Name suggestions for the new game engine

[Aapje]

DCS has a bigger player base, and outsources way more work to third parties, so that's not really a good comparison. They are also only ahead in some ways, but lag behind in other ways.

 

And the biggest reason to switch to a new engine is not that they couldn't replace big parts of the engine, but that it would be incompatible with the old planes and perhaps also maps, old campaigns, old missions, etc.  They don't have the means to redo large parts of the old content for free.

 

Then the choice to make a big leap with the engine provides a big opportunity to generate a lot more sales than for a module for an aging engine, and the new engine can support new modules for another 10 years hopefully, so this allows for investments that were hard to justify for the old engine, like replacing the GUI.

 

You seem to think that these companies have infinite resources, and that you are owed what you want. But in reality, there needs to be a business case, these companies need to make do with a limited numbers of developers, and they all have their expertise (and things they are not so good at), etc.

 

Ultimately, the better the new game and future modules will sell, the more money is available for more improvements to the current engine, etc.

[AEthelraedUnraed]

2 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Is it? Because I've seen some "unfixable" issues, and features that are in demand, but supposedly unfeasible to implement on GB engine.

And that's why it's being upgraded. No-one disputes that the current engine cannot handle everything. Still that doesn't mean that rewriting an engine is somehow by definition a better choice than upgrading one.

 

All the things in IL2 that I can think of that couldn't be done in the current engine version, are already confirmed to be fixed/improved in the new version. Please let us know if you're still missing some engine-related functionality that still isn't fixed in Korea (e.g. no flyable 4-engine bombers and no clickpits are not engine-related). Otherwise I'd be curious to hear why you think the IL2 engine is not modular enough.

 

2 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

DCS devs seem perfectly capable of completely overhauling their rendering engine to use Vulkan, adding DLSS and multithreading. Il-2 devs seem to be having trouble unlinking the guns on the Hs 129, despite having added the third trigger. Tech-wise, the latter sim does seem to lag behind, too.

Come on; what do you think the Devs are doing now? They're just as hard at work upgrading the IL2 engine. I can't remember they've said anything about DLSS one way or another, but they've already stated the Korea graphics engine uses DX12 and their physics engine has better threading in place (it's completely false that IL2:GB is singlethreaded but its threading performance could be improved - and is!). So your comparison between an IL2 team that is unwilling or incapable to solve even trivial issues on a severely outdated engine, versus a DCS team that keeps their engine up-to-date almost without effort, is at its best out of touch with reality.

Edited April 22 by AEthelraedUnraed

[Dragon1-1]

I'll believe when it I see it. DX12 is a questionable choice, from what I heard, Vulkan tends to work better, at least if it's implemented right (it requires doing a lot of things "by hand"). As for the others, we'll see. We don't actually know how much is actually fixed in Korea, and how many issues are merely painted over. I've seen a few "upgrades" to old engines that just piled up additional features onto a pre-existing mountain of technical debt. Does "better threading" mean "we've tweaked the half-baked system we've got in place now" or "we ripped the whole thing out and rewrote it to a modern, scalable architecture"? 

 

Four engine aircraft and especially clickable cockpits are a dev philosophy problem, usually even harder to fix than any engine issues... If the dev team doesn't think it's a problem, it's unlikely to ever get fixed.

[Dutch2]

For PCVR I do prefer DirectX12.x

Btw, In an old video 1c explains they are gong to use DirectX12

Edited April 23 by Dutch2

[Aapje]

9 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

I'll believe when it I see it. DX12 is a questionable choice, from what I heard, Vulkan tends to work better, at least if it's implemented right (it requires doing a lot of things "by hand").

 

From what I've seen, there's not much in it, and what matters most is how well the developers use the API.

 

9 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Four engine aircraft and especially clickable cockpits are a dev philosophy problem, usually even harder to fix than any engine issues... If the dev team doesn't think it's a problem, it's unlikely to ever get fixed.

 

It's a choice with upsides and downsides, not a bug. And the devs are entitled to their own philosophy of what the game should be.

[AEthelraedUnraed]

23 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

DX12 is a questionable choice, from what I heard, Vulkan tends to work better, at least if it's implemented right (it requires doing a lot of things "by hand").

