August 9, 2011 by HerrKaputt

[GGTharos]

QFT.

 

All in good time. As AI and framework around random mission generation, and mission scripting is built up and made more intelligent, eventually things like a resource management system may be overlayed on top, and eventually perhaps an automated quartermaster, supervised by an automated battle planner, and ... :)

 

But. All in good time, and this isn't going to be any time soon IMHO. There are other things in the works as well.

 

I think you're wasting your breath trying to convince these guys that a DC is worth thinking about. It's not that they won't listen. They probably would like it as much as we do! The thing is, it has to be financially viable. Several pages ago myself and Ethereal had a nice discussion about this, it all comes down to how many man-hours are needed to develop, test, and debug the whole thing versus the value it adds to the product.

[EtherealN]

All good points, thankyou for your input Kaputt. :)

[HerrKaputt]

Let's suppose it takes 10 Dev-years to develop a decent DC (i.e. one Dev working 10 years, or two working 5 years, etc). Assuming a Dev makes, say, $1500 per month, that's $18000 per year, or $180000 total cost for the DC. Unless DCS would sell an additional 4500 copies ($180000 total cost divided by $40, price of each copy), it's not worth it. And I'm assuming that the whole $40 goes to ED for each copy, which is not true even for digital copies.

 

Found the post I was looking for. This is the type of financial analysis I was talking about.

[GGTharos]

It's more expensive than this. There's overhead, research, and other issues as well. You have to factor in potential lost revenue by not making a new module as well.

[Bucic]

Found the post I was looking for. This is the type of financial analysis I was talking about.

F4 sold probably majority of the total copies sold thanks to its DC ;)

[sobek]

F4 sold probably majority of the total copies sold thanks to its DC ;)

 

I seriously doubt that.

[HerrKaputt]

It's more expensive than this. There's overhead, research, and other issues as well. You have to factor in potential lost revenue by not making a new module as well.

 

Yeah, the values might be completely off. It's just an illustration analysis.

[Frostiken]

You have to factor in potential lost revenue by not making a new module as well.

I c wot u did thar...

[RodrigoMF_BR]

Dynamic campaign will be a great thing.

 

Maybe in a another and new DCS Dynamic Campaign Product.

 

But i think with another issues are more importants now...

 

Anothers choppers, planes, theaters, bugs corrections, etc.

[Bucic]

But i think with another issues are more importants now...

 

Anothers choppers, planes, theaters, bugs corrections, etc.

A T C !

:tomato:

[Speed]

A T C !

:tomato:

 

What's that? Absolute, Total Chaos?

[Bucic]

What's that? Absolute, Total Chaos?

Air traffic control. Practically non-existent in LO/DCS.

[Speed]

Air traffic control. Practically non-existent in LO/DCS.

 

Hence: ATC = Absolute, Total Chaos. I was being sarcastic :doh: :P

 

You know, now that I think about it, it would be possible to stack flights over/near airbase and slowly lower them and land them one at a time using Lua-triggered orbit and switch waypoint commands. Would that help any?

 

But possible does not necessarily mean practical (I can already think of a few complications), and I've got a whole lot of other things to do before I would ever get to something like that. I get the idea because someone mentioned something like it, but implemented through mission editor triggers, somewhere else. A Lua implementation could work autonomously almost. Or you could have a human ATC actually clear AI to land.

Edited August 10, 2011 by Speed

[J. Heller]

Who cares about ATC in this sim? There not enough traffic to even worry about it... Things like making ATC work are a waste of time in my opinion, time that could be spent working on a DC. I forget who said it a few posts ago but it was something along the lines of "flying the same mission 3 times over again isnt very realistic", THANK YOU! Made my point exactly. Of course there was the immediate response of "actually that is pretty realistic, blah blah blah something about how it was realistic". Clearly no matter what good points are made for having a DC built the fanbois of the current system will defend it till death. There is what, ONE good campaign released with the sim, the other two are a joke. Make more(good) campaigns and I will shut up about it, until I have beaten those campaigns with no deaths in about 2-3 days worth of play and then come back here to bitch about the DC again. I am not saying I'm right about any of this, just voiceing my opinion. I dont mind being the DC fanboi punching bag for you folks, all my comments get beat down while others with similiar arguments get praise. I dont mind, I'm not going away until I actually have something interesting to do in the DCS series besides blow up the same tanks/vehicles in the same spot over and over again. Whew! DC for the win!

[HerrKaputt]

Who cares about ATC in this sim? There not enough traffic to even worry about it... Things like making ATC work are a waste of time in my opinion, time that could be spent working on a DC. I forget who said it a few posts ago but it was something along the lines of "flying the same mission 3 times over again isnt very realistic", THANK YOU! Made my point exactly. Of course there was the immediate response of "actually that is pretty realistic, blah blah blah something about how it was realistic". Clearly no matter what good points are made for having a DC built the fanbois of the current system will defend it till death. There is what, ONE good campaign released with the sim, the other two are a joke. Make more(good) campaigns and I will shut up about it, until I have beaten those campaigns with no deaths in about 2-3 days worth of play and then come back here to bitch about the DC again. I am not saying I'm right about any of this, just voiceing my opinion. I dont mind being the DC fanboi punching bag for you folks, all my comments get beat down while others with similiar arguments get praise. I dont mind, I'm not going away until I actually have something interesting to do in the DCS series besides blow up the same tanks/vehicles in the same spot over and over again. Whew! DC for the win!

 

Actually, flying those missions over and over is very realistic, but it becomes very boring to those like you (and me) who are into flying sims not so much for the uber-realistic avionics and flight models but for some fun as well.

 

But they are right when they say that a DC cannot make missions as realistic as scripted human-made missions.

[Bucic]

Who cares about ATC in this sim? There not enough traffic to even worry about it...

Obviously you have no idea how ATC operations look like. If you did, you'd know how a >proper ATC< changes everything. Even for four aircraft environment.

[RodrigoMF_BR]

ATC and much more detalied JPG maps, will be greater too!