http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=1863250&postcount=1053

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Evening everyone!

Quote:

 

Originally Posted by SiThSpAwN  View Post

Can you clarify the free flyables from the licensed ones, is there going to be free ones (or one like DCS World), it seems a little confusing right now...

 

FREE for everyone: 

P-47

Spitfire

Bf.109K

 

Paid on release

P-51 (from DCS World)

FW-190D (from DCS World)

 

If you back at a $20 level, you can pick a P-51 or FW-190D.

 

If you back at a $40 level, you will have both.

 

If you already own a DCS World P-51 and/or FW-190, then obviously no one wants you to have to pay for anything twice.

 

If we reach stretch goals, then the story changes.

 

Free aircraft list will most likely not change.

 

Backing at $20 still gets you one of the larger variety of paid aircraft.

 

$40 or above still gets you ALL of the initial flyables.

 

None of the aircraft released in future updates are covered by any of this.

Quote:

 

Originally Posted by Mainstay  View Post

I also want to ask Ilya to reconsider making a G serie along with the K. Either a G6/8 or 10 would be great.

I like the G. It's just we currently can only make one variant of the 109, and we picked the K as we have the best data on it.

 

I don't want to make empty promises or vaguely hint at something, but I really liked having multiple variants of the same plane in my older projects. The overall process is much simpler. Once we have the K, making the various Gs and maybe the F should be comparatively simple.

Quote:

 

Originally Posted by tintifaxl  View Post

Don't know, if it has been posted already, but the 100 USD backing reward states: printed manuals for 2 planes, in the description it is only 1 manual.

 

The sidebar description is the most correct.

 

Sorry about the confusion. I'm still unable to edit the description, getting the limit reached error. I guess I'll just honor the bigger rewards in every case, and deliver the maximum or the combination of any two tiers with errors in descriptions.

Quote:

 

Originally Posted by zaelu  View Post

I hope the map can be extended a bit more... we are used to 800+km across map  .

 

 

We can extend the map to the entire globe, but manually adding detail will be extremely hard to do.

 

We can have all of England done for the map in virtually no time, but it'll be a general coastline filled with vague generic field.

 

It really makes no sense to spend time making British airfields if you only have AI bombers; a flyable B-17 will obviously need to have a nice-looking airbase to take off from and return to.

Quote:

 

Originally Posted by horseback  View Post

The size of the map is a bit of a disappointment (expectations can be a biotch), but It looks like we'll get a territory reaching approximately from Cherbourg to Le Havre and a good bit south--assuming that my Google Earth distance thingie is accurate. Still, even in 1944, Normandy was a lot 'busier' than the Black Sea area, especially if they have to make time to create new landmarks, vehicles, buildings, ships as well as the aircraft flight models at the level advertised.

 

 

 

The way I understand EDGE - and I have to mention that there is a chance that I can be wrong here - is that we can take an existing map and just drag out the outer edges and extend it by any number of kilometers.

 

Creating generic terrain with a vague coastline and some elevation is not a huge task. Making it look good is. Making it historically accurate, i.e. recreating road networks, landmarks, etc, is a huge huge effort.

 

We could take our existing Normandy and tack on England and Paris and Ruhr and Berlin. Theoretically. It's just it'll either take many man-years to polish every square mile, or we'll end up with some empty generic filler across vast areas.

 

 

And THANK YOU to all the backers once again.

 

We'll have a new cool video released on Monday morning.

 

I'll be around until then to answer questions, so keep them coming!

 

 

http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=1865971&postcount=1113

 

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tvrdi  View Post

Luthier, One crucial question, which will decide me backing or not. Do you plan to make a collision model for trees. If not then ppl would use trees in mp to excape level chases. To hide. Its killing fun and is highly unrealistic. And if we turn off trees terrain will look ugly.

Let me be perfectly frank here.

 

I just cannot promise it at this time. All I can promise is that we will try.

 

I may have deja vu after my old project, where we've had quite a few instances of saying "we will do this" instead of a more semantically correct "we will try to do this", and where we eventually ended up not being able to deliver what we promised.

 

As it is today, EDGE is still being integrated with the rest of the game. That's precisely what's being done right now, today, having various game objects interact with terrain. Vehicles need to drive, planes need to collide, etc. 

 

We're obviously extremely interested in having tree collisions. There's no gameplay or realism reason for why it should not be that way. The only reason why trees would not have collisions is performance. 

 

There are obvious algorithms for making this work. There are also less obvious ones. We need to finish the programming, try things out, and make sure everything works well.

 

Need to point out that the people working on this are ED programmers. They're outside my control, and they obviously had absolutely nothing to do with any of my old projects.

 

This is why I personally cannot say with 100% certainty we will have tree collisions. My certainty is, let's say, 93.6%. This may be PTSD talking, but I don't think that's good enough for a promise, especially if your pledge depends on it. 

