I loved Wargasm. I love the concept of RTS/FPS hybrids…
I agree here with @MBot. The concept he present(-ed)/(-s) seems to me reasonable.
Also I dont thing DCS2 will be something groundbreaking. We always tend to expect that the next sim will finally brings something what we are still looking for.
Anyway, Computer Gaming World in its issue 86 (1991) came up with the best campaign system ever! All you need is a flight sim (they used Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat but DCS seems to me the similar case 
), piece of paper and two dice and you can play your DC right away. All in all is anything more needed for any other campaign system/engine? 
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And the answer is…
Dynamic campaigns - why can’t they do it?
FC2 has four phased campaigns and 91 stand-alone single missions. There is no dynamic campaign, and no plan (I know of) to add one to the Lock On series. DCS could be a different matter!** When I discussed this with @wagmatt in December, his take on the dynamic campaign was that their work with the military demanded, a powerful mission editor and scripting capabilities to create more realistic scenarios than dynamic campaigns are capable of generating. However, it is certainly something they wish to do at a later date.**
** still some hopes here
RPS: There’s no dynamic campaign system in Black Shark, but I’ve heard talk of a new trigger system. How does that work and what does it bring to the average sortie?
Matt: Ah, the old dynamic campaign topic.** Going back to the previous question about accuracy, at this time we do not feel a dynamic campaign works well for an attack helicopter game. For a proper battlefield environment, we require ground forces to be actively engaging each other and on the move. Additionally, we need to be able to create detailed and realistic AI Forward Air Controller interactions with the player and we want to be able to script realistic battle-flow. This simply has not been the case with previous helicopter simulations with dynamic campaigns, nor are we at the point we can create such a dynamic campaign system… yet. In the meantime, we’ve focused our efforts on creating a Mission Editor system that allows the mission designer to create triggers that allow cause and effect actions on the battlefield that give it a more live, and realistic feel. With this system, we’ve been able to create the realistic battlefield that we feel has been lacking in dynamically generated missions. As DCS evolves, new triggers will be added as well as all new Mission Editor functions. In multiplayer mode, realistic Forward Air Controller interactions with the pilots is achieved if one player takes the role of the Forward Air Controller.
** 
dynamic campaign is not realistic, forget it
I think you are taking his comments out of context here…
which context?
and of course here the latest input to DC
Interview: @wagmatt on MUDSPIKE
Are we any closer to seeing a dynamic type campaign engine in DCS World – is it something that ED has considered?
Our priority focus is still on the mission editor and we see several areas that need to be fixed and improved. Not only will this allow better missions/campaigns for our entertainment audience, it also goes a long way to satisfying the needs of our professional clients. We have however been doing research on this topic and have created internal design documents of how we could approach this using the DCS World structure. It is something we are considering to do once the time is right and we have the needed staff expertise.
With the Su-27 The Ultimate Argument DLC campaign being released recently, are you at liberty to reveal any other DLC campaigns that may be in development?
We are currently working on two campaigns for the NTTR map. They are both centered on the player taking part in RED FLAG exercises… one for the F-15C and one for the A-10C. We are doing these in close cooperation with the author Steve Davies and pilots that have flown multiple RED FLAGs. These campaigns will be very realistic to the actual exercises and include a wealth of briefing and background material. Going back to the previous question, it would never be possible to do these campaigns justice using a dynamically generated campaign system.
Give the interest in a DCS Dynamic Campaign feature within the poll here:
…I thought it worth necro/reminding about this topic as it had some good points.
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DCS + Dynamic Campaign = Nuclear Bomb of flight sims XD
we should start here
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sounds good gonna wait for more progress on that
That does look interesting.
I don’t know DCS mission designing very well, nor the import/export capabilities of what goes into and out of a mission ‘state’ (what got destroyed, what objective/trigger got met) but a generic dynamic campaign engine would have the following parts (rough idea - it’s about 1 cup of tea’s unit of time to do):
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Game State. You need a ‘meta’ game, as in something that holds the current game state and keeps it around to play at a level strategically above how you fly a single mission. A fair facsimile for this is the ‘board and pieces’ in a chess game. A lot of game states act as summaries rather than full-on detail (as in a ‘cell’ is used to represent an area, like a chequerboard or hex space rather than down to meter/feet level). Things need to access this game state and take it from ‘state 1’ to ‘state 2’ using discrete changes, i.e. turns. These turns can be typically be at the start/end of a mission or can be immediate, it really depends on the game design.
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The Strategy AI is the thing that ‘plays’ as a side, so in the diagram I plopped down two of them. It understands the internals of the Game State and uses the various capabilities of the resources/units at its disposal. The Strategy is the thing that will review the game state and prepare a ‘turn’, with an example being 'Objective A → Control Batsumi at coord 144,112. It is given winning objectives and rules to derive. This is the thing that gives the input parameters to the Mission Generator, or in Falcon speak, the parameters to generate the set of Air Task Orders objectives. Strategy AI’s tend to be rule based in that they iterate a number of times over a set of ‘what ifs’ and use point systems to pick the best objective.
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Mission Generator. Needs to generate a mission, as @MBot is doing in his engine module that meets the parameters of the Strategy game turn. Details like routing, waypoints, armaments and the like. The outcome of the mission (whether played or ‘simulated’ at the Strategy level) needs to be fed back into the Game State. If you blow up that bridge or lose an aircraft then the ‘resource’ within this state needs to be altered, ready for the Strategy AI’s next turn.
