afaik, never concrete,
the most that was said, is it’d likely be a major version and not a subversion
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Yes. The last 10% is kickin my arse.
The ATC part will be simplified. I’m covering things outside the Tower and Marshal - cus ED says they’re going to improve this (I think) - there’s a whole world outside those two entities.
It’s giving me the combat flight simulation environment I’ve always wanted, or close to it. Now, whether or not anyone else likes it remains to be seen. Likely will only appeal to 10%. But I’m okay with that.
And my wife keeps wanting to travel, taking me away from the project for weeks at a time…
The “official” part of my [volunteer] fire fighter training is starting (long story - there was a need for bodies, even old ones, so I felt compelled to help) so that’s eating into the clock; came home to the wife at 0330 last week after a house fire, smelling like a campfire gone haywire…
The back porch screening project is waiting for me as I type this.
So many excuses 
Feel free to skip all this below as I’m just thinking out loud…
Trying to create a system that supplies varied CAS missions (the DCS JTAC is supported too) is complicated.
*The challenge is keeping it from bogging down DCS yet provide enough ‘stuff’ to make you feel like you’re in a world where things are going on around you. All by simply downloading a campaign and hitting ‘fly’. Everything is self-contained. *
DCS provides a lot of depth in most areas, but is lacking in others, at least in Single Player. If I was to graph it:
Flight Modeling ---------------------------------------
Aircraft systems -----------------------------------
Visuals/graphics ----------------------------
“Atmosphere” ----
It’s that bottom bar I’m trying to raise (or lengthen), for me.
The ‘voice acting’ is generic because what happens is never, exactly, the same - there is a 400 word (and counting) ‘vocabulary’ that is used to build ‘sentences’. This allows it to be dynamic and not static.
I’m a bit ‘nervous’ about the communications interface (how you talk to the various AI entities) as I’ve had to do what I feel is a ‘hack’ to get it to work, using the existing DCS menu system or Voice Attack.
Getting your briefing in the cockpit isn’t ideal but hopefully ED’s new Ready Room/Briefing Room thing helps here. The dynamic weather will be nice assuming a few things.
*Your AI wingman is more useful now. Throughout the last 12-18 months of this project I’ve noticed some improvement from ED here - more like they don’t do crazy things as much; for pre-planned strikes they will actually hit the target. And there is a way to get them to attack groups (vehicles; tanks, APC’s, etc) you, the player, have visually acquired, if you have your options set correctly. *
So far on my 6-year old PC the lua code (after loading, which takes some time) percentage and simulation percentages have all remained low - below ~4% on average.
The ATC part isn’t going to be complex for various reasons but the communications mechanism to expand on it is in place. Just need content, which takes time. It will, as of today provide:
- Initial altitude (normally a block as is/was SOP) on departure while enroute to the AOR
- ATIS and either a Visual or instrument approach choice on RTB. Very generic here for now; for Super Carrier it just gives you the weather, expected BRC and hands you off to the DCS Marshal/CATCC.
As for missions it will dish out either pre-planned coordinated strike missions with other AI flights; give you “on call” CAS (to include a “Kill Box” - like armed recon mission). What you are likely to get depends on what phase of the war (campaign) you jump into.
** Pre-combat - you arrive, do some familiarization flights, etc. Then we go to war…*
** Air superiority*
** Interdiction*
** CAS
The campaign will progress along these phases with targeting based on such.*
The aircraft you are flying will dictate things: the AV8 is the first version so no Air Superiority phase for you (sorry). The multi-role versions (Hornet, Viper, Tomcat) will provide access to all the above.
I wish I could have put them all into one mission but you have to make it multi-player to do so and this, for reasons only known to ED, breaks the AI wingman…took me some time to narrow that one down. So each type of aircraft will have to be a separate campaign. *
Then finding willing victims to test.
Keeps me out of trouble.
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Happy to help if i can
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Thanks, I’ll keep it in mind. Taking the wife out for a 10-day road trip so be a bit until I can get back to it.
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Hey, before I go, have you any knowledge of writing 'hook’s, normally (required?) in this folder?:
C:\Users\USERNAME\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\Scripts\Hooks
If not no Biggy, I’ll dig through the single example I have while on the road.
Issues is: I don’t want to touch the MissionScriptin.lua settings (‘os’, ‘io’, ‘lfs’)
But there appears to be a way to read/write a simple text file. I don’t plan to save the entire state of the sim on exit just some high-level stuff; basically table keys off the top of my head.
Looks like an answer may lie around the following but haven’t had time to play with it.
I assume that in single player that instance of the game is the server?
If I understand it correctly, “lfs” is available ‘outside’ the sim in this manner - it just requires the following file to be placed as shown.
Example:
hookit.lua in “Scripts\Hooks”…
local function loadStuff()
supporting functions
Can I declare & define a global variable here, accessible during runtime?
local handler = {}
function handler.onSimulationStart()
do something useful, like load a string from a text file, parse the string, etc
end
function handler.onSimulationStop()
save a string to a text file
end
DCS.setUserCallbacks(handler)
end
local status, err = pcall(loadStuff)
if not status then
net.log("Something bad happend: " .. tostring(err))
end
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I wonder if we jump from 2.8 to 3.0 and multithreading.
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2.8 must be in closed testing now … who knows… it might be included in that …please note this is speculation on my part
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That’s the dream isn’t it.
I’ve felt like 2.8 might be coming now, given the flurry of media released.
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As a developer I wouldn’t do that unless it was absolutely technically necessary. Big feature releases almost always introduce new bugs. If you release big features one after the other, you give the codebase some time to mature in between and you are less likely to search for a bug in the wrong part of the code, as you can narrow it down more easily.
Given the fact that some issues with asynchronous code can be incredibly hard and arduous to debug, I’d want to release a switch from synchronous to asynchronous with as little other noise as possible.
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The way I’m seeing it 2.8 comes with all the features discussed in GS video and nothing else, probably October update next week. (it’s already a lot anyways, and the moving clouds alone took 1.5 years to come)
What I’m thinking is that it only leaves us two remaining updates for the year and call me pessimistic, but I can’t believe we can get 2.8 October, Strike Eagle november and Phantom December. So I’m thinking if we’re lucky we’ll get one of those planes this year and the next around February. DCS 3.0 I’m feeling mid 2023 at best, probably late 2023.
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you are probably right … its just wishful thinking 
but it does look like we might be getting blackshark 3 fairly soon (two weeks) 
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Quick cheeky😉 question to @NineLine …
Is there any news about combined arms being made compatible with VR … I have waded through the forums over at ED and couldn’t see any updates
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plenty of modules to fill the gap between 2.8 and 3.0
Get ready for 2.8.1, 2.8.2, 2.8.3, 2.8.4, 2.8.5
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