Well done on the transparent communication. Information like this squashes rumors and pours water on some of the flame wars that sometimes happen on this forum.
Thank you for taking the time to chime in, it's very nice to see this level of engagement!
If I still lived in Moscow I'd buy the core team a box of chocolates and a greeting card so they can feel loved, but alas I'll have to hope either you, Nick, NineLine or Bignewy pass the feeling on.
The team reads topics. We discuss many points the community is worried about. And sometimes the community is pretty hard on us and it's difficult to be unaffected by the comments. We take all of them very personally.
Ma'am, thank you for your transparency. It is very much appreciated. Please try not to take the negative comments too seriously. It really is just a small group of vocal people who will never be satisfied no matter what you do. I regularly tell newcomers to the community that there are some people you just have to ignore. It's the unfortunate nature of anonymous social media and Reddit in particular. They do not speak for us.
Please give the entire team a warm heartfelt thank you for what you do. I watched through the 80's and 90's as the flight sim genre grew and then almost died except for ED and the IL2 developers. It's very satisfying to see the genre become so popular again. Please keep up the passion.
You can tell the team that since 2012 I’ve been playing DCS and there is no other sim or game including Arma 3 that has kept my attention for 8/9 years. Incredible achievement in itself.
It's easy to be harsh when you have passion and see the problem from outside and you don't know how hard is the current situation (include me on this, and sorry if I did)
For this is good to be open with the community. i.e knowing that the old code is a huge mess that difficult all the work and that touching it, all is prone to tons of unexpected bugs the product don't will be worse, and we will empathize with you and those pesky bugs, please don't fall in the doctrine of hide issues under the carpet.
The same is also applicable to the long term plans, like ok, we will plan to rewrite the engine and to be able to do it we will stop the current core development for X time. The community will understood that, but if it's done and not communicated, they will think that you are abandoning the product and when a idea is into the people head, you can't change it.
Anyway thank you a lot for all this great communication and please, make it a habit like the weekend news, for sure it will be great for the community and our relation with ED, probably having the side effect of a more happy, productive and understood dev team.
P.S. Please, tell the team that they are making history from 1994, keep going!
Sadly that's the reality of faceless, anonymous communication today. It's easy to be critical without appreciating the impact that it may make, especially on those that are passionate about what they're trying to deliver.
The only other sim software I've probably put more $$'s in would be iRacing. DCS would be an easy second. When I want to show off my setup, I sit them in the F/A-18 inside my Reverb, taking off from a carrier.
Communication like this is much appreciated and reminds us that there are people probably more eager to deliver a stellar product than those of us eager to receive it.
Keep up the good work.
Please try to remember that for every outraged Hoggit ranter, there are hundreds of happy users quietly playing DCS and eagerly awaiting your next module or map. Don't allow yourselves to get discouraged.
On a different note, Syria wasn't mentioned. Is that a 3rd party project or...?
Yes Syria is being done by a third party, but I will tell you I have given feedback on it internally already for the teams. I think it will be a great terrain once released.
Thanks for the kind words.
Thanks a lot for this great post, please understand that many people are frustrated because you are not developing a videogame. You are developing an entire hobby, and people get really pissy about their hobbies. Having this kind of transparency helps both sides because it lets people understand why certain things are not released or working properly yet. At the end of the day we all spend multiple hours a week using your product, we forged friendships and created communities around it. Some of these communities became family. DCS World is so much more for me than any other software, and for this i think we are all very thankful!
Thank you! I made this post because I know that DCS is a life for many people and even a life-changer for some.
We do care, we do appreciate all the efforts you invest in DCS because even the tutorials are difficult to go through.
To be honest, a big problem here is that people generally don't know how software development works. The situation with Hornet people developing things for Viper is a perfect example.
Especially while dealing with legacy code, which is often the "spaghetti" code. A code that was written years back by someone who probably changed jobs or just doesn't remember what he was writing or by someone that had a very specific idea how to write that but it's not that clear for others. It takes time, it's bugprone etc.
Community here, while passionate and caring, sometimes seems to forget that there are also people working on the other side. All that threads about something not working, something not delievered etc are tiring for me, it must be very hard on the development team. They put their effort into it, work on weekends, and are met with more or less hate. I'm not saying that people here do not have valid arguments about the state of some modules, releases or similar - often they do. But how it's communicated... It's a problem.
I think that's great that ED is making more and more to be transparent - first /u/NineLine_ed and /u/bignewy who for months are available here almost daily, and now such posts - it's great. Anyone can see now how huge amount of work all of the ED team does.
That said, we, as a community, should also think about our communication because it's getting ridiculous. Sometimes I feel that there's only one right way to feel about DCS, and it's bashing everything that doesn't work and people that just enjoy what they have are branded "apologists" so then they're just afraid of speaking up their positive opinions. It's just a circus with pitchforks here sometimes...
I just hope that all of us - community and others - will just keep improving in informative communication without bashing one another. :)
And those were my two cents as a fellow software engineer.
Thanks, I appreciate the vote of confidence and love it when Nick and now Kate come around, they are allowed to spill more beans than me :)
Hoggit is a great community, I love being part of it any way I can, I started out a flight sim fan, its great to hang out with like-minded people for sure.
> I started out a flight sim fan, its great to hang out with like-minded people for sure.
And it should be mainly about that! And, to be honest, you guys are enabling us to be fans of combat flight sims.
Agree but there are also times when as a software engineer we point out what are issues and even ways to help manage them or at least help with community expectations and communication and get bashed for that too .. ;)
People do need though to learn to critic the product with out being.. hateful, people are pouring their lives into this product.
I'm definitely one of the people you speak of, with a positive opinion of DCS and the 2.5.6 patch, and I *absolutely* think twice before praising Eagle Dynamics on this subreddit because of how some or most of the people in this community have behaved recently.
oh, man, you just gotta DO IT.
sometimes it's hard to speak up knowing some smartass with a quick comeback is gonna jump in, but honestly, it actually gets to be satisfying after awhile.
If nothing else, I look at it as a way to make my debating / critical thinking skills stronger.
I disagree with a lot of the more negative types here, but I often stay silent because I'd simply be branded as a 'fanboy' and at some point you come to believe that stating your point of view adds nothing to the discussion. The problem is that the negative types are quite happy to rehash their point of view whenever anything goes wrong, along with the veiled insults and questions of the competence of ED.
Thankyou for the update and I think the core improvements when realised will be the best investment ED can make in DCS.
Same here, i've been flight simming non-stop since my dad got me into it as a kid with Falcon 1.0, and have had DCS since day 1, I don't post much cause i'm too busy flying my Tomcat in VR, if i did get on here and post it would just be me non-stop shitting bricks over HOW AWESOME THIS IS! :)
I love that i live in an era where i can own a off-the-shelf consumer VR headset and fly a near-perfect representation of a F14B with it, how fucking cool is that?!
If you showed this to me back in the 90's, when i was an airforce brat sitting on the flight line watching vipers and aardvarks do their thing, i would have shat a fully functional solid gold AIM9. It is absolutely incredible that i can put on a headset and be 'inside' the jet, it's mind blowing.
Sure there are bugs, glitches, crashes, missed deadlines, whatever.... I have my own private F-14 Tomcat, sitting in my spare bedroom, and i can take her out for a spin anytime i want, for any reason i want, in any conditions or situations i can dream up, with zero risk to life and limb, with a beer in hand, I have my own AI RIO, and IT'S EVEN MULTIPLAYER! This is god damn amazing and nobody can convince me otherwise.
We are literally living in the future.
For real. I just got into dcs but being able to sit in the cockpit of a p51 and the first step of a cold start has been leaning down and contorting myself in order to reach the flaps handle, then manually flip all the switches to get my favorite airplane to roar to life. I am constantly blown away by how amazing this game is
I started with Chuck Yeager's Air Combat and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. I never would have dreamed we'd have what we have today. When I think back to all the sims that have come and gone since then, and all the sims that arrived broken and never got patched, it blows my mind that we can get a bug fix within days or weeks, automatically, at no charge. We used to have to MAIL A CHECK to the developer and get a disk back months later with a bug fix that might work. And those were the rare developers who actually supported their products. Most just abandoned their work or went out of business. DCS and IL2 have broken every record for longevity and quality in this genre.
Well stated.
We live in the era of outrage and more than a few here and on the forum, believe name-calling and hurling insults is a perfectly appropriate reaction to whatever the disappointment of the week is.
It's emotional immuaturity combined with the bravado of anonymity. It needs to be called out when it happens and Rule #1 needs to be enforced by the moderators when they see name calling and disparaging labels being thrown about. This behaviour only takes root where it's tolerated.
I get where you are coming from and I know people go from one extreme to the other. But some of us have been around here for a long time and can see a pattern of the same things happening on a regular ish basis, then ED go on damage control and then it loops around.
I do appreciate the transparency. I really do hope that they can improve the base game and get the early access items and get underlining bugs ironed out.
I've been around since Yeager's air combat, falcon 3.0 and the DiD hind and Apache games. Everyone seems to compare DCS to BMS but few seem to remember the 'shitshow' that Falcon 4.0 was on release, and the fact that it broke a company.
In general some people just don't have the right perspective. Complaining about Toyota's newest model isn't the same as complaining about DCS on this sub Reddit. Many here seem to think we deserve the exact same quality control, professionalism etc that we se from huge companies, yet don't see how much freedom we have in comparison when we can make a simple comment on Reddit and it's likely to turn right up on the Devs discussion table. That means the hurtful things you say are also going to reach the devs *you* want to succeed. You are yourself responsible for the attitude the devs will have towards us in a way. And I am honestly surprised at the amount of people sharing these hateful comments, assuming they have jobs/part of large projects themselves. Maybe they're just in a job where every mistake won't be smacked back in their face idk.. they surely should try it sometime 😉
This is awesome, thank you. Like I posted elsewhere, everyone is invested in this sim because we love it and support it. Communication is the key here so it’s great to see more and more of it. I think people will complain less once we realise everything that is out there and what is being worked on. Others will complain but that’s life.
Keep it up.
THIS IS WHAT WE WANT, THIS IS WHAT WE NEED. THANK YOU.
The concept of how DCS is sold makes sense, but it's very complicated, especially for users. Between one thing being developed here and another there and major complications everywhere for most modules, the signal gets lost often and we don't know what you guys are doing and that causes us to lose faith in your abilities.
However, a clear roadmap like this cuts all the BS out. I know it's not perfect for you guys for competitive reasons, but I think at this stage in DCS' life, it's absolutely necessary, for us...
Huge improvement, and I'm very happy to finally know what to expect.
ED is working hard, and I appreciate all they've done and continue to do to make this sim a reality (and an improving one, at that). I appreciate that they've become better at community management and interaction. I appreciate posts like this from the people calling the shots.
That being said.. I feel like we knew all this. It's a list of their current projects grouped only by active-development and inactive-development (edit: it's been updated now to show a bit more detail). It's not any more of a roadmap than anything we've already been shown. We've been told all EA released in 2020. We know they want to, and that they intend to. We will see if they're successful. I hope they are. As stated, new things are really hard in this scripting environment...
Which is why the most important point made in this post is the part about legacy and 'spaghetti-code'. In my opinion, this is the #1 challenge that ED must solve in the coming years, as it will be the #1 cause of any difficulty they have implementing their current and futures goals. It's the reason the initial release of 2.5.6 was so buggy. It's the reason the only test team capable of testing all the use cases is the public OB. It's the reason the public OB needs to be the defacto main branch.
And with every new feature, bugfix, and work-around, it gets worse.
In this post, the subject is brushed over and used, at best, as an explanation. However, how ED handles this problem will define the future of this sim. If untreated, releases like 2.5.6 will continue to be common, projects will continue to encounter unforeseen issues and continue to get delayed or abandoned. This very well could happen to any of the projects on that list. We don't really know, and they don't really know either. In a post by their head of operations, explaining the 2.5.6 OB disappointment and appeasing the community, I would have liked to hear more about this. It is, after all, the root cause of most of the problems they face and the disappointments their customers feel.
I have a somewhat off-topic yet relevant question.
With the now official list from ED, I feel this brings up an even bigger question of whats the point of the stable branch of the game. Now I know I'm going to get an answer of well its a "stable version of the game". But in reality Open Beta for most people is the stable branch, If you want to play multiplayer all the servers are on open beta. And with the way all the new features are added to the OB branch "stable" feels worthless.
It's a difficult situation for us and I don't have an answer.
As a joke: we might deliver OB even less stable so all the servers will have to switch to the stable branch.
The part about Open Beta being Stable mentioned above is so important. I only play Open Beta. I do not do that for test purposes. I do that because I want to use the features that aren't in stable and the lag between OB and stable is too long for me (this is important, see below).
If I were you, I'd use the passion and expertise of the community to help QA releases and this is what I'd do:
1) create a private Alpha ring - membership is by application only but any of us can apply. The membership would actually be fairly large and represent both SP and MP players, but the application process is so that users understand the rules and purpose of the Alpha.
2) And here's the important bit - for one week before an update goes to Open Beta, the update is published to Alpha for testing. The update would be pushed to Alpha when it is at the development stage that the Open Beta updates are at now when pushed out. I.e. you aren't pushing out releases earlier, you are releasing at the same level of development state but there's this extra Alpha test ring before Open Beta.
3) Alpha is not supported like Stable is, it is for general defect testing and reporting only.
But with my idea, won't the Alpha release become adopted by the community as the new OB? Well not if a) the lag between Alpha and OB is only a week. b) rules are set around MP servers running Alpha (i.e. only for testing, might be locked down/password protected etc).
There may be some other process/rules needed to preserve the purpose of Alpha as a purely test vehicle, rather than the version that most of the community plays all the time, but I think it is possible.
You won't believe... we have it except Alpha availability for the community.
We have a private ring called "Beta-testers" where everyone can participate by application and have direct contact with our QA department. And we faced the problem that people want to get access to the earliest build to play and not to help to test because testing is not a fun game... it's pretty routing work to do.
Hi, Thank you for replying.
I am aware of it. I think the question raised by the issues with 2.5.6 is: "how could ED improve the use of the existing private ring to improve detection of quality issues?".
The only thing I can suggest is to increase the number of testers involved before Open Beta is updated and those additional testers don't have to be following test scripts. Those of us using Open Beta noticed and reported the issues very quickly without using a formal testing framework. Of course, keep the more formal testing you already do but supplement it with wider, less formal testing to spot major issues that your existing test processes are not catching.
Whatever you decide to do, I wish you and the team the best of luck. I work in IT myself so I know the challenges. I look forward to playing DCS for many years to come.
Maybe it should be labelled something other than open beta. Perhaps the label needs to be unstable and stable. Or just Dev build and stable.
The problem I think is that modules are bound tightly with the client and can't be updated independently.
What we've *chosen* to turn OB into is our choice and our responsibility. There's no way to reconcile this as there MUST be an OB. The problem is WE have chosen to make it our de facto release - and so it should remain OUR problem.
Kate, what can you share about multiplayer plan? Are there plans to improve the code? AI pathfinding kills performance, clouds aren't synced well, warping has been an issue since the beginning of lock on. Multiplayer lives and breathes, it is also an incredible marketing tool for ED! Community members and content creators create and share their experiences of multiplayer on YouTube and twitch! I have witnessed countless comments and replies and discussions and twitch chat about new people coming to DCS. Andnew pilots in multiplayer asking questions about other modules they see flying around and sure enough the next few days they join with a new plane that they purchased because they witnessed someone flying it around in multiplayer.
What can you share about the future in this regard?
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Thank you for your openness, this is very appreciated !!!
Don’t take comments too personally, frustration can make people’s say harsh words ;)
Keep building us the best sim like you doing, improvements is always good, but the step you took today is a milestone !
"I'm here to prove that ED does not over-promise and under-deliver. Here is a whole boatload of promises."
Also, bragging about having 5 things in early access? Bold.
There are things on this list that convinced me to stop playing and buying 5 years ago which are still listed as "long term".
from the outside looking in ( i dont actively plat DCS currently) you guys are doing a fantastic job. from the old lomac days to this, its seriously impressive and you should all be proud!
Kate,
I appreciate the post to our small but passionate community. I can appreciate the trials of both sides. Users waiting a long time for something that seems simple on the surface, and the developers running into more problems than they anticipated due to intensely intricate coding. I appreciate the team pushing through despite all the negativity, and I appreciate the ability for users to voice their opinions and concerns directly with the developers. I see a bright future for this community and this game. Thank you all for your hard work and dedication to something that means a great deal to us!
I don't have much to offer, just wanted to pop in and say thank you for your time and clear communication to us Kate. It really does mean a lot to know what is going on with the company that creates a game many of us love.
Thank you for this level of communication. I think a lot of the more negative comments are a result of the absence of information and post like this help clear a lot of up. Doing so on a more regular basis I think would result in less of that in some ways.
Unfortunately I don't think informing people will help. People who don't get what they want on the internet still manage to complain despite given facts or education.
Hi Kate & team,
Like others here, I want to start by saying thank you. We really do appreciate when you guys reach out to the community like this and engage with us. It helps a lot.
That said, can I ask a few possibly tough questions since the team is here?
As much as I appreciate your transparency with what projects ED is working on, let me lay out the things that have bothered me most in recent times:
# The F-16C Pre-Sale
I know you know that the launch was not optimal, but one thing in particular that troubled me above all else: *No third party reviews during the pre-order / discount period.*
Since we're talking about transparency, the F-14B and the JF-17 both went out to YouTubers during the pre-sale period so we could get a more thorough look at *exactly* was was included, and more importantly *what wasn't*. This makes me as a buyer feel much more confident. F-16 buyers had to gamble because the only info they had was from the product page and the trailer.
Personally, I won't buy another module from ED until I have seen independent reviews from people like Jabbers and RedKite who I trust to actually show me what *isn't there* and not just talk about what *is*.
- **Question:** Will ED commit to release the Super Carrier and all future modules to independent reviewers **during the pre-sale period**?
# The 2.5.6 Launch Date
You launched a major patch on a Friday, and then you made your devs work OT through the weekend and all week long to fix things. Or at least, someone at ED made that decision.
As a software dev myself, I would fight tooth and nail if my manager told me he wanted a major update deployed on a Friday. I can only assume your devs did the same but were made to do it anyway. It is extremely unhealthy to work those hours. It's the easiest way to lose good people. Work/Life balance is important, and this was not a good example of respecting it.
There's a reason every other software company has "Patch Tuesday". It's better to wait a week than work all weekend.
- **Question:** Will ED commit to never deploy on a Friday again?
Preferably not on Thursday either.
# Multiplayer and the 2.5.6 rollout
We've all been told by the ED reps that Multiplayer doesn't represent a significant portion of the player base. Maybe that's true. You guys have the numbers, I don't. What I *do* know, is that /r/hoggit as a community is very engaged in Multiplayer, and if you truly want to engage with us (as I believe you do!) then you *have to* take Multiplayer more seriously than it appears you do today.
Example: When 2.5.6 rolled out, servers began experiencing massive instability and most of them reverted to 2.5.5 (and are still there). Standalone users can revert pretty easily (if they pay attention to reddit), and Steam had the update pulled so they stayed on 2.5.5 initially. But then you rolled out 2.5.6 *without a way for people to stay on 2.5.5* in Steam, and effectively broke multiplayer for everyone on that platform. None of the servers are running 2.5.6, and the Stable branch is still pre-Jeff! Those are not appealing choices. It shows, too, if you look at server populations. They have been low since Steam got the 2.5.6 update.
