Are you saying arguing about the accuracy of the sim is (checks notes) a feature of the simulation?
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DISCLAIMER
I donāt speak for Eagle Dynamics and nothing I write is a direct connection to them specifically.
I also donāt claim to be right. There are my feelings and opinions based directly on my first hand experience with Military Flight Simulators in general.
YMMV.
I think this stuff would be better discussed in a bar, face to face, over a beer but -
Life cycle asā¦ well life cycle.
I made no secret that I work with Training Miltiary sims and I see the same thing at work that I see in DCS. FFS, Iiterally do my day job also at homeā¦ 
FOR FUN!
But itās impressive how everything that characterizes a Real-Life FS is present as a characteristic of DCS.
Itās coldly precise, almost sterile as an environment unless someone creates a (mostly) static mission, it requires actual study and preparation, and to be proficient one should (must?) perform some level of Debriefing to see if the training (or mission) goals have been achievedā¦
But the life-cycle part is a lot about :
- new features to be implemented take a lot to avoid breaking years of previously-amassed code,
- thereās the need for a very thorough regression testing every time, for every module,
- bugs found require a lot of effort to be pinpointed and fixed- usually being not just caused by a single āmistakeā but rather the result of an unfortunate consequence at the end of a potentially complex chain of events,
- thus thereās an inherent inertia when it comes to any change- both bureaucratic and technical,
- any form of employee turnover creates a very real difficulty when it comes to a programmer to pick up someone elseās job,
- I would also assume that the paycheck is not actually stellar and thus itās hard to retain good programmers.
By contrast, for instance, MSFS 20/24 is a very much alive beast.
Menus are ādesignedā and they are not just a list of things you can do.
Itās, dare I say it?, enjoyable!
The original Falcon 4.0 was a transition softwareā¦ you almost had the good old MicroProse immersion (movies before, during, and after the campaign), the After Action Report was detailed and enjoyable, and the Dynamic Campaign allowed the player to have an immediate effect on a āliving worldā. Things could get started, enjoyed, saved for later without much hassle.
Hell, if shot down you could exit and jump back in your wingman seat. You were not just a pilot, you were the entire Squadron. On the other hand some part of fun that was aplenty in Falcon 3.0 somehow still was beginning to thin.
Thereās a balance in the simulation environment. Too much realism detract from the āpure funā- although some people take honest real fun in a procedure well made and in the simple pleasure of a difficult landing in bad weather. Especially when the clouds and rain in DCS look so good.
I am finding GHPC (and other sim-lites) much more fun exactly because you can wing it and still bring home the goods.
All the while I just installed the 4TB SSD because DCS needs honestly a lot to be enjoyed.
In DCS favor I will say that sometimes, especially in multiplayer, thereās that golden, shiny moment of absolute perfection.
You are in your cockpit, everything is under control despite the danger surrounding you, your friend in on your wing (or vice versa), and you look up from the instrumentation* and you catch a glimpse of the wonderful, graphically stunning world, realistically lighted and atmospheric and think āOh hell yeahā.
Yes it can all come down, few moments later, at random, with a Crash to Desktop or when some bug rears its head. Sure.
But hell, the potential is right there.
PS: Sorry for the typos and the wall oātext.
*Modern flying requires way too much head down work to appreciate the marvellous work of the graphic engine. I vehemently object. Itās a waste.
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Thanks! But recently (say the last two years or so) I find myself writing before I even have formed a feeling or opinion about the topic. I just start writing and shape the opinions on the fly. It feels fake. And when I read what Iāve written I feel like I am reading a stilted version, almost AI-generated, version of myself. Really, all I wanted was for @Clutch to not feel like he was being ridiculed for being critical. The rest of the writing seemed like drivel chosen to achieve that goal. You can click the little edit icon on my post to see what I mean.
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just announced in the news letter, the afgan map will be extended to the indian ocean ā¦ there goes a few more Gbytes of my drive
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*extended to East China Sea. Woof. Joking but wouldnāt be upset! Gonna need all the gigabytes.
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I think your answer is in the first quote.
If the user base make something cool, Home Assistant get to sell more hardware.
Where is the incentive for ED?
Plus, managing DCS a open source would be a nightmare. Imagine the many dev. structures they need to monitor todayā¦
Awesome post!
Agree and it probably should be, or has to be, to provide the deep level of detail/fidelity people say they want (I do).
Understood. As a user my only concern with a UI is that it is simple and it does what it says it will do; I hate clicking on a bunch of stuff when I just want to play/fly.
If it looks good thatās nice. Iām fighting with this subject right now.
I recallā¦gosh a long time agoā¦conversations about the work put into intro movies (the graphics were better than in the sim, not the case today) vs putting a:
āDonāt show intro movie at startupā
The person who put all that time into creating a cool piece of artwork likely wasnāt happy about that check box. As a user itās cool. Once. Then I donāt want to be bothered again. At some psychological level perhaps it continues to āsellā the product.
It was a milestone for sure. I thought it made things a bit āgameyā after a point. Yea, I know, blasphemy. The best part was the sense of walking through a door into a world that was āaliveā (stuff going on) . Iād have been happy if they stopped there.
I donāt want a DCS DC campaign anymore. I have an idea that it will disappoint. Not from lack of effort or talent on their part but due a lack of variety due to limits required to actually build the darn thing [DC engine] in the first place. I want ED to open things up, just enough, to provide a method to save the state of the world - withOUT making your install unsafe[1].
