I’ve been experimenting with this myself. It’s composed of 2 parts:
placing a nav point for, say, a MRLS under a bridge (hard to do dynamically) = the scripted part, with a brief or small encoded bit that says, in effect, “under bridge”, then
If the ‘dynamic’ part of the engine finds this (via whatever means) it expands to something like, “your target is a MLRS at x/y/z, hidden under a bridge” and, “n-miles [direction] of Some Place”, instead of just “your target is a MLRS at x/y/z”.
Just comes across less mechanical, like someone actually “sees” it there [under the bridge]. Of course the code is ugly cus it’s not meant to do this but it helps.
Without getting too in the design weeds, one major things that DCS faces is that it’s a sandbox title. It’s not a WW2, it’s not a Vietnam sim, it’s not a cold war sim, etc. A realistic WW2 dynamic campaign (DC) is different than a modern one for example. Have a generic DC would probably annoy more people than not having one at all.
Well I have a solution to that problem: focus the DC to a specific map and genre, learn from the player experience and expand it from there. Might I suggest the Falklands as a test? I have no plans on getting the map but that would change for a DC.
Very good point for both of you. There’s not really such a thing as a ‘standard’ war. There are wars, conflicts, and merely police actions, though purple hearts seem to be awarded during them all.
Probably right to specialize. Falcon 4/BMS seems to be able to make it work well for both Korea and Israeli theatres (the only two I ever played, personally), but both of those bear similarities involving one country invading its neighbor with various other neighbors either allied for or against.
A Falklands dynamic campaign would be amazing indeed. While I’d thoroughly enjoy (and eagerly await) a Reflected take on a historical campaign, strapping in for a dynamic campaign where things begin along the same lines but aren’t strictly on rails (maybe Royal Navy does a better job of air defense and Atlantic Conveyor is never lost, or conversely, perhaps the Argies fuse their bombs more appropriately and more of the fleet is lost) would be very very interesting to me. I think I’d actually prefer it.
If the personalities (that is, the commanders making the decisions at the strategic and tactical levels) are the same on both sides, you might expect the same decisions to be made and the war to run along the same course as it did historically, regardless of ‘small’ variations in individual actions by the player. But what if the personalities were different, given the same order of battle/composition of forces?
I don’t think it’s too exciting to allow the player to start back at the beginning with the full power of hindsight, so that an entirely different fleet might be deployed in an entirely different way, because then you’re no longer fighting the same war, just one waged in the same place on the globe. But perhaps given the same starting conditions as historical on day one (arrival of the British fleet)?
Who seen my post on combatsim.com about F-22 TAW know how many enemy planes I shot down in cockpit of F-22 during 50+ flight hours in four days long campaign. Shortly: more then Adolf Galland during whole WW2.
When I played Strike Fighter 2 series dynamic campaingns I had feeling like: hmm … there is not too much activity in the air, seems that environment is less active then in TAW/Falcon 4.0. That’s true but there is one more but…
Falcon 4.0 original manual on page 523 pdf
“HYPER-ACTION For experienced combat pilots, flying the real F-16 is 99% boredom and 1% adrenaline. If Falcon 4.0 had the same ratio, nobody would buy the game. Falcon 4.0, like most games, increases activity levels to keep your interest engaged. The action that you see in one Falcon 4.0 mission is equivalent to two to five real combat missions. The number of missions you fly in a day has also been exaggerated. On the other hand, Falcon 4.0 does not feature a super plane with unrealistic performance and weapons (unless you set your game preferences that way). Once in an engagement, the simulation realistically depicts what real F-16 pilots can do.”
This is completely valid argument but on the other hand this means that less action in Eagle Dynamic Flanker 2.5 or LOMAC plus Flaming Cliffs datadisk or nowadays DCS World mission is probably more realistic then virtual pilot is thinking!
