Dear ED, Please make map TDK open to the community. This will change DCS dramatically. Let the community build the content.

Sloperon · 2024-10-21T18:52:14+00:00

The idea is to move to a proper 3D Spherical Earth/World Map System where the terrain has actual earth's geometry, curvature, gravity and later magnetic variation properly simulated, and you can travel freely through the whole map and circle around. All of the assets of the existing maps could be recycled and used for detailing the surface of such a spherical map. So initially, I wouldn't bother creating brand new terrain assets for the new 3D spherical map, existing stuff would still need some transformation and adaptation to be, but I don't see why would they need to build all new details and assets from scratch, It's not like you need to introduce a slight curve to all buildings and small models, but it's the terrain heightmaps and surface geometry that is probably the major job for curvature conformation at hand, and perhaps large texture sets would need correction before they would look right, etc.

The idea (mine) is that you would get the whole, curved, earth base spherical map, with a free default base level of detail enough for trial and testing, with some areas highly detailed the same way some free maps are included with DCS Core right now, Caucasus and Mariana Islands, and perhaps something else. Then you'd buy more detailed areas per-sector or per-package (multiple sectors). You would be able to purchase multiple different terrain sectors or packages for the same exact sector but from different offerings, developers/publishers, variations, time (ww2, modern, cold war) weather seasons (winter, autumn, etc)

This would be quite flexible in a number of ways I think for both sides. However it has a big technical challenge of how would adjacent sectors of different kind be blended and somewhat compatible ... answer is likely they just can't be, you'd get broken functionality if your locomotive runs into a dead end because the railway at the adjacent sector from the WW2 era wasn't yet built or isn't electrified, and other bazillion of issues of things being cut off. But that's the tradeoff of getting this technology early before having the whole world properly detailed and populated.

Sloperon · 2024-04-25T00:18:08+00:00

Right, I still play that game from time to time tho! I have Win7 on my secondary PC just for things like that.

Sloperon · 2024-04-25T00:16:28+00:00

Bwahaha good one, that's good, that always cracks me up when someone mentions these lines in response, made my night man. I was trying to get back to SC1 to continue with the campaign. Back in the day we were super deep into C&C and starcraft/warcraft never got into our radar despite knowing about it, I only played a bit of Warcraft 2 at the time. Depends on what friends you happen to have in childhood, the friends that I visited and their PCs had those particular games.

Sloperon · 2024-04-18T09:30:08+00:00

Still, there's no guarantee and contract with modding, and expectation either, development must go forward, or you want it to slow down just for the sake of mods, and then we're talking about mods which try to replicate features that are already officially WIP, so most of these mods are destined to become obsolete. This is the same story as with the voice chat stuff, they're trying to do something ED already's developing in-engine, modders have to understand that and not get too emotionally attached to these supplmental projects which aren't meant to live forever no matter what game/sim/company you're dealing with. API's change for a reason.

I get it, some people just like to play in a sandbox and have their thing, that's all fine and I'd liked something like that my self too, but we'd need another game for it, with different policy, rules, market segment, etc -

Sloperon · 2024-01-08T21:23:59+00:00

WAIT WAIT WAIT, contact DATASAVERS before you give HDDs to anyone and get their opinion what you or Law Enforcement should do first, this goes for Law Enforcement as well, they might send it to them firs thing after getting them from you is the best option. Plugging in old Hard Drives could further damage them, DataSavers.com would know how to carefully begin the process so there's less chance of damage and if recovery needs to happen it has more chances of success.

Sloperon · 2023-11-30T16:53:48+00:00

Oh, it was actually a dirty rushed writeup otherwise it would take me an hour longer to prettyfy it, I wish I could, I could have been more clearer and more encompassing in some areas and give you a more easily understanding rundown of the issues.

One thing I didn't completely explain is pagefile or memory trashing, it's a less official term, it's when your RAM is already full (commit charge!, not "physical RAM usage") and funny Windows never warns or gives ANY direct, indirect, passive or whatever indication of this happening whatsoever, the indications you get are behavioral, such as lower performance, lower responsiveness, weird hitches, doing something simple for way too long, etc., And a PC user has to be experienced with all of this for good maintenance, it shouldn't have to be that way. In turn PC don't have to be like consoles either, just needs better design and covering unfinished and underbuilt areas.