Then let those āpassionateā types have at it.
That would be me. Instant action furballs are fun. But limited.
It just dawned on me how to simplify what I think many/most people want (from DCS), in short:
High-Fidelity Instant Action (C)
Brilliant! Iām making a T-shirt. 
Dang, got to get back to testingā¦whatāll it be today? A-10C served over a hot, sweaty, JTAC, with a side order of Smokey SAMās? Or use the Harrierā¦ugh, laterā¦
[1] you can spit out whatever you want via lua right now -IF- you unsafe the install. Seems like a Bad Idea to ask the user to do that.
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yup, thatās me as well 
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I hope he doesnāt feel ridiculed in any way. But when making bold statements, bold replies usually ensue.
I have no issues with people being critical but remove all the early access modules and maps from the complaints, and there would be very little to complain about. And then if you go and read what ED states about the Early Access product, you find:
What is DCS World Early Access?
Early Access is an option for you to play this module in an early state, but it will be incomplete with bugs. The time a product remains in Early Access can vary widely based on the scope of the project, technical hurdles, and how complete the module is when it enters Early Access. Eagle Dynamics and all of our third parties strive to make this period as short as possible. Once the module exits Early Access, you will automatically have the Release version.
So complaining about bugs and problems, in Early Access products, gets old very fast, IMO.
Thank goodness. Iād have to dig through my [large] stack of notes/bookmarks but one of the first strikes there was with Tomcats; like the first armed aircraft to arrive overhead. Iām sure there were others in support of course.
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OK, let me reply in parts. I still think open sourcing the DCS core would either make it much better or the whole project would collapse. Basically no in-between.
First, Home Assistant is the open source project. Nabu Casa is the company. Nabu Casa only added the hardware later, to make it easier for people to start with Home Assistant. Before that, they offered a sunscription that made it a bit easier for users to connect to HA (reverse proxy). But because HA is completely open source, many talented users coild easily set up a reverse proxy themselves.
People mainly took a subscription because they saw the quality and potential of Home Assistant and wanted to contribute to its development. The added ease of use was just a bonus.
I think DCS is not that far off. Thereās plenty of people contributing in kind (mods) or financially (buying modules to support development, even though they donāt have the time to enioy them all).
The incentive for opening up the core of the platform is to make it better and speed up development. This should allow every module developer to sell more modules and reach more customers, including ED.
Home Assistant is the biggest open source project on Github. It has integrations with everything thinkable, from hundreds of brands of lights, switches, alarms, cars, sensors to Norwegian weather stations and Dutch waste collection trucks.
Everything can be connected and the codebase is huge and yet constantly changing.
From a software engineering perspective, it does not get much more complex than that. And yet it works amazingly, and develops at a speed that would not be possible in closed source.
Or what about the Linux kernel? It is unbeaten in servers, basically every IoT device and powers half of all phones.
You cannot say that from a software engineering perspective, DCS is too complex for open source when the most successful and complex software in the world is open source.
I see 3 differences:
- DCS is more niche: everybody can use home automation, not everybody can use a realistic flight sim.
- DCS requires domain knowledge: everyone with a bit of programming skill can write a Python interface for a smart home device, not every coding kid can write a flight model or jet engine simulation.
- DCS was not started as an open source project.
Other than that, DCS is very similar to Home Assistant.
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Ok. I have zero experience with HA, I just went with what you wrote.
Ok. With incentive, I kind of meant money. I donāt see it?
āAlexa, please drop a Mk. 82 on the neighboursā 
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LOL!!!
Ya had to go there, didnāt-cha
See, I was thinking that, while all this automation allows me to never have to move around, or get up off the couch, it wouldnāt be complete unless it could prepare and bring me a cup of coffee. That would be useful
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^
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A colleague of mine became a millionaire by building a free and open source product.
Thereās something about the combination of open source and the high level of automation possible today that leads to unparallelled development speed, given enough passionate contributors and a well-designed and maintained development process.
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Yeah, I got that. Still donāt see how more external developers developing more modules, would make money for ED, unless they get a cut. But ok.
If they started charging for the core software, maybe.
I mean, ED develops modules too right?
If core features, such as AI not seeing through clouds, sonar and ASW, etc are added much faster, their Hornet, Mosquito, (S)H-60, Iraq and other modules would sell more
The question is if the speedup would happen fast enough to survive the immediate reduced income through licensing.
And if the finances and value proposition are viable for DCS as an open platform.
Probably not, but if they areā¦ oh my. Imagine DCS being developed as quickly as Home Assistant.
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I too thought he took it too far. But āEAā, āPublic Betaā, āTest Alphaā, none of these things earn a pass anymore if the user had to pay to access them. Once you sell it, people have every right to complain about it. āEAā is otherwise a profitable barricade to hide behind.
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Yes, but when they sell it with the caveat that itās not finished and there will be bugs, it kind of makes no sense to complain about it not being finished and having bugsā¦ And, they sell it at a discount because of this caveat.
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Then why sell it? We wouldnāt tolerate that from any other product. Would you buy a pair of pants if they told you the workmanship was shotty and will probably never fit right? Would you buy a computer pre-loaded with viruses or life limited parts? of course not, and rightly so.
@Stormy801, thatās not really comparable.
This is software. It is announced, it is offered at a discount for those who want to try it early, but they will have to endure bugs for an unknown period of time. Thatās the deal. If you canāt accept that deal, donāt do it.
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