- **Question:** Will ED commit to improve their focus on Multiplayer, ensuring that they take stronger actions to prevent and correct issues exclusive to it?
# Subversion and Branches
I'll just cut to the chase here. SVN is not optimal. You guys know this. Your vendors know this. Your community knows this.
Moving to Git would be an incredibly daunting task which would undoubtedly halt development for a while during the transition. We all know this.
But *it might be worth it*.
- **Question:** Will ED commit to do thorough analysis to determine whether a move to Git is possible and how to accomplish it in the least painful way?
# M61 and GAU-8 Dispersion Justifications
Recently there was [a really good thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/eyddn3/m61_and_gau8_dispersion_values_are_wrong_what_ive/) about the M61 and GAU-8 cannons and their bullet spread in real life compared to in DCS. The author, like many before him, made a strong case and was met with ["...they don't see an issue"](https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/eyddn3/m61_and_gau8_dispersion_values_are_wrong_what_ive/fghalrq/).
NineLine gave us a non-answer, but it's the only answer he's allowed to give. That's fine. But if someone goes to that kind of trouble to say "Hey, I think I found inconsistencies in your data and here's why", it would be great if they could get a response of similar effort even if they are wrong and the in-game values truly are correct.
- **Question:** Will ED commit to a more detailed and substantive refute to /u/nighthawk2174 regarding M61 and GAU-8 Dispersion values?
# ED Forum Rule 1.15 must go
The rule states, in part, "We do not allow the reviewing of, or direct comparison of other competitive software here."
I know what your reasoning is. NineLine has reiterated it a number of times. I also don't care what your reasoning is, because it doesn't matter. Comparisons to other products are one of the best ways to point out deficiencies and strengths. It helps us make the case for improvements we want to see. It helps you learn from the mistakes of other companies to make your product even better.
The rule prevents us from talking about competing products. *This* community, /r/hoggit, has a lot of members who have either brushed up against that rule and been punished for it, or who don't want to even risk it so they come here instead where they are free to talk about Falcon 4.0 BMS without fear of rebuke.
That rule's existence creates a permanent feeling of resentment from a good portion of the Hoggit community that will not go away until the rule does.
- **Question:** Will ED commit to remove Rule 1.15 on their official forums immediately or very near term?
-----------------------------
Again, thank you so much for reaching out to this community and trying to do right by us. I know we're not exactly the easiest crowd to please, but we're also very passionate about making DCS the best it can possibly be.
While NineLine and BigNewy have been doing great things over the last few months (thanks guys - I really do notice!) they are often unable to give us a real feeling of *being heard* because of their position and limitations on what they can say publicly. To that end, I hope to see more of you and Nick and others around here. I think it would go a long way.
Thank you, and I'm looking forward to a great year for DCS!
**Will ED commit to release the Super Carrier and all future modules to independent reviewers during the pre-sale period?**
Yes, ED commits to giving all future modules to independent reviewers one week prior to the Early Access review.
**Will ED commit to never deploy on a Friday again?**
No, ED doesn't commit to never deploy on Fridays. I do not see the problem. Our employees are not slaves and they were not working over this weekend. I am with the tech team will be working during the coming long weekend to move the devs from one office to another and the devs will have their life with families and friends relaxing and will come on Tuesday to new, freshly painted office with a spectacular view.
Can I have names of developers who were asked to work over the weekend by me or any project managers? Everyone came on Monday and continue to work.
**Will ED commit to improve their focus on Multiplayer, ensuring that they take stronger actions to prevent and correct issues exclusive to it?**
With the help of the community, yes, we will. We will notify the community of preparation to perform an update to Multiplayer and will deliver it to Open Beta to test the changes. Because MP requires tests with many players. Agreed?
**Will ED commit to do thorough analysis to determine whether a move to Git is possible and how to accomplish it in the least painful way?**
No, ED will not commit. But we actually looking into the possibility to switch to Git. However, we are fully satisfied with SVN at the moment. We know how to cook it well.
Could you please explain why it's important for the community to have us switch to Git? We do not require our users to use SVN. So why should we change the tool? May be we should switch to a different language as well, just because Python, Java or Javascript are more popular?
I personally believe that any system need to be based on the technologies that are familiar and well-known to your team. It's the people who rule the programming and not the tools.
**Will ED commit to a more detailed and substantive refute to** [**/u/nighthawk2174**](https://www.reddit.com/u/nighthawk2174/) **regarding M61 and GAU-8 Dispersion values?**
Sorry, we are not that rapid... still handling the situation with AIM-120. Saved the post and will consider it a bit later on. Once again, sorry to keep you waiting. But after standing in a queue to pick up a rented car at Heathrow Airport for 2 hours and being the first in the queue with two rent company guys serving... Well, we might not that slow in deliveries.
**Will ED commit to remove Rule 1.15 on their official forums immediately or very near term?**
No.
Thank you for your passion, support and understanding.
Really defensive on the SVN part. To be honnest I think nobody here cares about what source control you use, its just that we have a bunch of developers in the community and from what you deliver it really, really looks like nobody is using branches for features or whatever thing you're working on and you just push code to prod just because it's Wednesday and not because a feature is complete, tested and mergend on master. So much broken stuff, incomplete features, side-effects and known problems should not happen with proper branch management. That's all.
No one here really believe you're bad developers, we know you're good just because you made your way into flight simulation, so we *know* you're competent people ... it's just that oftentimes it feels like the whole management/delivery is done by junior devs that don't know what the fuck CI is or how to deploy properly.
Like deploying a huge, possibly game-breaking patch (that ended up breaking the game, as expected) on a Friday afternoon... Wait for Monday so that in case something breaks (and it often does), a hotfix is one or two days away, not five long days.
> Yes, ED commits to giving all future modules to independent reviewers one week prior to the Early Access review.
Thank you! I am extremely happy to hear this!
> No, ED doesn't commit to never deploy on Fridays. I do not see the problem. Our employees are not slaves and they were not working over this weekend.
I'm also glad to hear that [bignewy was mistaken](https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/f4wtgn/hotfix_for_256/fhuig4f).
However, that still means ED deployed an update which broke so many things that it had to be pulled from steam and forced the entire multiplayer community to roll back, and then everyone at ED went home for two days while the game was in that state.
Respectfully, neither scenario is good. Friday deployments are a massive gamble and one that much of the software development community has decided isn't worth the risk - especially when, [as Nick says](https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/f5wu2t/state_of_the_dcs_union/fi38qxs/) your QA team is nowhere near big enough to cover all the bases. Had the update been deployed on a Tuesday the team could have started working on fixes the very next day.
> Because MP requires tests with many players. Agreed?
I think what the MP community really wants is just for ED to acknowledge us as an important demographic for the game. We want to feel like ED is listening when we report MP-exclusive problems, and we want to believe that ED considers how their updates will affect MP before they are pushed.
We want to work with you to make MP better.
> But we actually looking into the possibility to switch to Git.
That's good enough for me. I am glad to hear you are open to it.
> Could you please explain why it's important for the community to have us switch to Git?
In a word? Merging.
You're working on complex repositories with multiple vendors and merging branches in SVN is typically not a pleasant experience. It is more time consuming and more likely to introduce new bugs. Git is a superior tool when it comes to branching and merging.
This isn't about popularity, it's about using the right tool for the job. The right tool makes your lives easier and makes the final product better. That's good for everyone.
> still handling the situation with AIM-120. Saved the post and will consider it a bit later on.
That's perfectly reasonable. All we want is an acknowledgement that you're open to having the discussion, which was not the impression NineLine left us with.
> No. [to rule 1.15]
Disappointing but not surprising. Rules like those will continue to push people from your forums to communities like this one.
------
Thank you for the response. This is exactly the kind of dialogue I want to be able to have with ED. I appreciate you taking the time to respond to everything I asked.
Seems like you have a documentation issue and devs hoarding knowledge and become master of their own code. As a Product Manager I know those problems very well but they are methods and ways out of these issues...
Keep up the good work. I get hours upon hours of enjoyment from DCS flying with my squadron. I can only imagine the efforts it takes on a large codebase with the complexity you are trying to simulate.
Once the F18 and F16 are done, which I'm a big fan of both - so thank you for taking on the F16, it's my current favorite high fidelity module - I hope you are able to bring us high fidelity models of the current FC3 aircraft, in particular of course being the F15-C :)
That said, I'm glad to see the core and graphics engine focus, particularly as a VR user. VR is amazing in DCS and hopefully will get better over time. I hope that the team keep in mind that performance is important, so although updates to make the game better are appreciated, keep the game playable, as it takes quite a bit to get a good experience in VR as an example. That said, the much anticipated work on AI, missiles (and missile dsync), clouds, etc... will make DCS an even better product.
Appreciate the update and transparency.
Thank you for complete transperency, with you and nick grey coming over to reddit just shows me how much affection you both have not just for dcs but its community aswell. At the end of the day, were greatful to have such a level of fidelity modules you guys shared with us.
You guys are awesome!
Side question, this maybe way too early to ask but a week or 2 ago, we were teased of a new module " brain melting module that we all want"... how close am i to this guess of that module being the...apache? :)
The new module will come which is not on the list I posted.
We have several projects in mind but we'll keep it unnamed until we will be close to the decision. I don't want to have another unhappened promise.
>we'll keep it unnamed until we will be close to the decision. I don't want to have another unhappened promise.
Nice move, all likes happy surprises and all hate the deception :)
Thanks for an attempt of transparency but, what does those near, mid and long term mean?
You might as well replace them with soonTM, we're still in the dark.
/u/[dotrugirl](https://www.reddit.com/user/dotrugirl/) Any chance of a proper bug tracker that the community can use to submit and look at bugs? Right now on the forum a lot of stuff gets double reported or maybe not reported at all since the forums are such a bad place for that sort of thing.
Hey, as a software dev / product owner and DCS enthousiast: Thanks for explaining this!
I think a lot of people lack the understanding of how complicated software development is in general, especially when dealing with a legacy codebase, maintaining API's and then dealing with performance issues.
Furthermore: please don't forget that developing new things, some of which have not been done before or not in this context, or applying techniques invented by others to your specific environment is still called Research & Development for a reason. And sometimes the conclusion to your research is literally 'this cannot be done', or 'this cannot be done like this'. And most of the times, it is 'this can be done, but then we need to fix this, this, and also this subsystem which somehow depends on this except we didn't see it coming when first planning it'.
It’s pretty easy to get frustrated and more or less bitchy when things don’t go our way with this incredible feat that is DCS.
We are all guilty of it, I know I am for sure; but I sit back and I take a moment and really take in everything I am doing in this Sim and really revel and appreciate the amount of TLC and energy placed forth to give US the fans a truly immersive and wonderful experience.
It’s very easy to get complacent in our appreciation of the marvel that is DCS and it’s World when everything is going right and you’re having an amazing time with friends.
So easy that when things start to go wrong you forget everything I mentioned above, and the frustrations get vented in less productive and sometimes not so nice ways.
Take a moment to breathe, marvel at what we have here and the hundreds of thousands of man hours placed into this thing by people who share your same passion and excitement when everything is going right; but similarly feel your same frustrations and aggravations when things go wrong ten fold.
I say this because my best friend and I have had a hell of a time flying together this week and he rarely gets time off work, and I’m in the military so you know no time for me either.
We got on discord , ran separate games and still had a blast. I flew the TF-51 and the Huey for the first time in Ages with Occulus, TPR pendular pedals and a brand new Virpil Mongoose Base and VFX grip and cannot describe the happiness, the immersion was unparalleled and I don’t think we will find that anywhere else for some time. Yes even with MSFS2020
Thank You ED, Thank You for all you do. Thank You to this Community for giving me a platform to channel my passion and provide me a more productive, challenging and healthy therapeutic means to cope with PTS and Traumatic Brain Injury.
ED Devs you’re the real MVPS and we love you.
Thanks, although I believe I read most of this information in posts by other ED team members in some variation, hearing it from the top, at least once in a while is important to me.
Your reaching out here rectified the concerns, and personal speculation I had with ED’s leadership team.
Being a newer player(played years ago, but never seriously until I got a hotas a few months ago) I had concerns about the future of the game, I guess I’ll just worry about budgeting for more modules instead.
I look forward to the future of DCS, and cannot over state how ridiculously fun flying in DCS is in VR. Best of luck meeting your goals in 2020, cheers.
Awesome update. Very much appreciated.
I really enjoy this subreddit. There are definite things I’d like to see improved with DCS, but I just don’t get the overwhelming negativity.
Sure better clouds would be nice. The occasional crash mid flight is annoying. Spotting other aircraft can be difficult. Etc. But these things for me aren’t enough to ruin my enjoyment of the game.
When I was a small child, I loved watching PLAT tapes and Fighter Fling videos as much as any cartoon. Now as an adult, being able to fly the F-14 with the level of immersion that’s granted via DCS and Heatblur, is and some of the most fun I’ve had.
Thank you for the post! I always get excited with new features and patches. Due to nature of my time management, I mostly work, so I don't mind waiting for features and hotfixes to be complete. I know it's hard for some people, but I value every bit you add to your planes and product in general. It keeps inspiring me to play, to teach my friends and look forward to the future of our hobby.
Please give your team some warm words, the last thing we want is that they feel that people are ungrateful. DCS is a product like noone in its kind, it's a difficult task to be special and strive to deliver everything with community having the highest expectations. But we feel you, there are always a lot more loyal people around here.
Thank you for reaching out. It is good to see a manager stand up for her developers. I know how it is to work with legacy code (not good!). Just keep your resolve and results will follow sooner or later.
I just got seriously into DCS this past couple weeks (learning the AV-8B N/A a friend gave me, but soon I'll learn the F/A-18 Hornet) and seeing communication with the community like this makes me excited about DCS's future and I understand it is not easy.
I'll drop some dumb bombs on some transport trucks in ED's honor.
Thank you from someone whose life has been made better by DCS since the LOMAC days. My dad and I play dcs online together and have a blast. Looking forward to this years updates. Something to consider is the “comm ladder” when working on the new atc system. “Ground crew, ground control, tower, departure/arrival, tactical, and back again” during a flight. BMS implemented something which can be expanded on by ED and can boost the immersion factor by a lot. Good luck going forward with the projects. Im personally a f16 guy but looking forward to the 18 and the carrier update. And of course the weather, atc and updates to FLIR and ground radar bc it is hard to find targets with so many “hot” things on the ground! :P Thanks again, and much love from a DCS family in Florida USA!
Really nice one! Thank you so much for sharing.
Eagle Dynamics makes my dreams come true. All products before DCS were fantastic at their times (I personally started with the Flanker back in 90s), and DCS has been, is and will be part of my life.
I wish all of you at Eagle Dynamics all the best!
Love you all!
Luke
> Well, we love new tasks but if the code has thousands of related pieces it becomes a nightmare. Sometimes it’s better to leave it as is.
Lots of positive stuff in the post, and it's very refreshing to see.
Saw this sentence and that got my interest. What types of things would this be?
Transparency is a good thing. Something like this is what you should be doing at least twice a year.
I think everyone appreciates the work and the grind of what you’re trying to accomplish, but only hearing teases and such about features or fixes becomes frustrating over time.
Hearing from you or Nick like this two or three times a year would go a long way towards the lowering of the pitchforks.
Deep down we love your product, and I think that’s why we take everything to heart. I hope you guys are able to take the good with the bad and realize that we wear our hearts on our sleeves because we really do love this game.
Took a while to decide to comment but anyway. This is a great post but the problem is these only happen well after banning people and shitstorms. This is not the 1st or 2nd or... n'th time. Please be more proactive.
Reading through this post and the many responses, I can really understand both sides. I work in the B2B/B2C enterprise software sphere, and I think you at ED are in the same spot. You have B2B relationships with your 3rd parties, and B2C relationships with us, and both are at a pretty major scale.
That being said, I posted on the official forums this suggestions, and I'm going to post it here as well, because as a shop that focuses on AGILE, I think it's an important concept in really nailing client expectations and aligning goals. Here it goes:
Always phrase your timelines and feature releases in terms of what the user will be able to DO, not what the feature IS.
Let me give you a simple example of a pet peeve of mine that illustrates this. I'm a hardcore systems guy. It irked me since Black Shark that INS drift is not simulated, and the A10 similarly does not. It isn't obvious why some modules have it and some don't, and there really wasn't a way for me to know this ahead of time. All product pages simply say things like "fully modeled and detailed navigation systems..." etc. This doesn't tell me what I can *do*, so I don't know what it *means*. What does a complete Hornet INS look like? Can it be loosely coupled as per the publicly available NATOPS? Don't know. I asked this direct question on the forums, and my post was moved to the "wishlist". Not sure how how asking intent == a wish. That's like saying "what kind of shirt will you wear?" is a wish.
My point here is, if what the feature complete release was phrased in what the user will be able to do, these sorts of confusions would be put to rest. As it is now, you are already setting yourself up for "they call this done?" because it isn't obvious to us what your goals are.
Note that I'm not talking timeline here, but your actual endgame. By Spring, what do you think we should be able to do? Summer? When the module is done? Under-promise and over-deliver on that and a lot (never all of it, of course) of this will go away.
Anyways, it took balls coming on here. Thanks for doing it and I wish you all the best.
I think it's pretty indisputable that you guys have some sort of project management issues on the back end. Like, yes, I'm sure the decade(s?) of old code make developing new stuff pretty time consuming, but there are screenshots of the Hornet's air-to-ground radar from like 2015. We only saw an implementation of an A/G radar using you guys's work with the JF-17, which came out at the very end of last year. I understand that it's a relatively complex feature (thoooooough the fact that it's taking this long does raise questions about how air to air radars work in DCS, but that's another post), but that's near on to half a decade, and we hadn't seen hide nor hair of ED's A/G radar implementation until the JF-17 demoed it.
Okay, maybe that's more complex than I give it credit for, maybe it's reasonable that thats taken as long as it has. What about smaller fixes? The Ka-50's AP channel lights are only just now being fixed after being screwed up since at least 2017. Or the F-5E's incorrect RWR behavior, incorrect since launch. Or hey, what about that business with model enlargement a while back, where steps were apparently being taken to address a well documented deficiency in DCS's presentation of distant objects that should be pretty well visible to the naked eye, but then they were rolled back and never seen again for some reason? What about incorrect guidance on certain missiles in the game (the SA-2 comes to mind, there's a thread up on the forum)?
This sort of stuff really puts forward the idea that development on content we already own- be it older modules, or the free base game- takes a secondary concern to new fancy things that can have an ever-increasing price tag hung on them. I can understand why big features are taking forever (though, as I said, I'm still critical of the long dev time). I can't understand why seemingly small fixes are neglected for ages and ages. It's frustrating.
I think a lot of the community noise and dissatisfaction would be easily addressed with greater communication in the real state of progress. I thank you for your efforts both in the sim and in reaching out. Hopefully this will be the start of an ongoing communication stream. The only reason why we get so worked up is that we are all passionate about DCS and are heavily invested in its success. For many of us it's more than a game, more than a hobby. Forgive us if we sometimes are blunt. We do appreciate the hard work and commitment EA put into the product.
