Best news for 2020: Focus on CORE of simulation

It's the stuff we've been hearing about for several years already, so I'm not opening champagne until I see it on my PC.

I'm wondering how complicated and time consuming is to rewrite DCS to allow full multicore support. Will this take a year? Two? More? Or it'll prove to be impossible after meeting some unexpected difficulties?

Yea, it all sounds very nice. But as others have pointed out already, so far its standard ED ops: Lots of big announcements and marketing claims and very little tangible actual progress.

Won't get too excited until the stuff is actually here and given the announcements vs actual delivery relationship of the past I think it might be several years till then.

Personally I would prefer ED to scale down on the big flashy trailers and announcements and instead quietly stealthily roll out some real updates and pleasantly surprise us, but its their train set so hey..

Regards,

Snappy

I think I'll take another look at this list in 6 months or so to see how things are progressing.

If there's one thing that I want added to DCS core, especially for MP missions is some sort of inbuilt mission notification or mission request. Too many times you jump on an MP server, read the brief and still have NFI where the enemy is, especially if you're flying choppers. I can't go very far, very fast so the thought of having to fly 100nm to get to the target is not my idea of fun. That aside, it would be great to be able to jump into a server (hopefully once the dynamic campaign mode is complete) and be presented with the current status, map (incl front lines marked) and a list of tasks to be completed based on your aircraft type. So if you spawn in a huey you'll be tasked with:

1. troop transport from point A to B until complete;

2. VIP transport from point A to B to C to D;

3. gunship support for TIC (troops in contact);

4. SAR

5. armed recon along a certain point;

6. sling loading until complete, etc

Similar for jets. You should get a notification of taskings available eg:

- CAP in a specific area

- routine patrol

- armed recce

- SEAD against identified targets (PP mode)

- CAS for TIC

- anti shipping

- strike and deep strike missions (against buildings, structures, etc)

Nothing would be more immersive than that. IRL pilots don't just jump into a jet/heli, load up whatever they want and go 'hmmm, where do I go today?'.

For me right now this is my single largest gripe with DCS World in that the core features are lacking or have felt neglected and appear left behind while we get more and more modules arriving. I for one am very grateful that ED have over 50% of their team focussing on core features of the DCS World. I hope that the focus on this in 2020 will result in a more immersive and satisfying experience flying within DCS World.

It does sound amazing, though I have heard the exact same upcoming improvements for over 5 years. So while it's great that ED has made this announcement, I'm not very optimistic that we'll see much progress on these areas. Please ED, prove me wrong!

For me right now this is my single largest gripe with DCS World in that the core features are lacking or have felt neglected and appear left behind while we get more and more modules arriving. I for one am very grateful that ED have over 50% of their team focussing on core features of the DCS World. I hope that the focus on this in 2020 will result in a more immersive and satisfying experience flying within DCS World.

It feels this is a bit in response to the player community criticism. Indeed DCS coming to the new year seems to be going into a nice direction!

Dedicated server and the partially delivered new voice comms (not mentioned :noexpression:) are making the multiplayer side more viable and the dynamic campaign (when eventually ready to launch) will enhance the game to be a much more richer and deeper experience all around.

Plus what seems to be 6 new maps coming (one of them free; https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=1931687&postcount=5) - they have a lot of interesting stuff on the plate. Personally quite happy that many of the new aircraft are helicopters (count at least 4 in the works) - hoping for some love on the core side to match this.

If you look at my earlier call - https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=227081 - some of the issues are being addressed spot on. I would love some more emphasis on Combined Arms, it was released many years ago but never developed its potential - what I conclude from ED communications it's getting some attention but is not high priority at the moment. Still, lots of awesome stuff already there or coming over the next few years.

This stuff is exactly what DCS World needs, instead of more early-release modules that won't get finished for 5 years :)

This :thumbup:

Looking forward for new improvements and then having at least one aircraft working 98% (we are FAR away from this right now*), which I can trust and which I can depend on (normal and abnormal procedures, emergencies).

