The Future of DCS: More Detail or Broader Scope?

It would be nice to have 2 Different License Agreement Types for the SDK:

-Professional/Commercial License Agreement.

For Teams and Companies that Intend to Sell their Content through E.D.

 

-Basic/Community License Agreement.

For Community Teams that intent to distribute their products for free.

 

I would love to see something like this.

I don't think it's like comparing ED to Apple and liscencing it's OS and hardware. Seems more like comparing it to the APP developers.... afterall, modules are like aps on the Sim Engine. Apple's app process is controlled fairly well,and anyone wishing to write them has to get approval and go through the store - unlike Droid (cough, hack spit) stuff that you can get anywhere - just like STDs. No control. No safeties.

ED could open it up further. Just that everything has to pass muster and perform as billed prior to the development. "Here's the list you handed us, that we approved for dev. But your module doesn't do as you said it would. Sorry, no go this time."

They would be testers inthis regard, and would bring in trusted users for play testing as well.... on ED's server.

I think it's doable. Some dev wants to make a few bucks, they have to produce.

What ED has to do is commit to upgrades and patches that don't hose up previously proven features. That means better foundational coding practices. It's a beast of a product. I think it suffers from a lot of interworking patches with dependencies that are perhaps not quite well tracked. But them's just me guesses....

It is always to edged sword.

 

Learn from the history like what happened to PC when IBM decided to release everything else in first PC than the BIOS. It took just couple years from Compaq to reverse engineer the PC BIOS and no one anymore needed to license BIOS from IBM to get hardware and software compatibility. It was free personal computer platform that IBM build up and defined the standards. Suddenly market was full of "PC-compatible" and "PC-clone" hardware and software and IBM couldn't control the 80% market share it had with PC on personal computer market.

 

Or how about Apple. When Steve Jobs got kicked out from Apple, John Sculley with his vision got Apple board to open Apple hardware to others and by licensing SystemOS to other OEM. Market got filled with Mac-clones with SystemOS and it was total mess, it was not helping Apple to really go from hardware company to software company as it started to lose even more of the control.

And when Steve Jobs was hired back, his first actions as CEO was stop licensing SystemOS to others. Quickly new versions were released to fill the agreements and then kill them with versions that weren't in the agreements and this way Jobs got SystemOS back to the Apple control as the hardware, rest is history...

 

Nothing works well if there ain't standards and teamwork. Competition and such just destroy everything and leaves everyone than very minor people (who are controlling the chaos of competition) to benefit from it.

So if ED will ever open the SDK etc, it needs to be so well defined that modders and community members are required to provide quality like ED is now doing with their partners with agreements and such.

 

So basically little bit like Steam Workshop for many games, where you can either enjoy from the publisher game as is, or then go and install officially allowed mods and go to random direction as you like.

But easily it becomes like Steam Workshop, where most of the content is just "Hey, I loved to do this five barrel pump-shotgun to this game!" and it looks like someone just managed to learn how to do 3D.

 

The problem is as well that ED seems to require a 3Ds Max, instead accepting to use more popular and open tools like Blender.

 

Like think if we could have something even like the X-Plane 10 has with the plane builder? Even so simple tool requires time and effort put to 3D models, but oh boy doesn't those just allow to make nice things to that simulator!

Like think if we could "easily" (compared to full fidelity modules) a SFM + weapons like FC3 has?

 

Would it be better?

 

I think that the mapping at least could benefit a lot from it, or ground vehicles etc.

I can't speak for the Blender v Autodesk 3ds as I have no experience in that area. As for the open vs closed argument, history has shown again and again that open is better. 80% of the desktops today are PC based. Because it was open (forced open, more like). Macs are still 8% of the market and losing more marketshare every year. Perhaps because they haven't updated the line in a while in a meaningful way.

SCO floundered as did HP-UX, and Solaris is an after thought. AIX is still going strong compared to its peers. What about Linux? I still remember taking 48 floppies to install Linux enough to nfs mount sunsite for the rest of the distro. Openness of Linux made all the difference and it changed how compute gets done today. BSD beget Linux, but perhaps GPL vs BSD license made the difference. Or Linux was more sexy and just caught on. You could make an argument for both, I think. Remember, when Linux burst into the scene, BSD was already established. Commercial offering like Coherent was also available.

Look at the cottage industry of developers for MS Flight Sim. That would not have happened if MS didn't allow it to happen.