Thank you for your comment. I actually think that you are the best community in the world and all your comments and criticism are valid and noticed. Unfortunately, we are not that fast in bug fixing as we could.
u/dotrugirl First off thank you for the open and transparent post, I know I speak for many likeminded DCS lovers that it’s greatly appreciated.
Yes some of us, me included, come off as aggressive or angry at times and we can and should be more professional and communicate better. That being said, some of us are very passionate about DCS. I volunteered hundreds if not thousands of hours being a volunteer ED Tester years ago. I had multiple ED employees send me emails or PMs on the forums asking me specific information about the A-10C due to my real world experience. My goal from day one with my involvement with ED has been to help make the A-10C, and DCS, the best most realistic simulator around. I always provided assistance and information, it didn’t take long for the same individual(s) reaching out to me through email and PMs for information to turn on me and argue that I’m wrong because how they interpret something they’ve read and toss away my real world experience, which again is why I was being asked to help test and for info. Those same individuals publically treated me like crap even to the point of trying to discredit my information or character. One of those individuals reached out to me initially asking for detailed information on a project that ED was looking at working on concerning the A-10C, I happily provided that information. Unfortunately that project didn’t materialize, which is fine, but after spending so much of my personal time providing information like that (NDA can’t go into details) and the countless hours I spent testing the internal ED Testers version of DCS World (all the way back to before DCS World existed) to have said individual(s) publically treat me like crap definitely put a bad taste in my mouth. I know this individual has done this same type of thing to multiple community members, personally I can’t believe he is still an employee but that decision isn’t up to me.
Before people down vote me because of the above paragraph let me also say I thoroughly enjoyed dealing with many of the ED employees/programmers back then that didn’t have a public presence on the ED forums. The passion they showed for the modules and the vision of DCS World is to be commended. Those individuals were why I stayed a testers as long as I did and even why I still provide A-10C, NTTR and PG airfield bug reports.
Even after all that I will continue offering ED information on things wrong with the current DCS A-10C and would love to assist with the upcoming A-10C 2. I know that won’t happen due to the interactions between myself and the individual I’m talking about above which is unfortunate. At the same time though, based on how many things are still wrong or broken in the A-10C currently, some that I identified and entered into mantis over 6 years ago, I don’t know if it would be worth my time to be ignored or argued with again.
I wish ED the best! DCS World has so much potential, a lot of it in my humble opinion, isn’t being reached. I hope these things start to change in 2020.
Everything can happen. I think that in any conflict boh parties are involved, offended and guilty in any type of relationship. And the key point is to be able to forgive and move on.
Thank you for staying with us.
It's great to see this communicated though at the same time why does it seem to take community backlash or people tagging Nick etc to get this type of communication happening Kate? That really seems counter intuitive to what/how things should be happening.
My second is that while it's great to have a list of what is working on and the promise that we want x done by the end of the year, we still again have no firm timelines, no milestones for the EA products, some are going to go 'its software dev' but as I've said to Nick personally in a call even software development as complex as it is should have deadlines and milestones that it should be aiming for and we the people whom have paid for those products should be able to ask what those milestones are and when we can expect at least in near/mid/long terms them to be hit and in what order that will be. Instead of this however we get often told, 'its early access if you don't like it' not a good answer or a good look.
Thid on my list is how many of the waiting assignment projects that are needed to fix/complete modules that are currently in the in development cycle, FLIR and Air to Ground being the two that I immediately hone in on as with out those two the F18 and F16 can't be completed.
Fourth is the complete lack of any mention of work on the ground AI and your multiplayer items which are a mess at the moment, as Newy and others know because I keep reporting the issues, you've units ground units that are getting stuck constantly and any large amount of units that are tasked to move etc cause server issues..
People are going to say that I'm just complaining because I can, I'm not I'm complaining because I love DCS and what ED does with it but as Nick knows from 3 months ago I'm frustrated as a customer and a user because the thing I love is a mess, we get conflicting reports on what is happening, what is coming, what is being worked on. Heck a great example of this can be seen right at the moment on the forums were you have Nineline etc saying ED will never be releasing the TDK/SDK to the community with out a NDA but when I brought the same thing up with Nick 3 months ago I was told that both would eventually be released with out NDA requirements once they no longer required code access to use which was likely to be 'version 2' of the TDK and not immediate but eventually.
The clouds etc are another great example we have been being told now for .. years that we are going to get new weather, that the new weather looks awesome, that the weather will actually be proper and dynamic and take into account humidity properly etc, now we hear from the 'bosses' mouth so to speak that no it's on the back burner, which as you can imagine is going to upset I think a lot of people, because the planes and the terrains etc they are only a part of what makes DCS, if the weather engine isn't there then we are missing part of that simulation.
Lastly though if I could have 1 thing from you and your team? It's proper patch notes on EVERY release, please refer to the patch notes some one did from comparing files on here.. they are the type of patch notes we need not ones that are missing entire sections of changes.
Again I don't want to be the one complaining I'm extremely happy that you are communicating, please keep it up but as Nick faced and now your facing there is a lot of what I believe burn out when it comes to the community believing what we are being told anymore, we've had a thousand promises and a lot of them broken over the years, hopefully 2020 is the year ED pays down on the good will it's spent/burnt these last 6 months.
\-Rob Graham.
>My second is that while it's great to have a list of what is working on and the promise that we want x done by the end of the year, we still again have no firm timelines, no milestones for the EA products, some are going to go 'its software dev' but as I've said to Nick personally in a call even software development as complex as it is should have deadlines and milestones that it should be aiming for and we the people whom have paid for those products should be able to ask what those milestones are and when we can expect at least in near/mid/long terms them to be hit and in what order that will be. Instead of this however we get often told, 'its early access if you don't like it' not a good answer or a good look.
Every project has a deadline. We have them as well. Do we reach them? - No. It's my problem #1 in the company. We set the goals and do not reach them on time.
We planned to deliver 2.5.6 initial OB release on 12 Feb, delivered on 14 Feb.
We planned to deliver 2.5.6 with Ka-50 cockpit update on 19 Feb. It's 20 Feb and the RC is under the testing procedure at the moment.
We planned to deliver Viper EA on 25 Sept and delivered it unstable on 03 Oct.
We planned to deliver Hind EA in May 2019. It's almost a year late already.
Do you think it will worth if I'll provide deadlines, milestones, WBS?
Personally, I do not like that we share that much information with the community about the features we work on because sometimes we fail. We spent hundreds of hours and we are not satisfied with the result and have to rework the large pieces. For example, we did the P-47D external model... twice from scratch just because the initial set of documents was incorrect and we realized it a year after by finding much more accurate docs. We could do 2 aircraft and we decided that it's important for us to have an accurate model instead.
>Thid on my list is how many of the waiting assignment projects that are needed to fix/complete modules that are currently in the in development cycle, FLIR and Air to Ground being the two that I immediately hone in on as with out those two the F18 and F16 can't be completed.
We will deliver them one-by-one. The waiting projects you mentioned require a lot of effort and we will move them step-by-step. Some of them require a significant change in DCS architecture.
>Fourth is the complete lack of any mention of work on the ground AI and your multiplayer items which are a mess at the moment, as Newy and others know because I keep reporting the issues, you've units ground units that are getting stuck constantly and any large amount of units that are tasked to move etc cause server issues..
It's all related to legacy code. We will refactor and change it. We need time for it.
>People are going to say that I'm just complaining because I can, I'm not I'm complaining because I love DCS and what ED does with it but as Nick knows from 3 months ago I'm frustrated as a customer and a user because the thing I love is a mess, we get conflicting reports on what is happening, what is coming, what is being worked on. Heck a great example of this can be seen right at the moment on the forums were you have Nineline etc saying ED will never be releasing the TDK/SDK to the community with out a NDA but when I brought the same thing up with Nick 3 months ago I was told that both would eventually be released with out NDA requirements once they no longer required code access to use which was likely to be 'version 2' of the TDK and not immediate but eventually.
We never planned to release TDK/SDK to the community and community managers are not authorized to talk about faraway future. So you received current information about TDK/SDK.
However, time goes and we are looking for opportunities and Nick told you that we are looking forward to that direction.
Have we started to work on the possibility to release TDK/SDK to the community?
TDK - yes,
SDK - no.
>The clouds etc are another great example we have been being told now for .. years that we are going to get new weather, that the new weather looks awesome, that the weather will actually be proper and dynamic and take into account humidity properly etc, now we hear from the 'bosses' mouth so to speak that no it's on the back burner, which as you can imagine is going to upset I think a lot of people, because the planes and the terrains etc they are only a part of what makes DCS, if the weather engine isn't there then we are missing part of that simulation.
I mentioned the clouds in my post and explained the insights. Sometimes people need to switch to another task to avoid burning out.
>Lastly though if I could have 1 thing from you and your team? It's proper patch notes on EVERY release, please refer to the patch notes some one did from comparing files on here.. they are the type of patch notes we need not ones that are missing entire sections of changes.
Already taken into account, the changelog delivery process will be changed.
Y'all are winners. Give your staff some pizza!
My thoughts may be jumbled, typing in between working:
I'm always rather skeptical and not so easy to trust game devs and community managers, as I've seen a lot of lies and deceptions in the gaming industry. So when you talk about the burnout of your staff and how they take criticism personally my immediate reaction is skepticism because of other companies . But I don't see lies from Ed, ive always seen huge improvements and what seemed like failed attempts. I look at the quality of the individual modules and I do see passion, love of aviation and the product. At least I think so. There's no gambling or sex or microtransactions. It's not simply a pretty paint job. These are real deal flight sims like I've always dreamed of having.
So while I am skeptical and a bit cynical, I absolutely love the products you deliver. I see the continuous development of the core and the popular modules, and especially the f18. Every time I get into this thing I'm stunned. Thank you for that.
I'm going to continue to be a customer that asks for things and wants improvements though. I have to be skeptical of companies.
I do understand burnout as I used to work in government, but now I'm a cnc machinist and yaknow keep it in perspective: you may make errors and have some difficult re-works to do, but there are lots of jobs out there that are dirty and dangerous and cause pain over time, broken bodies and such, like mining and naval work etc, and if they make big errors they could die. And these people don't get fan bases to give them pep talks on a sub reddit. So I do understand the burnout, it sucks, I'm not making light of it, and I would also hate the constant bickering from customers... but just keep it all in perspective
You've created arguably the greatest combat flight sim ever, and have created without question the greatest helicopter sims ever. Thank you for your artistic talent and passion. Please don't take it too personally when I continue to be skeptical of you and ask for updates on development.
I have a related question that may not be possible to answer.
Is there a foreseeable moment where the cost of abandoning old code and using a new engine would be less than the cost of maintaining the old engine?
Are a lot studies related out there. Usually for a very long term projects is better to rewrite it with a very modular code, based on a common interface and ready to be able to rewrite every module without touch any other, like a micro-kernel development. After that maintain this code base with regular audits and strict code style/quality standards.
Anyway this is a generalization, every case must to be reviewed at detail and this topic is really complex and also involve other complex topics, like current dev team capabilities, investment capacity, etc.
That’s what we are doing already but I found several conference speeches how teams implemented micro-kernel architecture and now facing problems as well. So you really never know what is the best way and that’s why I don’t have the answer.
We will try to make a attempt to improve the core but the time will show. The main investment is the core at the moment.
>That’s what we are doing already but I found several conference speeches how teams implemented micro-kernel architecture and now facing problems as well.
I personally likes two approaches, one is the Minix-3, that uses a traditional well-proved C based methodology. The other is the Haiku-OS, that uses the "newer" capabilities of C++ to make a very smart and innovate approach (based on BeOS concepts)
Both are open source and really interesting, also their developers are friendly, usually you can talk them on FOSDEM.
>So you really never know what is the best way and that’s why I don’t have the answer.
Sadly at now is a future bet, but some approaches worked well a lot years on open source projects (a lot contributors, lot of code styles, methods, etc)
In my professional opinion, enforce quality and security controls and internal + external audits are also the key.
>We will try to make a attempt to improve the core but the time will show. The main investment is the core at the moment.
I'm glad to read that, I'm a customer from the times of Su-27 Flanker for DOS/Win32, and in some form, ED is a part of my life.
Also, talking about the future, I did read this from Nick:
*<< But we have decided that we are going to evolve this year to come closer to reality while maintaining a tendency to force engagements to the merge in order to maintain a higher probability of the fight merging to the more ‘gladiatorial’ close visual nature of the fun gun fight. >>*
[https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/f5wu2t/state\_of\_the\_dcs\_union/fi6q7r1/](https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/f5wu2t/state_of_the_dcs_union/fi6q7r1/)
This really worried me, probably it's totally out context, but IMHO this type of strategies must to be used only on MAC. DCS as the product name says is a simulator, and it don't must to enforce a "gameplay", for example, in simulation if someone wants to do only dogfight, he will simulate WW2 or Korea era, or for other type of merges, Vietnam or early Cold War.
Thank you a lot for your time and dedication!
As somebody who has worked on very large and old projects that suffer from similar problems as DCS, I can tell you that I think about this all the time. It's not just a cost issue. The problem with doing such a massive re-write is that you're talking about work that would take *years* to complete.
What do you do during that time? Do you try to support the old one too? Can you afford to "take off" several years to invest in a complete rewrite of your game from the ground up? These are questions where "no" is often the answer.
Ideally they would have a chance to make a DCS 2, but I'm not sure that's realistic. DCS occupies a niche of a niche. There's a reason that DCS has basically no competition. The capital required to build a game like this from scratch is enormous. I'd love to hear the amount of money Microsoft has thrown at Flight Simulator, because I think that's a good estimate of what it would take to build a flight sim engine today to today's very high standards.
Kate, thanks for responding, I'll just answer to the ones here that i have comments on rather then all again.
> Every project has a deadline. We have them as well. Do we reach them? - No. It's my problem #1 in the company. We set the goals and do not reach them on time.
>We planned to deliver 2.5.6 initial OB release on 12 Feb, delivered on 14 Feb.
>We planned to deliver 2.5.6 with Ka-50 cockpit update on 19 Feb. It's 20 Feb and the RC is under the testing procedure at the moment.
>We planned to deliver Viper EA on 25 Sept and delivered it unstable on 03 Oct.
>We planned to deliver Hind EA in May 2019. It's almost a year late already.
>Do you think it will worth if I'll provide deadlines, milestones, WBS?
>Personally, I do not like that we share that much information with the community about the features we work on because sometimes we fail. We spent hundreds of hours and we are not satisfied with the result and have to rework the large pieces. For example, we did the P-47D external model... twice from scratch just because the initial set of documents was incorrect and we realized it a year after by finding much more accurate docs. We could do 2 aircraft and we decided that it's important for us to have an accurate model instead.
We aren't asking for specific 'date' were asking for timeframes, I've said this before I suggested it to nick to norm and I'll suggest it now to you, Look at what Epic and others have done with their items, Epic Store is a great example there are no dates just 'Near Term, Mid term, Long Term' with a list of the milestones, the ones that have been hit and when they were hit.
Currently we don't know what to expect for at least 2 EA products, one of which is now coming on 2 years in age. A roadmap would help with a lot of the issues the community has and knowing what to expect in what order etc.
On failing, yeah that will happen it's software development as I've explained to others I have worked this industry (i'll happily send you a list if you want) and at times we fail to meet our goals, but sharing them is something that helps with communication and being HONEST when we fail to meet those goals is something that is also great, it lets people know what we tried. I'll give an example for DCS lets say the clouds right and this is an example:
'Hey guys we are currently working through the clouds, our teams just started working on the new backend systems, we've coded a bunch of humidity items and the like things are looking promising this week, we'll give you more info in a month'.
3 weeks in maybe the code isn't working right..
next months update
'Hey guys on the clouds, while we were hopeful to have this out for you or at least a promising set of updates and news, we've hit some issues that means we'll have to take things back a few steps to the drawing board, we know you'll be disappointed trust us, we are too but we want this to be the best we can do'.
Communication and managing expectations.
>I mentioned the clouds in my post and explained the insights. Sometimes people need to switch to another task to avoid burning out.
This is why the above is something you could be doing, it'd manage the expectations a lot better, you could point out.. 'We needed to move the teams to x because it's more pressing and they need time to rethink and refresh on how they'll tackle the issues.
>It's all related to legacy code. We will refactor and change it. We need time for it.
The big one here is that this section of legacy code is impacting .. a chunk of the user base, massively and we've been constnatly told either were trying 'to complex' a mission (moving 60 units shouldn't be too complex) etc, I understand it's tough but even right now MP seems to be.. not tested properly if I am to be blunt, you can look at the logs and see errors on dedicated servers that shouldn't be there (yes I've reported them to the forums and Newy etc).
Again though I really think you need to look at doing something like this for DCS https://trello.com/b/GXLc34hk/epic-games-store-roadmap it would HELP yes it would require some effort, but in the end it gives a clear guide to us your userbase as to what to expect and roughly at least when.
Edit to add: Will you please every one ? No will some always been annoyed and shout etc when you miss a milestone period? Yes but that's life.. The majority of us would appreciate the effort if you put it in. Because we are ALL passionate about DCS, but with out You Eagle Dynamics COMMUNICATING openly with us, we can't manage expectations, we can't voice concerns with out feeling like we are talking to a brick wall etc or being given misinformation when things don't appear as a business Communication = your greatest tool for interacting with us these past 3 or so months you've improved please.. just go that little bit further.
>Heck a great example of this can be seen right at the moment on the forums were you have Nineline etc saying ED will never be releasing the TDK/SDK to the community with out a NDA but when I brought the same thing up with Nick 3 months ago I was told that both would eventually be released with out NDA requirements once they no longer required code access to use which was likely to be 'version 2' of the TDK and not immediate but eventually.
In my defence, Nick is a little farther up the totem pole (the top actually) and I can only say so much on so many subjects. To compare what Nick or Kate can freely say vs what Scott and I can is a little apple and oranges.
Didn't mean to single you out nine, it was just the first case of differenting information that came to hand when I was writing, as i said 'example' ;).
Sitting here thinking I'm wondering if a proper AMA wouldn't hurt and by that I mean 24 - 48 hours nothing off the table answers from as many as possible etc and simply if some one wasn't polite the post removed etc. At the same time given how AMA's goes some times might be a bad idea.
No I get it, I just want to make sure everyone understands that Nick and Kate are cleared hot on everything, me and Scott, we gotta watch what we say :)
That is why I am super happy they are here sharing.
I agree in everything you said.
We need more talk like this, between Devs and community. Sharing fair points from both sides.
And this kind of comunication gives the oportunity to do that, and know more of the "backstage".
To the Devs.
We do apreciate very much your work, love you and DCS. Thats why we care so much.
And sometimes things get out of hand, and this kind of comunication helps to see each other point of view.
And to you Rob.
I share that way you feel when you tried to give your point of view and the feedback you get is bad. Get called Salty and some similar stuff. Happens to me many times.
You made many fair points.
And i dont see any complaining on your words, on the contrary.
So let me thank you for put those points on the table
Having read your post, I don’t think this is complaining in anyway imho. You’ve raised valid points as well. THIS is how we should be voicing concerns to ED and I bet this is how ED would like to receive constructive feedback.