Then you've heard wrong. Depending on what you want to do, either can be the better option. Vulkan is faster, certainly, since it adds less overhead. But more overhead can also be a good thing since it takes work away from the developers, freeing time to implement optimisations elsewhere. It's exactly as Aapje says: both are good, as long as the Devs implement it correctly.

 

23 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Does "better threading" mean "we've tweaked the half-baked system we've got in place now" or "we ripped the whole thing out and rewrote it to a modern, scalable architecture"?

Again, tweaking a half-baked system does not mean that the tweaked version is bad. Nor does rewriting a system to a modern, scalable architecture mean that it's good.

This goes especially if you're on a limited budget and completely rewriting a system may mean that you're forced to deliver it half-baked because you've run out of time or money.

 

23 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Four engine aircraft [...]

Playable four engine aircraft are a financial choice. As the Devs have said many times, implementing large bombers is much more work than implementing a single-seat fighter. I think they mentioned four times as much work. What do you think earns them more revenue: four fighters, or one bomber?

 

23 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

[...] and especially clickable cockpits are a dev philosophy problem, usually even harder to fix than any engine issues... If the dev team doesn't think it's a problem, it's unlikely to ever get fixed.

I'd call it a "design choice" rather than "dev philosophy." Whether or not you see it as a problem is your own opinion. Personally I'm fine with their decision, since it does mean that they don't need to simulate every single system and hence I can buy a module of 8 aircraft plus a map for less money than a single DCS plane. But yeah, I can see why people would like to have clickpits. That's why it's great that there's more than one combat flight sim on the market, isn't it?

[Dragon1-1]

51 minutes ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

Vulkan is faster, certainly, since it adds less overhead.[...]

I'll stop you right here. Handwaving about dev time for some nebulous "optimizations" will never compensate for the fact that Vulkan is just. plain. faster. Full stop, end of the story. DX12 can never be as optimized as Vulkan can, precisely because of extra overhead. Unless the devs botch the Vulkan implementation completely, it'll be faster, and that's what matters to the players. Also, Vulkan prevents you from reusing older DX code, which prevents situations in which old, bad code is reused to save time in short term. In long term, Vulkan would almost certainly pay off.

52 minutes ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

Again, tweaking a half-baked system does not mean that the tweaked version is bad.

It means it's still half-baked, just tweaked. All that matters is whether you have a good base to built upon. A system that's lacking in its core implementation, then hacked into functionality will never be as reliable, efficient and maintainable as one that's released half-baked, but built on solid, maintainable, extendable modern framework. Even if it's not entirely finished by the time it's deployed, it's preferable unless they'd abandon it in a half-finished state, or give in to implementing kludges to save time, then building upon them (still, if the foundation itself is solid, it might be possible to rework those later).

 

You're attempting to rationalize poor development practices, but in truth, doing the Right Thing from the start saves both dev time and money, at least in long run. If you have a kludge for your foundations, most of dev time will be spent attempting to work around it, or simply get it to behave. Designing the right foundation from the start might be a daunting task, but it pays for itself comparing to trying to maintain and extend a teetering heap of technical debt.

1 hour ago, AEthelraedUnraed said:

I'd call it a "design choice" rather than "dev philosophy." Whether or not you see it as a problem is your own opinion. Personally I'm fine with their decision, since it does mean that they don't need to simulate every single system and hence I can buy a module of 8 aircraft plus a map for less money than a single DCS plane. But yeah, I can see why people would like to have clickpits. That's why it's great that there's more than one combat flight sim on the market, isn't it?

Yeah, a grand total of two that support VR, three if you're on pancake (why is CLOD VR always "just around the corner"?). With time periods that scarcely overlap, I might add. Very competitive market, isn't it?

 

WWII aircraft systems are reasonably simple. It's not like the F-16, where you have half a million MFD pages. Most clickability in WWII comes up during engine start, with various means of engine priming, starter systems and electric power. CLOD has clickable cockpits and they don't price their modules like DCS does. Mostly, it would allow finer control of some specific systems and remove some annoyances like the "automatic" fuel gauge switching. 

[LukeFF]

Alright, we've gone way off-course with this one. Design decisions have been made by the team, and they are confident in those choices.