So for me, the more open DCS is, the more 3rd party friendly they are, it can grow DCS World. Falcon was supposed to be the start of a digital battlefield. That never came to fruition, but ED made it come alive with DCS.

So count me as a supporter of limited SDK for *anyone* and commercial SDK for 3rd Party developers. The more DCS is 3rd party developer friendly, the better it is for us. I want DCS to be more PC like than Mac. Again, history shows, the more open you are, the more successful you're going to be. Or software-wise, DCS should be like Salesforce. 3rd Party support it what makes it or breaks it in this market.

I can't speak for the Blender v Autodesk 3ds as I have no experience in that area. As for the open vs closed argument, history has shown again and again that open is better. 80% of the desktops today are PC based. Because it was open (forced open, more like). Macs are still 8% of the market and losing more marketshare every year. Perhaps because they haven't updated the line in a while in a meaningful way.

 

 

SCO floundered as did HP-UX, and Solaris is an after thought. AIX is still going strong compared to its peers. What about Linux? I still remember taking 48 floppies to install Linux enough to nfs mount sunsite for the rest of the distro. Openness of Linux made all the difference and it changed how compute gets done today. BSD beget Linux, but perhaps GPL vs BSD license made the difference. Or Linux was more sexy and just caught on. You could make an argument for both, I think. Remember, when Linux burst into the scene, BSD was already established. Commercial offering like Coherent was also available.

 

Look at the cottage industry of developers for MS Flight Sim. That would not have happened if MS didn't allow it to happen.

 

So for me, the more open DCS is, the more 3rd party friendly they are, it can grow DCS World. Falcon was supposed to be the start of a digital battlefield. That never came to fruition, but ED made it come alive with DCS.

 

So count me as a supporter of limited SDK for *anyone* and commercial SDK for 3rd Party developers. The more DCS is 3rd party developer friendly, the better it is for us. I want DCS to be more PC like than Mac. Again, history shows, the more open you are, the more successful you're going to be. Or software-wise, DCS should be like Salesforce. 3rd Party support it what makes it or breaks it in this market.

FSX would be gone long time ago if orbx, pmdg, aerosoft, rex and so on weren't able to produce DLCs for it. The community will filter out the crap from the good stuff.

Sent from my Redmi 4 using Tapatalk

ED could open it up further. Just that everything has to pass muster and perform as billed prior to the development. "Here's the list you handed us, that we approved for dev. But your module doesn't do as you said it would. Sorry, no go this time."

 

They would be testers inthis regard, and would bring in trusted users for play testing as well.... on ED's server.

 

I think it's doable. Some dev wants to make a few bucks, they have to produce.

 

What ED has to do is commit to upgrades and patches that don't hose up previously proven features. That means better foundational coding practices. It's a beast of a product. I think it suffers from a lot of interworking patches with dependencies that are perhaps not quite well tracked. But them's just me guesses....

I agree with the idea behind opening up the development. It seems that it ought to be possible to more openly allow development for DCS World, but only allow developers sell 'certified' modules that have been approved under the guidelines of the program.

Prior to certification, modules could be more openly tested with the community. These would be evaluated and discussed for realism, quality, etc and passed if certain standards are met. Once something becomes certified, it's can be adopted as part the DCS core and at that point the developer could require a fee for future use, or at least for "full featured use". So for example, if someone developed a Ford Class carrier, everyone could get the external model, but you'd have to pay a micro transaction to operate from it.

This might encourage vendors to develop modules, knowing they if they are well accepted by the community and ED, that there will be a financial incentive for doing so. Could also work for terrain, airports, map features, etc with a system where what one was a cool mod could become part of the release and earn a hard working coder some type of reward. It might also serve as a way to bring good freeware into DCS and have some certification process with community / ED standards.

I also agree that it seems a little more resilience between the modules and revisions to DCS World would be welcome. We need to encourage development, not create barriers to it.

?........As for the open vs closed argument, history has shown again and again that open is better........

 

So for me, the more open DCS is, the more 3rd party friendly they are, it can grow DCS World. Falcon was supposed to be the start of a digital battlefield. That never came to fruition, but ED made it come alive with DCS.

 

So count me as a supporter of limited SDK for *anyone* and commercial SDK for 3rd Party developers. The more DCS is 3rd party developer friendly, the better it is for us. I want DCS to be more PC like than Mac. Again, history shows, the more open you are, the more successful you're going to be. Or software-wise, DCS should be like Salesforce. 3rd Party support it what makes it or breaks it in this market.

+2