Someone tell our virtual ship commanders that burning up 20 SM-2s on a pair of Havocs is a waste!
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Same is true of a lot of AI logic. We have flexibility when it comes to air combat settings; I can tell the AI not to engage helicopters, bombers, attack, or fighters, have them engage cruise missiles alone, or some combination of such, as well as restrict their weaponry used to specific types. When it comes to ships and ground though, the options are limited. For example, SA-11 blowing missile after missile on a low flying helicopter at treetop level (which technically should be well below the SA-11ās engagement envelope). But I canāt tell a SAM site to ignore helicopters or only engage them at a certain altitude and profile, the same as I canāt tell a shipping group to ignore helicopters outside a certain range or use only specific types of weapons against them.
Itās another feature that goes onto the pile of features Iād like to see implemented, but until that time comes the only way to handle it is to work around it. And I canāt say itās a top-tier required feature ahead of all others either, especially in the face of other pressing AI problems.
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Anyone care for a little drama?
This block did a little ranting about DCS in this video. Nick Grey replied.
Dear Sir, Thank you for your podcast and for taking the time to announce your intentions. I am truly sorry that we have made you so angry. The openly caustic nature of your speech is of great concern as it seems very personal and somewhat targeted. You are absolutely correct, this genre is complex and non trivial. The combat simulation market is exceptionally small, technically challenging and fraught with difficulties and inter alia populated with well educated and rightfully demanding clients. To be frank that is why most, if not all companies have failed to survive in this space. What concerns me personally is that you make it sound as though we have gone out of our way to personally hurt you or damage your reputation and that our frivolous behaviour is due to the fact that we have no competition. Nothing could be further from the truth and I am deeply sorry and concerned that you feel this way. Should you wish to discuss this with me personally I would be delighted to make you acquaintance. Respectfully yours Nick Grey ED/TFC Founder
and then Nick Grayās response to Jabbers on YouTube.
Post release of Channel and P47 we agreed with the team to freeze most āproduct developmentā per se and focus on bug fixing
So ED will focus on bug fixingā¦hopefully optimizing as well.
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That comes with the territory of flight sims and perhaps sims in general. Just wait til MS2020 hits mainstreamā¦
Other than the borked damage from last weekās update ā which was patched the next day ā the game runs and my list of huge issues that must be fixed are relatively narrow. If I was to prioritize one, itās currently the AI ground vehicle pathfinding bug and the hit-warp bug in multiplayer.
Having said that, I wonāt say that people donāt have every right to be disappointed because many customers have some really large chunks of change put into DCS right now. A single module costs the same as an entire AAA game, and if we use the closest competitor of IL2BoX, ED is really, really, really falling short when it comes to content. Rarely, if ever, does IL2 have an update that fundamentally breaks the game, and if they do, theyāre quick to patch it. They also thoroughly test their updates before pushing them, so the chances of a critical bug escaping to the wild is much slimmer. The price is less frequent updates, but usually content-full ones when they do.
So, for the price of a single DCS WWII plane, a WWII map, and the WWII assets, I can buy 2-3 IL2BoX titles and have 16-24 more planes, two to three more maps, careers for those planes on those maps, and the ability to join multiplayer games where I donāt own the maps. On top of this, the AI doesnāt use a UFO flight model, their damage model is similar to the playerās, and the game is stable and bug-free. DCS, by contrast, offers me a ton of bugs, I have to make my own content, the AI cheats, and stability isnāt guaranteed. ED needs to look long and hard at how 1C/777 is doing things there if they want DCS to mimic that success.
Now, in modern combat, our options are currently BMS or DCS. If youāre not a die-hard F-16 fan, BMS can be lacking, plus the depth of BMS makes the learning curve very steep. You have to be willing to dedicate time to not only learning the airframe, but the mechanics of the campaign/mission system as well. But you can get it for $5 bucks and some download time. DCSā F-16 doesnāt even match the systems depth in BMS, much less the mission content. And youāre paying $80 for it.