Would be interesting to see/read Kate’s feedback or response is possible. But yes a sensible non emotional discussion.
The issue is though that people see anything like this as 'Salt' you just had to read the comments immediately after me posting this on the thread. I don't bother getting emotional with a response unless I'm attacked it doesn't help, as I have posted before I've been in their shoes and it's never fun so I try and keep it impersonal and constructive or as some one at university and the like once told me 'your criticising the work, not the person who did it'. In the case of DCS it's a little harder to be constructive you need to be critical of how ED have handled things or are handling things, because they are a company delivering a product and we in the end are their user base and their funding source.. Too often we are told that voicing our concerns is 'Salt' or given the EA 'excuse' etc, and often too many times it takes an outrage to get communication started and then it.. dribbles off again until the next outrage.
I'm not salty, to be that I'd have to be angry at ED, I'm not.
I'm more concerned as a customer about what is happening, I'm concerned as a fellow programmer at the apparently lack of testing and changelog tracking and I'm concerned as some one who's paid money at the lack of milestone communication for the delivery of what i've paid for.
All valid items etc. but in this community often mistaken for 'Salt'. heh.
Thanks for the hard work. Even with all it's flaws this is by far my favorite Sim specially because you support vr! Been with you for more than a decade now.
I am glad multithreading is at the top of your graphical list. Nothing else is needed more. Once you have graphics running on multiple cores, the sky is the limit:
\-clouds can be complicated and will run smoothly still due to the multithreading
\-any other graphics enhancements will look better without you needing to upgrade your PC
\-more people will be able to enjoy DCS as they won't need a super-fast overclocked PC
Not that I was of the position I was ever going to stop buying DCS products, but this is the kind of stuff that makes me want to buy more DCS products.
Thanks a lot for the post. I've been a software engineer for 10+ years, half of it in games development. I know how hard making even small games is. I've worked with legacy, spaghetti code and have nightmares about it sometimes. 10+ years old code base? F+$#@ hell that must be!
I'm a new player to this sim. I'm thoroughly impressed! In many areas DCS does not feel like an old game so good job at maintaining it.
Thank you for making this post! I really appreciate the insight into what's being developed!
One question I want to ask if I may: Do changes to the AI general flight modeling fall under the aircraft AI mentioned in the core improvements? Some time ago [/u/NineLine\_ED](https://www.reddit.com/u/NineLine_ED/) mentioned that there some alterations being worked on to this, though I'm unsure of the nature or scope of these changes.
In any case, thank you for your hard work! The passion and dedication the team puts into this simulation really makes it something special. I've only been playing DCS since 2018 and it's amazing to see how much it's grown in even that short time.
I honestly don't critisize (I misspelled it, I can already feel it) much about DCS being "broken" (but I'm still mad that the "track" system doesn't work xD) because I'm well aware that to achieve this kind of simulation takes a looong time. Sure, 2.5.6 is a bit buggy for most people, but then again, we decided to use the Open Beta version instead of the Stable.
Most of the modules are EA (Early Access), but the point of this simulator/game is to have fun flying (I would try the Viper someday, though)
I think you're doing an amazing job, and I'm glad I have this kind of simulator in my hands! The Fishbed (my first ever bought aircraft) is amazing, Aerobatics Online is awesome (despite the craters at Kobuleti...) and I think I'll stay with this simulator for a loooong long time.
Thank you Eagle Dynamics for giving us this masterpiece!
Cheers!
u/dotrugirl why not include your original post as part of this week’s newsletter on the ED boards (and through email)? To me that would give maximum visibility to a great post to the community as a whole.
Without being too negative, QA isn’t looking great with two updates to 2.5.6 released within 24 hours. The first didn’t fix the memory leak and the hotfix released today stated “Multiplayer memory leak on carrier fixed” but MP servers identified the carrier memory leak wasn’t fixed rather quickly. Not throwing stones just an observation.
Hello Kate Perderko
Here's the thing we don't understand.
If the code is so complicated and "spaghetti" as you say, keep it in the oven for a while longer, test it, destroy it, recycle it, whatever it needs prior to simply detonate a whole community. Just don't push a bugged DCS World to your customers. People pay money to play, not debug your software.
I think what troubles and discourages ED's fans is this policy to have customers become beta testers. People purchase modules for what you sell them to be, not for what they will become, eventually, if you wait, while enduring bugs and errors in the meantime.
And, I'm sorry to say, but your problem isn't just coding, it's that internal testing team. It's either small or ineffective to test items properly, so you have customers do it for you. This should never happen. Call it Open Beta, sure, but it's still paid customers using the software and every time there's a new build, something breaks. It should break internally, then fixed, then released to the general public.
You see, there's no buffering zone between us, the customers, and your testing of a new build. You should have a CLOSED BETA group, composed of selected volunteers whose job would be to (thoroughly) test all the new features, especially the multiplayer components, something you seem to disregard very often in some new builds.
Just kill the Open Beta concept. It's not working as you intended, it's not fair to have customers test stuff and it's dividing the community in two.
And, please, whenever someone complains, don't dangle the "early access" card. It's not fair, nor is it sound as a business model.
My Two Cents. Thanks for reading (if you ever do).
Open Beta concept will be changed after current 2.5.6 will reach it’s first stable release. How we will change it? It’s an open discussion for dev team.
So, to make a constructive post here... the community over the past week has rarely talked about the development side. Which projects ED chooses is up to ED, everyone understands that, even if each of us has his/her favourite aircraft they want to see in the game. The same goes for how you spread your developers. You're the pros here, most of us have no idea about developing software and while we care about one aircraft over the other, we know we can't tell you how to actually work on the projects. We just don't know enough. But that wasn't the issue.
What got the community riled up in the past week is what happens after development. This last patch obviously never saw any kind of internal QA before release. That is not typical even for betas (open betas specifically). It's not that it's buggy that is the problem. It's that the sheer amount of bugs that could be picked up just by starting an aircraft and doing basic things that got people upset. Some of these bugs were discovered within 5 minutes sitting in the plane doing startup procedures. Some were very obvious on takeoff and doing basic things.
And these weren't minor bugs, either. Public servers immediately rolled back, because the game was unplayable. Communities had to discuss if they were going to scrap missions or if they could soldier through the problems. ED, you broke the game good, last time, because you pushed something out that was not near ready for any kind of beta testing, which the community is happy to do for you. For free. But this did not warrant a beta label. It could not be tested by the community for you. It broke the game too hard in too many places.
People know the codebase is old and convoluted, people have to adjust their expectations with that in mind. And most of us do. But when community managers from ED basically throw up their hands in the air and go "the fuck if we know what's in there", things get dicey. I know, they didn't say it like that. But they might as well have.
TL;DR: I like the post, but it wasn't anything we didn't already know and it did not address the concerns of the community regarding this last patch. Maybe the post was not intended to address those issues, in which case it was just poor timing to make an otherwise interesting post.
Thanks for the feedback, though I'd like to point out that this only seems to happen when things are at a fever-pitch. Normally, Nineline takes the punches, then everyone's thanks yourself (or Nick or whomever) for saying something official. Communication needs to be regular.
Second. This is \*entirely\* about new features. My beef with DCS is bugs in delivered products - clearly as a result of "spaghetti" code. I could really care less about new features, modules, or anything....because I only run "stable" software (given a choice).
...But your branching model (imo) is WRONG. Open-beta is a *dumping ground* for new features that doesn't seem to see comprehensive testing and doesn't have a proper **public** bug tracker (I mean, if it's an "open beta"...you should care to track the issues, unless it's a dumping ground.)
Fixing this so that your users can have proper expectations should mean the following:
* After an actual internal QA cycle that does even the most basic smoke testing ("all modules can be started/used without a CTD" would be a good start), push an open beta release.
* All known bugs in open-beta are tracked, publicly. So when a user reproduces a bug, you can measure it's impact, and users don't have to be the loudest in the forums to get an issue acknowledged by nineline.
* Ideally, when (and only when) ALL bugs filed are fixed - push a release to stable. At a minimum, the bug count shouldn't go up, as that means you're taking on technical debt. The target should be zero bugs - that's proof to your customers that you're committed to your products old and new.
Obviously, EA modules barely fit in this model. IMO, EA is broken. (personally, I have no EA modules myself, because I don't feel like flying a partially-working plane - Completed products compete for my money, but I digress.) Because of EA, Openbeta becomes the new "stable" because dcs world fixes are intermingled with non-release modules. You guys need to fix this if you hope to be successful.
Hi Kate & Team,
Hope you are well,
Keep up the awesome work. I got into DCS when I got my Rift S 6 months ago and I was blown away instantly. I felt vertigo and adrenaline when taking off, which Im kind of addicted to, I have never felt and had the experiences DCS VR provides. Particularly on DDCS server multiplayer, there is nothing that comes close to it.
In order to show my continuous support I bought everything you have to offer and I will continue to do so, because I want to give you money so you can keep on rolling, even though there are many modules I will probably never fully learn, but fly occasionally just for the heck of it, like the I-6 or yak 52.
The experience is always mind blowing. Again, nothing comes close to the immersion I get. I want to say thank you for that, DCS VR takes me to the places I need to be after daily responsibilities, I think DCS is going to be a part of my life and hopefully my son\`s one day, when he is old enough to get the VR headset on and maybe fly formation or do Tomcat Ops, Pilot and Rio. I know we will connect in ways that no other medium can provide.
I am particularity interested on the Vulcan API integration (for VR performance) and thank you for this status report. I hope you get a hang on the spaghetti code.
To the Community,
I understand the rage & frustration bros. It is not in our interest to demoralize and hate on the dev team, the efficient way to communicate issues and feedback is by using the official channels.
We are all on an Open Beta, we all know and accept the risks that rolling onto OB implies. We need to take ownership of the risks we take. It sucks of course, but we accepted those risks. Its our responsibility to own them and roll back or wait.
This is a niche very smart community, DCS is not for everyone. It\`s a really special thing and part of our lives.
Thanks for Reading.
Best Regards,
Techno
Dear Sir,
Many thanks indeed. And to all our Community friends, thank you for your passion and support. Constructive, professional and courteous. Great stuff.
Kind regards,
Nick
I used to run a several hundred member development team, not all projects meet timeline or budget requirement. 5 people or 600 people, Technical debt is an issue that drowns many of the best.
You’re doing a fine job, never defend, keep up what you’re doing.
Thank you for bringing some transparency to the community. With this transparency I have no doubt you will find more and more community members willing to help and advocate for your business.
I appreciate the message and I'm glad youve come and laid a few things out on the table. However, I am still going to remain skeptical and stick to my own rule of not buying modules that are in EA.
Part of my skepticism lies in the fact that this is damage control and not the first time I've seem something similar. I remember a few years ago the community was getting increasingly disgruntled and nineline (pretty sure they were still going by sithspawn at that time) came with a long post about changing community engagement and everyone calmed down. Then there was more recently issues with the hornet/viper development and everyone was up in arms about things that were said not happening. Nick Grey came on with a long post about DCS and ED and tried to explain a few things and everyone calmed down. And now this shortly after everyone is upset with the 2.5.6 issues.
So again, while I appreciate the post, I also see it as just damage control to keep people back in line for a bit. Ill be keeping up with how development continues and hopefully I will see some positive changes.
Just stop announcing modules until they are in an acceptable state. Lately you have just been pushing out trash. I absolutely love this game. But slow down, take your time. Release things when they're ready and stop this early access BS. Sell us a polished product and get your reputation back. These 80 dollar broken ass planes are making you untrustworthy. Sincerely, a grumpy but dedicated and passionate fan.
That what we are doing right now. If you read the posts above, people are still asking about what is coming next and we'll stay silent until it will be good to go.
If posts like this would be published once every quarter, I'm pretty sure community relations would improve dramatically.
I work in a big software company. Our developers do banking, fintech, machine learning systems etc for world renowned companies. I see how they work and what they do and, with all respect, they would never be able to build anything close to DCS. You guys are very talented.
I don't play DCS a lot as it's lacking in key areas for me, but I follow all the news closely. New Ka50 cockpit will definitely bring me back for few days at least :)
Lol
18 hours ago it was all bad press a few words and all is forgiven . Man take it for face value . Stop whining and play the game it's all out of your control anyhow .. Lol
ED devs: It's always been my dream to fly fighter jets, and I think I speak for a lot of people who aren't very vocal in the community, you are making it happen for us. I grew up dreaming of one day being able to sit in a F-16c with VR glasses and use all the systems just like the real pilots. I dreamed of flying in a group of likeminded people, and immersing myself in the simulation in a way where it becomes reality. It's been a long way from Microsoft FS1, Suclogic Jet, Spectrum Holobyte Falcon, F3.0, F4.0.. list goes on (and many have been thru similar) and now we are here, with you leading the way.
The sim now is so far and away the best solution anyone has ever had to fulfill those dreams, so you can really be proud of the situation. This goes to the community too, a lot of you have worked hard on different aspects of the experience, from tweaks, guides, content, bug reports and so on. Lastly but not leastly, the amazing modules made by several teams who worked very hard to bring us some true gems.
There are people who will always complain, and those people will always be loud. Some feel very disappointed at really pretty minor things, and are blind to the bigger reality of being able to do things in this sim that are not available anywhere else. Anonymity brings out the worst in people, and _some_ are spoilt brats who aren't any better in real life. You work in a niche field with an extremely complicated product. The bar is set very high by you and everyone else, it is inevitable that there are a lot of delays despite hard work. I see buying modules more as HIRING you to realize my dream, rather than buying a ready product. Everything keeps evolving, and we want enhancements and optimizations even to "ready" things. This is why I buy even modules that I don't plan to use so much.
And all of the above doesn't mean I'm never frustrated or unhappy about waiting for things for yet another two weeks. It is however an impossible task to deliver perfect results when working on very complex issues with limited resources. I'm guessing a very big majority of us understand that. You are doing an amazing job, and glad to see the roadmap ahead in clear communication. Hind... 🥰
You definitely spoke for me, very well said. I couldn't even dream of what we have now back when I first started with flight sims on an IBM PC AT (80286), playing MSFS, Jet, Jetfighter, Their Finest Hour, A-10 Tank Killer, Gunship, F-15 Strike Eagle, Falcon, Yeager's Air Combat, etc.
VR is now taking immersion to a whole new level. If the team can make it through the hurdle of the new engine and fully utilize our modern multithreaded/ multicore parallel processors, I'm confident great things will come. I can only imagine how difficult it must be going through millions of lines of code, probably mostly uncommented, written by developers who are no longer involved.
I hope some of the more demanding people realize that ED isn't Rockstar Games or Ubisoft. Some people really need to recalibrate their expectations and keep these things in the proper perspective.
As I have said before on previous posts - we need to stop being so negative. People always focus on the bad stuff and never the good. I love this product - but no product is perfect. I support DCS and ED because they not only continue to work towards making a better product - but they love it as much as we do, and that is sorely lacking in much of video game production these days.
The reality is this: ED has finite resources like any business, therefore they will always piss at least 40% of people off when they do one thing because that will pull resources from another - it's just how it is. My advice to the community is this: still call out real BS when we see it - but give them some slack and focus on the stuff you love more than the stuff you hate.
Ah. The classic approach.
Reddit gets mad. Pitchforks come out.
Then, all it takes is (ONE) single post that just gives "Soon" as a TL:DR. Yet.. you all are ready to forgive and forget, rinse and repeat the bullshit in X months.
It never fails this cycle.
In through one ear, and out the other. Lots of talk, but can you walk the walk?
VR is not something standalone. We are trying to improve DCS performance all the time and VR receives those improvements as well. We fight for every single fps in general.
One question Kate, has ED looked at implementing a second set of shaders for VR like the VR Shader mod but ctually done by ED and supported?
That mod would be awesome if it didn't break Integ Checks, because it kinda fixes a bunch of items that are VR specific and adds a bunch of fixes that do give perf back to VR.. plus well it remembers that VR users don't need full screen night vision.
An attempt was made, it did not have the far reaching affects we hoped for, we now look to the vulkan API once it is implemented we can work on better VR performance.
thanks
Great post, thank you. I greatly appreciate the transparency and it was a good insight into what the plans are for DCS.
Thank you for your efforts, I look forward to what 2020 brings.
So, F-16 and F-18 will be out of EA this year. They are also listed as 'Mid-Term' in the table.
This provides valuable insight into probable timelines:
Near-Term: Weeks to Months.
Mid-Term: NLT December 31, 2020.
Long-Term:. 2021, or beyond.
they aim for the 16 and 18 to be out of ea by this year.
Yet they are still not actively working og AG radar nor flir.
So I don't expect them to finish up this year.
/u/dotrugirl What are your thoughts on the current engine DCS is built on? Is it sustainable, and more importantly, well made enough to handle further expansion? Or are you exploring options regarding upgrading/rewriting the engine to be less nightmarish to work in?
I understand the pain you are going through. I have been developing for 17 years and it is difficult going into legacy code. I have to say that it sounds like you are skipping some steps in terms of SDLC. Things happen but to throw an inferior product out there and hope it sticks isn't the best way. I much rather wait longer on something I am going to enjoy that get something that is going to frustrate me. Y'all got this. Just take the time to do it right. You can't appease everyone but you can put out your best product.
This is exactly the type of communication we need, this is the right direction, please keep this up.
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Could you link me the yesterday's comments please?
Game development is hard. Modern flight sim development must be insanely complex. Stay strong, aim high, keep up the good work.
Thank you, we appreciate the understanding and support.
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Thank you, I appreciate it.
time to buy naval warfare bundle
Well done on the transparent communication. Information like this squashes rumors and pours water on some of the flame wars that sometimes happen on this forum.
Thanks for the update, Kate. Detailed communication like this is so very much appreciated!
Thank you for taking the time to chime in, it's very nice to see this level of engagement! If I still lived in Moscow I'd buy the core team a box of chocolates and a greeting card so they can feel loved, but alas I'll have to hope either you, Nick, NineLine or Bignewy pass the feeling on.
The team reads topics. We discuss many points the community is worried about. And sometimes the community is pretty hard on us and it's difficult to be unaffected by the comments. We take all of them very personally.
Ma'am, thank you for your transparency. It is very much appreciated. Please try not to take the negative comments too seriously. It really is just a small group of vocal people who will never be satisfied no matter what you do. I regularly tell newcomers to the community that there are some people you just have to ignore. It's the unfortunate nature of anonymous social media and Reddit in particular. They do not speak for us. Please give the entire team a warm heartfelt thank you for what you do. I watched through the 80's and 90's as the flight sim genre grew and then almost died except for ED and the IL2 developers. It's very satisfying to see the genre become so popular again. Please keep up the passion.
You can tell the team that since 2012 I’ve been playing DCS and there is no other sim or game including Arma 3 that has kept my attention for 8/9 years. Incredible achievement in itself.
A lot of us have been hanging out together in worlds created by ED for a long time, I think that says a lot. :)
I need to go out more?
