DCS

[dburne]

On 1/7/2020 at 4:42 PM, Gambit21 said:

 

Here's my problem.

I don't have the time in my life to actually learn how to fly a modern jet.

I want just enough complexity so that I can pretend that I know how to fly an F-16 and operate it's systems, without actually having to know how to operate all it's systems.

The latter is sounds great in theory, and it's all...you know "hard core" and stuff, but 'life' doesn't allow for this...it just doesn't. Maybe if I was single and nothing better to do.

 

I used to study the Su-27 and F-16 systems on my lunch breaks at work back in the day before going home to practice what I read about...it was like taking a college class.

I just cant' do that anymore

 

So something like the MiG 15 is right up my alley...in theory.

I need at least a fully populated air show if not a Korea map and assets. 

 

Someday down the road I may get the F-14, but I doubt it. It's another "great in theory" equation for me .

The reality is that the novelty will wear off, and I'll forget all my key binds, procedures etc after letting it go for a few weeks and trying to fly it again...like I see happen to others on here over and over and over again with just about every DCS aircraft.

 

So basically WWII is my jam, and even that I don't have time to fly right now.

 

I can relate to where you are coming from.

I have a ridiculous number of hours put into the Hornet now, learning all it's systems to hopefully someday be able to competently fly and fight in it.

It has both been fun ride so far, but a frustrating one at the same time. I am getting there though and determined to see it through. About all I have left is the weapons  and countermeasures systems. 

And of course there is IL-2 which is my # 1 so I put more time in it which takes away from my learning time on the Hornet. Spent about 3 hours with the Hornet yesterday and about 4 hours flying my IL-2 Career today.

 

However I have the benefit of being old and  retired with a lot of time on my hands, but even with that it is still taking me quite a long time. I suppose I would get there a lot quicker if not for IL-2, but that won't happen. Plus last week I ended up playing Asgard's Wrath all week which did not help...

 

Edited January 9, 2020 by dburne

[Bremspropeller]

The cool thing about the F-16 is that it's an airplane for dummies (like me): Throw a hand full of switches and you're going.

Just put everything in the forward/upward/outboard position and you're pretty much good to go. That's literally how I start the MiG-21, BTW.

 

Seriously: The F-16 is quite easy to learn if you skip the BITs and all the stuff you don't have to worry about if you can't die for real.

The F-18, however, is a royal pain in the butt. You can also launch without a lot of switches thrown, but the weapons are a lot of keystroking.

It's got nice, big colour MFDs, though. And that greek-letter. What's it called? I believe it's called ALPHA.

 

Don't you just like parking at 50° AoA, reading 60KCAS on the HUD and walking the jet with the throttles?

Edited January 9, 2020 by Bremspropeller

[CanadaOne]

That's one reason I life the F5E. The panel is like operating an old oven. I get to break the sound barrier and launch missiles and don't feel like I have reset an iPod while doing it. And it can land on carriers and has a drag chute system for landing. I love that stuff.

 

The Harrier is more complicated, but kinda straight forward and with enough techno to make it cool. And the hovering thing is just too much fun.

[Sharpe43]

Im starting to suspect that Pacfic news will be overshadowed, today!

[RedKestrel]

On 1/7/2020 at 10:26 AM, CanadaOne said:

Well I'm still holding my breath for an F-104.

 

Ya gotta dream, baby. 

Someone just needs to mod an AMRAAM to be pilotable, then you got a Missile with a Man In It. 
/more survivable than flying F-104s 

[Taxman]

2 hours ago, Sharpe43 said:

Im starting to suspect that Pacfic news will be overshadowed, today!

I just checked the DCS forum for the weekly update news letter.  It is a lengthy one and it does include some Pacific map news and more information on WW11 damage model and the Channel map time period of 1939 to 1945.

 

The real question  is how many years before release and the proper plane set for 1939 to 1945?

[ROCKET_KNUT]

26 minutes ago, Taxman said:

The real question  is how many years before release and the proper plane set for 1939 to 1945?

 

Knowing DCS´s pace when it comes to releases, this is avalid question. I guess they didn´t call it "DCS World 2020 and Beyond" for nothing... ?

Don´t get me wrong, I´m glad they do that Channel map and I´m looking forward to it, but I don´t think it will drop this year. A complete plane set? Who knows...

[CanadaOne]

It's a flightsim, we have access to it now, it does a lot of pretty cool things in an enjoyable way, and if people don't like it they can fly a variety of high-fidelity planes over multiple maps with really nice eye candy in that other sim over at itdoesntexist.com.