I get that Mr. Grey feels insulted, but I think he might be lacking perspective. Does he know what his customers feel when they want to play DCS, but then they load up and find out the damage model doesnāt work? Or to spend weeks of your own spare time working on a mission for your buddies, scheduling a flight time for everyone, and finding out an update broke critical functionality ā or worse, causes a game crash? No, sorry, āgo to stableā isnāt an acceptable answer because the stable version is just as broken. Go to stable right now and try turning on the MiG-21ās radar at low altitude over land; watch as your framerate drops into a crawl. Stable isnāt supposed to have that kind of issue. āOh, just fly something else!ā nice, but if someone has burned $50 on the MiG-21 and thatās the only one they really play the game for, Iād say theyād be feeling pretty dang salty by now. If you got the UH-1 back in '13, youāre probably pretty sore that it still doesnāt have multicrew despite it being on the feature list when you paid for it. In addition, you donāt have the ASE equipment that the model should have, so youāre hamstrung in anything past 1970.
No, these problems donāt make the game unplayable, but it does make people very upset when they look at something that worked, then suddenly gets broken for no reason. How does that happen? How is it that stable is just an older beta rather than actually stable? How is that bugs keep coming back after theyāve been fixed? Itās like playing whack-a-mole and no one knows why. Is everyone on the development team using their own custom build of the game? We donāt know and honestly we donāt need to know; but we did pay for a functioning product and ED needs to remember that the next time an outburst happens (and it will).
As a sandbox game that expects its users to spend their own time creating content rather than having it provided to them, DCS is setting some very high bars without getting into the cost investment. How much money does it cost server operators to keep their server hardware running and their bandwidth going? How much money does it cost mission creators to create missions? How much money does it cost skinners to create skins? And so on. This is important because time equals money and none of this stuff is light when it comes to investments in time. It took me a full week to make a working WWII scenario! Assuming 40 hours in that week at my old club Fed paycheck, that wouldāve been a whopping $1120 if you were paying me for my time, and the actual time spent was probably closer to 70 hours, not 40. Then push comes to shove and my scenario doesnāt work right because the AI jump around upon taking a hitā¦ I feel like Iāve wasted my time. That is what the community feels when ED drops the ball. I think Mr. Grey would be well advised to think long and hard about that before lashing out at a content creator.
The fact that thereās so few simulators like DCS doesnāt give ED carte blanche to treat its community ā and by extension, customers ā like dirt. Because eventually people will get tired of waiting 6 months for things to get fixed and theyāll simply decide thereās more interesting things to spend their money and their time on. Iām all set to go to IL2BoX if they push me, plus I still have a full library of Steam and GoG games (including older sims that I never got a chance to play years ago) to check out. If ED wants to burn that bridge, then they have more to lose than we do.
Iāll close this lengthy rant by stating that currently, DCS open beta is still fun for me. I wonāt go back to stable because itās not fundamentally different from the current beta. But ED has put DCS on very shaky ground in the past 6 months; thatās on them, not us.
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Extremely well said. Touched on pretty much every point I wanted to make and much more eloquently than I probably would have.
At the end of the day, we donāt want a perfect product. Small bugs will creep in, especially with new features. Thatās life. But we do expect to have something that is usable where all of the major established components work correctly with no fussing or wondering about whatās broken this week.
I go through this cycle of booting up DCS, playing around for a bit, getting frustrated/disheartened, and walking away for a while. Currently Iāve been running the Mudspike Dirt Rally league and loving it. Even when I get back to flying Iāll probably boot up DCS for a quick look, then jump in to BMS or Il-2 for some real enjoyable gameplay.
I think everythingās come to a head at the moment. DCS needs to change something. If the comments are to be believed, they are trying to enact changes. Many eyes will be watching to see what happens.
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Iām lucky I guess. DCS only occupies a fraction of my sim/gaming time - so when I visit it, I feel like a kid in an ever renewing candy store. I think the people that get MOST frustrated with it are those that are so heavily invested (not monetarily necessarily) in it that they can see the warts due to their intimate familiarity with the whole āeco-systemā. Meā¦I get giggly and awestruck just by climbing in the Ka-50 every couple months and am amazed at we have the level of fidelity we do have.
