DCS Tank Simulator Possible?

[Wolfie]

Silly infantry..

 

LMAO! You'll never see that manpad ( or even RPG ) coming. Right now we all know where the AI AA Specialist are in the missions ( they're out in the open and don't even move ) and they're usually only maybe 2.

 

Now imagine 7 or so HUMAN Anti-Air Specialists on the ground protecting an armor company, which is embedded in a town surrounded by woods and such. You better blitz the shit out of that town before you get near it.

 

ARMA proved why you put infantry in with armor. There is no enemy more mobile or stealthy.

 

You guys should google for the Arma mission "They Came from Above" and play it through. Its an ACE 2 mod mission that puts you in charge of a very well equipped Special Forces commando team. Commander, Heavy Weapons Specialist, Medic, and one other guy ( can't remember his specialty ). Show you what HELL a well trained, well equipped infantry squad can put down. Takes you about 5 hours to get through the mission as you take on a large terrorist group thats been firing grads on an American position.

 

It would be great to see this in DCS as I could call for REALISTIC Human air support.

Edited June 24, 2013 by Wolfie

[DPS]

I'd buy a DCS tank simulator with a clickable pit (or should that be hull) without a second's hesitation. Of course we'd have to be able to make holes in the scenery in order to go 'defilade' if you intend to do it properly.

[Purzel]

If ED would put a realistic tank-simulator in DCS:World, they would have the simulation domination on their side.

Honest? Yes, if someone searches for a fighter sim, they will stumble sooner or later over DCS.

DCS is a very good and affordable simulation-game, I´m happy, to have it and would buy no other simulator.

Even because it´s a module-based game, it´s very interesting - you only buy what you want. But you buy a highly complex game, which could be the

market leading simulation, if they don´t sleep.

Put some ground troops, vehicles, boats, etc. inside at that high leveled DCS:World and we won´t need any civilian traffic ingame anymore... ;-)

 

Maybe some croudfounding would show, how many would have serious interests.

The main thing is, that it has to be to complex for all that mainstream "Battlefield-Kiddies"...

It has to at a very high simulation level.

And open for third-party developers...

 

;-)

Edited June 26, 2013 by Purzel

[diveplane]

just like aircraft and helos I vote for a addon module tank system for combined arms.

[geloxo]

Yes, that would be interesting. However the graphical environment at land level should be seriously improved. We still have the old style graphics from lockon and even infantry moving perpendicular to those angled surfaces. I own Combined Arms, but see Arma3 for instance: huge island, huge terrain details, huge immersion, huge effects and nice sounds. A moderate shit on vehicles simulation but... really impressive on infantry and environment with acceptable performance on medium edge machines.

 

Future of simulation is a mid term between both things: eye candy and versatility of Arma3 (incl. troops being able to enter and shoot from vehicles, paradrop, etc) + realism, fidelity and vehicle physics from DCS.

[EtherealN]

I own Combined Arms, but see Arma3 for instance: huge island, huge terrain details, huge immersion, huge effects and nice sounds.

 

Okey. :D

 

You asked for it. :)

 

 

I asked the official site, and Bohemia themselves (I have a friend there, btw) clock it in at... 270km².

 

So, that's the place where you're fighting a full-on modern war! Awesome.

Basically, you are conducting a war in Queens... Yes, one of the boroughs of New York. Not New York State. Not New York City. Just one borough. Awesome.

 

At the same time...

 

DCS Georgia: 125 000km²

 

When I did the calculation, I only conted actual terra firma - terrain that is "populated" (that is, has buildings, roads, forests, and so on). So in DCS there is more actually, since your ARMA does it's "borders" through a borderless ocean rather than having to conform with reality.

 

Actually, my local commune (the smalles government division in Sweden) is Forshaga. It is 397,29km². So almost twice the size of your "huge island"? Population 11 267.

 

Shall I continue to the technical details? :)

[geloxo]

Come on... Do you really want to drive your tank from one corner to the other on the whole georgia map (such an obscene amount of Km are useless if the map is almost empty) with such a bald repetive landscape and unaligned objects or roads, and phantom trees that fly on the edged polygonal hills as in current DCS, or do you prefer to drive it on a detailed Queens map, with curvy hills, details such as stone walls, fields, bushes, properly aglined streets, signals, rivers and coastial details and all crashable and destructable...?

 

 

Or check even this one:

 

 

And the details of buildings here:

 

 

Now open DCS, drive inside a city and cry with the 128 Kb textures on those "boxes" (not buildings) and drive through the "texture trees" (not crashable objects). And don´t even pay attention to the ground texture, cause it was made for flying and is so pixelated that you will only see blurry ground. Sorry, I prefer Queens again :P (just kidding)

 

Anyway, I respect your point of view and I said future is a middle term between both but honestly Arma3 graphical engine is far away from the 10 years old refurbished Lockon terrain. DCS is superb on many other things, sure, and I´m really happy with them, but not on terrain, which is vital for a ground simulator (probably not important for an air one). Even for the recently released Huey or any other chopper module a proper ground environment is a must have. Arma 3 on the other hand is a shit for many other things and I don´t like them at all. They are just two concepts, but I would like to have the best of both in just one single product.