* maybe the F-5 is somewhat of 98% ... is it?

Vulkan is a fairly recent API as an alternative to the currently used DirectX API. It is said to be faster and more graphically impressive on most machines.

It is because it actually is an API, which DirectX is not (read it just like "Windows isn't an OS", "SuSE isn't linux", "Netgear and D-Link aren't network brands"). Back in the day when all that s*** was new, I tended to call it "Dreckiges X", being German, which means dirty X. Reason for that being the games that also ran in DOS were usually less than half as fast when running in Windows with DirectX instead. It was so obvious, that I could run games as good or sometimes even better on a 486DX2 80 in DOS than on a 200MHz MMX CPU in Windows, including the Jane's survey sims or an award-winning fantasy round-based strategy game based on a fantasy RPG series famous back in the 90s. And there was a time when there were quite some games optimized for OpenGL, or even 3dfx Glide, for that matter. Those were performing better by ages compared to running them with DirectX. I guess, one of those, being a sim, is still pretty well-known here, but shall not be named however. Anything that gives us the move away from DirectX will be a pure bless for sure, because of it being optimized, simple as that. Get away from the steamroller tactics...

or even 3dfx Glide, for that matter. Those were performing better by ages compared to running them with DirectX. I guess, one of those, being a sim, is still pretty well-known here

He I remember buying my first ever graphics card to run that...a Voodoo 3 16Mb Card...happy days!

I won't get my hopes up about Vulkan and the possible performance gain.

Whatever games I have tried with vulkan support previously it had only about 5-10%

performance gain or none at all on my PC while it was running with Vulkan compared to running it with DirectX. Its seems its a good API on paper but I have not seen anything where it was utilized to make a difference.

If there's one thing that I want added to DCS core, especially for MP missions is some sort of inbuilt mission notification or mission request. Too many times you jump on an MP server, read the brief and still have NFI where the enemy is, especially if you're flying choppers. I can't go very far, very fast so the thought of having to fly 100nm to get to the target is not my idea of fun. That aside, it would be great to be able to jump into a server (hopefully once the dynamic campaign mode is complete) and be presented with the current status, map (incl front lines marked) and a list of tasks to be completed based on your aircraft type. So if you spawn in a huey you'll be tasked with:

1. troop transport from point A to B until complete;

2. VIP transport from point A to B to C to D;

3. gunship support for TIC (troops in contact);

4. SAR

5. armed recon along a certain point;

6. sling loading until complete, etc

 

Similar for jets. You should get a notification of taskings available eg:

- CAP in a specific area

- routine patrol

- armed recce

- SEAD against identified targets (PP mode)

- CAS for TIC

- anti shipping

- strike and deep strike missions (against buildings, structures, etc)

 

Nothing would be more immersive than that. IRL pilots don't just jump into a jet/heli, load up whatever they want and go 'hmmm, where do I go today?'.

This would actually be pretty amazing if they could pull this off.

Multi core support would allow to implement advanced weather, advanced AI, more graphical effects, bigger maps, more physical calculations, dynamic campaign, more ground forces AND improved performance.

That's a stretch, it's quite a bit more complicated than this. We gone over this a lot in the past threads, and DCS is as most applications are, already multi threaded, the question is how good and how good it can be, how good it can be is unfortunately lower than most games because it's a simulator with a lot of serial type of workload that cannot be parallelized, so we need to forget about the level of multi-threading other modern physics-less games can be.

That said improvements can still be done in this regard to get everything away and the main simulation thread, the serial workloads that have to be part of the same thread, to have the best an most optimal conditions and have the space all for it self, while other stuff is put on their own threads.

The announcement Title was DCS World 2020 and Beyond

There should be no expectations everything Listed will be accomplished in the next 10.5 months.

I wonder which pieces will fall into the Beyond...Not that I have any issue with that at all.