 

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by ishtmail  View Post

As it stands now, there is some confusion.

One part of the description states that at 100k funding goal we get 5 airplanes (P51D and FW190 included), in another part it states that we get 3 airplanes.

 

Five airplanes total, three of them free.

 

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mogster  View Post

I don't really understand the business model at this point. 

 

Giving 3 free DCS level planes seems a strange choice, unless the idea is to draw punters away from other products the initial release being really a loss leader. DCS isn't known for anything other than jets, the WW2 hardcore may take some drawing away from the IL2 series. Maybe this is Tishin's play for world flight sim domination.

 

This decision was based on gameplay considerations, not marketing or sales.

 

DCS World is based on decades of content. While there's only one free plane, there's tons and tons of other content that the player encounters, and there's a lot of fun to be had.

 

DCS WWII starts from scratch. We can't do all that much in the next year. If we were to release a free version of the game with a single flyable plane, there'd be significantly fewer options for the player.

 

We want people to enjoy themselves and really have a good, all-around complete product even in the free version. 

 

I personally would be very uncomfortable releasing a bare-bones single-flyable free game. We still have to strong paid aircraft in the basic version, and we really hope that the influx will drive enough people to purchase the P-51 and the Dora to keep the series going.

 

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Furbs  View Post

1. How will MP work? Coops/servers? how many players in a mission.

 

Same as DCS at least, and we're hoping to improve on it as much as we can.

 

Like I said in the kickstarter description, we really want to spruce up the MP, but we don't know how much we can do and how fast, so perhaps some major features will be added on later. 

 

In other words, we have lots of strong opinions and a lot of plans, but it's way too early to talk about them. We'll only know what we can do in the process of doing it.

 

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Furbs  View Post

2. How big is the map, ive heard 100/160km but is that just the detailed area with more less detailed map area around that, will there be a English coast?

WW2 reach 50% (51.354$).

 

http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=1867547&postcount=1131

 

I'm starting to think we might need to shuffle things about a little bit.

 

We'll try to change the immediate next stretch goal, and make it a flyable B-17 and British airfields. Move all other stretch goal aircraft one tier up.

 

We'll talk this over and have a decision for you within a day or two.

 

Also going to work on adding some more attractive backer rewards.

 

Oh trust me, I'm very familiar with southern England

 

--------

 

RRG does not currently have a dedicated AI programmer. 

 

We could theoretically look into hiring one for this project, which would probably give us tons and tons of cool stuff over the course of the project, but I really don't know how to budget for that. We're already pretty far out there for a stretch goal. I'm kind of cautious about adding too many tiers or too many options. If I add, for example, and intermediate "improved AI" stretch goal, all as a part of all additional stretch goals, that might turn off some other people, and make it seem like the aircraft they really want are too far away.

 

ED has programmers too, of course. We however do not have a current plan for AI improvement.

 

-----------------

 

No clue at this point. 

 

---------------

 

This new video is basically introduction part 2. Nick Grey is a hugely important part of this project, but it felt like putting him in the initial video made everything way too long.

 

It's also not about passion but about our relationship with TFC. This has immediate, direct, and unique impact on the product. We have access to the actual aircraft and the actual pilot. That's not sentimentality or small talk at all. These are the precise reasons why DCS: P-51 is the best prop simulation available today.

 

I have another talk video all put together, which I foolishly planned to release as video 3, but I realized the error of my ways while uploading video 2 this morning. Video 3 will be a detailed look at EDGE. Video 4 will be a detailed overview of aircraft modeling in DCS. Video 5 will be a video QnA, and then video 6 will probably be the thing I planned for Video 3.

 

I also have to point out that it's all just me. I write the scripts, I direct, I shoot, I edit, I release, I discuss. I don't have a marketing staff, anything like that. I'm learning as I go. Hopefully I can do enough to reach at least one stretch goal in the next 30 days. Please don't let the fact that I'm not a marketing professional or a filmmaker influence your opinion of myself as a game developer!

New info KickStarter DCS: World WW2 1944

 

New Kickstarter video up....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tylMZPZeozQ

http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=1872455&postcount=1

 

Hello everyone,

 

Many of you have been really waiting for it, so here it is!

 

We’re showing the new EDGE landscape engine today, and meeting the people working on it.

 

Please keep in mind that the Normandy terrain is in the very earliest stages of development. The terrain engine itself is very mature, but is missing some features needed for a proper WWII simulation. So that’s where we started our terrain design. 

 

We are using the famous Pointe du Hoc location to test everything we need: bunkers, trenches, and bomb craters. We are doing that with a few simple placeholders and a few low-res textures.