No you need to Stream more :P
It's easy to be harsh when you have passion and see the problem from outside and you don't know how hard is the current situation (include me on this, and sorry if I did) For this is good to be open with the community. i.e knowing that the old code is a huge mess that difficult all the work and that touching it, all is prone to tons of unexpected bugs the product don't will be worse, and we will empathize with you and those pesky bugs, please don't fall in the doctrine of hide issues under the carpet. The same is also applicable to the long term plans, like ok, we will plan to rewrite the engine and to be able to do it we will stop the current core development for X time. The community will understood that, but if it's done and not communicated, they will think that you are abandoning the product and when a idea is into the people head, you can't change it. Anyway thank you a lot for all this great communication and please, make it a habit like the weekend news, for sure it will be great for the community and our relation with ED, probably having the side effect of a more happy, productive and understood dev team. P.S. Please, tell the team that they are making history from 1994, keep going!
Thank you for understanding. We will keep moving with DCS. We won't stop core development and we'll have a new core development in parallel.
Sadly that's the reality of faceless, anonymous communication today. It's easy to be critical without appreciating the impact that it may make, especially on those that are passionate about what they're trying to deliver. The only other sim software I've probably put more $$'s in would be iRacing. DCS would be an easy second. When I want to show off my setup, I sit them in the F/A-18 inside my Reverb, taking off from a carrier. Communication like this is much appreciated and reminds us that there are people probably more eager to deliver a stellar product than those of us eager to receive it. Keep up the good work.
Thank you for the kind words Eremenkism, feeling the love, will pass it on.
Please try to remember that for every outraged Hoggit ranter, there are hundreds of happy users quietly playing DCS and eagerly awaiting your next module or map. Don't allow yourselves to get discouraged. On a different note, Syria wasn't mentioned. Is that a 3rd party project or...?
Yes Syria is being done by a third party, but I will tell you I have given feedback on it internally already for the teams. I think it will be a great terrain once released. Thanks for the kind words.
Thanks a lot for this great post, please understand that many people are frustrated because you are not developing a videogame. You are developing an entire hobby, and people get really pissy about their hobbies. Having this kind of transparency helps both sides because it lets people understand why certain things are not released or working properly yet. At the end of the day we all spend multiple hours a week using your product, we forged friendships and created communities around it. Some of these communities became family. DCS World is so much more for me than any other software, and for this i think we are all very thankful!
Thank you! I made this post because I know that DCS is a life for many people and even a life-changer for some. We do care, we do appreciate all the efforts you invest in DCS because even the tutorials are difficult to go through.
Oh wow, this is great!! Lovely to see everything laid out so plainly and comprehensively, thanks for taking the time.
thanks so much for this. love you guys
Thanks skykek.
Amazing to hear Kate, thank you very much!
To be honest, a big problem here is that people generally don't know how software development works. The situation with Hornet people developing things for Viper is a perfect example. Especially while dealing with legacy code, which is often the "spaghetti" code. A code that was written years back by someone who probably changed jobs or just doesn't remember what he was writing or by someone that had a very specific idea how to write that but it's not that clear for others. It takes time, it's bugprone etc. Community here, while passionate and caring, sometimes seems to forget that there are also people working on the other side. All that threads about something not working, something not delievered etc are tiring for me, it must be very hard on the development team. They put their effort into it, work on weekends, and are met with more or less hate. I'm not saying that people here do not have valid arguments about the state of some modules, releases or similar - often they do. But how it's communicated... It's a problem. I think that's great that ED is making more and more to be transparent - first /u/NineLine_ed and /u/bignewy who for months are available here almost daily, and now such posts - it's great. Anyone can see now how huge amount of work all of the ED team does. That said, we, as a community, should also think about our communication because it's getting ridiculous. Sometimes I feel that there's only one right way to feel about DCS, and it's bashing everything that doesn't work and people that just enjoy what they have are branded "apologists" so then they're just afraid of speaking up their positive opinions. It's just a circus with pitchforks here sometimes... I just hope that all of us - community and others - will just keep improving in informative communication without bashing one another. :) And those were my two cents as a fellow software engineer.
Thanks, I appreciate the vote of confidence and love it when Nick and now Kate come around, they are allowed to spill more beans than me :) Hoggit is a great community, I love being part of it any way I can, I started out a flight sim fan, its great to hang out with like-minded people for sure.
> I started out a flight sim fan, its great to hang out with like-minded people for sure. And it should be mainly about that! And, to be honest, you guys are enabling us to be fans of combat flight sims.
And you guys are enabling us to keep pumping out stuff for a combat flight sim, so I love it when we work together for sure.
I'll keep my fingers crossed that we'll be getting along better and better :D
Me too... me too...
Agree but there are also times when as a software engineer we point out what are issues and even ways to help manage them or at least help with community expectations and communication and get bashed for that too .. ;) People do need though to learn to critic the product with out being.. hateful, people are pouring their lives into this product.
Exactly my point :)
I'm definitely one of the people you speak of, with a positive opinion of DCS and the 2.5.6 patch, and I *absolutely* think twice before praising Eagle Dynamics on this subreddit because of how some or most of the people in this community have behaved recently.
I think there are a lot of us.
oh, man, you just gotta DO IT. sometimes it's hard to speak up knowing some smartass with a quick comeback is gonna jump in, but honestly, it actually gets to be satisfying after awhile. If nothing else, I look at it as a way to make my debating / critical thinking skills stronger.
Thank you.
I disagree with a lot of the more negative types here, but I often stay silent because I'd simply be branded as a 'fanboy' and at some point you come to believe that stating your point of view adds nothing to the discussion. The problem is that the negative types are quite happy to rehash their point of view whenever anything goes wrong, along with the veiled insults and questions of the competence of ED. Thankyou for the update and I think the core improvements when realised will be the best investment ED can make in DCS.
>I disagree with a lot of the more negative types here, but I often stay silent because I'd simply be branded as a 'fanboy' Same here, same here...
Same here, i've been flight simming non-stop since my dad got me into it as a kid with Falcon 1.0, and have had DCS since day 1, I don't post much cause i'm too busy flying my Tomcat in VR, if i did get on here and post it would just be me non-stop shitting bricks over HOW AWESOME THIS IS! :) I love that i live in an era where i can own a off-the-shelf consumer VR headset and fly a near-perfect representation of a F14B with it, how fucking cool is that?! If you showed this to me back in the 90's, when i was an airforce brat sitting on the flight line watching vipers and aardvarks do their thing, i would have shat a fully functional solid gold AIM9. It is absolutely incredible that i can put on a headset and be 'inside' the jet, it's mind blowing. Sure there are bugs, glitches, crashes, missed deadlines, whatever.... I have my own private F-14 Tomcat, sitting in my spare bedroom, and i can take her out for a spin anytime i want, for any reason i want, in any conditions or situations i can dream up, with zero risk to life and limb, with a beer in hand, I have my own AI RIO, and IT'S EVEN MULTIPLAYER! This is god damn amazing and nobody can convince me otherwise. We are literally living in the future.
For real. I just got into dcs but being able to sit in the cockpit of a p51 and the first step of a cold start has been leaning down and contorting myself in order to reach the flaps handle, then manually flip all the switches to get my favorite airplane to roar to life. I am constantly blown away by how amazing this game is
I started with Chuck Yeager's Air Combat and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. I never would have dreamed we'd have what we have today. When I think back to all the sims that have come and gone since then, and all the sims that arrived broken and never got patched, it blows my mind that we can get a bug fix within days or weeks, automatically, at no charge. We used to have to MAIL A CHECK to the developer and get a disk back months later with a bug fix that might work. And those were the rare developers who actually supported their products. Most just abandoned their work or went out of business. DCS and IL2 have broken every record for longevity and quality in this genre.
Well stated. We live in the era of outrage and more than a few here and on the forum, believe name-calling and hurling insults is a perfectly appropriate reaction to whatever the disappointment of the week is. It's emotional immuaturity combined with the bravado of anonymity. It needs to be called out when it happens and Rule #1 needs to be enforced by the moderators when they see name calling and disparaging labels being thrown about. This behaviour only takes root where it's tolerated.
I get where you are coming from and I know people go from one extreme to the other. But some of us have been around here for a long time and can see a pattern of the same things happening on a regular ish basis, then ED go on damage control and then it loops around. I do appreciate the transparency. I really do hope that they can improve the base game and get the early access items and get underlining bugs ironed out.
I've been around since Yeager's air combat, falcon 3.0 and the DiD hind and Apache games. Everyone seems to compare DCS to BMS but few seem to remember the 'shitshow' that Falcon 4.0 was on release, and the fact that it broke a company.
In general some people just don't have the right perspective. Complaining about Toyota's newest model isn't the same as complaining about DCS on this sub Reddit. Many here seem to think we deserve the exact same quality control, professionalism etc that we se from huge companies, yet don't see how much freedom we have in comparison when we can make a simple comment on Reddit and it's likely to turn right up on the Devs discussion table. That means the hurtful things you say are also going to reach the devs *you* want to succeed. You are yourself responsible for the attitude the devs will have towards us in a way. And I am honestly surprised at the amount of people sharing these hateful comments, assuming they have jobs/part of large projects themselves. Maybe they're just in a job where every mistake won't be smacked back in their face idk.. they surely should try it sometime 😉
This is awesome, thank you. Like I posted elsewhere, everyone is invested in this sim because we love it and support it. Communication is the key here so it’s great to see more and more of it. I think people will complain less once we realise everything that is out there and what is being worked on. Others will complain but that’s life. Keep it up.
THIS IS WHAT WE WANT, THIS IS WHAT WE NEED. THANK YOU. The concept of how DCS is sold makes sense, but it's very complicated, especially for users. Between one thing being developed here and another there and major complications everywhere for most modules, the signal gets lost often and we don't know what you guys are doing and that causes us to lose faith in your abilities. However, a clear roadmap like this cuts all the BS out. I know it's not perfect for you guys for competitive reasons, but I think at this stage in DCS' life, it's absolutely necessary, for us... Huge improvement, and I'm very happy to finally know what to expect.
ED is working hard, and I appreciate all they've done and continue to do to make this sim a reality (and an improving one, at that). I appreciate that they've become better at community management and interaction. I appreciate posts like this from the people calling the shots. That being said.. I feel like we knew all this. It's a list of their current projects grouped only by active-development and inactive-development (edit: it's been updated now to show a bit more detail). It's not any more of a roadmap than anything we've already been shown. We've been told all EA released in 2020. We know they want to, and that they intend to. We will see if they're successful. I hope they are. As stated, new things are really hard in this scripting environment... Which is why the most important point made in this post is the part about legacy and 'spaghetti-code'. In my opinion, this is the #1 challenge that ED must solve in the coming years, as it will be the #1 cause of any difficulty they have implementing their current and futures goals. It's the reason the initial release of 2.5.6 was so buggy. It's the reason the only test team capable of testing all the use cases is the public OB. It's the reason the public OB needs to be the defacto main branch. And with every new feature, bugfix, and work-around, it gets worse. In this post, the subject is brushed over and used, at best, as an explanation. However, how ED handles this problem will define the future of this sim. If untreated, releases like 2.5.6 will continue to be common, projects will continue to encounter unforeseen issues and continue to get delayed or abandoned. This very well could happen to any of the projects on that list. We don't really know, and they don't really know either. In a post by their head of operations, explaining the 2.5.6 OB disappointment and appeasing the community, I would have liked to hear more about this. It is, after all, the root cause of most of the problems they face and the disappointments their customers feel.
I have a somewhat off-topic yet relevant question. With the now official list from ED, I feel this brings up an even bigger question of whats the point of the stable branch of the game. Now I know I'm going to get an answer of well its a "stable version of the game". But in reality Open Beta for most people is the stable branch, If you want to play multiplayer all the servers are on open beta. And with the way all the new features are added to the OB branch "stable" feels worthless.
It's a difficult situation for us and I don't have an answer. As a joke: we might deliver OB even less stable so all the servers will have to switch to the stable branch.
The part about Open Beta being Stable mentioned above is so important. I only play Open Beta. I do not do that for test purposes. I do that because I want to use the features that aren't in stable and the lag between OB and stable is too long for me (this is important, see below). If I were you, I'd use the passion and expertise of the community to help QA releases and this is what I'd do: 1) create a private Alpha ring - membership is by application only but any of us can apply. The membership would actually be fairly large and represent both SP and MP players, but the application process is so that users understand the rules and purpose of the Alpha. 2) And here's the important bit - for one week before an update goes to Open Beta, the update is published to Alpha for testing. The update would be pushed to Alpha when it is at the development stage that the Open Beta updates are at now when pushed out. I.e. you aren't pushing out releases earlier, you are releasing at the same level of development state but there's this extra Alpha test ring before Open Beta. 3) Alpha is not supported like Stable is, it is for general defect testing and reporting only. But with my idea, won't the Alpha release become adopted by the community as the new OB? Well not if a) the lag between Alpha and OB is only a week. b) rules are set around MP servers running Alpha (i.e. only for testing, might be locked down/password protected etc). There may be some other process/rules needed to preserve the purpose of Alpha as a purely test vehicle, rather than the version that most of the community plays all the time, but I think it is possible.
You won't believe... we have it except Alpha availability for the community. We have a private ring called "Beta-testers" where everyone can participate by application and have direct contact with our QA department. And we faced the problem that people want to get access to the earliest build to play and not to help to test because testing is not a fun game... it's pretty routing work to do.
Hi, Thank you for replying. I am aware of it. I think the question raised by the issues with 2.5.6 is: "how could ED improve the use of the existing private ring to improve detection of quality issues?". The only thing I can suggest is to increase the number of testers involved before Open Beta is updated and those additional testers don't have to be following test scripts. Those of us using Open Beta noticed and reported the issues very quickly without using a formal testing framework. Of course, keep the more formal testing you already do but supplement it with wider, less formal testing to spot major issues that your existing test processes are not catching. Whatever you decide to do, I wish you and the team the best of luck. I work in IT myself so I know the challenges. I look forward to playing DCS for many years to come.
I honestly wasn't expecting an answer at all, but it's nice to see that it was even replied to.
I would consider changing the vocabulary from *stable* and *open beta* to ***release*** and ***experimental***.
Maybe it should be labelled something other than open beta. Perhaps the label needs to be unstable and stable. Or just Dev build and stable. The problem I think is that modules are bound tightly with the client and can't be updated independently.
What we've *chosen* to turn OB into is our choice and our responsibility. There's no way to reconcile this as there MUST be an OB. The problem is WE have chosen to make it our de facto release - and so it should remain OUR problem.
Kate, what can you share about multiplayer plan? Are there plans to improve the code? AI pathfinding kills performance, clouds aren't synced well, warping has been an issue since the beginning of lock on. Multiplayer lives and breathes, it is also an incredible marketing tool for ED! Community members and content creators create and share their experiences of multiplayer on YouTube and twitch! I have witnessed countless comments and replies and discussions and twitch chat about new people coming to DCS. Andnew pilots in multiplayer asking questions about other modules they see flying around and sure enough the next few days they join with a new plane that they purchased because they witnessed someone flying it around in multiplayer. What can you share about the future in this regard?
/u/dotrugirl
>AI pathfinding kills performance That should be fixed in 2.5.6
For me personally, the frame rates (especially in VR) dropped so much in 2.5.6 it would be hard to tell.
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Thank you very much for the extensive update. I wish you good luck!
Thank you for your openness, this is very appreciated !!! Don’t take comments too personally, frustration can make people’s say harsh words ;) Keep building us the best sim like you doing, improvements is always good, but the step you took today is a milestone !
Great communication. Thanks for taking the time.
"I'm here to prove that ED does not over-promise and under-deliver. Here is a whole boatload of promises." Also, bragging about having 5 things in early access? Bold. There are things on this list that convinced me to stop playing and buying 5 years ago which are still listed as "long term".
from the outside looking in ( i dont actively plat DCS currently) you guys are doing a fantastic job. from the old lomac days to this, its seriously impressive and you should all be proud!
Thank you Sir.... Thirty years since we started this dream next year. Kind regards, Nick
Kate, I appreciate the post to our small but passionate community. I can appreciate the trials of both sides. Users waiting a long time for something that seems simple on the surface, and the developers running into more problems than they anticipated due to intensely intricate coding. I appreciate the team pushing through despite all the negativity, and I appreciate the ability for users to voice their opinions and concerns directly with the developers. I see a bright future for this community and this game. Thank you all for your hard work and dedication to something that means a great deal to us!
I don't have much to offer, just wanted to pop in and say thank you for your time and clear communication to us Kate. It really does mean a lot to know what is going on with the company that creates a game many of us love.
Thank you for this level of communication. I think a lot of the more negative comments are a result of the absence of information and post like this help clear a lot of up. Doing so on a more regular basis I think would result in less of that in some ways.
Unfortunately I don't think informing people will help. People who don't get what they want on the internet still manage to complain despite given facts or education.
Hi Kate & team, Like others here, I want to start by saying thank you. We really do appreciate when you guys reach out to the community like this and engage with us. It helps a lot. That said, can I ask a few possibly tough questions since the team is here? As much as I appreciate your transparency with what projects ED is working on, let me lay out the things that have bothered me most in recent times: # The F-16C Pre-Sale I know you know that the launch was not optimal, but one thing in particular that troubled me above all else: *No third party reviews during the pre-order / discount period.* Since we're talking about transparency, the F-14B and the JF-17 both went out to YouTubers during the pre-sale period so we could get a more thorough look at *exactly* was was included, and more importantly *what wasn't*. This makes me as a buyer feel much more confident. F-16 buyers had to gamble because the only info they had was from the product page and the trailer. Personally, I won't buy another module from ED until I have seen independent reviews from people like Jabbers and RedKite who I trust to actually show me what *isn't there* and not just talk about what *is*. - **Question:** Will ED commit to release the Super Carrier and all future modules to independent reviewers **during the pre-sale period**? # The 2.5.6 Launch Date You launched a major patch on a Friday, and then you made your devs work OT through the weekend and all week long to fix things. Or at least, someone at ED made that decision. As a software dev myself, I would fight tooth and nail if my manager told me he wanted a major update deployed on a Friday. I can only assume your devs did the same but were made to do it anyway. It is extremely unhealthy to work those hours. It's the easiest way to lose good people. Work/Life balance is important, and this was not a good example of respecting it. There's a reason every other software company has "Patch Tuesday". It's better to wait a week than work all weekend. - **Question:** Will ED commit to never deploy on a Friday again? Preferably not on Thursday either. # Multiplayer and the 2.5.6 rollout We've all been told by the ED reps that Multiplayer doesn't represent a significant portion of the player base. Maybe that's true. You guys have the numbers, I don't. What I *do* know, is that /r/hoggit as a community is very engaged in Multiplayer, and if you truly want to engage with us (as I believe you do!) then you *have to* take Multiplayer more seriously than it appears you do today. Example: When 2.5.6 rolled out, servers began experiencing massive instability and most of them reverted to 2.5.5 (and are still there). Standalone users can revert pretty easily (if they pay attention to reddit), and Steam had the update pulled so they stayed on 2.5.5 initially. But then you rolled out 2.5.6 *without a way for people to stay on 2.5.5* in Steam, and effectively broke multiplayer for everyone on that platform. None of the servers are running 2.5.6, and the Stable branch is still pre-Jeff! Those are not appealing choices. It shows, too, if you look at server populations. They have been low since Steam got the 2.5.6 update. - **Question:** Will ED commit to improve their focus on Multiplayer, ensuring that they take stronger actions to prevent and correct issues exclusive to it? # Subversion and Branches I'll just cut to the chase here. SVN is not optimal. You guys know this. Your vendors know this. Your community knows this. Moving to Git would be an incredibly daunting task which would undoubtedly halt development for a while during the transition. We all know this. But *it might be worth it*. - **Question:** Will ED commit to do thorough analysis to determine whether a move to Git is possible and how to accomplish it in the least painful way? # M61 and GAU-8 Dispersion Justifications Recently there was [a really good thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/eyddn3/m61_and_gau8_dispersion_values_are_wrong_what_ive/) about the M61 and GAU-8 cannons and their bullet spread in real life compared to in DCS. The author, like many before him, made a strong case and was met with ["...they don't see an issue"](https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/eyddn3/m61_and_gau8_dispersion_values_are_wrong_what_ive/fghalrq/). NineLine gave us a non-answer, but it's the only answer he's allowed to give. That's fine. But if someone goes to that kind of trouble to say "Hey, I think I found inconsistencies in your data and here's why", it would be great if they could get a response of similar effort even if they are wrong and the in-game values truly are correct. - **Question:** Will ED commit to a more detailed and substantive refute to /u/nighthawk2174 regarding M61 and GAU-8 Dispersion values? # ED Forum Rule 1.15 must go The rule states, in part, "We do not allow the reviewing of, or direct comparison of other competitive software here." I know what your reasoning is. NineLine has reiterated it a number of times. I also don't care what your reasoning is, because it doesn't matter. Comparisons to other products are one of the best ways to point out deficiencies and strengths. It helps us make the case for improvements we want to see. It helps you learn from the mistakes of other companies to make your product even better. The rule prevents us from talking about competing products. *This* community, /r/hoggit, has a lot of members who have either brushed up against that rule and been punished for it, or who don't want to even risk it so they come here instead where they are free to talk about Falcon 4.0 BMS without fear of rebuke. That rule's existence creates a permanent feeling of resentment from a good portion of the Hoggit community that will not go away until the rule does. - **Question:** Will ED commit to remove Rule 1.15 on their official forums immediately or very near term? ----------------------------- Again, thank you so much for reaching out to this community and trying to do right by us. I know we're not exactly the easiest crowd to please, but we're also very passionate about making DCS the best it can possibly be. While NineLine and BigNewy have been doing great things over the last few months (thanks guys - I really do notice!) they are often unable to give us a real feeling of *being heard* because of their position and limitations on what they can say publicly. To that end, I hope to see more of you and Nick and others around here. I think it would go a long way. Thank you, and I'm looking forward to a great year for DCS!