And then there is always...EISTC

Yea, it all sounds very nice. But as others have pointed out already, so far its standard ED ops: Lots of big announcements and marketing claims and very little tangible actual progress.

Won't get too excited until the stuff is actually here and given the announcements vs actual delivery relationship of the past I think it might be several years till then.

 

 

Personally I would prefer ED to scale down on the big flashy trailers and announcements and instead quietly stealthily roll out some real updates and pleasantly surprise us, but its their train set so hey..

 

 

 

Regards,

 

 

Snappy

Come on, tell that to Amazon, Google, Microsoft ...

It's always been a look back and a look forward around new year milestone with many announcements to give us an idea what's officially confirmed and what not, there's a lot of swirling wishes and things that people talk about during the year.

There was proper disclaimer on the use of some FX and effects, because in real life sound takes a while and you wouldn't have heard the explosion of the train from the view on the airplane the immediate moment it exploded, so they had to add that in. You see any marketing ethics violations then let us know but I don't see any myself yet.

The trailer showcases the whole thing overall, and yes it can look deceiving if you take it literally, but because it's a lot of information in a short time, you can't play for 10 minutes and recreate the action packed scenario like that, ofcourse not, but that's not the point, it's to showcase the whole thing what you can do and it does a better job than explaining for 1 hour, but if you want to get into details then ofcourse you go down into the manuals and all the rest.

Interpreting the marketing correctly is also your responsibility, you have the power to take what you want from that, to control to what extent will it influence your decision on which module to buy and when.

And let me point out one such example, proper simulation of IR aka proper FLIR rendering, that one thing turns out to be such a big deal to develop under the hood, because that's just the technical reality of things, and I knew that was a big task because I had an idea what had to be done from simply having modding experience and an attention for tech, gaming dev, and programming news for many years and it's that background that allows for better tuned expectations and timeframe, and that's the ever repeated standard fact that if you're just a gamer without the gaming background about how things work then you're far more likely to be always disappointed for all the wrong reasons, with unrealistic expectations and getting excited too early, you're making it harder on your self while waiting, but the best thing someone like that can do is to sit back and relax and make the wait easier, because your input probably not going to affect the development, either FLIR is done right or nothing, there's so many things to do while we wait, I'm not 100% immune to the excitement either, but I just started with Mig-21bis finally after having it on the back of my mind for so long, I still have a list that I created in the years before, just sticking to that list and not skipping ahead is a good strategy to keep too early excitement about new things down. So, getting to know it, going through training and tutorials, I don't need FLIR rendering for that, don't need new ATC for that, don't need the new AI RTS Campaign system for that either, but I know having those things is so tempting that we try to create artificial requirements for ourselfs to feel comfortable, that's the psychology that I'm trying to counteract, but people who aren't aware they let these primitive programs control so much, you must counteract the temptation the brain is making.

I won't get my hopes up about Vulkan and the possible performance gain.

 

 

Whatever games I have tried with vulkan support previously it had only about 5-10%

It's not jsut about Vulkan itself. DCS still lacks many technologies. For example, having multi core processors in my rigs for 14 years now, DCS still runs on a single core, totally ignoring the others except for the sound processing which utilizes a second one, but probably with close to zero advantage - Sound shall be done on hardware directly (heck my audio card even has dedicated RAM, but it's probably unused since Vista).

And VR has lots of potential. AFAIK right now DCS simply renders 2 viewports completely independently. Optimized engines can render the stuff once and display it from 2 different viewports at the same time. This is what DCS really badly needs for the future, even though it still does a rather decent job already.

BTW what I'd really love to see in DCS is proper GCI. Not just a bogey dope. Getting directions from the ground controller to get into position is the magic. This would even fill old modules like the MiG-21bis with life and pave the way for more future cold war assets like the 104 or EE Lightning. Those dedicated interceptors literally are worth just half without proper environment.

BTW what I'd really love to see in DCS is proper GCI. Not just a bogey dope. Getting directions from the ground controller to get into position is the magic. This would even fill old modules like the MiG-21bis with life and pave the way for more future cold war assets like the 104 or EE Lightning. Those dedicated interceptors literally are worth just half without proper environment.

