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DCS Tank Simulator Possible?


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DCS Tank Simulator Possible?  

310 members have voted

  1. 1. DCS Tank Simulator Possible?

    • Yes
      268
    • No
      43


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Generationally I don't think we're at the tech level where our ambitions can be met. Part of it is that the insanely huge focus on console based game design is limiting a lot of what can happen in PC gaming. It basically freezes the vast majority of game design in a single iteration of hardware for 5+ years and within a few years most games are becoming endeavors to bootstrap new graphical improvements into hardware that can't really take it. You end up with very limited design focus.

 

This doesn't mean exciting things don't happen, it does mean though that very very few companies are actually putting the money into making it happen. As much as we have our love affairs with one company or another, the harsh reality is that there just isn't much work being put into hardcore realism gaming.

 

Who makes good modern jet fighter sims? ED. Who did the whole WW2 fighter sim thing? Well there were a number of companies, but that was before the sim market fell on its ass and disappeared. Today, its basically Oleg and IL2: Cliffs of Dover or whatever which is pretty massively disappointing. All other combat flight sims are basically arcade nonsense by comparison, and the shift towards free to play mass market games that can be hopped into and enjoyed in 15 minute chunks doesn't exactly focus the existing market into anything close to realizing the massive dynamic world potential that exists in even the hardware we have.

 

Oh yea, and civilian flight simming? Well MSFS is dead and the massive existing community is limping along with a game from 2005 while X-Plane has its own share of limitations that don't look like they're gonna change anytime soon.

 

And lets look at hardware. Well we have basically seen video cards stall where less than 10 years ago we saw some pretty rapid iterative improvements happening every year. Now things are stable, so lets not expect a whole lot of new stuff there, but then thats not really the problem, and it never was.

 

The big shift has been FINALLY that 64 bit architecture has taken over, finally. Multicore CPUs are now being used properly along side oodles of ram. Remember the good old days when you could have 4 gigs of ram and only 3.5 of it was gonna get used because the other 512 had to be used by the video card? Thankfully we're past that, but sadly software isn't fully caught up.

 

How many games today are actually multi-core ready? How many REALLY take advantage of this? Well sadly software is lingering in some half way not really there thing where all this great hardware we have isn't properly exploited in many cases, at least for the amateurs like us. Its a slow process while legacy dependencies are shucked off and we get proper multi core software happening, but its really stifled what can happen.

 

Sadly DCS is a legacy product. Its still clinging to dependencies from the 32bit era and as such we're looking at some problems there. FSX is a single core slave, and even the Lockheed Martin continuation of it hasn't been fixed in this regard.

 

Lastly, even if hardware and software could finally get to be good friends, the design that happens won't make it easy for the "big thinkers" to really take advantage of a lot of it. If you're building a normal crappy $40 FPS dungeon crawler you can just buy the latest version of the Cry engine or the Unreal engine or whatever, and go at it. You can make a pretty decent game, but the limitations are all within the parameters of normal mainstream gaming, so thats not a problem. You can't really take these engines, that were developed with millions of dollars, and just turn them into the games that support what we want to see.

 

If you could get some mad billionaire to drop insane dollars into making the ultimate combined arms hard sim then it could happen. Right now, I don't see it being a reality. We're CRAZY if we think that we can get even a remotely realistic combined arms game going. Arma 3 is about it right now. The aircraft are basically crap compared to DCS or any legit sim, but their role in the infantry game is much more realistic than ironically the excellent DCS aircraft are against the insanely unrealistic ground environment that they have to cope with.

 

So, right now realism in Modern flight sims has one real company working on the supporting structures. WW2 has 1 I guess ( I'm not up to date on whats happening with Oleg and IL-2), There's 1.5 with civil aviation, because Lockheed Martin... well they're not exactly targeting the lowly casual simmer, and infantry basically has one good one and a bunch of half assed semi realistic ones. Tanks you get one.

 

Really, if you think about it we get about 1 seriously contender in any definable category of realism gaming. That means that we're expecting 1 company to do the hard work of driving forward the tech of a whole genre. Thats not how you really see revolution. Thats a recipe for marginally improving the status quo over time, as most of these companies do, quite well.

 

Whats perplexing though is how you get a game like Falcon BMS doing it amazing dynamic campaign all them years ago, and yet today we can't do it. I guess that says something about money, will, and design.

Warning: Nothing I say is automatically correct, even if I think it is.