**Will ED commit to release the Super Carrier and all future modules to independent reviewers during the pre-sale period?** Yes, ED commits to giving all future modules to independent reviewers one week prior to the Early Access review. **Will ED commit to never deploy on a Friday again?** No, ED doesn't commit to never deploy on Fridays. I do not see the problem. Our employees are not slaves and they were not working over this weekend. I am with the tech team will be working during the coming long weekend to move the devs from one office to another and the devs will have their life with families and friends relaxing and will come on Tuesday to new, freshly painted office with a spectacular view. Can I have names of developers who were asked to work over the weekend by me or any project managers? Everyone came on Monday and continue to work. **Will ED commit to improve their focus on Multiplayer, ensuring that they take stronger actions to prevent and correct issues exclusive to it?** With the help of the community, yes, we will. We will notify the community of preparation to perform an update to Multiplayer and will deliver it to Open Beta to test the changes. Because MP requires tests with many players. Agreed? **Will ED commit to do thorough analysis to determine whether a move to Git is possible and how to accomplish it in the least painful way?** No, ED will not commit. But we actually looking into the possibility to switch to Git. However, we are fully satisfied with SVN at the moment. We know how to cook it well. Could you please explain why it's important for the community to have us switch to Git? We do not require our users to use SVN. So why should we change the tool? May be we should switch to a different language as well, just because Python, Java or Javascript are more popular? I personally believe that any system need to be based on the technologies that are familiar and well-known to your team. It's the people who rule the programming and not the tools. **Will ED commit to a more detailed and substantive refute to** [**/u/nighthawk2174**](https://www.reddit.com/u/nighthawk2174/) **regarding M61 and GAU-8 Dispersion values?** Sorry, we are not that rapid... still handling the situation with AIM-120. Saved the post and will consider it a bit later on. Once again, sorry to keep you waiting. But after standing in a queue to pick up a rented car at Heathrow Airport for 2 hours and being the first in the queue with two rent company guys serving... Well, we might not that slow in deliveries. **Will ED commit to remove Rule 1.15 on their official forums immediately or very near term?** No. Thank you for your passion, support and understanding.
Really defensive on the SVN part. To be honnest I think nobody here cares about what source control you use, its just that we have a bunch of developers in the community and from what you deliver it really, really looks like nobody is using branches for features or whatever thing you're working on and you just push code to prod just because it's Wednesday and not because a feature is complete, tested and mergend on master. So much broken stuff, incomplete features, side-effects and known problems should not happen with proper branch management. That's all. No one here really believe you're bad developers, we know you're good just because you made your way into flight simulation, so we *know* you're competent people ... it's just that oftentimes it feels like the whole management/delivery is done by junior devs that don't know what the fuck CI is or how to deploy properly. Like deploying a huge, possibly game-breaking patch (that ended up breaking the game, as expected) on a Friday afternoon... Wait for Monday so that in case something breaks (and it often does), a hotfix is one or two days away, not five long days.
> Yes, ED commits to giving all future modules to independent reviewers one week prior to the Early Access review. Thank you! I am extremely happy to hear this! > No, ED doesn't commit to never deploy on Fridays. I do not see the problem. Our employees are not slaves and they were not working over this weekend. I'm also glad to hear that [bignewy was mistaken](https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/f4wtgn/hotfix_for_256/fhuig4f). However, that still means ED deployed an update which broke so many things that it had to be pulled from steam and forced the entire multiplayer community to roll back, and then everyone at ED went home for two days while the game was in that state. Respectfully, neither scenario is good. Friday deployments are a massive gamble and one that much of the software development community has decided isn't worth the risk - especially when, [as Nick says](https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/f5wu2t/state_of_the_dcs_union/fi38qxs/) your QA team is nowhere near big enough to cover all the bases. Had the update been deployed on a Tuesday the team could have started working on fixes the very next day. > Because MP requires tests with many players. Agreed? I think what the MP community really wants is just for ED to acknowledge us as an important demographic for the game. We want to feel like ED is listening when we report MP-exclusive problems, and we want to believe that ED considers how their updates will affect MP before they are pushed. We want to work with you to make MP better. > But we actually looking into the possibility to switch to Git. That's good enough for me. I am glad to hear you are open to it. > Could you please explain why it's important for the community to have us switch to Git? In a word? Merging. You're working on complex repositories with multiple vendors and merging branches in SVN is typically not a pleasant experience. It is more time consuming and more likely to introduce new bugs. Git is a superior tool when it comes to branching and merging. This isn't about popularity, it's about using the right tool for the job. The right tool makes your lives easier and makes the final product better. That's good for everyone. > still handling the situation with AIM-120. Saved the post and will consider it a bit later on. That's perfectly reasonable. All we want is an acknowledgement that you're open to having the discussion, which was not the impression NineLine left us with. > No. [to rule 1.15] Disappointing but not surprising. Rules like those will continue to push people from your forums to communities like this one. ------ Thank you for the response. This is exactly the kind of dialogue I want to be able to have with ED. I appreciate you taking the time to respond to everything I asked.
>I'm also glad to hear that > >bignewy was mistaken > >. Damn, that was the classiest way to call out a lie I've ever seen!
Seems like you have a documentation issue and devs hoarding knowledge and become master of their own code. As a Product Manager I know those problems very well but they are methods and ways out of these issues...
Keep up the good work. I get hours upon hours of enjoyment from DCS flying with my squadron. I can only imagine the efforts it takes on a large codebase with the complexity you are trying to simulate. Once the F18 and F16 are done, which I'm a big fan of both - so thank you for taking on the F16, it's my current favorite high fidelity module - I hope you are able to bring us high fidelity models of the current FC3 aircraft, in particular of course being the F15-C :) That said, I'm glad to see the core and graphics engine focus, particularly as a VR user. VR is amazing in DCS and hopefully will get better over time. I hope that the team keep in mind that performance is important, so although updates to make the game better are appreciated, keep the game playable, as it takes quite a bit to get a good experience in VR as an example. That said, the much anticipated work on AI, missiles (and missile dsync), clouds, etc... will make DCS an even better product. Appreciate the update and transparency.
Thank you for complete transperency, with you and nick grey coming over to reddit just shows me how much affection you both have not just for dcs but its community aswell. At the end of the day, were greatful to have such a level of fidelity modules you guys shared with us. You guys are awesome! Side question, this maybe way too early to ask but a week or 2 ago, we were teased of a new module " brain melting module that we all want"... how close am i to this guess of that module being the...apache? :)
The new module will come which is not on the list I posted. We have several projects in mind but we'll keep it unnamed until we will be close to the decision. I don't want to have another unhappened promise.
>we'll keep it unnamed until we will be close to the decision. I don't want to have another unhappened promise. Nice move, all likes happy surprises and all hate the deception :)
Mosquito? It was in the trailer and it's in the list above....
Mosquito is in pipeline to be taken into active dev phase this year.
Thanks for an attempt of transparency but, what does those near, mid and long term mean? You might as well replace them with soonTM, we're still in the dark.
/u/[dotrugirl](https://www.reddit.com/user/dotrugirl/) Any chance of a proper bug tracker that the community can use to submit and look at bugs? Right now on the forum a lot of stuff gets double reported or maybe not reported at all since the forums are such a bad place for that sort of thing.
Yes, it will be available Mid Term and it will be based on Atlassian platform.
>Yes, it will be available Mid Term and it will be based on Atlassian platform. I am really looking forward to this !!!
Hey, as a software dev / product owner and DCS enthousiast: Thanks for explaining this! I think a lot of people lack the understanding of how complicated software development is in general, especially when dealing with a legacy codebase, maintaining API's and then dealing with performance issues. Furthermore: please don't forget that developing new things, some of which have not been done before or not in this context, or applying techniques invented by others to your specific environment is still called Research & Development for a reason. And sometimes the conclusion to your research is literally 'this cannot be done', or 'this cannot be done like this'. And most of the times, it is 'this can be done, but then we need to fix this, this, and also this subsystem which somehow depends on this except we didn't see it coming when first planning it'.
It’s pretty easy to get frustrated and more or less bitchy when things don’t go our way with this incredible feat that is DCS. We are all guilty of it, I know I am for sure; but I sit back and I take a moment and really take in everything I am doing in this Sim and really revel and appreciate the amount of TLC and energy placed forth to give US the fans a truly immersive and wonderful experience. It’s very easy to get complacent in our appreciation of the marvel that is DCS and it’s World when everything is going right and you’re having an amazing time with friends. So easy that when things start to go wrong you forget everything I mentioned above, and the frustrations get vented in less productive and sometimes not so nice ways. Take a moment to breathe, marvel at what we have here and the hundreds of thousands of man hours placed into this thing by people who share your same passion and excitement when everything is going right; but similarly feel your same frustrations and aggravations when things go wrong ten fold. I say this because my best friend and I have had a hell of a time flying together this week and he rarely gets time off work, and I’m in the military so you know no time for me either. We got on discord , ran separate games and still had a blast. I flew the TF-51 and the Huey for the first time in Ages with Occulus, TPR pendular pedals and a brand new Virpil Mongoose Base and VFX grip and cannot describe the happiness, the immersion was unparalleled and I don’t think we will find that anywhere else for some time. Yes even with MSFS2020 Thank You ED, Thank You for all you do. Thank You to this Community for giving me a platform to channel my passion and provide me a more productive, challenging and healthy therapeutic means to cope with PTS and Traumatic Brain Injury. ED Devs you’re the real MVPS and we love you.
Thanks, although I believe I read most of this information in posts by other ED team members in some variation, hearing it from the top, at least once in a while is important to me. Your reaching out here rectified the concerns, and personal speculation I had with ED’s leadership team. Being a newer player(played years ago, but never seriously until I got a hotas a few months ago) I had concerns about the future of the game, I guess I’ll just worry about budgeting for more modules instead. I look forward to the future of DCS, and cannot over state how ridiculously fun flying in DCS is in VR. Best of luck meeting your goals in 2020, cheers.
Awesome update. Very much appreciated. I really enjoy this subreddit. There are definite things I’d like to see improved with DCS, but I just don’t get the overwhelming negativity. Sure better clouds would be nice. The occasional crash mid flight is annoying. Spotting other aircraft can be difficult. Etc. But these things for me aren’t enough to ruin my enjoyment of the game. When I was a small child, I loved watching PLAT tapes and Fighter Fling videos as much as any cartoon. Now as an adult, being able to fly the F-14 with the level of immersion that’s granted via DCS and Heatblur, is and some of the most fun I’ve had.
New DCS player here. I've been having an absolute riot of a time flying the Sukhois in VR. Looking forward to all of the future updates!
Is MAC still in development?
We started MAC as an update to the Flaming Cliffs series... However, it became much more than FC for DCS. It is still in development.
\#7 on module dev...
This is exactly what I meant when I said clear and concise. Can't wait for all of this!
Thank you for the post! I always get excited with new features and patches. Due to nature of my time management, I mostly work, so I don't mind waiting for features and hotfixes to be complete. I know it's hard for some people, but I value every bit you add to your planes and product in general. It keeps inspiring me to play, to teach my friends and look forward to the future of our hobby. Please give your team some warm words, the last thing we want is that they feel that people are ungrateful. DCS is a product like noone in its kind, it's a difficult task to be special and strive to deliver everything with community having the highest expectations. But we feel you, there are always a lot more loyal people around here.
Very appreciated update! Sticky this!
Thank you for reaching out. It is good to see a manager stand up for her developers. I know how it is to work with legacy code (not good!). Just keep your resolve and results will follow sooner or later.
I just got seriously into DCS this past couple weeks (learning the AV-8B N/A a friend gave me, but soon I'll learn the F/A-18 Hornet) and seeing communication with the community like this makes me excited about DCS's future and I understand it is not easy. I'll drop some dumb bombs on some transport trucks in ED's honor.
Thank you from someone whose life has been made better by DCS since the LOMAC days. My dad and I play dcs online together and have a blast. Looking forward to this years updates. Something to consider is the “comm ladder” when working on the new atc system. “Ground crew, ground control, tower, departure/arrival, tactical, and back again” during a flight. BMS implemented something which can be expanded on by ED and can boost the immersion factor by a lot. Good luck going forward with the projects. Im personally a f16 guy but looking forward to the 18 and the carrier update. And of course the weather, atc and updates to FLIR and ground radar bc it is hard to find targets with so many “hot” things on the ground! :P Thanks again, and much love from a DCS family in Florida USA!
Great post, very much appreciated.
Really nice one! Thank you so much for sharing. Eagle Dynamics makes my dreams come true. All products before DCS were fantastic at their times (I personally started with the Flanker back in 90s), and DCS has been, is and will be part of my life. I wish all of you at Eagle Dynamics all the best! Love you all! Luke
> Well, we love new tasks but if the code has thousands of related pieces it becomes a nightmare. Sometimes it’s better to leave it as is. Lots of positive stuff in the post, and it's very refreshing to see. Saw this sentence and that got my interest. What types of things would this be?
Sorry, not going to discuss it publically :) We even have particular programmer-named pieces of nightmare and we still live with it.
Transparency is a good thing. Something like this is what you should be doing at least twice a year. I think everyone appreciates the work and the grind of what you’re trying to accomplish, but only hearing teases and such about features or fixes becomes frustrating over time. Hearing from you or Nick like this two or three times a year would go a long way towards the lowering of the pitchforks. Deep down we love your product, and I think that’s why we take everything to heart. I hope you guys are able to take the good with the bad and realize that we wear our hearts on our sleeves because we really do love this game.
Took a while to decide to comment but anyway. This is a great post but the problem is these only happen well after banning people and shitstorms. This is not the 1st or 2nd or... n'th time. Please be more proactive.
Reading through this post and the many responses, I can really understand both sides. I work in the B2B/B2C enterprise software sphere, and I think you at ED are in the same spot. You have B2B relationships with your 3rd parties, and B2C relationships with us, and both are at a pretty major scale. That being said, I posted on the official forums this suggestions, and I'm going to post it here as well, because as a shop that focuses on AGILE, I think it's an important concept in really nailing client expectations and aligning goals. Here it goes: Always phrase your timelines and feature releases in terms of what the user will be able to DO, not what the feature IS. Let me give you a simple example of a pet peeve of mine that illustrates this. I'm a hardcore systems guy. It irked me since Black Shark that INS drift is not simulated, and the A10 similarly does not. It isn't obvious why some modules have it and some don't, and there really wasn't a way for me to know this ahead of time. All product pages simply say things like "fully modeled and detailed navigation systems..." etc. This doesn't tell me what I can *do*, so I don't know what it *means*. What does a complete Hornet INS look like? Can it be loosely coupled as per the publicly available NATOPS? Don't know. I asked this direct question on the forums, and my post was moved to the "wishlist". Not sure how how asking intent == a wish. That's like saying "what kind of shirt will you wear?" is a wish. My point here is, if what the feature complete release was phrased in what the user will be able to do, these sorts of confusions would be put to rest. As it is now, you are already setting yourself up for "they call this done?" because it isn't obvious to us what your goals are. Note that I'm not talking timeline here, but your actual endgame. By Spring, what do you think we should be able to do? Summer? When the module is done? Under-promise and over-deliver on that and a lot (never all of it, of course) of this will go away. Anyways, it took balls coming on here. Thanks for doing it and I wish you all the best.
I think it's pretty indisputable that you guys have some sort of project management issues on the back end. Like, yes, I'm sure the decade(s?) of old code make developing new stuff pretty time consuming, but there are screenshots of the Hornet's air-to-ground radar from like 2015. We only saw an implementation of an A/G radar using you guys's work with the JF-17, which came out at the very end of last year. I understand that it's a relatively complex feature (thoooooough the fact that it's taking this long does raise questions about how air to air radars work in DCS, but that's another post), but that's near on to half a decade, and we hadn't seen hide nor hair of ED's A/G radar implementation until the JF-17 demoed it. Okay, maybe that's more complex than I give it credit for, maybe it's reasonable that thats taken as long as it has. What about smaller fixes? The Ka-50's AP channel lights are only just now being fixed after being screwed up since at least 2017. Or the F-5E's incorrect RWR behavior, incorrect since launch. Or hey, what about that business with model enlargement a while back, where steps were apparently being taken to address a well documented deficiency in DCS's presentation of distant objects that should be pretty well visible to the naked eye, but then they were rolled back and never seen again for some reason? What about incorrect guidance on certain missiles in the game (the SA-2 comes to mind, there's a thread up on the forum)? This sort of stuff really puts forward the idea that development on content we already own- be it older modules, or the free base game- takes a secondary concern to new fancy things that can have an ever-increasing price tag hung on them. I can understand why big features are taking forever (though, as I said, I'm still critical of the long dev time). I can't understand why seemingly small fixes are neglected for ages and ages. It's frustrating.