Edited June 27, 2013 by geloxo

[EtherealN]

My point is that the "huge map" you talk about is not big enough to simulate any armored conflict in the history of humanity.

 

I did a quick look around, and the smallest battle I could find that included active air and mechanized components was Mogadishu.

 

~1700km²

Ooops.

(And air components were sourced from outside that. Not so in ARMA.)

 

This is the huge difference: take that same picture in a simulator that allows cooperation of airborne assets at realistic ranges as well as the human control of the supported ground forces. You cannot do that in ARMA 3. Impossible. The idea of basing the active air component on Lemnos while fighting is ongoing there is, quite simply, rediculous. It's laughable. It's cartoon country.

 

As for driving a tank from one end to the other: you are the one that said the map was, I quote, "huge". Here's what I'm saying: deploying tanks to Lemnos is retarded. Conducting armored warfare on Lemnos is retarded. Thus the premise you are defending is... yeah, a cartoon. As far as simulatin actual warfare, you might as well play Battlefield.

Driving a tank from one end of the ARMA battlefield to the other takes about 45 minutes. How is that huge? That isn't even the START of a batlle. ;)

 

ARMA 3 chose Lemnos to get a good mix of suspension of disbelief while still giving a good gameplay experience for infantry and armored warfare at platoon level. But this is not warfare that would ever happen on Lemnos, simply because whoever had air superiority would JDAM the crap out of everything on the island that looked funny. And in the DCS engine, the guys that fly aircraft would see the entirety of Greece in their scopes, while the guys that fly aircraft in the ARMA engine can't even reach their operational altitude because the graphics engine doesn't have the power to support it.

 

Juist look at the picture you posted. Fadeout at 10km. How am I to use anything airborne when the graphics engine blocks me from seeing halfway through my weapon's engagement envelope? And given the size of the map, I'll overfly it in two minutes anyway...

Edited June 27, 2013 by EtherealN

[Silver_Dragon]

yehaa..... old refurbished Lockon terrain

 

Last Year images future engine.....

[EtherealN]

Anyway, I respect your point of view and I said future is a middle term between both but honestly Arma3 graphical engine is far away from the 10 years old refurbished Lockon terrain.

 

This is the thing you fail to understands.

 

In the 10 years since LOMAC, DCS has gotten bigger terrain. Not by orders of magnitude, no.

In the 10 years since OFP, ARMA has gotten bigger terrain. Not by orders of magnitude, no.

 

The problem here is that you are saying the DCS engine is "old" and various other things, towards simulating armored warfare, while holding the ARMA engine as some sort of good example.

 

Subject of thread: "DCS Tank Simulator Possible?"

 

Answer: Yes.

The engine supports everything you would need to do an A-10C level simulation of tank combat. Say that about ARMA?

The engine supports everything you would need to simulate actual warfare, without being limited to platoon level skirmishes - which is ARMA's limitation.

 

What ARMA does is give you the platoon level combat, asks you to suspend disbelief (which I happily do while in a ground vehicle), and get this wrapped in a pretty-looking graphical presentation - just don't EVER step even close to an aircraft, fixed or rotary, because suddenly you'll notice how your balls just got chopped off. :P

 

Further question is: if OFP was good enough 10 years ago - and it was! - imagine what Bohemia could have done to make the flight thing at least sort of functional, or the map at least somewhere relatively big enough to actually be home to something bigger than a domestic disturbance; if it wasn't for people drooling over screenshots and thus forcing that arcade game to stick to it's shooter maps... ;)

[leafer]

Note to self: Do not get into a verbal jousting match with EtherealN. Ever.

 

Thank you.

[stuart666]

yehaa..... old refurbished Lockon terrain

 

Last Year images future engine.....

Thats a LOT better. But Im still not seeing a lot of evidence for hull down positions. Not that every place in the world offers them, and Iraq was a pain unless someone had put in some decent prepared positions.

 

Only one way I can see this working. Have a hifi digital terrain to operate the tanks on, then have all positions generated on the map the aircraft uses. Would create some odities, but at least it would stop the map the aircraft use slowing to a crawl.