 

 

[LuftManu]

That new map announced for Delay Combat Simulator is dissapointing. It's not free so it will divide furthermore the player base. The area is too small, most action was on the South or inland for the V-2 sites. Instead of trying to gather more players they end up doing what many people say, turning in circles gathering cash in the process. It is not that I dislike it but it is not the saviour many believe it is. It could be fun but reality is this.

 

This is the detailed map area

 

Sorry, but no wonder sim with allmighty B-17s and long range or superduper Pacific everybody wants. There is only one real sim in the park now with the ww2 combat theme, maybe Tobruk later and it will be two.

Edited January 10, 2020 by LF_Gallahad

[CanadaOne]

Look at the detail and textures on the map. That's pretty damn good.

 

 

[DD_Arthur]

Now that is a map crying out for a Spit mk 1 and an emil?

[Rolling_Thunder]

There'll be kurfürst over the white cliffs of Dover. I dont get why they dont make a map for the available aircraft?

They have the 2 iconic korean war aircraft and they ignore them. 2 new maps, a missed opportunity.

The channel map? Why not a rheinland to go with the WW2 planeset? I just don't get it, sure it looks good but c'mon. There are no "late 30s" aircraft.

Who the f**k comes up with these ideas?

[LukeFF]

1 hour ago, DD_Arthur said:

Now that is a map crying out for a Spit mk 1 and an emil?

 

Bonus points if anyone can guess what airfield that is.  

[kestrel79]

So they have the Normandy Map, and now a Channel Map? Don't those two cover the same ground in a few places? You'd think they'd spread it out a bit, or make a map for the planes they have in game. This seems odd to me...but it does look very nice.

[bzc3lk]

30 minutes ago, LukeFF said:

 

Bonus points if anyone can guess what airfield that is.  

 

RAF Detling

 

https://frontlineulster.co.uk/raf-detling/

 

 

Edited January 10, 2020 by bzc3lk

[SYN_Vander]

19 minutes ago, kestrel79 said:

So they have the Normandy Map, and now a Channel Map? Don't those two cover the same ground in a few places? You'd think they'd spread it out a bit, or make a map for the planes they have in game. This seems odd to me...but it does look very nice.

 

Well, for one, the distance between UK and France is quite different. I have flown DCS missions where I took off from UK and escorted B-17's to Caen and it does take a lot more time than I thought to cross the Channel. It shouldn't be a problem for SP missions, but for MP I predict a Channel Map focusing around Dover / Calais will be a lot more popular than the current DCS Normandy map!

 

It's good that the proposed map for IL2 covers more area to the North East of Normandy for this very reason.

Edited January 10, 2020 by SYN_Vander

[DD_Arthur]

37 minutes ago, LukeFF said:

 

Bonus points if anyone can guess what airfield that is.  

Yep. It’s Detling. Pity they’ve given Manston a concrete runway.  That makes it ‘44

[CanadaOne]

Apparently the map gets a 30% pre-order discount in February. With ground textures like that I'm definitely in.

 

 

[LLv34_Flanker]

S! 

 

Will definitely get the map. Also buying the P-47D. It looks marvellous. Good to have options. Going Vulkan also is interesting, never have enough performance

[Uufflakke]

13 hours ago, CanadaOne said:

Look at the detail and textures on the map. That's pretty damn good.

 

 

That single screenshot represents Europe far much better than the entire BOBP map.

 

Talking about details...

C'est magnifique.

 

[CanadaOne]

I was wondering if they were getting help from ORBX.

 

A map like that will beat the sh-t out of our hardware, but I don't care. With FS2020 coming, and the possibility of multiple cores CPU being utilized, a bunch of us will be finding the cash to get a honking good CPU. Maybe a 3900X is a good idea.

[Guest deleted@50488]

AFAIK Orbx is not coorperating with ED.

[CanadaOne]

Just mentioned it because they have alluded to helping with other sims, perhaps not just FSX, X-11, and FS2.

 

Let them help out here, I'll buy it!

[ZachariasX]

On 1/10/2020 at 8:43 PM, CanadaOne said:

Look at the detail and textures on the map. That's pretty damn good.

It‘s a pretty damn small map. I‘m honestly not very impressed by getting the same flat napkin over and over again. Yes, it has more colors since Their Finest Hour, but you cannot do thing you couldn’t do back then. In that price range, that‘s not what you want for 2020. For that price.

 

And yes, they are great in making screenshots and even way more great in making videos.

 

But looking at FS2020, this looks like Pong.

[Picchio]

25 minutes ago, ZachariasX said:

It‘s a pretty damn small map. I‘m honestly not very impressed by getting the same flat napkin over and over again. Yes, it has more colors since Their Finest Hour, but you cannot do thing you couldn’t do back then. In that price range, that‘s not what you want for 2020. For that price.