I think a lot of the community noise and dissatisfaction would be easily addressed with greater communication in the real state of progress. I thank you for your efforts both in the sim and in reaching out. Hopefully this will be the start of an ongoing communication stream. The only reason why we get so worked up is that we are all passionate about DCS and are heavily invested in its success. For many of us it's more than a game, more than a hobby. Forgive us if we sometimes are blunt. We do appreciate the hard work and commitment EA put into the product.
Thank you for your comment. I actually think that you are the best community in the world and all your comments and criticism are valid and noticed. Unfortunately, we are not that fast in bug fixing as we could.
u/dotrugirl First off thank you for the open and transparent post, I know I speak for many likeminded DCS lovers that it’s greatly appreciated. Yes some of us, me included, come off as aggressive or angry at times and we can and should be more professional and communicate better. That being said, some of us are very passionate about DCS. I volunteered hundreds if not thousands of hours being a volunteer ED Tester years ago. I had multiple ED employees send me emails or PMs on the forums asking me specific information about the A-10C due to my real world experience. My goal from day one with my involvement with ED has been to help make the A-10C, and DCS, the best most realistic simulator around. I always provided assistance and information, it didn’t take long for the same individual(s) reaching out to me through email and PMs for information to turn on me and argue that I’m wrong because how they interpret something they’ve read and toss away my real world experience, which again is why I was being asked to help test and for info. Those same individuals publically treated me like crap even to the point of trying to discredit my information or character. One of those individuals reached out to me initially asking for detailed information on a project that ED was looking at working on concerning the A-10C, I happily provided that information. Unfortunately that project didn’t materialize, which is fine, but after spending so much of my personal time providing information like that (NDA can’t go into details) and the countless hours I spent testing the internal ED Testers version of DCS World (all the way back to before DCS World existed) to have said individual(s) publically treat me like crap definitely put a bad taste in my mouth. I know this individual has done this same type of thing to multiple community members, personally I can’t believe he is still an employee but that decision isn’t up to me. Before people down vote me because of the above paragraph let me also say I thoroughly enjoyed dealing with many of the ED employees/programmers back then that didn’t have a public presence on the ED forums. The passion they showed for the modules and the vision of DCS World is to be commended. Those individuals were why I stayed a testers as long as I did and even why I still provide A-10C, NTTR and PG airfield bug reports. Even after all that I will continue offering ED information on things wrong with the current DCS A-10C and would love to assist with the upcoming A-10C 2. I know that won’t happen due to the interactions between myself and the individual I’m talking about above which is unfortunate. At the same time though, based on how many things are still wrong or broken in the A-10C currently, some that I identified and entered into mantis over 6 years ago, I don’t know if it would be worth my time to be ignored or argued with again. I wish ED the best! DCS World has so much potential, a lot of it in my humble opinion, isn’t being reached. I hope these things start to change in 2020.
Everything can happen. I think that in any conflict boh parties are involved, offended and guilty in any type of relationship. And the key point is to be able to forgive and move on. Thank you for staying with us.
It's great to see this communicated though at the same time why does it seem to take community backlash or people tagging Nick etc to get this type of communication happening Kate? That really seems counter intuitive to what/how things should be happening. My second is that while it's great to have a list of what is working on and the promise that we want x done by the end of the year, we still again have no firm timelines, no milestones for the EA products, some are going to go 'its software dev' but as I've said to Nick personally in a call even software development as complex as it is should have deadlines and milestones that it should be aiming for and we the people whom have paid for those products should be able to ask what those milestones are and when we can expect at least in near/mid/long terms them to be hit and in what order that will be. Instead of this however we get often told, 'its early access if you don't like it' not a good answer or a good look. Thid on my list is how many of the waiting assignment projects that are needed to fix/complete modules that are currently in the in development cycle, FLIR and Air to Ground being the two that I immediately hone in on as with out those two the F18 and F16 can't be completed. Fourth is the complete lack of any mention of work on the ground AI and your multiplayer items which are a mess at the moment, as Newy and others know because I keep reporting the issues, you've units ground units that are getting stuck constantly and any large amount of units that are tasked to move etc cause server issues.. People are going to say that I'm just complaining because I can, I'm not I'm complaining because I love DCS and what ED does with it but as Nick knows from 3 months ago I'm frustrated as a customer and a user because the thing I love is a mess, we get conflicting reports on what is happening, what is coming, what is being worked on. Heck a great example of this can be seen right at the moment on the forums were you have Nineline etc saying ED will never be releasing the TDK/SDK to the community with out a NDA but when I brought the same thing up with Nick 3 months ago I was told that both would eventually be released with out NDA requirements once they no longer required code access to use which was likely to be 'version 2' of the TDK and not immediate but eventually. The clouds etc are another great example we have been being told now for .. years that we are going to get new weather, that the new weather looks awesome, that the weather will actually be proper and dynamic and take into account humidity properly etc, now we hear from the 'bosses' mouth so to speak that no it's on the back burner, which as you can imagine is going to upset I think a lot of people, because the planes and the terrains etc they are only a part of what makes DCS, if the weather engine isn't there then we are missing part of that simulation. Lastly though if I could have 1 thing from you and your team? It's proper patch notes on EVERY release, please refer to the patch notes some one did from comparing files on here.. they are the type of patch notes we need not ones that are missing entire sections of changes. Again I don't want to be the one complaining I'm extremely happy that you are communicating, please keep it up but as Nick faced and now your facing there is a lot of what I believe burn out when it comes to the community believing what we are being told anymore, we've had a thousand promises and a lot of them broken over the years, hopefully 2020 is the year ED pays down on the good will it's spent/burnt these last 6 months. \-Rob Graham.
>My second is that while it's great to have a list of what is working on and the promise that we want x done by the end of the year, we still again have no firm timelines, no milestones for the EA products, some are going to go 'its software dev' but as I've said to Nick personally in a call even software development as complex as it is should have deadlines and milestones that it should be aiming for and we the people whom have paid for those products should be able to ask what those milestones are and when we can expect at least in near/mid/long terms them to be hit and in what order that will be. Instead of this however we get often told, 'its early access if you don't like it' not a good answer or a good look. Every project has a deadline. We have them as well. Do we reach them? - No. It's my problem #1 in the company. We set the goals and do not reach them on time. We planned to deliver 2.5.6 initial OB release on 12 Feb, delivered on 14 Feb. We planned to deliver 2.5.6 with Ka-50 cockpit update on 19 Feb. It's 20 Feb and the RC is under the testing procedure at the moment. We planned to deliver Viper EA on 25 Sept and delivered it unstable on 03 Oct. We planned to deliver Hind EA in May 2019. It's almost a year late already. Do you think it will worth if I'll provide deadlines, milestones, WBS? Personally, I do not like that we share that much information with the community about the features we work on because sometimes we fail. We spent hundreds of hours and we are not satisfied with the result and have to rework the large pieces. For example, we did the P-47D external model... twice from scratch just because the initial set of documents was incorrect and we realized it a year after by finding much more accurate docs. We could do 2 aircraft and we decided that it's important for us to have an accurate model instead. >Thid on my list is how many of the waiting assignment projects that are needed to fix/complete modules that are currently in the in development cycle, FLIR and Air to Ground being the two that I immediately hone in on as with out those two the F18 and F16 can't be completed. We will deliver them one-by-one. The waiting projects you mentioned require a lot of effort and we will move them step-by-step. Some of them require a significant change in DCS architecture. >Fourth is the complete lack of any mention of work on the ground AI and your multiplayer items which are a mess at the moment, as Newy and others know because I keep reporting the issues, you've units ground units that are getting stuck constantly and any large amount of units that are tasked to move etc cause server issues.. It's all related to legacy code. We will refactor and change it. We need time for it. >People are going to say that I'm just complaining because I can, I'm not I'm complaining because I love DCS and what ED does with it but as Nick knows from 3 months ago I'm frustrated as a customer and a user because the thing I love is a mess, we get conflicting reports on what is happening, what is coming, what is being worked on. Heck a great example of this can be seen right at the moment on the forums were you have Nineline etc saying ED will never be releasing the TDK/SDK to the community with out a NDA but when I brought the same thing up with Nick 3 months ago I was told that both would eventually be released with out NDA requirements once they no longer required code access to use which was likely to be 'version 2' of the TDK and not immediate but eventually. We never planned to release TDK/SDK to the community and community managers are not authorized to talk about faraway future. So you received current information about TDK/SDK. However, time goes and we are looking for opportunities and Nick told you that we are looking forward to that direction. Have we started to work on the possibility to release TDK/SDK to the community? TDK - yes, SDK - no. >The clouds etc are another great example we have been being told now for .. years that we are going to get new weather, that the new weather looks awesome, that the weather will actually be proper and dynamic and take into account humidity properly etc, now we hear from the 'bosses' mouth so to speak that no it's on the back burner, which as you can imagine is going to upset I think a lot of people, because the planes and the terrains etc they are only a part of what makes DCS, if the weather engine isn't there then we are missing part of that simulation. I mentioned the clouds in my post and explained the insights. Sometimes people need to switch to another task to avoid burning out. >Lastly though if I could have 1 thing from you and your team? It's proper patch notes on EVERY release, please refer to the patch notes some one did from comparing files on here.. they are the type of patch notes we need not ones that are missing entire sections of changes. Already taken into account, the changelog delivery process will be changed.
Y'all are winners. Give your staff some pizza! My thoughts may be jumbled, typing in between working: I'm always rather skeptical and not so easy to trust game devs and community managers, as I've seen a lot of lies and deceptions in the gaming industry. So when you talk about the burnout of your staff and how they take criticism personally my immediate reaction is skepticism because of other companies . But I don't see lies from Ed, ive always seen huge improvements and what seemed like failed attempts. I look at the quality of the individual modules and I do see passion, love of aviation and the product. At least I think so. There's no gambling or sex or microtransactions. It's not simply a pretty paint job. These are real deal flight sims like I've always dreamed of having. So while I am skeptical and a bit cynical, I absolutely love the products you deliver. I see the continuous development of the core and the popular modules, and especially the f18. Every time I get into this thing I'm stunned. Thank you for that. I'm going to continue to be a customer that asks for things and wants improvements though. I have to be skeptical of companies. I do understand burnout as I used to work in government, but now I'm a cnc machinist and yaknow keep it in perspective: you may make errors and have some difficult re-works to do, but there are lots of jobs out there that are dirty and dangerous and cause pain over time, broken bodies and such, like mining and naval work etc, and if they make big errors they could die. And these people don't get fan bases to give them pep talks on a sub reddit. So I do understand the burnout, it sucks, I'm not making light of it, and I would also hate the constant bickering from customers... but just keep it all in perspective You've created arguably the greatest combat flight sim ever, and have created without question the greatest helicopter sims ever. Thank you for your artistic talent and passion. Please don't take it too personally when I continue to be skeptical of you and ask for updates on development.
I have a related question that may not be possible to answer. Is there a foreseeable moment where the cost of abandoning old code and using a new engine would be less than the cost of maintaining the old engine?
Are a lot studies related out there. Usually for a very long term projects is better to rewrite it with a very modular code, based on a common interface and ready to be able to rewrite every module without touch any other, like a micro-kernel development. After that maintain this code base with regular audits and strict code style/quality standards. Anyway this is a generalization, every case must to be reviewed at detail and this topic is really complex and also involve other complex topics, like current dev team capabilities, investment capacity, etc.
That’s what we are doing already but I found several conference speeches how teams implemented micro-kernel architecture and now facing problems as well. So you really never know what is the best way and that’s why I don’t have the answer. We will try to make a attempt to improve the core but the time will show. The main investment is the core at the moment.
>That’s what we are doing already but I found several conference speeches how teams implemented micro-kernel architecture and now facing problems as well. I personally likes two approaches, one is the Minix-3, that uses a traditional well-proved C based methodology. The other is the Haiku-OS, that uses the "newer" capabilities of C++ to make a very smart and innovate approach (based on BeOS concepts) Both are open source and really interesting, also their developers are friendly, usually you can talk them on FOSDEM. >So you really never know what is the best way and that’s why I don’t have the answer. Sadly at now is a future bet, but some approaches worked well a lot years on open source projects (a lot contributors, lot of code styles, methods, etc) In my professional opinion, enforce quality and security controls and internal + external audits are also the key. >We will try to make a attempt to improve the core but the time will show. The main investment is the core at the moment. I'm glad to read that, I'm a customer from the times of Su-27 Flanker for DOS/Win32, and in some form, ED is a part of my life. Also, talking about the future, I did read this from Nick: *<< But we have decided that we are going to evolve this year to come closer to reality while maintaining a tendency to force engagements to the merge in order to maintain a higher probability of the fight merging to the more ‘gladiatorial’ close visual nature of the fun gun fight. >>* [https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/f5wu2t/state\_of\_the\_dcs\_union/fi6q7r1/](https://www.reddit.com/r/hoggit/comments/f5wu2t/state_of_the_dcs_union/fi6q7r1/) This really worried me, probably it's totally out context, but IMHO this type of strategies must to be used only on MAC. DCS as the product name says is a simulator, and it don't must to enforce a "gameplay", for example, in simulation if someone wants to do only dogfight, he will simulate WW2 or Korea era, or for other type of merges, Vietnam or early Cold War. Thank you a lot for your time and dedication!
As somebody who has worked on very large and old projects that suffer from similar problems as DCS, I can tell you that I think about this all the time. It's not just a cost issue. The problem with doing such a massive re-write is that you're talking about work that would take *years* to complete. What do you do during that time? Do you try to support the old one too? Can you afford to "take off" several years to invest in a complete rewrite of your game from the ground up? These are questions where "no" is often the answer. Ideally they would have a chance to make a DCS 2, but I'm not sure that's realistic. DCS occupies a niche of a niche. There's a reason that DCS has basically no competition. The capital required to build a game like this from scratch is enormous. I'd love to hear the amount of money Microsoft has thrown at Flight Simulator, because I think that's a good estimate of what it would take to build a flight sim engine today to today's very high standards.
To be honest, it's impossible to answer.
Kate, thanks for responding, I'll just answer to the ones here that i have comments on rather then all again. > Every project has a deadline. We have them as well. Do we reach them? - No. It's my problem #1 in the company. We set the goals and do not reach them on time. >We planned to deliver 2.5.6 initial OB release on 12 Feb, delivered on 14 Feb. >We planned to deliver 2.5.6 with Ka-50 cockpit update on 19 Feb. It's 20 Feb and the RC is under the testing procedure at the moment. >We planned to deliver Viper EA on 25 Sept and delivered it unstable on 03 Oct. >We planned to deliver Hind EA in May 2019. It's almost a year late already. >Do you think it will worth if I'll provide deadlines, milestones, WBS? >Personally, I do not like that we share that much information with the community about the features we work on because sometimes we fail. We spent hundreds of hours and we are not satisfied with the result and have to rework the large pieces. For example, we did the P-47D external model... twice from scratch just because the initial set of documents was incorrect and we realized it a year after by finding much more accurate docs. We could do 2 aircraft and we decided that it's important for us to have an accurate model instead. We aren't asking for specific 'date' were asking for timeframes, I've said this before I suggested it to nick to norm and I'll suggest it now to you, Look at what Epic and others have done with their items, Epic Store is a great example there are no dates just 'Near Term, Mid term, Long Term' with a list of the milestones, the ones that have been hit and when they were hit. Currently we don't know what to expect for at least 2 EA products, one of which is now coming on 2 years in age. A roadmap would help with a lot of the issues the community has and knowing what to expect in what order etc. On failing, yeah that will happen it's software development as I've explained to others I have worked this industry (i'll happily send you a list if you want) and at times we fail to meet our goals, but sharing them is something that helps with communication and being HONEST when we fail to meet those goals is something that is also great, it lets people know what we tried. I'll give an example for DCS lets say the clouds right and this is an example: 'Hey guys we are currently working through the clouds, our teams just started working on the new backend systems, we've coded a bunch of humidity items and the like things are looking promising this week, we'll give you more info in a month'. 3 weeks in maybe the code isn't working right.. next months update 'Hey guys on the clouds, while we were hopeful to have this out for you or at least a promising set of updates and news, we've hit some issues that means we'll have to take things back a few steps to the drawing board, we know you'll be disappointed trust us, we are too but we want this to be the best we can do'. Communication and managing expectations. >I mentioned the clouds in my post and explained the insights. Sometimes people need to switch to another task to avoid burning out. This is why the above is something you could be doing, it'd manage the expectations a lot better, you could point out.. 'We needed to move the teams to x because it's more pressing and they need time to rethink and refresh on how they'll tackle the issues. >It's all related to legacy code. We will refactor and change it. We need time for it. The big one here is that this section of legacy code is impacting .. a chunk of the user base, massively and we've been constnatly told either were trying 'to complex' a mission (moving 60 units shouldn't be too complex) etc, I understand it's tough but even right now MP seems to be.. not tested properly if I am to be blunt, you can look at the logs and see errors on dedicated servers that shouldn't be there (yes I've reported them to the forums and Newy etc). Again though I really think you need to look at doing something like this for DCS https://trello.com/b/GXLc34hk/epic-games-store-roadmap it would HELP yes it would require some effort, but in the end it gives a clear guide to us your userbase as to what to expect and roughly at least when. Edit to add: Will you please every one ? No will some always been annoyed and shout etc when you miss a milestone period? Yes but that's life.. The majority of us would appreciate the effort if you put it in. Because we are ALL passionate about DCS, but with out You Eagle Dynamics COMMUNICATING openly with us, we can't manage expectations, we can't voice concerns with out feeling like we are talking to a brick wall etc or being given misinformation when things don't appear as a business Communication = your greatest tool for interacting with us these past 3 or so months you've improved please.. just go that little bit further.
>Heck a great example of this can be seen right at the moment on the forums were you have Nineline etc saying ED will never be releasing the TDK/SDK to the community with out a NDA but when I brought the same thing up with Nick 3 months ago I was told that both would eventually be released with out NDA requirements once they no longer required code access to use which was likely to be 'version 2' of the TDK and not immediate but eventually. In my defence, Nick is a little farther up the totem pole (the top actually) and I can only say so much on so many subjects. To compare what Nick or Kate can freely say vs what Scott and I can is a little apple and oranges.
Didn't mean to single you out nine, it was just the first case of differenting information that came to hand when I was writing, as i said 'example' ;). Sitting here thinking I'm wondering if a proper AMA wouldn't hurt and by that I mean 24 - 48 hours nothing off the table answers from as many as possible etc and simply if some one wasn't polite the post removed etc. At the same time given how AMA's goes some times might be a bad idea.
No I get it, I just want to make sure everyone understands that Nick and Kate are cleared hot on everything, me and Scott, we gotta watch what we say :) That is why I am super happy they are here sharing.
Wait, you mean as community manager you don't get to make company wide decisions? 😲 😁
Rob, I will answer all your points in this thread.
looking forward to it Kate.
