IL-2 Cliffs of Dover original map:
Really rough approximate reprojections:
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Here it is with typical Spitfire missions from June, July, and part of August 44 overlaid. We were already good to go but this makes it a lot more comfortable.
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Very happy at the news but wish for a wee bit north for Debden and Duxford.
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The ideal would be all the primaries in 11 Group really, but then my vote would be to not stop going north until you get to fjords! 
A lot of the ābig wingā stuff came from g12 in the latter war, but then itās getting into a crazy (and huge data) levels of details for a single map.
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I would not put too much into the geographic map size. Remember that the outline of the current Caucasus map includes the complete Black Sea up to Istanbul and Bulgaria, but it is simply the coastline with empty, untextured flat land. This is probably the same.
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Good point. Likewise parts of the Nevada map.
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There is a lovely beach in Guernsey called Petit Bo Bay, canāt wait to land my chopper there for a picnic 
Great news on the expansion
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Iāve said it before and Iāll say it again now: I think ED has something up their sleeve for post-Hornet.
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Wouldnāt it be nice id theyād knock it up two notches, though (from C to E)
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I wish, so, freaking, hard.
It was nice to hear Wags touch on the concerns about the asset packs. Iām still concerned what this forebodes once we start hitting the Vietnam era, where aircraft and weapons begin to have much longer services lives (what is the difference functionally between an SA-2 in 1972 and 1991?, an S-60? a ZPU-4? a PT-76? a DDG-2? Does that difference warrant a whole new exclusionary purchase? etc.). Iām willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for now, but I feel the system could be better.
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This is why they need to be a little bit more clear about their future plans instead of announcing this stuff last minute, itās a bit worrisome for the long term prospects.
Oh well, looks pretty still.
Undeniably, that it do.
The performance and lighting looks really nice. If you havenāt watched it, itās worth it for the Q&A stuff as well.
Interesting things for me to come out of it (with my commentary because I canāt help myself):
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The assets pack pricing concept is about effort and revenue, in that as ED being DCS World ābaseā makers it sounds like an experiment for a business model that isnāt tied around aircraft module sales but something else. A broad equivalent would be like Microsoft giving away āWindows 10ā for free, but then trying to make it up on Word or Excel (app) sales. As they try to create a viable 3rd party market for āmodulesā (apps) then how does the ābaseā (OS) get revenue other than competing in the modules/apps market?
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Multiplayer stand-alone servers will need their own license keys, so if you run a client and a server youāll need two of both the map and asset purchases. For me this is trickier, as I could see the argument for making a UI-less stand-alone server with all maps/assets available, but then the work would be to get that together plus then alter the licensing scheme for that special case and āserverā install. The reasoning for doing that work would be a āall boats would riseā thinking around encouraging MP servers then encouraging more āclientā module/map/asset sales. Again though, if MP is a tiny sector then perhaps the numbers donāt make it worth it. Dunno, but I guess all academic anyway until the ābig mergeā, so not within this Normandy map time-frame away.
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Available late May. I think it will be a while personally, as there is a lot to put in those WWII AI unit packs, and lots of moving parts. I think it is absolutely a good decision to not put more scope/effort into the map now. Itās way big enough already, and if it inadvertently pushes 2.5 out of 2017 then itāll be a real shame.
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Performance optimization for the number of rendered objects running on T4 (terrain engine 4 I guess) looks amazing. Seriously, a few years a go, this stuff moving around like that would have freaked people out. The push for VR makes 1080 2D look like childās play
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Some mentions of Combined Arms, as it looks a great fit for World War II plus that map, and I can see it being simpler to have a realistic ground combat experience compared to M1 Abrams level stuff. With CA Iām not sure if itās worth pursuing until it gets a huge amount of love though, as in does it get stuck between being ātoo simpleā for the tank crowd and then āa bad RTSā for people used to HOI etc? Itās like CA needs to be āDCSā like DCS A-10C simulation complexity, rather than the āFlaming Cliffsā levity it seems like it feels like now. It can sort of get away with that as a JTAC role in modern times, but it is very nichey (plus ironically MP reliant). One of those things that is a bit āall or nothingā as the in-between doesnāt make anyone happy.
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No period radio or modern day nav VOR/TACAN etc. One of those things that it people moan enough might be added one day. Again, I can see that āreleasing itā is the best Normandy feature now, so while would love to see that can understand the why.
If this comes in around Summer ish then I think itāll be all good, and something really worthwhile for DCS over time. If it goes on forever though, and then bumps merge/2.5, the F/A-18C, Straits of Hormuz, Carriers all far out etc, then I personally with just throw another Luthier effigy on the fire and rue that kickstart day once again. 
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My opinion:
It looks good. And thatās about it. Iāll judge the important things when I finally play it.
ā¦I can see with those settings, performance is not enough for VR. And that is with 1080 card. (90fps)
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I think with sit-down CPU core-0 locked legacy sims like this, 45fps Async Time Warp is the new 90fps. Theyāve got to get AI off the main thread and thatās probably a bigger code rewrite than the terrain engine. DX11 Instancing is helping, but thereās just so much look-up math going on when compared to the usual AAA game engines.
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An argument could be made that the development of the MP community is warped by the prohibitively high server hosting costs that arise from the absence of a headless linux server. If the latter came to be, iām sure that a lot more people would bother with hosting.
The magnitude of that warping is quite impossible to put into numbers, though.
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And From -15 to -16 
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