Well, geez…just glue them together…double the resolution! Duh…
https://media1.tenor.com/images/b6d83d66859b0cf095ef81120ef98e1f/tenor.gif
Well, geez…just glue them together…double the resolution! Duh…
https://media1.tenor.com/images/b6d83d66859b0cf095ef81120ef98e1f/tenor.gif
I wonder if someone is working on a VR keyboard that sort of “soft glows” the keys when you look down or look down in combo with a HOTAS press. For instance, if I look at my keyboard in VR…it would be interesting to see a very faint glowing ASDF keys lined up and then maybe also have a tiny sensor on your finger tip. I’m sure someone is working on something like that…
You’ve got a lot of good and bad right now in DCS. The good news is that Eagle Dynamics’ published roadmap addresses most of the bad and expands most of the good.
Good: An ever-expanding list of quality aircraft to fly that are continuously updated.
Bad: Aircraft role distribution right now is strange, and the back-end of DCS World doesn’t support flying them as intended (As mentioned, MiG-21 GCI, Viggen NOE/field strips, etc)
Good: More maps that are gorgeous, with incremental technology improvements on each one.
Bad: Community fragmented between 2 or 3 versions right now (MP player count, mission distribution, ED support focus, depending on which map you want to run.
It’s been touched on earlier in this thread, but Eagle Dynamics’ general silence sometimes makes it hard to judge whether to be optimistic or pessimistic. Updates are flowing out on a regular basis, but I seriously doubt anyone outside the ED dev team has a true sense of what their long term vision of the simulator is.
You could interpret their chaotic release cycle as either the result of a responsive and rapid development pace, or desperate thrashing about as an understaffed team tries to pave the road to 2.5. Exciting times!
Hey Jedi! It’s always nice to be replied to. But in this case I wasn’t singing the praises of VR (for once) but the unrealistic acquisition distances in nearly all flight sims.
This.
Ah…
Sorry! Don’t want to start a Rift vs. Vive war.
Yes, spotting stuff is harder in VR. But like @PaulRix I have been scouting airliners for almost two decades now and despite getting bearings and altitude of the conflicting traffic from both the TCAS and ATC, spotting them can be really difficult.
But the whole visibility thing is a challenge for any sim, VR or not.
About the OP. Yes, a lot has changed in DCS. The development is slow. There doesn’t seem to be a red line through the project…
But, still, they keep on delivering fantastic products…!
And no one mentioned the lack of F-111
I have had many multiple simultaneous Eagle Dynamics Icons since Black Shark. I am not holding my breath for a Grand Unifying DCS version. If Sauron had been ED there would have been 343 rings.
I have 1 icon that manages all builds…
So what you are saying is… “One icon to rule them all.”
I just assume whenever F-14 is written they mean 111. It’s a pretty common spelling mistake around here.
I’ve written some 8,326 letters to various global consumer protection bureaus, and not one seems to take our plight seriously.
I have thought a lot about this lately, I think a VERY simple way of doing this would be with reflective stickers (think trackIR). You place a small circle on buttons on your stick or keyboard or your custom input device, and you now have a overlay that can be popped up or as you said faintly seen all all times).
Just today I had to think about this again. Up to this day it is not possible in DCS to write a debriefing for your missions. Something as simple as: End Mission->Debriefing: “Good job taking out that nuclear reactor. The president expressed his gratitude for saving the world.”. Not in DCS. I had to write a script that opens up Notepad to write a debriefing into a text file!
Will be interesting to see if their focus shifts after 2.5. I hope they will dedicate more resources to improving gameplay.
It’s all about priorities, and even though what you describe would likely not take that much time to implement, it’s not on their radar.
Of course, you could argue the 90s sims had much better gameplay because things like graphics and systems were incapable of being modeled as well as they are now, so the team had the time after they got as far as they could with those to devote to how the game played. Current sims require so much in resources just to get what we have that the rest of the game get only the leftovers. This is also why there is the current debate about how single player games can survive when companies spend so much on them that a few million copies sold won’t cut it, they need to have DLC and microtransactions and all that so people spend more than just the purchase price in order to make their money back.
That said, as far back as Il-2 and even Flanker it was obvious that Russian programmers had a different perspective when it came to sims. For them, the immersion was 100% about what happens in the cockpit, the menus/UI/campaign interface/etc is a means to an end and they give it little thought.
Load up a sim from MS, MPS, Origin/EA/Jane’s, Sierra/Dynamix…all had a lot going on even without ever going into the cockpit. Yet aside from Falcon and Longbow and F-15, maybe, they all had a lot less modeled once you were in the cockpit. It was ok, though, as the gameplay was really good and you could simulate in your mind the things the game left out.
I just find that exceedingly difficult to do with the Russian sims.
If sims were sandwiches, than those 90s Western sims had awesome bread but not a lot inside. A few slices of meat, a pickle, maybe some mayo, but that’s it. Yet it tasted really good because of those awesome bread carbs.
The Russian/21st century sims were thick sandwiches with good meat, a wide variety of toppings and sauces, all made really well…but lackluster bread. Sometimes, you just open the sandwich up and eat the insides and don’t touch the bread…and you can really miss the bread.
I have also made the same observation. While some things in DCS have improved greatly over the past years (compared to 10 years ago), this is still fundamentally true for Eagle Dynamics. In over 20 years of making flight sims, they apparently didn’t consider a text debriefing to be worth their development time. In those two decades they must have revisited the debriefing screen multiple times during the design process of their various flight sims. And apparently each time they found table listing all mission events by the second to be an adequate mission debriefing for a flight sim.
While ultimately this is only a minor issue (as annoying as it is), I think it is actually a fitting characterization of Eagle Dynamics. Log>Text, technology>gameplay
I agree, but they’ve got to balance what can make them money and bring in more customers.
Revamping the Caucasus map is a good start. This is their baseline free to play that draws in the new customers. They like the experience and begin buying more modules. This creates additional cash flow. However, if Caucasus fails to deliver anything beyond a pretty environment, this will turn off some of those new customers as well as the existing core group of simmers. From reading various forums, the M/P environment isn’t utilized as much as other sims. Server stability, focused mission objectives and general jack-assery from immature players turn people away. They stick with single play against AI opponents that can defy laws of physics and can see you at all distances.
I too am hoping they can finally place some attention on legit concerns with the core functionality/deficiencies of the sim.