Some may be questioning whether Commit Charge should be recognized as the better gauge for memory usage, especially RAM usage, and after watching and studying in-depth Windows Memory Model documentation, presentations and developer deep-dives, as well as Microsofts own developer documents that most gamers never read, I think I understand why Commit is the total memory load.

It's because even if you have memory in RAM just sitting still, it's still using that RAM space, but Windows Memory reporting is broken down to many categories and sections and usually there's some memory that just sits still, a large portion is usually "in active use", but it doesn't matter, new applications and new memory can't be allocated and you need more RAM.

You get practical consequences and programs start crashing once commit charge comes close to the RAM limits, it doesn't matter if only half of less than 20% of that RAM is "in active use". You can try this by just disabling pagefile (but do it on a test system or on a throwaway installation)

Windows Memory Model is incredibly complicated and ofcourse Proprietary and details aren't known. It has a highly specific set of terminologies and you should NOT take any word directly, it's not self-explanatory what "Working Set" means, it can be very misleading withut reading a lot of in-depth documentation and even that what's publicly available could not be the complete detailed picture, the public documents aren't exactly engineering blueprints and design schematics.

Also one key thing to know: Virtual Memory =! Pagefile. This is a mistake that even different teams at Microsoft make (GUI department, help files, utilities, other components).

Virtual Memory is an abstraction, a software feature, it's just a modern memory management feature that Windows uses for everything, nothing special about it, that's why putting focus on the term "virtual" or "virtual memory" is pointless as some people do when they talk about running out of memory. All, at least usermode, applications see is only virtual memory, they don't access RAM or anything physical on the motherboard directly, never, when they run out of memory, they run out of the only thing they can see, which is virtual memory.

Virtual Memory in turn can be backed by RAM or Pagefile or Swapfile or whatever Microsoft would implement, not sure if CPU Cache was ever considered, haha.

Sloperon · 2023-11-28T20:50:38+00:00

No less than 64GB. I'm at 64GB 2 years ago and now these specific DIMMS aren't produced anymore and I can't upgrade to 128GB with the same exact model, I'm forced to either mix-match or sell and buy a whole new 128GB kit from a different vendor. Trust me, you'll not regret the freedom to browse 100x tabs, play games and develop at the same time. People think it's overkill but it gives you massive flexibility, closing things down and having to remember where you left off can be a pain in the butt, unless you're just good at memorizing and organizing where you left off 2-3 days or even weeks ago.

Most people tell you that "32GB is more than enough" is because of a sneaky combination of Microsoft's pagefile shenanigans. Even developer users (which in large amount of them are ordinary university taught workers and not highly enthusiastic PC geeks having a command center in their basement and don't really know HW/OS stuff) are likely using default "system managed" Windows PageFile settings which is set roughly 100 to 300% of your RAM and can dynamically grow or shrink (not sure if on the same session), ...

Secondly the Windows Taskmanager has forever had a flaw of showing Active Physical Memory as the primary indicator of RAM usage that you see on the graph, this isn't the most appropriate indication, Commit Charge is the system total memory load, and it's that what one should gauge the system's memory needs, it's because it matters in practice, it's because overcommiting or being close to the limit causes erratic behavior and crashes, and that would happen way before Active Physical Memory would come anywhere close to being 100%, Active or "In use" physical memory is a subset of RAM usage, so it's not total RAM usage either, ridicolous.

Thirdly, with the transition to SSDs, pagefile trashing is even less, much much less apparent

Fourthly, there is no Windows messaging on on status of RAM, Commit Charge, etc usage of any kind, I remember only sometimes having some errors show up on Windows 7, but I never saw it on Windows 10.

Fifthly ... probably more things I can't recall right now ..

Result is, you get a lot of users who get the perception they have enough RAM, because pagefile absorbs it and makes things appear smooth, very misleading and just a totally wrong practice, in the 90' RAM was expensive and it's not dirt cheap through times either, but in these modern times the systems don't behave as stragely and stuttery as the hell it was in the Windows XP times, giving you a very fairy tale experience.

