About the DCS:BS Campaign System

[DaWu]

DaWu that's a pretty bald post considering it's your 1st!

 

I must admit I was impressed with F4 campaign system but it also has some flaws! In fact it was a buggy mess when it hit the shelves! Latter Super Paks, Free Falcons and Global Falcon patches, upgrades, HFFM kinda ironed it out! To some level!

 

But look at my point!

On a D+3 of a Rolling fire campaign I chose Pinpoint strike over Northern Korea, objective to take out a bridge and this flight is departing within 6 hours! I had 5.5 hours to study the map, plan my approach (edit default Bee-line waypoints), plan my ingress route and safest NOE egress thanks to those sharpshooting Shilkas and few SA-6 securing the airspace around the bridge. So, I had to carefully plan each second of flying over hostile terrain! No prob, I took a clean sheet of paper and wrote down some timing notifiers to know exact second when to turn 14° offset, descend to 300ft, down the river bed into the bridge, pull 4G, pitch up to 40°, roll into the TGT, and have 4 seconds to allign CCIP marker on a bridge pillars I should hit!

 

OK, well prepared - well executed! It went smooth! When I RTB-ed there's another Pinpoint Strike sortie waiting in the list! I chose it just to see what's the objective:

 

Same bridge, same waypoints, same threats...

 

So DaWu welcome to forums.eagle.ru!

 

thx for the welcome.

thats a very poor situation you are describing. and I must confess I dont spend way as much time as you into planing my flights.

 

but its not the missions that are superior in a dc. its the feel of a real battlefield. knowing that when you destroy that sam, mig, bridge or runway it is gone. knowing that everytime a unknown threat can cross your flightplan. seeing all the other ai aicraft flying their own missions. beeing able fly around and knowing there is a war going on even without your interactions.

 

I cant remember the initial status of the dc system on f4 release. was it really that buggy? did all the great coders (FF etc.) update the dc system really that much? I thought that they tweaked it only and most of the work was done to avionics and other stuff.

[GGTharos]

Yes, a lot of stuff got updated in F4 by the various coders :)

 

Anyway, I relaize you have a desire to have the sim provide you with a mission to play, and I don't blame you for this; not everyone likes or has the time to go 'all out' even and learn every feature of a complex sim.

 

Some people don't really want to do a startup procedure more than once, either. And me, I don't care much for flipping switches past the 'missile launch' button :D

 

That however, does not mean I do not wish for a high-fidelity sim. Just saying people will like various aspects of the DCS series, not necessarily all at once.

 

The beauty of it is, there'll be something there for everyone - from the casual guy, to the hard core sim fan. (... are you listening Mower? ;) )

[DaWu]

well having the sim providing me a mission does not interfere with wanting a complex sim. I could play HAWX on my PS3. But since I found this place over here you can guess what I am interested in most. :)

 

building missions can be fun but flying your own created missions isnt. at least for me. every surprise is missing.

[Vekkinho]

Yeah, Working hours pass faster when U know you'll fly a plane when U get back home!

[GGTharos]

Yes, even if there are surprises you don't get surprised much with your own missions. Such is the curse of the mission builder! :)

[Vekkinho]

Working hours pass faster when U know you'll fly a plane when U get back home!

^^^^^^^^^

:megalol: That's good enough for my new sig!

[Vekkinho]

Yes, even if there are surprises you don't get surprised much with your own missions. Such is the curse of the mission builder! :)

 

Ask a squad mate to create some missions for U! ;)

[CAT_101st]

If you randummise enough and chance to apear. You can suprise your self. Large randum spawn's for AAA along flight path with 60% chance to apear X 10 you will never know witch one or all will apear or where.

[EvilBivol-1]

I always enjoyed flying my own missions, but maybe I'm an egomaniac?

 

DaWu, the mission editor and the campaign systems have enough tools to supply plenty of surprises. The main difference is not the potential for surprise, but that it takes a human to actually build missions, often for hours, to achieve the same thing (or often better) that a dynamic campaign system will do automatically "behind the scenes." Again, ED does plan on moving toward a more dynamic environment, but it's a building process, of which Black Shark is the beginning. Hopefully, in the future we will have the best of both worlds - powerfull ME scripting ability to control the world environment and a dynamic world state.

Edited July 11, 2008 by EvilBivol-1

[DeathDemon]

We've got all the time in the world...well, I know I do. I don't know how old you other guys are. :D

 

Anyways, I'd think it's a heck of a lot better to slowly build up to a dynamic campaing system, adding new content and features to it with every new DCS release. That way, we'll avoid the bug overdose of Falcon.

