VEAO Hawk T.1A

What I remember reading from some ED forum post (either NineLine or Capt Smiley?) is that DCS World basically gives you true air speed, air density, temperature, etc. Then a 3rd party dev writes C++ code that takes those parameters and calculates forces and rotational forces (torque) on the plane from them. Those are basically accelerations (apart from some plane-specific constants), and DCS World then integrates those into (rotational) velocity and pose of the plane.

DCS does handle the collision once you provide a model.

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Looks like the VEAO site has an announcement on their closedown:

I’ll take the more unusual step of copy/pasting the entire site text because (a) the site might be gone soon and (b) the line-height makes it hard to read…

Dear VEAO Customers,

It is sad that we are having to write to you now that our business has permanently closed. However, we as ex directors of VEAO feel that you, our customers, are entitled to a full and frank explanation of at least our side of events.

Early in November 2018 we were contacted by Eagle Dynamics offering us a new contract in retrospective agreement for our Hawk module.
This agreement varied significantly from our original publishing agreement signed many years ago.
Now while we expect and agree that contracts are subject to change and variation, especially in the technology and software industry, this should not be implemented unilaterally.
The new contract included several clauses that we as a British business simply could not legally or morally consider.

Clauses included terms to place our IP into escrow outside of our control at a mandated agent, penalties for bug fixing where the error is solely within the control of ED.
An example being 4 bugs that we reported with ED in 2014 that are still unanswered or fixed, these would incur financial penalties to us as a business where we are unable to remedy the issue.
This is obviously unfair and impractical.

We raised our concerns with ED directly and via the directors of the business, these concerns were met with rebuttal as we were advised that the contract was mandated and non-negotiable, as a result we are unable to sign the agreement.
ED’s response to this was simply “we wish you well in the future” but that they could not do business with us going forwards without us signing this retrospective and punitive agreement for Hawk.
This included a refusal to renew the standing agreement we had with ED for the P-40F.

Our existing agreement makes no provisions for IP transfer or ownership in the event of company failure, as such we will not be making assets or code available for the Hawk, either to ED or the community.

While ED maintained that we could continue publishing Hawk under our current agreement, we as a business are unable to maintain a product / support line for a simulator where there is zero potential for growth so under these circumstances the decision was made that we would close VEAO Simulations and walk away from DCS.

Contrary to popular belief the last communication we had from Eagle Dynamics happened on the 27th of November, a mere 2 days after our decision to withdraw from DCS.
No further contact was received from ED after this date.

Some 3rd parties have agreed to the new conditions and we both sincerely wish them well, some were bullied because of liabilities that they have and financial investments they must recoup.
We had no such obligation as we were entirely self-funded, while we are no longer involved with DCS World we wish them all well in the future.

A major stumbling block for any DCS world development is the lack of documentation and assistance for the platform.
Some people may criticise us for the slow response to critical software issues and bugs.
Often we had to find a solution for these with little to no assistance from ED, despite them claiming 35% of the gross revenue for each sale.

It is our belief, that if more support was provided to 3rd parties that critical bugs would be resolved faster, damage model implementation would work as intended and release timelines would be considerably shorter.

ED even admitted in a 3rd party developer meeting that their SDK documentation is almost non-existant and in fact Chris from VEAO produced development guides that are still part of the SDK today.
There is a reason that most 3rd parties have now undertaken to work outside of the DCS world simulation, to calculate results required for their aircraft…

While this news is never welcome, we invested heavily with both financial and personal sacrifice to work on DCS world. This led to many sleepless nights and countless unpaid hours to try and resolve and improve our product.

We would also like to remind the community that while Hawk was our only released publicly available product, we undertook many corporate and military projects and over 30 contractors are now out of work based on this decision, as the refusal to allow us access to DCS World was universal and not limited to our consumer works.

This decision came at a critical time for us as we were on the verge of signing a new agreement with outsider investors for over £100,000 of investment to recruit a full-time studio to work solely on consumer products for DCS world.

Finally, I would ask that you remember that the VEAO family worked on DCS as a love for the subject matter and the product, every one of our guys and gals worked on DCS world for the love of it and came from within the community. Each and every one of us were heavily invested emotionally and with passion for the DCS community and we are all devastated to be leaving under such circumstances.

We wish you all well in the future,
The VEAO team.

Lots of inside-baseball on the contract stuff we might never know, but one thing that does stand out to me is the irony of now not having access to the code (to keep the product supported and still around at least) because one of the new contract stipulations was that an ESCROW was needed to make sure the code would be kept around in the event of the supplier going away. So the thing that was trying to be avoided was the thing that caused it to happen. Cool. :roll_eyes:

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I’m sure there are lots of sides to this story. I don’t see much self reflection on the state of the Hawk and whether it was at a level that it should have been after so many years. Should ED have been putting the screws to them? Should they have wanted some assurances? And I don’t know about saying that other companies were bullied. Is VEAO applying their perception of their relationship to other developers, or have they talked to them? There is a lot unanswered, and I don’t know that more communication will really tell the whole story. I’m sure it will be circular and not everyone will be comfortable disclosing everything from their “side”. It leaves us consumers in the middle confused and not sure who to believe.