 

And yes, they are great in making screenshots and even way more great in making videos.

 

But looking at FS2020, this looks like Pong.

 

[simfan2015]

Looking at fs2020 I think that we are more likely looking at napkins and... Pong! With DCS World and il-2 maps we can at least interact in some ways, destroy, move stuff! The fs2020 maps... Wait and see if those are not only great looking placeholders. Dunno for sure of course, but I would not be at all surprised ! I have seen too many truly dead scenery in sims. At least the TC map is nothing like that. 

Edited January 11, 2020 by simfan2015

[CanadaOne]

1 hour ago, ZachariasX said:

It‘s a pretty damn small map. I‘m honestly not very impressed by getting the same flat napkin over and over again. Yes, it has more colors since Their Finest Hour, but you cannot do thing you couldn’t do back then. In that price range, that‘s not what you want for 2020. For that price.

 

And yes, they are great in making screenshots and even way more great in making videos.

 

But looking at FS2020, this looks like Pong.

 

Yeah, but it's Pong with 2000lb laser guided bombs.

 

Viva la difference!

[Gambit21]

1 hour ago, CanadaOne said:

 

Yeah, but it's Pong with 2000lb laser guided bombs.

 

 

[ZachariasX]

It‘ does look great for making screenies and to get to know and operate your plane. But that is about it.

 

The fact that they get away will selling „maps“ instead of a place on a world is probably telling as much about us as customer demographics as it tells about business rationale.

 

While I remain deeply impressed about some of their modules (I own most of their offerings), over time I get less and less tolerant to the game not providing in the very least a world that we live in. If you care about the look of airfields or about balconies on city buildings, clearly, there is little difference and I see it looks pretty there. But for everything else, you get sort of the real looks only with cheats. What is worst, they like dawn and dusk screenies. It makes for nice colors. Too bad you can never get that right on a flat napkin. It‘s simple geometry. The same geometry that makes all ingame maps differing from actual distances.

 

You can put as many nice textures and shadings on the Pong bars. It still is Pong.

 

EDIT: I‘m trying to imagine the crowds reaction is MS came up with grand screenies of MS2020 and then on a footnote mentioning that everything you see is taking place on flat 0.25 mio. km2 maps.

Edited January 12, 2020 by ZachariasX

[ZachariasX]

11 hours ago, Picchio said:

 

I'm sure that flat earthlings from all around the globe have different priorities than I have in what makes a beautiful map. But it's just this:

 

 

I do acknowlegde however that when being creative, that napkin offers unlimited possibilities, you could even simulate an Apollo mission. Here:

Spoiler

 

It's just not my cup of tea. YMMV.

[CanadaOne]

4 hours ago, ZachariasX said:

It‘ does look great for making screenies and to get to know and operate your plane. But that is about it.

 

The fact that they get away will selling „maps“ instead of a place on a world is probably telling as much about us as customer demographics as it tells about business rationale.

 

While I remain deeply impressed about some of their modules (I own most of their offerings), over time I get less and less tolerant to the game not providing in the very least a world that we live in. If you care about the look of airfields or about balconies on city buildings, clearly, there is little difference and I see it looks pretty there. But for everything else, you get sort of the real looks only with cheats. What is worst, they like dawn and dusk screenies. It makes for nice colors. Too bad you can never get that right on a flat napkin. It‘s simple geometry. The same geometry that makes all ingame maps differing from actual distances.

 

You can put as many nice textures and shadings on the Pong bars. It still is Pong.

 

EDIT: I‘m trying to imagine the crowds reaction is MS came up with grand screenies of MS2020 and then on a footnote mentioning that everything you see is taking place on flat 0.25 mio. km2 maps.

 

You have me curious now - what isn't Pong?

 

And what is a "place on a world" as opposed to a map?

 

 

[Bremspropeller]

Be advised, I'm wearing my special-issue sunday's Pong-Thong today.

[Trooper117]

Trying not to picture that last remark!  

[ZachariasX]

1 hour ago, CanadaOne said:

You have me curious now - what isn't Pong?

 

1 hour ago, CanadaOne said:

And what is a "place on a world" as opposed to a map?

 

Ok. Let's go through the semantics of it. I take the example above, where I selected Madagascar as a battleground to finally provide a battle for this series where Great Britain can bomb its arch enemy France without any German encroachment whatsoever. (We could have Lysanders for that one!)

 

 

You can see that Madagascar is a certain place on earth. In terms of a simulator, it would represent the scenery. It could (and would!) have a higher LOD then the rest of the globe. The map however is just that, a flat projection of a certain place on earth at more or less eqial LOD. Whether the scale is 1:20'000 or 1:1 is plain arbitary, it remains a flat projection. This flat projection may or may not contain a relief. Either way, it is just a map. And no scenery. You can see that a map in no way whatsoever resembles our world.