 

Our Normandy still needs most of the French 1940s buildings, airfield structures, and proper French countryside textures. All of those, while time consuming, are no-brainers at this point. Making and placing objects, or texturing terrain, are the kind of tasks the team has done before while making landscapes for helicopter and pilot training simulators. Once we have our bunkers and craters done and tested, the rest of the project is rather routine.

 

Unfortunately, as the other landscapes done in EDGE were done as commercial projects, we are unable to show any part of that terrain. Normandy is the only thing we can show, and it is clearly nowhere near finished. 

 

We are also not at the stage where planes can fly over Normandy. We really tried to have a Mustang in a Normandy field today, but ran into some issues, and decided not to delay the video for it. Once we have those tests done, we’ll definitely release those shots.

 

With that in mind, here’s the video:

 

Bump....let's feel the love

Update 4  DCS: World WW2 1944 de 

 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/508681281/dcs-wwii-europe-1944/posts

 

Hello everyone,

The update pace has slowed down, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. We’re scrambling to shift gears; we've had a whole campaign written out and put together. As the kickstarter got started we realized it was all wrong, since we were doing something for people new to flight sims, expecting an influx of people who have never flown a plane in their life. Now that we've realized that this project can only succeed if we work with the dedicated flight sim fans, we're redoing and scrapping everything to give you guys what you need. We know the clock is ticking, so it's not a pleasant feeling.

 

We’re working on a large comprehensive video about aircraft. The part that is taking too long is the aircraft footage. We’re working to have some videos of the FW.190D-9 flying and fighting showing the cockpit, but some of the gauges are not yet working so that’s causing some delays. We really hate releasing stuff that does not look great. We also cannot afford to become a screenshot-taking and video-making project, so this makes juggling priorities rather difficult.

 

I’ve literally worked around the clock to have it ready today, but now that I’ve slept on it, it just does not look impressive enough. I think I’d rather spend a few more days adding more footage and changing a couple of other things rather than release the most important video of the project that I myself am not happy with it, and go out with a whimper.

 

In the meantime, here’s what we’ve done with the terrain over the last week.

 

We did a few more tests, and made a PSP runway and a pseudo-airfield with some parked P-51s. Have an annoying problem where static P-51s have issues with a transparent canopy.

 

We’re pretty much done with various terrain tests, and we’re ready to move on and start building it properly. General to-do is as follows:

 

1. High-res textures and terrain "noise"

 

2. Color correction

 

3. Go through the list of high-detail areas and recreate terrain from period sources.

 

4. Create and place proper 3D objects (buildings, hangars, fortifications, etc)

 

Tasks 3 and 4 will last well into 2014, especially 3D objects, which will keep being created and added all the way up to beta.

 

The first two tasks are quicker, but they will also not finish by the time the KS campaign does. Color correction is especially important. I find it difficult to release screenshots with it not done, but whatever time we spend doing it now will be wasted. There are a lot of components that need to be corrected and tested together. Terrain textures, tree textures, and vegetation, are all stored in different areas, and the colors are also affected by distance. Just making sure that trees look good at all distances and aren’t all the same shade of green while at the same time not looking like a circus is a long painstaking process.

 

We won’t do it now because we’re still working in the terrain editor. The terrain editor is simplified not to contain the atmospheric model. That really affects the in-game colors. Atmosphere, obviously, adds hues to everything. With a 24-hour day-night cycle, this makes color correction a huge chore. Think of it as trying to balance 20 spinning plates while riding a unicycle. You get the distant trees all nice and murky at dawn, and some trees become purple when viewed up close at noon. That kind of thing.

 

So, a few more points about the current terrain:

 

Textures are low-res placeholders

PSP runway is a quick test to see how a huge number of tiny holes interact with the underlying terrain and grass. Not final!

P-51s are the same P-51s that currently fly in DCS World, but they’re not flying here. They are just parked. You will be strafing these helpless static objects, nothing else.

As you can see, their canopies are opaque. That’s temporary, and only a feature of the terrain editor. Obviously, they will have beautiful transparent canopies in the final game, just as they do in the P-51 currently flying in DCS World.

Thanks everyone! Stay tuned for the killer aircraft video.

 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/508681281/dcs-wwii-europe-1944/posts

 

Hello everyone,

We're almost there! We've almost reached the goal. That is amazing.  

 

I think the backing pace slowed down a bit because everyone feels that the base goal is pretty much there, but the very next stretch goal is so far it's virtually unreachable.  

 

We need smaller stretch goals, and we need to make them good. I've asked about this in the comments yesterday and received overwhelming support.

 

The thing is, after the base 100K we are hitting the no-internal-funding zone. Features begin to cost what they really cost. We need to raise a lot more money for individual line items. 150K seems like a very reasonable stretch goal to add, but we can hardly do anything for the extra 50K. Definitely not a map and definitely not a whole new plane. The only thing we can try to squeeze in for the 50K is a cockpit for the 262, and that's only because we are already doing the AI version.  