[RedTiger]

Wow, I totally didn't notice this thread. I saw the original post talking about the new system and sorta left it at that.

 

I did want to stop in here and relate something to this discussion about dynamic campaigns. Last week I sat down and decided to start a F4AF campaign. "This time", I told myself, "I'm going to stick with it and watch what happens!". I decided to let HQ (in other words, the AI) handle everything; I was just going to fly the missions.

 

Several ejections and aborted missions later, I took a really good look at the theatre map and at the missions HQ was assigning my squadron. "Hmm...how many times are we going to chase these little missile boats around while the FLOT is a sea of red units? Wow..not one CAS or BAI mission! Damn..it sure is hard to kill all these little boats when there's all these MiGs in the air."

 

Truth is, I already knew this would be the outcome. So I restarted and decided to play with the sliders and PAK settings. I decided not to fly, I was just gonna watch what happened. Just for the sake of experimentation, I set all sliders to zero EXCEPT for the ones for offensive counter air, defensive counter air. I also maxed out "aircraft" as priority targets and zeroed out all others. I set all the PAKs in the DPRK as high importance.

 

For awhile, it worked! After a few hours, the mass of enemy planes dried up. Now, despite my settings, I started to get CAS and BAI missions. I was hopeful that I had basically destroyed the enemy airforce...but to no avail. A few hours later, they were back in force. I had forgotten that all I probably did was knock out enough airfields to slow them down. Now they'd been repaired and it was business as usual. The fact that in Falcon you're basically fighting an uber-Korea, one that is a whole lot more like the USSR, a center of major industrialization with sustained war-fighting ability, doesn't help the situation much -- but I digress. ;)

 

I decided to look up some strategies on the campaign. Funny how you can find lots of great stuff in the manual on avionics, lots of youtube videos on all kinds of stuff....but try to find out what EXACTLY Falcon's campaign does when you target CCC and you'll have a much harder time. I located a campaign guide on Lead-Pursuit's website and it was pretty crazy stuff. Apparently, you have to not only fly your Viper to perfection, you also have to play CINC. You have to baby sit ground units and directly order them around, eliminate the suicide missions the stupid ATO likes to send pilots on, you have to skip around to other squadrons to ensure key missions are not screwed up by the AI, etc etc etc.

 

My point to all this? I don't want to play CINC. Last time I checked, these are flight sims. If I wanted to figure out how to win Korean War 2, I'd play TOAW or some other dedicated war game that does it better. The realization of this basically killed whatever small interest I still had in Falcon.The main thing is that I'm hoping that DCS stays as tactical as possible. Squadron management and airbase resource management will hopefully be the outer limits to that kind of stuff.

[GGTharos]

I believe DCS will attempt to reconcile and provide the 'best of both worlds' eventually. For now, it is purely tactical.

[Tango]

I know DCS is in freeze now, but is there any way to randomly generate a mission each time, with random units, and one or more goals?

 

It wouldn't run like a campaign, but offers the opportunity to fly a different mission each time, and *not* know what is coming up.

 

I create TEs for Falcon, and it's just not the same as flying a campaign where I don't know what will happen next (but I still enjoy the TEs as individually, they can be challenging).

 

Best regards,

Tango.

[Yellonet]

I'm not sure, but I don't think you can get a completely random mission with the current editor.

What you can do is randomize what units that will appear, so you can set up a certain mission and randomize the enemy that you'll encounter but it's going to be the same goals and such each time. I guess there will be a quick battle generator as in LO though.

[Tango]

Hmm! Well based on what I've read above, if target randomization is possible, then I guess that would work, thinking about it.

 

I like the way in Falcon how I can brief a mission, start to fly, then come across a threat I didn't know was there. Even if there is a low probability of a unit appearing here however, I know it is possible, so it takes the element of surprise away.

 

I was also thinking that if it was possible as the engine stands now, maybe that method could be a basis for a dynamic campaign.

 

Best regards,

Tango.

[sure]

Sounds all terrific. When is it coming?

[SUBS17]

4- After the player is KIA, their log book entry simply indicates how many times they have been shot down – the log book entry does not change to KIA and become inactive. So, unlike Lock On, players will not have to save out their pilot log books. Regarding player death and missions, you can easily set a goal state to the player surviving the mission. Up to you.

 

 

Thats awesome news can the logbooks be viewed by other players online like Falcon? The other question regarding the campaign system is there going to be detailed mission briefing, reccon pictures and detailed mission debreifing?