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Whats perplexing though is how you get a game like Falcon BMS doing it amazing dynamic campaign all them years ago, and yet today we can't do it. I guess that says something about money, will, and design.

 

Falcon BMS did not.

 

Falcon 4, developed by Microprose, did.

That company does not exist anymore. Figure. :)

Indeed, the guy who made those portions has said he wouldn't do it that way if he started such a project now, based specifically on his experience of working on making a DC.

 

While I would personally disagree that anyone, any time, has ever made an "amazing" dynamic campaign, there's no hard limitation against doing it. But when it comes to making a good return on investment from such endeavours, that is when things get interesting - and Falcon is not a good example here because... Well, Microprose is dead, and the people that bought the rights and put out F4AF... Well... Yeah. ;)

 

Obviously though, this has all been gone through a couple hundred times in the threads that deal with DCs.

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Daniel "EtherealN" Agorander | Даниэль "эфирныйн" Агорандер

Intel i7 2600K @ 4.4GHz, ASUS Sabertooth P67, 8GB Corsair Vengeance @ 1600MHz, ASUS GTX 560Ti DirectCU II 1GB, Samsung 830series 512GB SSD, Corsair AX850w, two BENQ screens and TM HOTAS Warthog

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Falcon BMS did not.

 

Falcon 4, developed by Microprose, did.

Fair enough, I got my falcons mixed up. :music_whistling:

 

Indeed, the guy who made those portions has said he wouldn't do it that way if he started such a project now, based specifically on his experience of working on making a DC.

Doesn't change its relevance, it just means that nobody used that experience to build on it. Since nobody has done much of any work on such a concept since its hard to judge it fairly.

 

Its really the tragedy of the hardcore simmer's world that so much potential existed, and many great ideas started, and so much of it died because the money just stopped being available. A better way to make a buck in the growing gaming market emerged. How many start up simming companies are there? I don't even know one. Pretty much anybody still in the simming genre has been doing it a fair while, meaning its rather hard for them to find the capital to restart and build a new engine which is mainly why I think nothing really changed quickly in simming. The dangers involved in making radical new things happen are fatal if no revenue stream come as a result.

 

So far as I can tell most of the money in mainstream gaming these days is spent on parasitic DRM, Free to Play servers, and developing newer and deeper blue filters for the game world.

 

My experience also has been that if you try and use the words "Dynamic" or "Sandbox" in a mainstream gaming forum you get flamed.

Warning: Nothing I say is automatically correct, even if I think it is.

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Its really the tragedy of the hardcore simmer's world that so much potential existed, and many great ideas started, and so much of it died because the money just stopped being available. A better way to make a buck in the growing gaming market emerged.

 

Microprose (and Falcon) didn't die because "money stopped being available" in the investment sense that seems implied here.

 

Microprose went bankrupt because it spent WAY more money developing it's sims (like Falcon 4) and their overambitious features (like the DC) than simmers - even back then in the "golden age of flight sims" - were prepared to pay for. There simply were not enough simmers out there to pay for it. And there's not really more of us now either; but sims themselves have become way more expensive to make.

 

My experience also has been that if you try and use the words "Dynamic" or "Sandbox" in a mainstream gaming forum you get flamed.

 

In a mainstream gaming forum I get the opposite impression. Sandbox game concepts are some of the biggest moneymakers on the planet (Hello Minecraft! :D ), and dynamic gameplay is huge.

 

There is only one thing stopping it from getting done "right" in a quick way in a real simulator; there's just way too few simmers out there. The "golden days" weren't because there were more simmers, just that simmers as a portion of "gamers" was way bigger than now. When I grew up, I didn't know anyone that had a gaming computer that did not also own a flight sim. Not a single one. But of course, I didn't know very many that did have a gaming computer at all... Nowadays I barely know of any home (I guess my grandmother's maybe?) that does not have at minimum a console.

 

But anyways, this thread was supposed to be about "DCS Tank Simulator". We are here just reiterating the same arguments that have been gone over a million times in the threads that actually deal with that topic. :P

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Daniel "EtherealN" Agorander | Даниэль "эфирныйн" Агорандер

Intel i7 2600K @ 4.4GHz, ASUS Sabertooth P67, 8GB Corsair Vengeance @ 1600MHz, ASUS GTX 560Ti DirectCU II 1GB, Samsung 830series 512GB SSD, Corsair AX850w, two BENQ screens and TM HOTAS Warthog

DCS: A-10C Warthog FAQ | DCS: P-51D FAQ | Remember to read the Forum Rules |

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| Life of a Game Tester
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