The road forward in the core game from 2020

There seems to be a significant change towards concentrating on the things that make DCS core much better in this newsletter. Great news but there's something not mentioned that has importance.

DCS is still in "single sortie design" in the engine. DCS doesn't provide good tools for persistent missions between server restarts. Persistence/campaign is of benefit to everyone because it gets players to "come back" and feel part of something large. That 'coming back' in multiplayer is a significant way to keep player interest and builds into buying multiple modules. However, the underlying toolset, the mission SSE API specifically, is somewhat left behind at version 1.2.

Now we hear the terms "RTS" applied when discussing the Dynamic Campaign in development. We don't know how realtime that is, if it works in conjunction with the sim as an added layer or makes some simulation behind the scenes.

We still require abilities in scripting to put together one mission after another properly, despite working around most of the shortfalls of the current design.

The primary part of a campaign is, "Join in Progress" play, where the mission continues regardless, uninterupted, and public players join and leave as they wish. All relevant events happen during the mission and not in the downtime. Currently a restart is used to clear up mess, repair air bases, clean out memory but we have no scripting API for;

• Access to creating/deleting (progresive moving) new FARP's, even airbases
  
• Creating or deleting new Client slots
  
• Repairing map assets like bridges/engineering
  
• Creating a workable supply system and infrastructure
  
• Giving strong API access to the Resource Management system mid mission
  
• Adjusting weather, time and date post mission start (read; having a locked miz file and interpreting changes so that one miz is used +code, rather than an entirely new individual mission built and zipped whilst events ongoing are developing)
  
• Embarking/Disembarking vehicles (ships, large planes carrying items across the map) CTLD has been de facto for 5 years now
  
• Continuing to develop and support the extremely valuable SSE in the Mission Environment - note that the Server API is great, for server things, but we are heavily clamped down on Player interactivity, and many of the SSE functions for players joining, were moved to Server side API methods.
  

It's possible we will be given what was asked for, but not what we really need.

That's what this post is asking for, a refresh of the mission SSE functions, to do dynamic campaigns properly, for you, at a fraction of the development cost. And it will cascade down to everyone playing the Sim to enjoy.

REFERENCES

2016 Farps moving request (one of many) http://forums.eagle.ru:8080/showthread.php?t=160322

2013 Client slots spawning (one of many) https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=114576

2018 Runway repair (2 of many) https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=255468 https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=225122

2015 similar wishlist https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=146748

2013 changing time of day/date https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=115925

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Hear hear!

Unfortunately the visibility of these threads don't rate highly because they make no sense to your normal player who doesn't care about a scripting item, it's all black magic, under the hood stuff that nerds do ("thanks by the way, but can you fix my module bug first")

I get that, this is an unsuported part of DCS that, lets be fair, the community doesnt even know they rely heavily on.

And that is an issue. The amount of people that try to make a mission and dont understand why you can't save the state, spawn farps, create client slots and such... they just walk away from the mission editor never to return because it doesnt do what they want.

Multiplayer players, or the smaller groups of DCS users that exclusively fly online with friends, tend to have a greater appreciation of scripting limitations, if not a skill in Lua directly. They see bad servers with performance issues and invariably are part of groups that exist closer to the mission designers who are looking for feedback and in a community group that is pushing content limits harder than most (as MP servers never run at the performance of a single player hosted game)

I think we can all see the amazing efforts put in by this small amount of players. Look at what Ciribob did for Xcom and Greg in the Blue Flag team for the last few years that gave rise to the explosion of web interfaces and workarounds to DCS core issues. Greg went on to do a commercial DLC campaign on the Huey, because his interests in the entire MP game came full circle round to benefit the Single Player market, who often download new content without really getting into the Mission Editor itself. Ciribob went on to drive CTLD, SRS, two huge mainstays of DCS which continue to grow.

So it does take a leap of imagination from players reading this to understand what they miss. The community needs more tools, and in return they will get free content forever, both in the Single Player arena and on full elaborate persistent servers that you see out there.

I understand that to an extent, ED needs to protect a revenue stream. Currently to be a third party developer you don't get a "technical course" or documentation supplied, you have to be able to understand the nuts and bolts from the code itself, so you are already the cream of your area of expertise.

I'm not brave enough to suggest ED redesign their own stance on providing tools for the community, it's not a free game, but to break out of that niche and encourage more new 3rd party DLC content creators and more revenue, one possible solution discussed many times has been to concentrate more on the transparency of the core sim tools and design and leverage community development. It's not easy, and this is not other sims, but a few more bones here and there multiplies into a few more servers here and there and that multiplies tenfold into a few more interested customers having good experiences online that bring them into the game and make them more invested into buying modules.

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