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I don’t really get the point of that message… I don’t know what that particular message tried to achieve; it doesn’t change the fact that VEAO slammed the door shut and the Hawk was left to die.

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This saga was from long before I got into DCS, but all I got to say is that when you’re announcing projects left and right before the first is even done, it does call a few things into question.

I’ll be the first to say ED has their own problems, but a close look at VEAO’s past actions does them no favors.

When a commercial product is getting bested by a free mod, a serious gut check ought to be performed.

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My take on it (and loosening my moderator strait-jacket a bit here, so might regret this) is:

  • VEAO lacked good system programmers, or experience to manage/find good ones. Had sales people, art asset people, lots of passion etc, but lacked that angle in-house.

  • ED is inexperienced in 3rd party supplier agreements back then, because DCS World modules ‘out of house’ was a new thing, and didn’t think through all the scenarios of what sort of software contract should exist. (It is so easy at the beginning of something to only think ‘happy thoughts’ so I can sympathize).

  • DCS World is complex, so lots of complexity/bugs/changes as it moved from a flight sim to a ‘OS’ of hosting modules in the sim… The modules API level is evolving and that hurts the module makers. It’s not deliberate, it’s just classic underestimation by everyone. Software people are the world’s worst optimists when it comes to dates because doing new work is not deterministic.

  • VEAO got further and further behind, product suffered. Community piled on (as they do, rightly or wrongly) so sales suffered. Revenue → costs → less revenue → less new stuff, Repeat.

This statement is just a plain ‘we have the last word. bye’ because the professional relationship between ED and Veao has collapsed, so it’s just a sign it’s all over.

An escrow is absolutely normal in pretty much any trivial non-hobby software supplier contract, so it is just a shame it had to get sorted out later in the day. It’s not good ED didn’t have it up-front, and it’s even worse that Veao think it’s unusual to abide by one. It’s just all part of the evolving process of passionate people that love flight sims moving into a big ol thing like DCS World.

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I think what also contributed to all the problems was that VEAO was among the first third parties and both them and ED didn’t have a lot of experience. Errors are made and things start to go south.

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I had no idea of the level of money and personnel required to make a DCS module. I’ve always naively assumed that “developer” was just a kind term-of-art for a single, Cheeto-stained dude avoiding sunlight in his mom’s basement.

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Minus the mom’s basement and Cheetos. Add tissue boxes and lotion. Add permanent dark circles under eyes.

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Bad blood in business happens. Despite the expectation that human emotion should be replaced by the logic of capitalism, we are all people after all. I think that’s what this letter is about.

Must be tough developing for a platform you have no control over, but that’s how it goes. Modules for DCS aren’t the same as general software to run on windows. There must be a closer OS / application relationship and I imagine that would be hard to come to “fair” terms with on either side.

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Those who pre-ordered the P-40 might take issue with this statement…

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A good carpenter doesn’t blame his tools

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I don’t buy it, for some of the reasons already pointed out, but also because others have produced modules for DCS sucessfully, while VEAO’s Hawk was just treading water, slowly drowning.

I can imagine that making DCS modules must be a challenge, because you don’t have control of the core software, that is evolving continously. But again, that’s not unheard of, in the field of software development.

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As Fearless mentioned, they couldn’t get a hold of decent programmers.

They went with Tango for a while, whose track record is all but stellar (hindsight, of course). Them having to redo most of the code points to serious issues in the design (refactoring happens constantly in new projects, but if you have to completely rewrite something from scratch, chances are your initial design had severe oversights).

I remain seriously underwhelmed by their PR. Not to wonder though, passing blame onto ED has been a staple of VEAO from very early on.

Edit:
Does anybody know if this affects their FSX/P3D side of things? Was that a separate company or did that close down as well?

Also, in going over the statement a second time:

Is it just me or does this read like they tried to drop the Hawk from their portfolio but wanted to keep developing for DCS? If so, no wonder ED would not have any of that.

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Good to see a pilot sober enough to type. :wink:

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I think given the nature of the DCS beast and where we (and were) at, coding needs to be a core competency within a module maker team. Without a tech co-founder it must have been hard to roll with the API’s evolving, and like you said, is why the other mod makers are still around.

It actually happens surprisingly a lot in tech companies, in that they get a ‘leader’, a ‘sales guy’ and then think the actual tech work is something to buy in like they are getting someone to paint their house for a few weeks. There’s lots of noise and big ideas, the initial money gets spent on puff, but then products tend to be weak.

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Agreed, but IMHO “tech company” is a misnomer in that case.

My thoughts as well. When I read the statement from VEAO that started this thread my first thought was “wow, this says a lot more about VEAO than the target of their ire.” If I had any respect for VEAO it is now gone for good.

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Exactly, the statement feels more like a temper tantrum rather than a professional parting of ways.

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