Very true. Even the modern aircraft need this (esp MiG-29) in the form of GCI and AWACS. DCS can easily run large missions with dozens of flights, but if you go this route your radio callouts can be a mess with AWACS, wingmen, and nearby flights calling out contacts 100's of miles away constantly. Getting relevant information can be frustratingly difficult.

Smarter AWACS would also be great for dynamics missions if it can be setup to pickout targets of interest (like identifying the player as the closest friendly to another unit that's under attack by hostiles).

with AWACS, wingmen, and nearby flights calling out contacts 100's of miles away constantly.

THIS!

It's insanely immersion-breaking when your wingmen can spot enemies at 400nm with a radar that only displays contacts out to 160nm. It's especially annoying when this suggests that the enemy AI can see you and your flight at similarly extreme distances.

Accurate/realistic/just-plain-plausible AI sensor-usage is definitely one of the bigger issues to address in the current engine.

This is all good news. I would rather ED concentrate on core improvements rather than new modules. Having said that.... PLEASE get The Hornet and Viper to a 99% solution as well. Thanks!

THIS!

 

It's insanely immersion-breaking when your wingmen can spot enemies at 400nm with a radar that only displays contacts out to 160nm. It's especially annoying when this suggests that the enemy AI can see you and your flight at similarly extreme distances.

 

Accurate/realistic/just-plain-plausible AI sensor-usage is definitely one of the bigger issues to address in the current engine.

True. AI wingmen should only say 3 things, EVER.....

1. "TWO"

2. "Lead, you're on Fire"

3. "Save the Fat one for me"

I'll repeat what I said many months ago, I still agree with this method of getting a bunch of modules out before the sort of lockdown and a season for a lot of core improvements, if it were the other way around, you'd be waiting for core improvements without F-18C, without F-16, without a bunch of stuff that's in-house, perhaps the 3rd-parties would be unaffected but still, it makes sense.

I think the whole MAC thing is a huge solution to the EA in DCS that we had to sacrifice for DCS future to be secured with key core improvements that are necessary to stand against competition, then the MAC can make the extra resources that is necessary to feed the DCS behemoth which is still a specialized area in comparison of all flight sims popularity. Just the hardcore tight community probably couldn't stand against other massive companies who can just throw 100x million into those civilian flight sims and the mass online ones. But I don't mean DCS could go away, it would just lag behind in tech probably.

I think that we have more than enough modules, even tho some areas aren't covered kinda we could leave for later but obviously most of it is not covered there's too much out there and DCS existed for what a bit more than a decade now, that's a fraction compared to ~70 years of history in real life.

I'm going to say this right now, ... there's one surprise aircraft coming, there's the WW2 stuff coming, that's two, and three the helicopter guys finally get their big fish right there as the core updates are dropping, the Mi-24 Hind/Krokodil, and if you think Mi-24 doesn't look cool I don't know what you're smoking. The DCS Warthog 2 and Black Shark 3 ... don't count as much as new modules but it's still a thing that's happening, and ofcourse finishing F-16 and F-18 ... there's a bunch of things going on as we can see, and there's a bunch of new people that don't have some of those modules yet, .... so I'm going to say this right now, I think I would cut out releasing any modules for a while, to let this be absorbed at all, that's harder to do when there's 3rd parties involved with their own schedules so I understand, perhaps expanding the development of those unit modules and save it for later so they're more complete when they get into Beta.