[galevsky06]

ArmaIII island as a map for DCS ? What a joke :prop:.... 20km*20km square ? :megalol:

 

You can put tanks and infants on the map, but you cannot make them play the same mission, I mean even if they are on the same server, they won't drive for one hour to join the mission objectives (no NAV shared), and they will juts attack targets (maybe others, maybe the same) in their own, with no relation to the aircraft strike..... unless you go to BF3-stylish game, where both F-18 and infants have to care about each-other. (:megalol:)

 

Even in Arma, the most serious servers just use helicos as means of tranportation for very short troops deployment (which is NOT simulation), nothing more.

 

But this is NOT what we want for DCS, of course. ;)

 

The remaining main issue is the fact that the current world is not able to provide good ground battles, due to the cheatd IA who can find you immediately when you are on the LOS, and the LOS goes throughout trees, buildings sometimes and so on....

 

Want to play J-TAC role ? You have to set your unit as invisible, in other case you won't be able to hide and mark before dying under ennemy fire. :mad: So far away to be DCS-T90 ready, isn't it ? :music_whistling:

Edited June 27, 2013 by galevsky06

[geloxo]

Guys, come on. Read my posts before firing to me like crazy. I did not say to use an Arma 3 island for DCS. I just said that the graphical engine of Arma 3 is far away from the one of DCS because it´s able to handle a huge island with huge amount of detail, and to me, the future of simulation was a mid term between both things.

 

EDGE? Sure, I want it, all of us want it. Graphics, sounds, physics, realism... All those topics are important in a simulation, not only the cockpits themselves. To feel the simulation you have to feel that you are there in some way. Now, if I take a module in DCS and enter the cockpit I feel it, but... till I start to fly and face those ugly cities, that ugly infantry that moves crouch with no animation, stay put perpendicular to the surfaces against all rules of nature, etc. I don´t want that for a tank simulator cause there you will still be closer to such kind of details.

 

Blame me if you want. I´m a customer and I know what I want for my money.

[galevsky06]

And Frosbite4 kicks in the ass ArmaIII engine for sure. But, since it is not several-countries large, there is no interest for us. Grass bends when you couch ? What for in DCS ? We don't mind, sincerely, what we want -on the contrary to what you said- is to fly over whole Georgia from one corner to the other, with great realism, but since frosbite4 engine could not be used to render so big maps regarding PC performances, we will focus on what is important as an aircraft pilot: almost true mesh, nice far and closed textures, nice 3D objects (towns, civil traffic and so on...) and we won't focus on the points that made frosbite4 and ArmaIII good engines. :smilewink:

 

Tank simulator ? I don't think that DCS is the right location to get this kind of sim, because you will have to do both jobs: air combat + ground combat, and switch between engines to get the best performances when you are on the field. It is not a deal for ED. It is not adeal for Bohemia (their ground sim is very nice for infants, but ground vehicules are far from being simulators, and I don't want to speak about aircrafts). You want a nice tank sim ? Please start to implement nice tanks units in ArmaIII, you will make benefit from a very nice environment, looking at very nice soldiers and other nice-looking vehicules. You will be able to hide behind trees and everything. What we expect from DCS environment is just montains not being 3D polygons like pyramids. :D

Edited June 27, 2013 by galevsky06

[muamshai]

After this DCS: Soldier will be soon

Your own soldier with clickable buttons. You might be scratch your balls out of sheer boredom...

...and it will come with its own hidden hot coffee mode if you decided to feel naughty with a local girl.

[galevsky06]

:lol:

[Echo38]

I just said that the graphical engine of Arma 3 is far away from the one of DCS because it´s able to handle a huge island with huge amount of detail, and to me, the future of simulation was a mid term between both things.

 

I can't believe you're serious with this, especially after EtherealN pointed out that Arma 3's island is tiny, not huge, in comparison to DCS's--and in comparison to any map that realistic fighter aircraft could reasonably operate on. Arma graphics in the Arma engine would kill your framerate if the map & render distance were large enough for realistic flight simming. It's as simple as that, really.

 

Blame me if you want. I´m a customer and I know what I want for my money.

 

You want to have your cake and eat it as well. Which is all very well and good, but there's no way it can happen. Not in this decade, anyway.

[104th_Cobra]

... I just said that the graphical engine of Arma 3 is far away from the one of DCS because it´s able to handle a huge island with huge amount of detail, and to me, the future of simulation was a mid term between both things...

 

Wait for the EDGE engine in development. It will bring DX11 with tessellation capability and multithreaded rendering. This realizes in a more efficient terrain and objects rendering, including a increase in the number of polygons: more diversified terrain and vegetation. It will rest with the developer of the theater/scenery, the responsibility to increase the number of terrain features.

For infantry or even to armored combat, it will not be practical the development of large and very detailed theaters. But there's the possibility to make a smaller one...

[NineLine]

As far as simulating Tanks, and for that matter other vehicles, I would be happy with:

 

1) Better ground vehicle physics (yes I want to jump a Humvee over an A-10)

 

2) Better/more realistic views, I want to see what the gunner sees, not just an open screen with the reticule in the middle

 

Starting with those 2 things I would pretty happy... for me it doesnt have to be a hardcore A-10 fidelity sim of a tank...