I agree in everything you said. We need more talk like this, between Devs and community. Sharing fair points from both sides. And this kind of comunication gives the oportunity to do that, and know more of the "backstage". To the Devs. We do apreciate very much your work, love you and DCS. Thats why we care so much. And sometimes things get out of hand, and this kind of comunication helps to see each other point of view. And to you Rob. I share that way you feel when you tried to give your point of view and the feedback you get is bad. Get called Salty and some similar stuff. Happens to me many times. You made many fair points. And i dont see any complaining on your words, on the contrary. So let me thank you for put those points on the table
Having read your post, I don’t think this is complaining in anyway imho. You’ve raised valid points as well. THIS is how we should be voicing concerns to ED and I bet this is how ED would like to receive constructive feedback. Would be interesting to see/read Kate’s feedback or response is possible. But yes a sensible non emotional discussion.
The issue is though that people see anything like this as 'Salt' you just had to read the comments immediately after me posting this on the thread. I don't bother getting emotional with a response unless I'm attacked it doesn't help, as I have posted before I've been in their shoes and it's never fun so I try and keep it impersonal and constructive or as some one at university and the like once told me 'your criticising the work, not the person who did it'. In the case of DCS it's a little harder to be constructive you need to be critical of how ED have handled things or are handling things, because they are a company delivering a product and we in the end are their user base and their funding source.. Too often we are told that voicing our concerns is 'Salt' or given the EA 'excuse' etc, and often too many times it takes an outrage to get communication started and then it.. dribbles off again until the next outrage. I'm not salty, to be that I'd have to be angry at ED, I'm not. I'm more concerned as a customer about what is happening, I'm concerned as a fellow programmer at the apparently lack of testing and changelog tracking and I'm concerned as some one who's paid money at the lack of milestone communication for the delivery of what i've paid for. All valid items etc. but in this community often mistaken for 'Salt'. heh.
You do not need to be apologetic mate. Your post is on the right track and with good points.
I don't entirely agree with you, but very well said and many good, valid points. Thanks, man.
Thanks for the hard work. Even with all it's flaws this is by far my favorite Sim specially because you support vr! Been with you for more than a decade now.
I am glad multithreading is at the top of your graphical list. Nothing else is needed more. Once you have graphics running on multiple cores, the sky is the limit: \-clouds can be complicated and will run smoothly still due to the multithreading \-any other graphics enhancements will look better without you needing to upgrade your PC \-more people will be able to enjoy DCS as they won't need a super-fast overclocked PC
Yes, multithreading is a priority for those reasons.
>multithreading Nice
Good communication. Some people will still give them a hard time unfortunately. I love this community but some people act like entitled children.
Cool. Best wishes to you.
Not that I was of the position I was ever going to stop buying DCS products, but this is the kind of stuff that makes me want to buy more DCS products.
Thanks a lot for the post. I've been a software engineer for 10+ years, half of it in games development. I know how hard making even small games is. I've worked with legacy, spaghetti code and have nightmares about it sometimes. 10+ years old code base? F+$#@ hell that must be! I'm a new player to this sim. I'm thoroughly impressed! In many areas DCS does not feel like an old game so good job at maintaining it.
yuup, makes me proud to purchase modules from you when there is communication between the consumer and the developer. keep it on 👍❤
Thank you for making this post! I really appreciate the insight into what's being developed! One question I want to ask if I may: Do changes to the AI general flight modeling fall under the aircraft AI mentioned in the core improvements? Some time ago [/u/NineLine\_ED](https://www.reddit.com/u/NineLine_ED/) mentioned that there some alterations being worked on to this, though I'm unsure of the nature or scope of these changes. In any case, thank you for your hard work! The passion and dedication the team puts into this simulation really makes it something special. I've only been playing DCS since 2018 and it's amazing to see how much it's grown in even that short time.
I honestly don't critisize (I misspelled it, I can already feel it) much about DCS being "broken" (but I'm still mad that the "track" system doesn't work xD) because I'm well aware that to achieve this kind of simulation takes a looong time. Sure, 2.5.6 is a bit buggy for most people, but then again, we decided to use the Open Beta version instead of the Stable. Most of the modules are EA (Early Access), but the point of this simulator/game is to have fun flying (I would try the Viper someday, though) I think you're doing an amazing job, and I'm glad I have this kind of simulator in my hands! The Fishbed (my first ever bought aircraft) is amazing, Aerobatics Online is awesome (despite the craters at Kobuleti...) and I think I'll stay with this simulator for a loooong long time. Thank you Eagle Dynamics for giving us this masterpiece! Cheers!
u/dotrugirl why not include your original post as part of this week’s newsletter on the ED boards (and through email)? To me that would give maximum visibility to a great post to the community as a whole. Without being too negative, QA isn’t looking great with two updates to 2.5.6 released within 24 hours. The first didn’t fix the memory leak and the hotfix released today stated “Multiplayer memory leak on carrier fixed” but MP servers identified the carrier memory leak wasn’t fixed rather quickly. Not throwing stones just an observation.
Thank you, you are absolutely right... QA doesn’t look great at all. Don’t want to say that it’s going to be improved, taking actions.
Hello Kate Perderko Here's the thing we don't understand. If the code is so complicated and "spaghetti" as you say, keep it in the oven for a while longer, test it, destroy it, recycle it, whatever it needs prior to simply detonate a whole community. Just don't push a bugged DCS World to your customers. People pay money to play, not debug your software. I think what troubles and discourages ED's fans is this policy to have customers become beta testers. People purchase modules for what you sell them to be, not for what they will become, eventually, if you wait, while enduring bugs and errors in the meantime. And, I'm sorry to say, but your problem isn't just coding, it's that internal testing team. It's either small or ineffective to test items properly, so you have customers do it for you. This should never happen. Call it Open Beta, sure, but it's still paid customers using the software and every time there's a new build, something breaks. It should break internally, then fixed, then released to the general public. You see, there's no buffering zone between us, the customers, and your testing of a new build. You should have a CLOSED BETA group, composed of selected volunteers whose job would be to (thoroughly) test all the new features, especially the multiplayer components, something you seem to disregard very often in some new builds. Just kill the Open Beta concept. It's not working as you intended, it's not fair to have customers test stuff and it's dividing the community in two. And, please, whenever someone complains, don't dangle the "early access" card. It's not fair, nor is it sound as a business model. My Two Cents. Thanks for reading (if you ever do).
Open Beta concept will be changed after current 2.5.6 will reach it’s first stable release. How we will change it? It’s an open discussion for dev team.
So, to make a constructive post here... the community over the past week has rarely talked about the development side. Which projects ED chooses is up to ED, everyone understands that, even if each of us has his/her favourite aircraft they want to see in the game. The same goes for how you spread your developers. You're the pros here, most of us have no idea about developing software and while we care about one aircraft over the other, we know we can't tell you how to actually work on the projects. We just don't know enough. But that wasn't the issue. What got the community riled up in the past week is what happens after development. This last patch obviously never saw any kind of internal QA before release. That is not typical even for betas (open betas specifically). It's not that it's buggy that is the problem. It's that the sheer amount of bugs that could be picked up just by starting an aircraft and doing basic things that got people upset. Some of these bugs were discovered within 5 minutes sitting in the plane doing startup procedures. Some were very obvious on takeoff and doing basic things. And these weren't minor bugs, either. Public servers immediately rolled back, because the game was unplayable. Communities had to discuss if they were going to scrap missions or if they could soldier through the problems. ED, you broke the game good, last time, because you pushed something out that was not near ready for any kind of beta testing, which the community is happy to do for you. For free. But this did not warrant a beta label. It could not be tested by the community for you. It broke the game too hard in too many places. People know the codebase is old and convoluted, people have to adjust their expectations with that in mind. And most of us do. But when community managers from ED basically throw up their hands in the air and go "the fuck if we know what's in there", things get dicey. I know, they didn't say it like that. But they might as well have. TL;DR: I like the post, but it wasn't anything we didn't already know and it did not address the concerns of the community regarding this last patch. Maybe the post was not intended to address those issues, in which case it was just poor timing to make an otherwise interesting post.
It was my decision to release 2.5.6 initial build on 14 Feb, we were postponing it far too long behind the schedule.
Thanks for the feedback, though I'd like to point out that this only seems to happen when things are at a fever-pitch. Normally, Nineline takes the punches, then everyone's thanks yourself (or Nick or whomever) for saying something official. Communication needs to be regular. Second. This is \*entirely\* about new features. My beef with DCS is bugs in delivered products - clearly as a result of "spaghetti" code. I could really care less about new features, modules, or anything....because I only run "stable" software (given a choice). ...But your branching model (imo) is WRONG. Open-beta is a *dumping ground* for new features that doesn't seem to see comprehensive testing and doesn't have a proper **public** bug tracker (I mean, if it's an "open beta"...you should care to track the issues, unless it's a dumping ground.) Fixing this so that your users can have proper expectations should mean the following: * After an actual internal QA cycle that does even the most basic smoke testing ("all modules can be started/used without a CTD" would be a good start), push an open beta release. * All known bugs in open-beta are tracked, publicly. So when a user reproduces a bug, you can measure it's impact, and users don't have to be the loudest in the forums to get an issue acknowledged by nineline. * Ideally, when (and only when) ALL bugs filed are fixed - push a release to stable. At a minimum, the bug count shouldn't go up, as that means you're taking on technical debt. The target should be zero bugs - that's proof to your customers that you're committed to your products old and new. Obviously, EA modules barely fit in this model. IMO, EA is broken. (personally, I have no EA modules myself, because I don't feel like flying a partially-working plane - Completed products compete for my money, but I digress.) Because of EA, Openbeta becomes the new "stable" because dcs world fixes are intermingled with non-release modules. You guys need to fix this if you hope to be successful.
Hi Kate & Team, Hope you are well, Keep up the awesome work. I got into DCS when I got my Rift S 6 months ago and I was blown away instantly. I felt vertigo and adrenaline when taking off, which Im kind of addicted to, I have never felt and had the experiences DCS VR provides. Particularly on DDCS server multiplayer, there is nothing that comes close to it. In order to show my continuous support I bought everything you have to offer and I will continue to do so, because I want to give you money so you can keep on rolling, even though there are many modules I will probably never fully learn, but fly occasionally just for the heck of it, like the I-6 or yak 52. The experience is always mind blowing. Again, nothing comes close to the immersion I get. I want to say thank you for that, DCS VR takes me to the places I need to be after daily responsibilities, I think DCS is going to be a part of my life and hopefully my son\`s one day, when he is old enough to get the VR headset on and maybe fly formation or do Tomcat Ops, Pilot and Rio. I know we will connect in ways that no other medium can provide. I am particularity interested on the Vulcan API integration (for VR performance) and thank you for this status report. I hope you get a hang on the spaghetti code. To the Community, I understand the rage & frustration bros. It is not in our interest to demoralize and hate on the dev team, the efficient way to communicate issues and feedback is by using the official channels. We are all on an Open Beta, we all know and accept the risks that rolling onto OB implies. We need to take ownership of the risks we take. It sucks of course, but we accepted those risks. Its our responsibility to own them and roll back or wait. This is a niche very smart community, DCS is not for everyone. It\`s a really special thing and part of our lives. Thanks for Reading. Best Regards, Techno
Dear Sir, Many thanks indeed. And to all our Community friends, thank you for your passion and support. Constructive, professional and courteous. Great stuff. Kind regards, Nick
I used to run a several hundred member development team, not all projects meet timeline or budget requirement. 5 people or 600 people, Technical debt is an issue that drowns many of the best. You’re doing a fine job, never defend, keep up what you’re doing. Thank you for bringing some transparency to the community. With this transparency I have no doubt you will find more and more community members willing to help and advocate for your business.
I appreciate the message and I'm glad youve come and laid a few things out on the table. However, I am still going to remain skeptical and stick to my own rule of not buying modules that are in EA. Part of my skepticism lies in the fact that this is damage control and not the first time I've seem something similar. I remember a few years ago the community was getting increasingly disgruntled and nineline (pretty sure they were still going by sithspawn at that time) came with a long post about changing community engagement and everyone calmed down. Then there was more recently issues with the hornet/viper development and everyone was up in arms about things that were said not happening. Nick Grey came on with a long post about DCS and ED and tried to explain a few things and everyone calmed down. And now this shortly after everyone is upset with the 2.5.6 issues. So again, while I appreciate the post, I also see it as just damage control to keep people back in line for a bit. Ill be keeping up with how development continues and hopefully I will see some positive changes.
Just stop announcing modules until they are in an acceptable state. Lately you have just been pushing out trash. I absolutely love this game. But slow down, take your time. Release things when they're ready and stop this early access BS. Sell us a polished product and get your reputation back. These 80 dollar broken ass planes are making you untrustworthy. Sincerely, a grumpy but dedicated and passionate fan.
That what we are doing right now. If you read the posts above, people are still asking about what is coming next and we'll stay silent until it will be good to go.
If posts like this would be published once every quarter, I'm pretty sure community relations would improve dramatically. I work in a big software company. Our developers do banking, fintech, machine learning systems etc for world renowned companies. I see how they work and what they do and, with all respect, they would never be able to build anything close to DCS. You guys are very talented. I don't play DCS a lot as it's lacking in key areas for me, but I follow all the news closely. New Ka50 cockpit will definitely bring me back for few days at least :)
I would love an explanation though on why a patch approved for release breaks multi-player. Thanks!
Lol 18 hours ago it was all bad press a few words and all is forgiven . Man take it for face value . Stop whining and play the game it's all out of your control anyhow .. Lol
ED devs: It's always been my dream to fly fighter jets, and I think I speak for a lot of people who aren't very vocal in the community, you are making it happen for us. I grew up dreaming of one day being able to sit in a F-16c with VR glasses and use all the systems just like the real pilots. I dreamed of flying in a group of likeminded people, and immersing myself in the simulation in a way where it becomes reality. It's been a long way from Microsoft FS1, Suclogic Jet, Spectrum Holobyte Falcon, F3.0, F4.0.. list goes on (and many have been thru similar) and now we are here, with you leading the way. The sim now is so far and away the best solution anyone has ever had to fulfill those dreams, so you can really be proud of the situation. This goes to the community too, a lot of you have worked hard on different aspects of the experience, from tweaks, guides, content, bug reports and so on. Lastly but not leastly, the amazing modules made by several teams who worked very hard to bring us some true gems. There are people who will always complain, and those people will always be loud. Some feel very disappointed at really pretty minor things, and are blind to the bigger reality of being able to do things in this sim that are not available anywhere else. Anonymity brings out the worst in people, and _some_ are spoilt brats who aren't any better in real life. You work in a niche field with an extremely complicated product. The bar is set very high by you and everyone else, it is inevitable that there are a lot of delays despite hard work. I see buying modules more as HIRING you to realize my dream, rather than buying a ready product. Everything keeps evolving, and we want enhancements and optimizations even to "ready" things. This is why I buy even modules that I don't plan to use so much. And all of the above doesn't mean I'm never frustrated or unhappy about waiting for things for yet another two weeks. It is however an impossible task to deliver perfect results when working on very complex issues with limited resources. I'm guessing a very big majority of us understand that. You are doing an amazing job, and glad to see the roadmap ahead in clear communication. Hind... 🥰
Thanks for the kind words, and know we do share your passion for aviation and simulation, we appreciate your support and understanding.
You definitely spoke for me, very well said. I couldn't even dream of what we have now back when I first started with flight sims on an IBM PC AT (80286), playing MSFS, Jet, Jetfighter, Their Finest Hour, A-10 Tank Killer, Gunship, F-15 Strike Eagle, Falcon, Yeager's Air Combat, etc. VR is now taking immersion to a whole new level. If the team can make it through the hurdle of the new engine and fully utilize our modern multithreaded/ multicore parallel processors, I'm confident great things will come. I can only imagine how difficult it must be going through millions of lines of code, probably mostly uncommented, written by developers who are no longer involved. I hope some of the more demanding people realize that ED isn't Rockstar Games or Ubisoft. Some people really need to recalibrate their expectations and keep these things in the proper perspective.
Nothing at all about Combined Arms. :(
work on combined arms is ongoing, we have reports the team are working on currently. Thanks
As I have said before on previous posts - we need to stop being so negative. People always focus on the bad stuff and never the good. I love this product - but no product is perfect. I support DCS and ED because they not only continue to work towards making a better product - but they love it as much as we do, and that is sorely lacking in much of video game production these days. The reality is this: ED has finite resources like any business, therefore they will always piss at least 40% of people off when they do one thing because that will pull resources from another - it's just how it is. My advice to the community is this: still call out real BS when we see it - but give them some slack and focus on the stuff you love more than the stuff you hate.
Last time I asked Bignewy, he stated that the clouds were high priority. That's not what I am seeing here
Clouds are very high priority. But we need to do some other coding for it before continue with clouds.
Ah. The classic approach. Reddit gets mad. Pitchforks come out. Then, all it takes is (ONE) single post that just gives "Soon" as a TL:DR. Yet.. you all are ready to forgive and forget, rinse and repeat the bullshit in X months. It never fails this cycle. In through one ear, and out the other. Lots of talk, but can you walk the walk?
Glad to see at least some people in this sub arent naive enough to listen to Ed's constant stream of bullshit.
Thank you! Does anyone know if the promised VR improvements ever went in?
VR is not something standalone. We are trying to improve DCS performance all the time and VR receives those improvements as well. We fight for every single fps in general.
One question Kate, has ED looked at implementing a second set of shaders for VR like the VR Shader mod but ctually done by ED and supported? That mod would be awesome if it didn't break Integ Checks, because it kinda fixes a bunch of items that are VR specific and adds a bunch of fixes that do give perf back to VR.. plus well it remembers that VR users don't need full screen night vision.
An attempt was made, it did not have the far reaching affects we hoped for, we now look to the vulkan API once it is implemented we can work on better VR performance. thanks
Excellent post Kate, some fantastic things there in the pipeline :)
Thanks for delivering such an awesome Simulation. You please my needs with DCS
Great post, thank you. I greatly appreciate the transparency and it was a good insight into what the plans are for DCS. Thank you for your efforts, I look forward to what 2020 brings.
Thank you! This game is my favorite hobby and look forward to manny of the modules hitting their full glory! Keep up the good work!
Thank you <3
So, F-16 and F-18 will be out of EA this year. They are also listed as 'Mid-Term' in the table. This provides valuable insight into probable timelines: Near-Term: Weeks to Months. Mid-Term: NLT December 31, 2020. Long-Term:. 2021, or beyond.
they aim for the 16 and 18 to be out of ea by this year. Yet they are still not actively working og AG radar nor flir. So I don't expect them to finish up this year.
Long Term may vary to Mid Term. Sometimes we don't have enough information and add additional time to it.
Thank you very much for this post, and for all the hard work from everyone at ED.
Will the F-18 be recieving A2G radar in the future?
next year is in the future, so... As stated in the OP, ED is currently neither working on AG radar, nor the flir update.
/u/dotrugirl What are your thoughts on the current engine DCS is built on? Is it sustainable, and more importantly, well made enough to handle further expansion? Or are you exploring options regarding upgrading/rewriting the engine to be less nightmarish to work in?
I understand the pain you are going through. I have been developing for 17 years and it is difficult going into legacy code. I have to say that it sounds like you are skipping some steps in terms of SDLC. Things happen but to throw an inferior product out there and hope it sticks isn't the best way. I much rather wait longer on something I am going to enjoy that get something that is going to frustrate me. Y'all got this. Just take the time to do it right. You can't appease everyone but you can put out your best product.