[SUBS17]

I played a singleplayer campaign in unpatched Falcon 4.0 and It worked fine. Majority of bugs reported was 'AWACS reporting non existent units" kind of thing - not crashes. So let's not forget about this and "Flanker 2 internal error" and move on.

 

IMO this campaign system for DCS will be a great boost for one of the core elements of the simulation and I would trade it for half of avionics modeling.

 

I hope some mission builders will pop-up with a bunch of tough questions so we can hunt for more juicy details. I can't think of any - I have the Armed Assault editor in mind all the time because of these pieces of information about triggers...

 

Just imagine if someone made a Warfare mod for BS:thumbup: Or the evolution mod player starts off with cannon only until he has 10 kills then he gets FFAR, 50kills = AAMs, 100kills Vhkrs, 150kills Apache, 200 kills A10, 250 kills F-16, 350 kills Tanker, 400 kills AWACs, 500 kills a Sopwith camel:D

And then you have the side missions, Domination mod would also work quite good as well.

[Weta43]

Wouldn't it be more interesting to go the other way ?

Start with access to everything, then as your skill level / # kills goes up, you slowly have to limit your choice of weapons more & more till eventually you have only the cannon or vikhr ?

Then you'd really see how good you were...

[SUBS17]

Thats how evolution works you start off with the basics and work your way up. Its quite a good mod warfare would probably be better suited for DCS since it involves logistics and the capturing of towns to increase funds to buy more weapons and ammo. The good thing is that warfare is 2 opposing sides so the AH64 addon vs KA50 would be ideal.:thumbup:

[Yellonet]

Sounds like something for the arcade mode...?

[qrazi]

Imho it works well in arcade games like BF2 etc. but the basic idea should work very well in a realistic setting as well. Didn't F4 have something simular? and I am pretty sure ArmA has a mp mode like that.

[Cola]

How does missions actually work though? (as I've never played a military flight sim.) Will it mostly be like "head to x, destroy convoy/sam site/something, and return to base", or will it be about participating in coordinated battles with friendly and enemy ground and air vehicles? I've been reading Red storm rising lately, and I would definately love to play something like that.

[Gary]

In addition to what EB said, Falcon 4 was released 10 years ago as one of the buggiest POS in existence, and only years of labor by community persons on pretty much illegaly obtained code gave you what you have today.

 

Falconites like to forget this.

 

Im new here, but far from new with flight sims, and spending time reading up previous posts.

 

I'm amazed that anyone connected with our hobby could even think of knocking F4...blimey, has to be THE benchmark for a proper study sim still, some 10yrs after release.

 

Was in buggy?...blimey yes

Was it the cause of MP downfall....no way

 

Truth is, simulation software has become a niche market following widespread participation during the early years on the home PC...they were just victims of this.

 

The DC system in F4 is 10 yrs old and nothing compares to it still today...god, you all know how long 10yrs is in the world on PC software development.

 

Im hopefull the BS software and battle environment will be the next step we are all waiting for and from what I have seen and read so far im sure it will be...

 

but please, dont knock or forget the pioneers who pushed the boundaries for us to get where we are.

 

Regards,

 

Gary

[Cowboy10uk]

In addition to what EB said, Falcon 4 was released 10 years ago as one of the buggiest POS in existence, and only years of labor by community persons on pretty much illegaly obtained code gave you what you have today.

 

Falconites like to forget this.

 

Yes we will never say Falcon wasnt buggy, It tended to work great on free flight, But as soon as you entered Campaign mode it slowed down to a slideshow. However after years of dedicated patching by the fans and of course the increase in technology, It IS one if not the Best fast jet sim out there. While there is always going to be the LO vs Falcon Crowd, I think its out of order to say Falconites like to forget this.

 

We have been flying this sim for 10 years, which lets face it, on the PC is a bloody long time. We are well aware about the bugs, but at the end of the day we have got something amazing, It just took time. Falcon while not perfect on release showed what can happen when the community comes together and luckly we have some very very talented modders in our community.

 

Myself and my wingman still fly Falcon 4 everyday unlike LO which will not install on Vista. (yes I know flaming cliffs will, but we havnt got that) I am keeping everything crossed that BS is as good as falcon is now and has the lifespan that Falcon has had. I for one am really really looking forward to BS, so is my wingman to that matter, Hell it may even cause us to park our trusty F16 in the hanger for a bit.

 

Right Rant over, I just dont like watching Falcon get moaned about, We all have our fav jet sims in this wonderful community, and if every one gives just one of us pleasure then its made it, buggy or not.

 

Cowboy10uk

Edited October 18, 2008 by Cowboy10uk