One of the things I really enjoy about the NTTR map are the inclusion of some of the smaller general aviation airports around the area. It would be great to see ED add some more to the Caucasus map as well.
It’s a weird time for maps and flight sims. On one hand you have DCS $60 maps occupying a few hundred square miles, and they are developed over literally years of effort, with the value proposition like it’s a big a deal as an entire aircraft module.
In X-Plane you have the other extreme where a height mesh, OpenStreetMap overlay and satellite/ortho photos make something of arguably better quality and for the basic cost of your time rather than dollars. On P4/FSX you have the option to go the Orbx suite route and buy pretty much the entire world’s surface.
Commercially it would probably be dumb (because it’s a way to recover costs of having ED’s own terrain rendering engine), but DCS with some open map tools would make a lot of sense for the end user. I’m not sure why the tooling is accepted for as the reasoning for why these smaller areas need to cost so much in terms of hand-crafted overlays and labor intensive art work. Tech-wise, they are just been taken over by events of how other flight sims do it today.
Anyway, interesting to think about, in that an Ortho4DCS only really can not exist for non-tech reasons. I wonder if it did though, if it would open up for more DCS flyers, i.e. more non-combat modules down the road etc.
IIRC they also talk about ground AI units as making things complicated. On the other hand, that would only be a good argument if ground AI didn’t have issues, but that is a bit early to judge in case of 2.5 Caucasus. 1.5 Caucasus on the other hand, the ground AI had its fair share of problems.
That is a really good point, in that ground navigation over the road/topo mesh is something more important that a general civil sim.
I think the commercial reasons of being able to sell the maps (to help fund future terrain engine improvements) is probably reason enough. It might be the sort of thing that DCS does way down the line, where the ‘platform’ bit is so mature then it makes it worth opening up.
The other good reason is being able to have a tight control on performance of what goes into the terrain engine. It’s obviously something that is still very much in flux, which makes that moving target hard to make ‘public’. A lot of the subjective ‘art’ of the maps seems to be tuning the amount of objects (in comparing the old Caucasus map with the new one for example) so that the whole thing runs well enough on that main thread. As DCS would get the wrap for poor performance whatever the map, it’s probably better to be able to control that data pretty tightly for now.
They could probably sell a blue 500x500km rectangle sea map for $10 and get quite a lot of takers though.
Add to that that combat operations do not take part in as much space as something like plane has. So it makes senese that a combat sim Does it this way