Is the combat flight sim community is big enough to properly take all this in to get the? The core upgrades are to be excited about and to get experience out of that for a while, unless the community gets bigger but I don't know. Now ofcourse none of this is extinguishable content, it's so deep and the learning experience rich that there's never truly an end, you can go back at any time even if you keep jumping to the latest things all the time, well some people may be fine with that and don't mind it, but the content I think would receive less attention and appreciation because I don't know if all the hype is genuine then when it's working like a conveyor belt machine. Even if a portion of community is hungry for more content I'm not too sure about if trying to serve the content ASAP is indeed better than delaying and letting them come back slower but steady, but when you draw a line it kinda ends up the same, but this is so hard to prove as we would need to be in an alternate universe and test both methods with exactly the same circumstances and product, the hype for F-16 was insane and testing the opposite method with another module may not be a valid test because there's just apparently nothing as big as F-16 at least in the popular community, I think I have the screenshots somewhere of the servers and forums barely responding that day.

So if more stuff comes ontop of saturated times it would get less the attention it may get otherwise, or they would steal the attention away, just saying. More niche and high-risk modules such as AC/C-130 would definitely be at a negative handicap if they're released at saturated time, that kind of stuff has to be purposelly released after some time of draught and then still some drought after it and that's not me being a wise guy kinda managing things for others, because that applies to myself as well and I'm saying things I would do for myself as well, I would like to increase my motivation for things that aren't my favourites that I haven't came across in history and it can be hard to create that emotional attachement sometimes, it takes a person to do some tricks to get the mind to start liking and appreciating and objectively treating it and not just shooing it aside because it's some unknown thing.

So I don't think things are exhausted, even if there's a healthy hiatus of less new modules, it shouldn't mean that everyone stops getting the stuff they queued up from before, I mean I have a bunch of things on queue, Warthog 2 and Syria map absolutely.

If modules are churned out too fast, well there may be a module famine in the future and could be a gap lacking of modules, real history is a finite resource.

EDIT:

I even could go as far to propose a crazy idea of having a community-agreed-upon-self module lockdown weekend or aka emergency module showcase weekend where a special scenario could be created DCS wide, where most modules would be temporairly disabled as if you didn't own them, so no F-16, no F-18, and only one or two aircraft modules would be enabled as part of this weekends AC/C-130 emergency showcase and we got a special mission here (MP and SP versions), downloaded as part of patch update for this feature, with the initial story for such showcases always beginning with an imaginary emergency story that we got lost somewhere and we have no other aircraft and we only have this damaged AC-130 to get back home, on the double move out go go go, we have to learn how to fly AC-130 now MUHAHAHA, sergeant get the manual will ya!

But ofcourse such a thing would be possible to disable as a failsafe for people who would totally not agree with it or whatever issue could arise, failsafe for any technical reasons, it would be a timer that would automatically run out as 2 days have passed according to the computer clock, which one could mess around if they wanted to, so even if you don't have internet connection it would unlock it self if you didn't yourself manually already, I'm not sure about providing a GUI button to disable, it's too easy, you could edit the special config file for this feature and get rid of the restriction. This way all those people who aren't interested in a module because they're busy with else but they keep having it on a queue and keep forgetting about it would then be kinda "forced" to try it, but not truly forced, just participating in a fun scenario that the whole community could enjoy and make fun stories about, well, in theory.

EDIT: That mission could be made to also be part of some kind of a competition at the end with some symbollic prizes such as perhaps apparel or ED Miles, that would make more people more relaxed about it as there's something you get if you have to be locked out of other modules for a while :)

I think that the announcement was a multi-year plan as well, the "beyond" gives them quite an out. But if they get Hornet and Viper to at least 90% complete, and give us half of the core improvements we are hoping for by year's end, it would be a banner year for ED, and I don't think we'd really have a valid complaint (but that isn't going to stop some).

As for the surprise aircraft, if we are starting a pool, put me down for the F4E.

True. AI wingmen should only say 3 things, EVER.....

 

1. "TWO"

2. "Lead, you're on Fire"

3. "Save the Fat one for me"

Gotta love Dos Gringos. Good pull sir. The Legend of Shaved Dog’s _ _ _

Cheers,

Don

Gotta love Dos Gringos. Good pull sir. The Legend of Shaved Dog’s _ _ _

 

 

Cheers,

 

Don

;)