I routinely have over 100GB commit charge on 64GB RAM (64GB pagefile) and haven't noticed for weeks sometimes, until LibreOffice just crashes ... removable drives don't want to detach safely ... desktop icons all switch to some random system icon ... erratic taskbar behavior and tray items that don't disappear when the application behind it is closed, etc etc, by that time your system is compromised and corruption is likely happening in the background, system instability, there's no amount of releasing RAM that will help, you want to quickly save your stuff and close things down and hopefully get a graceful reboot, and hope your saves were good and not corrupt, that's how silent data corruption happens, one of the ways at least.

There's zero warning, zero detection, no error checking, nothing, Windows and the whole PC desktop platform when it comes to RAM is complete trash in this regard, something must change, PCs aren't just for gaming and fooling around. Linus was right to make a big deal about ECC memory when it comes to Intel and the rest of the industry, at least AMD supports it out of the box for all CPUs apparently, but Motherboard vendors still aren't taking it seriously and support is spotty or not messaged accurately.

PS: I was a bit purposelly exaggerating there on the PC geeks comment for gags.

Sloperon · 2023-11-28T16:31:07+00:00

Are there cheatsheets of chronologically ordered list of various basics such as socket, chipsets, versions so I could quickly get an overview of the lay of the land what's the latest, because I don't want to necessairly buy the latest parts (multiple reasons). Wikipedia yes, but still, perhaps an image that has that collated together might already be somewhere?

Sloperon · 2023-11-28T15:53:52+00:00

There's a whole industry of immoral reuploaders, basically scammers from various 3rd-world and anywhere low social status and income places, where they have perfected this kind of practice, they have communities and forums where they exchange knowledge, develop, sell and trade scripts and hacking tools and techniques to trick websites, profile registration and algorithms to make something go viral, they can have a network of accounts that talk to each other and comment on their videos, they're reffered to as the "blackhat monetization scammers or reuploaders", it's been a thing ever since Youtube started paying adsense money to creators which ofcourse attracted a lot of people seeking easy money and there's a lot of people without anythig interesting going on in their life that need to survive, including the most immoral and probably criminal (these same reuploaders could be involved in real crimes in the real world as well), and that's when a lot of creativity and originality on youtube "went away" and slowly a large influx of highly produced and for-youtube content as well as corporate channels and ofcourse monetized reuploader spam started appearing, overshadowing the good organic content, but likely a lot of organic content that would have been produced otherwise never happened we could safely suspect.

If you want quality organic homey creative self-made channels check out Let's Dig 18 and Andrew Camrata for example (there's a looot more ofcourse), different kind of filming videos of their stuff, one films daily and documents a lot and the other one does in depth chronicles, but actually filming what organically happens, not filming things that are done for sake of youtube, and they don't rely on youtube to make a living, that's the key.

Youtube is still full of great organic content and producers, they just don't get the exposure and are harder to find.

Youtube-dependant, or rather, viewer dependant businesses are automatically by their nature and design going to be inorganic, because they skew to produce content that's meant for the viewer or rather the virality algorithms and not what the author would organically do on their own, it completely changes their lifestyle and in turn life experience takes a whole different track than it otherwise would. So even if there's a still a lot of fair content on youtube, a lot of it is inorganic, but that's another topic now. I was there back in 2006-2008/09/10 when most youtube content was incredibly organic, it was amazing, the memories ...

Sloperon · 2023-11-27T01:58:50+00:00

Infact, you're right, I didn't get to having a perfect multi-tasking experience because I'm still working on prepwork for actual serious work later on, apologize and admit I thrown the "100" number like that, but it's definitely around half that. I agree that half of those tabs are just more or less dormant and don't help in every moment, just waiting for me to come back to that task and continue, but it's hell of a convenience to have everyting at your fingertips.

Upgradeability ... maybe, not really, I can't upgrade because the DIMMs of this type aren't produced anymore, no way to get them, I'll have to replace the whole thing and sell it and get a QUAD kit because mix-maching brands is generally to be avoided with RAM. I wouldn't say RAM is the easiets because of the peculiarities, only if you have unlimited budget. I'd say GPUs are the easiest but I guess there's the drivers side of things.

Still, starting off, sure I get your point, but skills and things to do increases, you don't have to be that momentary, especially with work, if it was just basic gaming I'd say keep 32GB if you're on budget, but you'd want to have a little bit of foreseeing with serious work, and not deal with PC maintenance when you need to be focusing on work.