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Game Resource Units are the things that separate out the capabilities of units away from the Strategy and Mission generation rules. It’s an abstraction that allows you to add over time more unit abilities that get exposed to how the Strategy and Mission gen work. Example: you start with the air war but could evolve to a ground war over time.
So a couple of important points not clear by the wee diagram:
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A DC is sort of a game added over an existing game, but with the ‘micro’ (your mission) being able to impact the ‘macro’ (the meta game of strategy and resources).
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The Game State used by the Strategy AI is at a higher level of abstraction than what you use in a mission, i.e. a battalion level simulation rather than a individual unit simulation.
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The hooks for adding this sort of stuff to any sim would be the trick on how effective or nice to play it is. Falcon has this built within it using a bubble system where the micro and meta are modelled in a summary. I’ve never looked at DCS or the LUA api in much detail to know how easy it would be to integrate (other than a mission gen and a completely separate DC UI outside of DCS).
Fun subject though.
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Nice description by MBot. And FF, I believe you’re in my mindset with your boardgame analogy (I think chess game). Also to push the “turns” as you say, I tend to relate to RESTful technologies versus purely state driven. Less global data to sync.
Interesting times we live in.
Awesome thread!
Very interesting to read the minds of people who know of what they write… I’m just a user, a player. But I have designed a few missions in sims. Sims of today, and DCS in particular is quite complex. There are lots of variables in a mission and even more in a campaign.
I’m not sure a true dynamic campaign is what’s needed. Like Beach I’m afraid it might be realistically booring.
My key elements to a good campaign is:
Resource management on a squadron level. (Pilots, loadouts and route planning)
Mission consequences (dead stay dead)
Feeling of being part of a large operation. Not necessarily a war, but a big strike package.
F4 campaign was great! Especially for its time! Back then the campaign was as demanding on the PC hardware as the sim itself. But I loved the feeling of being a small part of that big package gearing up to go.
Great thread.
I seem to remember Falcon 4’s dynamic campaign was one of the first sims that could use more than one CPU core? It even worked better with the original one core Hyperthreading CPU’s from Intel.
Back then myself and friends tried Falcon 4 campaign on dial up and no way it could work, but the other F4 online content like TE’s worked fine on dial up back then where other sims were still to laggy.
Thankfully I’m on fibre optic now.
I wish we had EF2000 with little more than upgraded graphics and ability to work on modern OS’s, really loved that simulation.
Not to be pendantic but unless you mean ‘Math Coprocessor’ I do not think multi-core was available in 1998. I know that wikipedia says this in the Falcon 4 page:
Falcon 4.0 originally featured 3D graphics with multitexturing support. It was one of the very first programs on the market which was designed multi-threaded to take advantage of dual-core x86 processors.[5] The game used one thread for graphics and primary simulation and the other thread for the campaign engine.
But I can not find any Intel processor that was ‘dual core’ until 2006 (excluding Xeon server processors which were in ‘dual processor’ systems). According to the reference in that section above (linking here) it seems that the quote is mis-attributing the dual core nature of the code to Falcon 4 when it should have been applied to Falcon 4: Allied Force? But that is in 2005.
Now multi-threaded … that is different :-).
Please let me know if I am wrong on my history … which should make many of us feel old
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Fridge, thinking back to those days, AMD beat Intel for the cores, and i was using both companys back then, AMD Thunderbird CPU’s … and i ran F4 on that were really good … Intel fought back with single core Northwood CPU’s and that was when I bought my first 3GHz + CPU and it had hyper-threading too.
It worked and i know it worked, was a big F4 enthusiast back then.
But there was some middle ground back then with mid life F4 hardware tackle and a lot of us with poor internet connections enjoyed it too.
Long live Falcon 4
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I don’t think a Dynamic Campaign has to be on the level of Falcon 4 to be enjoyable. I have enjoyed campaigns that aren’t really dynamic in sims like Red Baron 3D and the Strike Fighters series and many others. Even though the SF series is more sim-lite and the missions are more just random objectives…the activity on the battlefield is enjoyable. On long flights to and from objectives I always enjoy looking at the “Action view” and seeing all the things happening that don’t involve my flight. It’s immersive to see other things going on and not always have my flight being the center of attention.
I would very much like more of a “Career System” where my AI squad mates have names and there is a squadron kill board and ranks, medals etc. similar to what we’ve seen in sims past. This is something Wings Over Flanders Field does very well. It just adds to feeling like you’re a pilot and not just a plane.
On the other hand, deep down, I hope that ED doesn’t make a Dynamic Campaign…I don’t have enough free time as it is. Right now DCS is something I play inbetween a host of other sims (BMS,WOFF etc.)…I don’t need it domnitating more of my CPU time or cutting into time with my family! It might hurt the pocketbook as well…modules that I only had a passing interest might be more attractive to purchase to fly and see how their role plays out in a lively battlefield!
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Honestly I dont think it should be like F4, F4 and DCS World are two different worlds, to get something like that running in DCS (with all its modules, etc) and then maintain it sounds like a crazy complex job.
I think the big thing we need is the transferring of mission info from one mission to the next (built into the sim, I know Mbot has that working). Once we have that, then the possibilities are endless.
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Sith!
Surprised you have time to post here right now given the flurry of activity going on at the ED forums!
I only mentioned F4’s campaign since many regard it as the Holy Grail of dynamic campaigns…and while I do enjoy it…I also enjoy many other flavors of lesser dynamic campaigns and career generators. Just looking for something where we’re all not flying the exact same campaigns and missions. Having AI flights going about their own missions around the battlefield is something I think adds to the immersion and is do-able in the DCS framework.
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Mudspike is a great place to catch my breath
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