Me and some of the other professional pilots around here have companies that probably spend 20K or more a year on real simulator sessionsā¦and Iām amazed that a VR headset and X-Plane (or Aerofly, or DCSā¦) can pretty much give me the same feeling (mostly).
With ALL of that saidā¦I donāt have the P-47 or the new terrain. They arenāt my cup-o-tea and Iāll probably pass on them unless some compelling gameplay comes along that makes me want to mess with it. Iām happy that other peopleās itches are getting scratched though. Honestlyā¦I have plenty to do with what is already out thereā¦so Iām happy that bug squashing will take precedence since my cup runneth over.
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Letās just say that if you were to get into that Ka-50 English (bleh) cockpit now, you might be a wee bit disappointed. 
However, if you choose like real man and have glorious cockpit of the Russian, all is fine, comrade!
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Translated cockpit screwed up? Seems like an easy enough fix Iād hopeā¦
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Shkval screen is unusable (contrast/brightness mess) in the English cockpit. Russian is fine though.
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I think sometimes people can get way too torqued over this stuff. We seem to demand more but want it to work perfectly, yesterday if not sooner. Also, we want support for modules that are in some cases almost a decade old but donāt want to pay any extra for that support or the development of upgrades.
Chris touched on professional simsā¦ they are not perfect by any means. They break, sometimes certain systems donāt behave as they should, they never (to my mind) feel like you are flying a real airplane and we are talking multi-million dollar simulators here. They are very effective training tools though.
There is no better simulation of a MiG 21 available to the public (or probably anywhere to be honest), than the DCS MiG 21, even if some systems are not working or are broken.
There is also no better simulation available of a Harrier, Viggen, F/A 18, F5, Mirage 2000, Mi 8, KA50, F86, MiG 15, MiG 19, UH1, A10C, F14, Spitfire, etc etc. They are all, to be frank, quite incredibleā¦ Not perfect by any means, but incredible none the less.
I am fortunate enough to get to fly in the real world, and train with expensive simulators. Iām also knocking on the door of turning 50 and have been playing with flight sims since I was 12. Maybe that makes me more easily impressed with what we are playing with in our homes these days.
Ok, Iāll step off my soapbox nowā¦ .
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Let me just borrow it for a moment, to say āWORDā.
Oh, while Iām hereā¦
I donāt get why some people get so emotional and create such drama, over this. Look at the comments after Magz videoā¦! OMG!
Also laughing a bit at the comments about MSFS2020 will destroy DCS and ED and devs should port their modules over. Yeah. Because MS never let anybody down with their FS franchise. 
Ok. Iām done. Getting down again.
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While Iām more on the happy side of the camp, I see both sides of the argument - and to some extent, the loud voices moaning about bugs etc. act as canaries in the coal mine: Iām still happy with my DCS experience and I probably always will be, because when something breaks, a portion of the community will throw their toys so much (well before I notice anything), that someone at ED will get worried and will fix things well before the sim gets to a state where Iām properly bothered.
In saying that, have noticed a few broken things lately and there is probably some truth in that EDās focus has been in churning out new content and that may have impacted the bug side - and that probably means they need to play a bit of catch up. There may well have been important financial reasons which made it a necessity, we donāt know. Either way, itās certainly a balancing act on EDās part. They could probably spend all day every day fixing bugs until they went bankrupt and someone would still find a rivet out of place somewhere.
Above all, I continue to be happy and impressed with what DCS is / has come to be, warts and all.
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Gah, another round of this manure.
What Paul said.
Bunch of ****** spoiled children if you ask me. I would be more russian about it and tell them what whiny brats theyāre being and to put up or shut up.
But thats why Iām running a small crew of landscapers and not a multimillion dollar aircraft company. I donāt have to suck up to my customers, just tell em how it is.
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Look at Franzeās post, if you invest weeks of your time into the sim building complex scenarios just to find out something got broken without any fault of yours, i donāt think you wouldnāt be pissed off. Thatās not to excuse the behaviour that some people step down to in their anger, but the anger in and off itself is, in some cases, understandable.
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Which is why i nuanced my post by writing so emotional and such drama.