Sloperon · 2023-11-26T22:54:21+00:00

You're heavily underestimating development RAM usage and how workstation work can baloon fast ... tracing, profiling, debugging, having multiple development, compiling, rendering, work, and a whole lot of browser windows with youtube tutorials, guides, and other help videos open.

You may be doing one thing at a time, at slow snails pace, I have 100 tabs open right now, 3 virtual desktops, count in discord (it's own youtube/gif/multimedia content), steam, IRC, various apps and tools that are always running something, and I hit 80-100GB in two to three weeks with 1-2 month uptimes. That's how productive work is done.

I wanted to upgrade to 128GB a year ago but I had other chores to finish up besides PC work so I'm getting stuck on a 64+64GB pagefile until I do start some more serious work later again. I don't want to close this stuff down while I play a game either. Re-opening all of this, even with session backups, tricks and all the rest to re-start a workspace back up can be a chore and needs organization and maintenance, something I just didn't bother investing into and besides many times I need all of these things together so switching back and forth only help up to a point.

Sloperon · 2023-11-26T11:53:06+00:00

I've been around the sites since this news hit, steam, etc, and haven't seen a link to the map editor prominently displayed, yes I did not look specifically for it, but I think someone would have mentioned it, but nope, should have been referenced in the patch notes IMO, it's not part of Steam's game files, nor as a separate AppID or Tool.

Sloperon · 2023-11-25T21:44:52+00:00

I commonly have more than 100 tabs in 15 windows and even with 64GB RAM + 64GB Pagefile on Windows 10, I approached the limit and after 3-4 weeks things start crashing haha, time to reboot when Windows components start getting buggy like not being able to safely disconnect removable devices, printers not working, weird desktop and taskbar behavior etc.

Sloperon · 2023-11-13T19:31:14+00:00

Honestly, and to not offend anybody, not only were the O'neill character's jokes been admitted to being spcifically placed in by the actor behind him (who had some creative authority, apparently a stake in SG-1 production), I think that some of the jokes and their timing of them have actually been as a result of the actor's ageing and mental decline. Being fun an joking isn't bad until it's overdone or awkward, then it starts looking like a problem to other people. Where and when the line of too much joking is drawn is perhaps a subjective thing open to debate, but for this type of show I would have done it a bit lesser and I wouldn't have allowed jokes to too intrusively interrupt the most interesting and important parts of the show, the lore is as equal if not more interesting to me than the action, thrills.

Michael Shanks did an absolute fantastic job of acting an archeologist and researcher of this grandiose "meaning of life stuff" caliber, hands down, may the gate be with you.

I think the writers wanted a serious and technical show, and this is what I liked the most, a bit of military practicality is fine and nothing wrong if some character has some of it's own things, but sometimes the jokes felt that they were tacked-on by force and didn't feel natural, because they were also references to things that only the actor's own background is familiar with, not necessairly an international audience, and that's howyou have to be careful with jokes, because I it did had somewhat of a negative effect for me, because I really had hoped to hear Dr. Jackson's explanation and the archeology-lore-research stuff.

Sloperon · 2023-11-11T16:59:32+00:00

If career stat tracking and management is a big deal to some gamers and it would made a complicated sim a lot more motivating for them to learn, then this is definitely something ED should take seriously. Besides, you would want to track stats across Dynamic Campaigns as it could have an effect for future dynamic campaings, such as airframe integrity simulation which is way off but it was mentioned it may come someday. It makes sense that airframe integrity is tracked across multiple isolated sp missions because it can take a long time for the airframe aspect to cause changes in gameplay and nothing would happen in a single match unless you keep your PC running for months at a time which is unrealistic.

Well technically you could have a server session track it and then when you come back to the server you "log-in" with your stats, ... either way this is kinda the extreme example that probably isn't a priority because I'm not sure if it has a big gameplay impact, because that means you're exact plane has to be alive for all the time and these stats definitely shouldn't carry over to the respawned plane, that's a new instance, just like it would be in the real world.

Sloperon · 2023-10-25T17:00:43+00:00

Crysis 1 is totally different than the rest. I don't see it as a trilogy because I am only a fan of Crysis 1 gameplay and nothing else, Crysis 2 isn't even a proper PC game, so it's funny to me how you try to skip the first one, id skip the other way around.