 

Sitting on that flat napkin instead of a round world will give you a greatly altered perspective and different lightning than you have on a round one.

 

There is of course a good reason to opt for a map instead of a scenery for a flight simulator. If it's for instance the year 1983, and all you can draw are 100 objects. Then those objects would be so close to each other that your play pen is small enough to not differ noticeably from what it would be if it was a scenery on a globe (of equal little detail). Also you do not have the colors to really reflect correct lightning, hence even that problem is no issue. We see, then, all is fine. And thus we get used to those "maps".

But now, we can draw so many things, so far out that what was a workable short cut to make things work simply makes any real depiction impossible. Even worse, it limits basic gameplay in a grotesque manner. In 1983, nobody would take a real map to navigate in a computer game. In 2020, it's different. Yet some still produce environments where it is not possible to make maps such that they match the real world.

 

As long as the play pen can be kept small due to slow moving actors, it is a tolerable deficit. But it begins to show. Also just being able to load one "map" limits your gameplay in a most severe manner, only rivalled by "just being able to load one plane type oer mission". How would you like that?

 

Great Battles Series spwaned from a wery small home brew project and you can clearly see that in such things. For Rise of Flight, it was an easy choice to be a flat earther. It makes the map/mission editor simpler, everything on that map was hand drawn anyway. Who could have thought back then what it would mature into? I think Neoqb can be forgiven for such. But a company like ED redoing their entire sim engine and... stay with the napkin? Just gaga. It was the decision to never produce a true flight simulator. Simulating planes seem to be good enough.

 

Even more hilarious is people defending that flat napkin, when there is actually no upside whatsoever to it. It is not like that we have 455 FPS because it is flat. As if you said for any shooter game, binary space partitioning is the best and we should NEVER do different, as we can do without odd angles and inside is better anyway.

 

[CanadaOne]

Cool.

 

And it's legal here too.

[DD_Arthur]

Canada has legalised dope and napkins?    Holy sh@t the sky will surely fall!?.                                      

Oh yeah,  perhaps I dreamt this but   I’m sure Han has stated in the past that the maps are placed on a globe otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to model the curvature of the earth.....

[Jaws2002]

22 minutes ago, DD_Arthur said:

Canada has legalised dope and napkins?    Holy sh@t the sky will surely fall!?.                                      

Oh yeah,  perhaps I dreamt this but   I’m sure Han has stated in the past that the maps are placed on a globe otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to model the curvature of the earth.....

 

 

Of all Combat flight sims out there today, only Cliffs of Dover modeled the maps as part of a globe. All other combat flight sims are using flat maps. 

That and the great lighting engine gave the early cLOD such a realistic look....Then, after Oleg left, Ilya got his dirty boots and color blind programmers, in the lighting engine and turned everything in a gray murky mess, with cheap HDR in place of lighting engine. ?

 

Edited January 12, 2020 by Jaws2002

[DD_Arthur]

36 minutes ago, Jaws2002 said:

....Then, after Oleg left, Ilya got his dirty boots and color blind programmers, in the lighting engine and turned everything in a gray murky mess, with cheap HDR in place of lighting engine. ?

 

Was that the second patch issued after the initial release? 

I seem to remember a vain attempt to raise fps and overall 'fluidity' by dipping the game in a large vat of human urine.  A yellow, murky mess.

 

But I still 'seem' to remember Han saying they modelled a globe.  Was it during the Q & A session he did with Jason?

 

I'm prepared to admit I might be talking out of my backside.  I wonder if lukeff  knows?

Edited January 12, 2020 by DD_Arthur

[Jaws2002]

 

 

23 minutes ago, DD_Arthur said:

Was that the second patch issued after the initial release? 

I seem to remember a vain attempt to raise fps and overall 'fluidity' by dipping the game in a large vat of human urine.  A yellow, murky mess.

 

 Yep. something like that. It wasn't only about fps.   He wanted to create the "English smog" and ruined all the game for it. When Team Fusion took over the game I had high hopes to see that gorgeous lighting engine brought back to the game, but With time i realized the guys in charge of how the game looks are more interested in old photos and old gun camera footage, than how the real world actually looks.

 

23 minutes ago, DD_Arthur said:

But I still 'seem' to remember Han saying they modelled a globe.  Was it during the Q & A session he did with Jason?

 

I'm prepared to admit I might be talking out of my backside.  I wonder if lukeff  knows?

 

 

Nope. This game is using flat maps.

Edited January 12, 2020 by Jaws2002

[Monostripezebra]

I am more preparing for the kiowa.