I get pissed off when I get a CTD, freeze or other game stopping bugs. Thatās not what Iām talking about. I donāt go about calling devs names because of it. The comments Iām referring to were of a completely different nature. I think they are overreacting, to put it mildly.
I can tell you that itās frustrating when the ārealā flightsim resets in the middle of a proficiency check too. 
But I would never use the kind of language I see in many of those comments. Iād probably lose my job if I did. That kind of behaviour just isnāt acceptable, in the real world.
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I can somehat understand the sentiment from a content creatorās perspective, being one myself. As a content creator you invest consierable time and it is extremely frustrating to see your work not come to fruitition or break shortly later due to some game issues.
Few of my missions and campaigns last very long before breaking. At the begining of the year I released my F/A-18 and F-14 dynamic campaigns which were the culmination of years of development, hundreds if not more hours of work. They lasted exactly to the next beta update which broke their carrier spawning. Over the years I have come to releasing comaratively few of my work, I now keep most of it for personal use only. In fact I have various missions and campaigns on my drive, often an investment of months of work, which simply donāt work right due to one DCS bug or another.
For complex missions, DCS is just such an unstable platform. If you do simple things, as to occasional put down some tanks in the mission editor to blow up, you will be fine. The Hornet has brokean feature XY right now? Easy, blow up some tanks with the Viper instead until it is fixed. The tank gets stuck on a bridge? Simply move it somehwere else. But if you try to create something complex that lasts for longer than one play session, things go south very quickly. Just a tiny example out of many I have expierienced: AI Tomcat trying to park at Bandar Abbas strikes wing on hangar and gets stuck, which blocks airbase for all AI operations, which breaks the mission, which breaks the campaign. The AI hitting a hangar is a small issue in itself, something which most players would simply categorize as a nuisance (and ED treats such issues the same). But in the context of larger missions, these little things quickly become showstoppers. And DCS is literaly full of hundreds of such issues. I fear that ED is on for a rough awakening when they get serious about their own dynamic campaign.
Why do I keep investing so much time into DCS then you might ask? A good question, something I also ask myself. Ultimately it is because neither ED or someone else makes the things I want to play in DCS, so I need to do it myself.
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The reason or at least the main one I tend to avoid the ED forums is the influx of people who think it is their god given right to everything now and who scream blue murder for the slightest of excuses. I am still waiting patiently for huey multi crew which was promised in the roadmap for mid may update. Still waiting patiently and understandingly the reasons why. I agree that content creators get the short end of the stick when stuff breaks and I have also had missions fail because of a patch. I just cant get my head around the angst and anger that proliferates ED forums and youtube content.when ED on the whole rush out fixes for the more glaring bugs.
I would like to see better AI path logic for Normandy and I imagine The Channel map but I am not going to throw my toys out the pram just yet
Happy tuesday everyone 
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I totally get that. Imagine what it must be like to create modules for DCSā¦!
But I donāt see you stoop to the levels of some of the more vocal complaints out there.
DCS has issues that needs to be fixed. No doubt about that.
But DCS also has some of the best features of any flightsim, ever.
If it didnāt, we wouldnāt be having this conversation.
I donāt know how to fix DCS. Iām not a game developer. Maybe huge parts of the code needs to be rewritten? But I can imagine that itās not a pleasant experience for the developers to constantly battle these bugs, either. They have the pressure on their shoulders to continue development, so DCS continue to make money, all the while they must play āwhack-a-moleā with new and old bugs popping up all the time.
The question I keep asking myself is where will we be if ED quits on us?
Would the market open up for another developer to deliver a new and better sim?
Or would we just lose the best option weāve got?
I donāt know? I do know that we flightsimmers are few and we donāt have a powerful lobbyā¦
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Hi all
We are moving to longer patch cycles to enable more time for testing.
I have updated the patch status post with our next planned date for open beta.
Patch Status - DCS 2.9 - ED Forums
Next open beta patch is planned for 15th July
Well, guess as moving target itās going to slow down a little, but move further.
At least current version aint half bad. I havenāt run into any showstoppers so far.
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