Mission Scale - Guidelines for multiplayer and single player

I browsed a little for guidelines on recommended mission scale, but came back with nothing. I expected that something on this topic would be available from ED itself considering how much whining wrong use of ME can cause on forums :D

So I've been now involved with DCS for about 2,5 years, of which 2 years I'm also making multiplayer missions for my clan and units within. In that 2 years, I really spend quite a lot of time learning mission making, scripts, etc, but I never came across such document.

I think this is extremely important and it surprises a little that this is not already part of DCS manual on mission making?

Fact is, that we the non-professional mission makers, probably get very playful while making missions and are most likely breaking certain boundaries on number of units, triggers, etc. that may be known to professional mission makers that need to comply with ED standards while publishing new campaigns.

So, I ran mission generator for 10-15 times, both sides, and all units maxed out, hard difficulty, me+wingmen, to see what numbers I will get there.

Conclusion:

- mission will generate from 130 to 300 units (depends a lot on players aircraft, A-10C tends to give higher number of total units placed)

- 10 once score triggers

- group size is never more than 4 units

And this is single player mission, so I can only imagine that multiplayer limitations would be even lower due to complexity that is added with having clients connecting from all around the certain region.

Considering DCS is in constant development, and I'm really excited about things to come, I'm sure that making certain limitations / recommendations known would help a lot to community, just like guys who need to provide support to all our whining. :D

If you can point me in right direction, or share experience, I would be super grateful.

Personally, I'm trying to reduce numbers as much as possible and add complexity through teamwork and precision in executing mission tasking.

In single player, even 100 units can make up super awesome mission with a lot of things happening and things to destroy, however when you need to prepare mission for 30-40 players, demand on unit numbers can grow quite exponentially.

One would expect that if servers support up to 100 players this days, that this 100 players need to have something to do, but is it really smart to have 100 players in one mission?

Hopefully, ED guys can chip in some wisdom as well, so that we can try follow this rules and at least be aware that what is "go" or "no go".

It would be really great to know:

- what is biggest stress for performance in different environments (SP, MP),

- are there any limitations of certain units (example: recommended max # of radar SAMs 5 at any time),

- max # of triggers, (by type, complexity)

- moving units vs stationary,

- late activated units,

- AI aircraft starting cold from ground vs air started...

- AI units vs same static units

- group sizes (air, ground, sea)

- list could go for quite some time ...

Thanks to everyone for feedback.

Multiple long AI routes, long range RADAR SAMs, and Artillery are known performance killers...as DCS is still very much in development and performance is largely dependent on the user's PC I think you'd have a difficult time pinning down hard limits on things though.

I can say from my own experience that I've run missions with hundreds if not thousands of units without any game-breaking issues directly related to unit quantities. I have designed several total war scenarios for my group that encompassed all of Abkhazia/South Ossetia/Southern Russia with reasonably realistic air defense setups and enemy artillery.

I will add that you will want a dedicated server machine if you start getting into larger scale ops, but again; that unit number and player count where you start to encounter performance issues is more going to come down to the indvidual user's PC than any hard limits in the software.

I can say from my own experience that I've run missions with hundreds if not thousands of units without any game-breaking issues directly related to unit quantities.

Wow, thousand is really huge number. I've read your responses in similar thread.

If we presume availability of dedicated server and all clients connected to MP server having equally good quality of internet, (which I know, both is a big assumption), could user with low-end PC cause mission to have performance issues?

In multiplayer, as long as the server is handling things fine a person with performance issues will only affect themselves. You may see warping etc. but only for the problem client.