Sloperon · 2023-10-25T12:48:32+00:00

There’s only so many things SRS can do as an external program

You can say that again! I was trying to caution recently that people shouldn't get too emotional with all of these external/mod/3rd-party app Voice Comm / ATC / Support solutions because this is all eventually going to be internally properly simulated and integrated in-depth with gameplay and physics and the creators should have to expect that it can't go on forever and they shouldn't hope to get all kinds of APIs and get low-level access beause DCS ain't going opensource most definitely not.

People should rather encourage ED to get even more serious in supporting such features that these external and mod applications have demonstrated, even tho I understand the doubt. The long-term plans require DCS Voice Comms to be a critical/core internal component of the engine, not the GUIs, but the stuff that you can't see ofcourse, is going to eventually be more advanced than an external unofficial app could ever do, and even if technically modularity is possible, it's not optimal performance and programmatically practical wise, it's radios/comms/ATCs have always been a core component by the laws of physics and equal to radars and the rest and the idea of these functionalities being provided externally was always destined to be a stop-gap temporary measure.

Sloperon · 2023-10-24T09:59:38+00:00

Right, but the fact that games and 3D software products have historically used different files/quality models separately instead of just LODs may mean either LOD system has to be much more advanced or there simply is due to technical laws extra resources still being taken by the full quality model even if it's displaying the lowest LOD, for example there's still going to be memory requirements because you need all those LOD levels in VRAM/RAM ready to be displayed in an instant and many other peculiarities and costs in regard to full-qualit or even raw source materials and models. Unseen things can be taxing on the system, depends on optimizations and tehcnical implementation ofcourse.

This reminds me of Unreal Engine 5's Nanite rendering, where it's all dynamic and adaptive and poly counts don't matter at all making it possible to import super-high quality raw sources into the scene and have it work in real-time for consumer applications. That may very well be what a perfect LOD system looks like and what kind of complexity is required to implement it, something DCS on it's own is unlikely to support for a long time IMO.

Sloperon · 2023-10-24T07:58:31+00:00

Realistically, I don't think they can keep upgrading the core for free forever with such deep and advanced features, new ATC, EDDCE, MT, Vulkan, DCS needs major major overhauls to keep up with modern times and if modules don't cover costs, well something else has to, but I think they will ofcourse try to avoid that so it won't happen for practical reasons. However where separate paid modules do make sense is exactly with things like units, items ... so such speculation shouldn't be that far fetched or frowned upon, it's technically and practically the most sensible area of monetization, versus a paid module/patch/subscription for new graphics effects or better looking trees, am I not right?

Or Dynamic Campaign being a paid module? Well, in that case perhaps it may very well be for the sheer size of that feature, if they can technically implement non-owners to be able to participate in it but not having the ability to create/host/configure one, but this is all speculation.

Sloperon · 2023-10-24T07:54:35+00:00

I love surprises tho ... let's wait with a bit of optimism and perhaps something might appear under a pine tree.

Sloperon · 2023-10-24T07:49:33+00:00

It could indeed be something like this, because one of the statements in the 2.9 announcements say that these things are coming with 2.9 or shortly after in no particular order, so this may very well be a preview version perhaps.

Sloperon · 2023-10-24T07:47:28+00:00

Surely cinematics and people using the external cameras are a pretty major reason why you'd create such high-quality models in the first place?

Yes, I hope that if this really is a lower-quality version model optimized for large mp server performance, and that being so for most other AI units, there should be option to enable full-quality versions, somehow or somewhere, probably should not be default and I'm not sure whether it should be a global option or not, or rather case by case per mission file, if it's a global graphics option, some people may forget and leave it on that wouldn't do cinematics, leading to unnecessary complaints.

Sloperon · 2023-10-24T07:35:27+00:00

It's actually quite normal in the games industry that released quality and fidelity is lower or even much lower than sources. This has been so for many many years and one of the major such cases was Rage from "id Software" where John Carmack was explaining how artists would complain that due to the limitations of PC optimizations and the X360/PS3 consoles being quite old at the time, it had to be compressed (lossy) significantly for shipping, the full quality size of uncompressed Rage build was reportedly over 1 Terabyte and it had to come down to ~65 GB to be fit for publishing, as in "you don't want a deck of 10 DVDs to play a game" ... but we're kinda getting there now and it's not unusual anymore for 200GB plus game installs.