[104th_Cobra]

After this DCS: Soldier will be soon

Your own soldier with clickable buttons. You might be scratch your balls out of sheer boredom...

...and it will come with its own hidden hot coffee mode if you decided to feel naughty with a local girl.

 

:D

 

And with all objects destructible, with fancy animations like light bulbs going off with a shot, metal sounds coming from some transit signals with the respective holes animation, cows going off pieces after a automatic grenade launcher impact, feathers going off birds ripped from the sky with shotgun shots, etc, etc. :D

 

Will also be good the capability to automatically court martial and the respective virtual career termination, after an infantry platoon going berserk and slaught an entire village civilian population...

Edited June 28, 2013 by Xpto

[maturin]

 

Subject of thread: "DCS Tank Simulator Possible?"

 

Answer: Yes.

The engine supports everything you would need to do an A-10C level simulation of tank combat. Say that about ARMA?

 

The current DCS engine is crippled, as you well know. You could make a beautiful TANK in DCS, but you could never actually fight in it.

 

The game world is essentially a featureless plain. There isn't a single bump in the terrain that isn't a huge five-poly mountain, and the trees are just 2D sprites that the AI sees and shoots through. There is no promise to ever fix this, even though it has been destroying the game's flagship heli title for years and years. You NEED to have a complex gameworld to provide the battlefield with enough clutter and cover, and size is a necessary sacrifice to accomplish this. The part of warfare where you drive hundreds of kilometers towards the front is painfully boring and will never be simulated by human drivers in any sim that ever sees that light of day. You know that, and you're just wanking all over the forum with your talk of scale realism. You just can't have an entertainment product where an entire ground element does nothing but drive in a straight line as targets for the fly-boys.

 

I won't even mention the DCS engine's shitty particle effects that somehow reduce high end computers to 2fps or how the engine couldn't even use scripts until recently. DCS is hopelessly unequipped for anything resembling ground combat. Unless that tank is just a glorified chess piece for the airwar and macro strategy elements, you can forget it. It will never happen.

 

Drooling over the square footage of a map is pointless when it's all dead potential. How come I've never seen a MP map with a grand war on it? Nothing much bigger than some ArmA missions, really. Then engine can't handle much in the way of AI, even AI that does almost nothing. You might as well say that TES: Daggerfall is the perfect game for tank simulation because its map is the size of England.

 

By the way, how big are Steel Beasts maps? ArmA could match them at ease if the requisite sacrifices in terrain detail were made. Best to leave the game as an infantry simulator (it earns that title with the right mods), though. DCS is never going anywhere below 5 meters of altitude, though. The community says it wants it, but they don't really. You should have seen how they fight whenever you bring up the idiotic tree issue.

Edited June 28, 2013 by maturin

[geloxo]

That´s correct. I see it´s time to reduce size but increase the overall quality. Anyway, 1000km for a tank or even a chopper means around 10h driving or flying. Who is going to stay put for 10h in a mission? Not me at least. I love simulation but I have a life to enjoy too. If EDGE is the solution, go for it. Eagle has my money granted. Currently I have only seen nice old pics of what someday would be a product but 0 interest in releasing it. Instead we have jet another FC release planned (so, again, same thing, same history, same toys). At that speed the process runs with EDGE it would be complete when next gen of standards are set on the market and then it will be outdated just when released. If engine came to the limits, then no more discussion here. No prob, say it and we will stop dreaming, and paying, of course. Let´s squeeze what we have till it dies and people gets bored of it. There will be always a Georgia map in the engine for the people who prefer the other alternative or is happy with it but as maturin said I have not seen so many giant battles on the servers so far. I have been playing missions for 5h and I had pain on my ass after it, so... come on.. don´t tell me that I even need more km in a map to enjoy a mission cause I don´t really need them.

 

In 2013, instead, I honestly expect photorealistic and DEM terrains, detailed environments, detailed cockpits, realistic sounds, realistic navigation and realistic physics. It costs 80€ instead of 40€ to have an improved simulation engine? Taking into account the money a typical simmer spends on just sticks or home cockpits complements... that´s the smallest problem one may face. I don´t care about FPS. I will be always able to tune settings lower. The problem is that now, I can´t tune them higher even if my PC allowed that :-(

Edited June 28, 2013 by geloxo

[agrasyuk]

After this DCS: Soldier will be soon

Your own soldier with clickable buttons. You might be scratch your balls out of sheer boredom...

...and it will come with its own hidden hot coffee mode if you decided to feel naughty with a local girl.

 

 

:lol:

[Smartie]

Voted yes, a fully featured DCS tank simulator would be awesome!