Following a shareholders meeting with our investors this week, development of modules for DCS was high on the agenda amongst other business development items.
Following the recent activity in regards to contract renewals for specific aircraft modules we were in the process of developing and heavily invested in, the following conclusions were made regarding moving forward with DCS module development:
DCS will no longer be our primary development platform.
That said; we are committed to getting Hawk out of early access and released as soon as possible. This will involve updated PBR cockpit textures, bug fixes for major systems, bugs recorded internally with ED and any found with future DCS patches as ongoing maintenance.
Development of P-40F for DCS will resume but will not take precedence of development over other platforms. We maintain that we do not expect to release P-40F prior to 2.5 and a release schedule will be confirmed when the module is ready for beta.
When P-40F is ready for review in DCS; we will, as previously agreed with TFC arrange an acceptance demonstration with a view of releasing the aircraft to you, the public.
Development work on our other aircraft will no longer continue for DCS.
If, at a suitable time, we however convert these assets for DCS we will confirm this in due course when the aircraft is ready for release, not during its development cycle.
Chris and I along with the entire VEAO family appreciate the support of the DCS Community during this time and continuing into the future of our modules in DCS world.
Pete
I think it’s never a great thing to lose a developer. That said: VEAO didn’t seem to be in the business of developing things.
Unfortunate, but frankly not very surprising.
I don’t recall what other planes they said they were going to make, but given their track record in DCS so far, I don’t think it really mattered.
The best news to come of this is it “frees up” whatever else they had claimed to be made by another developer instead.
A Contract Agreement doesnt prevent another Developer from Developing the same Aircraft.
What this does is gets rid of all the “Coming Soon Hype” from their Roadmap.
Especially the EuroFighter.
Gimmie My P-40 and Hawk 2.0 Recode.
Sad about the Eurofighter and about the loss of a dev team in general. Otherwise… meh. Sorry that the guys made that decision but most of the planes on their roadmap weren’t too interesting for me to begin with.
So, they doing X-Plane or P3D v4 modules instead I guess?
The only thing I wanted from them was my money back. This news doesn’t surprise me and I had vowed never to touch anything of theirs again, anyway - and I am convinced I am far from alone.
They use P3D for their “Pro/Private Stuff” IIRC
So what are they saying? They continue development, but not for DCS. What do they develop for? Mil customers?
Do they have a different team on Mil projects? As much as it pains me to say this, their performance on the DCS side was far from stellar, unfortunately.
Edit: Wondering the exact same thing.
Do they have any released projects to their name on that platform?
I think at least some members of their team have released freeware stuff for FSX (and pretty good quality, too) - if they are still with the company.
Leatherneck
PolyChop
Cortex
VEAO
Whose Next???
Leatherneck Split into 2 Groups, Magnitude 3 and Heat Blur
Polychop Split into 2 Groups, Polychop and Poly Dynamics/Miltech-5
Coretex Never had a License Agreement, just SDK access,.
VEAO Was Struggling to keep up with the updates to the engine and API, Their programmer issues also did not help.
The Issue here is FSX Teams try to come over w/ their pretty models and then realize none of their code will work, and their models will have to be re-done or extensively re-worked, There’s at least a dozen plus smaller FSX Studios that tried and failed within months.
VEAO is no exception to that, they do their Pro stuff in P3D, and have had products for FSX in the past.
The only FSX Studio that hasnt had issues w/ the Increased Coding Workload is RAZBAM.
Isn’t it something like
MAGNITUDE 3 LLC
Leatherneck ->
Heatblur
Poly-Dynamics
PolyChop ->
PolyChop
Cortex never really started with DCS did they?
VEAO -> VEAO (Hawk + P40 till completion, then out till 2.5 for sure)
So in terms of numbers it’s not really going down, but it is showing that it is hard to do a start-up in the flight sim modules business for sure.
EDIT: So close, but ninja’d by the Skate… 
They have been struggling for months. This comes as no surprise. Razbam seems to have taken a good approach to their modules and not biting off more then they can chew at once.
I do empathise with these dev teams as far as trying to keep up with ED updates goes. Can you imagine doing hours, weeks and months of work, just about getting it right, then a patch comes along and messes everything up and it’s back to square one?
Times that by n and you’d soon get just a little frustrated. Then customers or potential customers getting frustrated because xyz function doesn’t work any more - or not like it did - and so on.
I can’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t have been a better idea for ED to wait until they had a function/code complete product (i.e. except for bug squashing) before inviting tender from 3rd party devs. So DCSW 2.5 or 3.
As it is, it seems, from the outside, to be constantly moving goalposts for devs.
DCS will never be code complete.
We’ve seen some teams cope quite well with API changes, others struggled. It probably boils down to how good the abstraction is between the meat of the EFM/systems model and the API.
Yep - that’s the comment I expected - but as long as they keep changing the core, fundamental aspects of the base simulator, they are making life unnecessarily difficult for the 3rd party devs.
Get the based sorted, by all means add to it, but get the base sorted, then invite tender from devs to make stuff for it.
Otherwise you will never get the interest, and therefore returns, that would otherwise be possible.
That’s a pipe dream.
No human has ever managed to write software in a way that he didn’t need to refactor when stuff gets added, given a certain size of the project (DCS is WELL past that size). There’s always something you didn’t think about in the original design.
The question is, how hard will it be for you to adapt. If you write spaghetti code and expose the inner functionality in the API, you basically have to do major rewrites everytime the API changes. If you have a clean system architecture, chances are you will dodge most of the work most of the time.
If ED went the way you want them to, DCS would turn into FSX. Yes it is getting band aids here and there, but at the core it is hopelessly outdated. P3D on the other hand completely breaks compatibility at every version increment.