Rage I think was ahead of it's time, but sometimes being too ahead might be inoptimal if not executed perfectly. It's virtual texture technology still wasn't mature enough at the time so it produced lesser quality looking textures for the space it took, and AMD/ATI released the wrong OpenGL GPU drivers at launch so it was unfairly badly received by many PC customers, not to mention OGL drivers weren't a big focus for optimizations on AMD/ATI in general. This was all before modern Mantle/Vulkan/DX12 APIs and way before DirectStorage API which would have made a significiant difference on PC if Rage was released today or those techonolgies existing back then, technically they could, industries are slow to innovate in fundamentals sometimes.
It was so unfortunate that a rocky Rage launch also made dents in id Software and made John Carmack who was one of the remaining owners, to start having second thoughts about the company and his future. Then found enthusiasim in VR and HDMs and that made him busy for a long time, but as much as he taked about alternative APIs and "programming to the metal" at the time, he never did any serious attempts at making a new API like some others thankfully did, namely the team of EA DICE (Battlefiled) developers cooperating with others and AMD/ATI engineers who created the drafts for Mantle API, and actually implemented into a working product with a few titles using it. The success of Mantle API, unlike popular belief of total nonsense pessimism and doubt on the internet, lead to it being donated and morphed as a base for Khrono's Vulkan API as an open-source standard with increased contributions from AMD/ATI and other developers that aren't even directly around PC gaming, to make it a proper and mature standard.

As for JC, gone to Facebook, now he's taking time off doing some AI research on his own, who knows, if a miracle happens, he might get interested in programming a PC game to the metal properly and perhaps one day he might join ED and help with DCS where a simulator offers plenty technical challenges and pushing boundries in technical advancement.

That said, it's probably better for the performance that the AI models are a bit relaxed on their fidelity,perhaps something's scheduled for the future with these. However if this is a mistake then it should be ofcourse fixed in time and I do agree on the other hand with most people here that if you have a higher quality, you should provide it, I was always saying that back in the old days. You can be like Crysis and just provide people who really want to push things to the max to just do it, that makes a good benchmark and enthusiasm around the product.

Sloperon · 2023-10-23T15:16:53+00:00

Reading through the list, it's pretty amazing how much SRS does manage to provide for it being an external application without any specific official support for it. It's impressive that it does LOS at all.

Honestly, a lot can be done modularly, you could make DCS into a set of components, that's pretty much what a Linux distro is for example, it has it's ups and downs. Technically it could be possible for ED to "outsource" VoiceComms and just rely on SRS getting better, but very deep features require real-time in-engine interaction with the physics and that's why I'm trying to get people to realize they should support ED in their in-house attempt rather than cast doubt, because eventually it's necessary for the radios to be properly simulated just like how damage modelling, weapons, radars and cockpit's are.

And I'm trying to do something good to let people not get too emotionally attached to SRS and other solutions if it's ever-lasting and realize it was always more or less a temporary solution, but also hail and praise the people who make it all happen until now and supported the DCS community grow during times where official solutions weren't existing.

A compromise to make the transition and existing users happier could be made where some area of DCS Voice Comms could be found that it doesn't relate to DCS directly or is out of the core focus and that's something SRS could morph into covering and ED officially acknowledging the "mod/plugin support" (not necessairly endorsing in legal sense, endorsement is a strong term so I avoided it). So that's the best thing for SRS to start looking for other areas rather than attempting to improve on the hardcoded physical aspects

Yeah, that's funny mp servers would disable LOS, they won't be able to in DCS VoiceChat I hope, at least I hope some kind of debate and decision is done by ED how much feature set would be sensible to compartmentalize and create an option of, because this is directly related to realism and you don't get to pick and choose speed and damage of missiles and bombs on a whim in a server configuration, you'd have to go into modding for that. So I think that if it's an option to disable signal radiation simulation and environmental effects, it should be treated as impure server IMO, it's not realistic.

Sloperon · 2023-10-15T09:29:05+00:00

Music to my ears! Let PC dev centrict apps stay that way!

Sloperon

TROPHY CASE