When I look outside, early/late in the day the shadows cast by the hills, plus the cloud shadows on the ground, seem to give me a sense of depth.
Not sure if, without a mod/editing, this is possible - to have only those outside the cockpit. Not sure how much it would matter but for certain maps (Syria) I could live without buildings and tree shadow, if I had the above.
Cockpit shadows are nice for that immersion thing - feeling more ‘inside’ the thing.
Most of us, if not all, are aware of a certain youtuber’s DCS rant in early 2022. Whether you agreed with it or not, it certainly made waves and got people talking.
Juice sent me his latest video and I thought he did a great job providing constructive feedback to improve DCS. I would say this is a more level headed discussion (without the emotion ) it’s 30+ minutes…
Didn’t have time to watch it all, but I got as far as mentioning TacticalPascale. Will watch the rest at my hotel tonight
To things I reacted to, thus far.
They need a project manager for WWII. That’s how WWII started.
DCS is the best because it doesn’t have competition. Sure, but why doesn’t it have competition…?
Anyway, the DCS businessmodel being a problem. Sure! I agree. Stuff isn’t getting finished in due time and thing break in updates. Yeah. Consider what DCS is though. It’s an enormously humongous project. And that’s an understatement. Everything that’s made for DCS need to work in all of DCS. As there are more modules introduced, the complexity seems to increase for the dev team… I’ve said it for a long time now. Go back to study sims. One map and a couple of airframes. Finish and move on. But that wouldn’t be the huuuge DCS sandbox that ED is trying to create. But do we really need to fly the F-16 in the 1944 WWII map, if you get my point? ED should at least split DCS into Modern and WWII, IMO.
If allowed to grow in every direction, DCS will burst. I hope they change their strategy for 3.0.
I’m not sure your example is the best one, though. Getting any plane to work with any terrain is super basic.
Working on things like prop wash and gyro precession vs AAM flight modeling is something else.
On the one hand, not letting the WWII stuff die on the vine has undoubtedly set back the overall progress on the modern era side. On the other, it has brought in customers who never have and never will care for modern jets or helos. So has it brought in more than it’s cost them? Only they know the answer, but they haven’t abandoned it so my guess is that it is profitable.
For those like me that get their WWII fix from Il2, it’s not a positive…unless doing these things have increased their overall financial health making the odds of them getting DCS into the 2020’s with all the theaters, aircraft, features, and dynamic campaign I’ve been wanting for years actually completed higher. If that is the case, then I accept the delays in return for the certainty that this will not end up like Strike Fighters and just stop one day after it reached the highest point it ever had.
Is the business model wrong because the consumer thinks it is though?
because as a business, if they’ve been able to thrive for 15 years, the business model must be working, while other developers have come and gone from the genre.
We also don’t know about the commercial/consumer split. While it could be assumed that the consumer sales fund the consumer side and vice versa, that is not necessarily true. One could be helping to subsidize the other, or there could be cross support where one side’s investment turns out to be useful to both.
So any consumer-only sim might be at a serious disadvantage.
Like you said, it’s obviously working for them, even if some users feel like it’s not working for them.
As for the WWII stuff hampering development of modern stuff is what I meant by F-16 in 1944. They could split the product here… But they don’t. That’s entirely their call to make.
I just think that ED is making it harder for themselves by maintaining the businessmodel and development cycle they are currently engaged in.
Their products do spend a lot of time in development. A lot of that is because they invent new amazing tech as they go, it seems. I can’t blame them either, because they are moving DCS forwards, but every update creates a backlog of stuff that must be updated in older modules and this certainly is hampering the development of all modules…
That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy DCS. I do! Very much!
I’m certainly not boycotting DCS because I think things could be better.
For Single Players my ‘adventure’ in improving the “Combat” and “World” parts of DCS World have led me to dead ends concerning a couple of vital things that, without access to them, forces me to create ‘hacks’. That’s all I’m saying for now
I feel once We Finally get some Substantial Additions to The Pacific Theatre
The interest both online/offline/campaign building/selling in WWII will be a major breakthrough in DCS.
I have my doubts this will actually be beneficial.
If you “split the product” you practically fork the code base. Now you need two teams to implement base features (3D engine, weather, lightning, multi threading, terrain, physics, etc…)
You don’t want to have to merge commits between the two teams in such a scenario as this is what you wanted to prevent with the split.
I think the key word was already mentioned here, its SANDBOX.
thats what DCS is. and I think they are doing the right thing to sticking to their businez model while slowly shifting towards some wider experience like SP scripted campaigns then SP dynamic campaign.
but stating that for wwii we dont need full fidelity to be satisfied !? ask @Derbysieger what he thinks about this?
in that case we can all just close it all here with DCS and move to War Thunder
) it’s 30+ minutes…