 

So, the new stretch goals will be as follows:  

 

100K: Base  

 

150K: Flyable Me.262A-1 jet fighter  

 

275K: Normandy map extended North to include Southern England (up to but without London)  

 

425K: Flyable B-17  

 

Moving the 262 up allows us to create an attractive stretch goal at the lowest cost possible of all. This pushes back the flyable B-17 by the same 50K, but I think it's worth it.  

 

Please help us get there! If you've already backed the project, please consider increasing your pledge. If we all put together, everyone who pledged $40 or higher gets the Me.262 for free in the initial release!  

 

And if you have not yet backed, please consider doing so. Even backing at the $1 level helps. That still gets us a little closer to our goals, and most importantly shows the overall level of support. This project is not just about the dollar amount, but about community support. The number of backers shown next to the project is extremely important! We're currently at 1,378 backers and $97,293. If we can get to 2,000 backers by the project's end, even if that means only adding a single dollar from these new backers, that is still going to be an amazing showing.  

 

Please remember that backing at even the $1 level allows you access to backer-only updates, polls, and discussions. We will be interacting with the community a lot in the months between the end of the KS campaign and the initial release. We are currently discussing our 3rd party content development options internally. A decision will be reached next week as to the exact extents, but some level of involvement is virtually guaranteed. We will almost certainly do a backer-only something, perhaps an SDK, perhaps some other tools. So backing at even the $1 level will allow you to either get directly involved in modding and expanding the game, or just to access the internal updates on the progress.  

 

Thank you everyone for your support and for your enthusiasm. Let's keep pushing forward!

 

PS Some of you noticed that the P-51s in the previous update had no weight with the gear struts fully extended. Everyone responsible has been dealt with. Struts have been compressed. Apologies extended.

Weird....

New update:

 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/508681281/dcs-wwii-europe-1944/posts/610190

 

DCS WWII: Europe 1944: Kickstarter Video #4: Plane Talk

 

Update #6 · Sep 25, 2013 · 15 comments  

Good evening gentlemen!  

 

We're down to the wire! Just a few days left before this kickstarter ends.  

 

I really hope we can energize the community enough not to just hit the 150K Me.262 stretch goal, but to get as close as we can to the 275K Southern England stretch goal!  

 

We can do this in one of several ways.  

 

We can find a large new community that has never heard of this project and get them excited. That's certainly very possible. We're getting virtually no exposure outside flight sim forums. If you know of a gaming resource that could be interested in our project, please help us out!  

 

Secondly, we can get some extra help from existing backers. If you've backed at a $40 level, it may seem like you're already getting everything you want. If enough others come in and pledge, you'll get the Me.262 at no extra cost. However what if they don't? No one gets anything. We're getting into a very interesting field of psychology here, but basically we're in a situation where inaction gets everybody nothing, while a seemingly altruistic action benefits everyone, including the actor. In other words, if you can, please bump up your $40 pledge. If enough people do that, all $40 backers get the Me.262. In yet other other words, while on paper the price of the game with the included Me.262 is $40, in reality it is probably a bit more. The way things stand today, a $40 pledge may not actually buy the 262.  

 

Lastly, we hope that some people who were on the fence about the project will be finally converted by today's video. If you have not yet backed the project but were watching it, please get involved! Even a $1 pledge is absolutely great. It still gets us a bit closer to our stretch goal, and, even more importantly, it increases our total number of backers. That, at this point in time, is at least as important a number as the dollar amount below it.  

 

So, without further ado, here's a long extended conversation with Dmitry "Yo-Yo" Moskalenko, the lead aircraft programmer in DCS. He'll talk about the long evolution of the Eagle Dynamics flight model, and puts forward a great case for it being the best flight model on the market today. Yo-Yo created the P-51, our flagship prop-driven fighter simulation, and we're very fortunate to announce that not only will Dmitry be involved with and supervise and quality control all aircraft built by RRG, he will also personally work on our Spitfire Mk.IX, a project of a great personal interest to him.  

 

Here's the video:

 

I can't watch the video :-(

The video come available some hours after post the Update 6 (uploading to youtube)

Update 7 incoming:

 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/508681281/dcs-wwii-europe-1944/comments

 

Ilya Shevchenko about 12 hours ago

Hey folks,

Brace yourselves. The next video I release is going to be a much less hardcore look at the game, targeted towards more casual or new players. Still going to have a bunch of gameplay footage, maybe some EDGE, but generally nothing amazingly new.

Then I'll do a part two of the aircraft video talking about the modeling. There's a lot of intricacies there too. External models, cockpits, animations, damage, etc. Should be interesting, and I don't think a lot of developers usually talk about that.

Now, back to EDGE. Doing some color corrections. Maybe it'll look a lot prettier by tomorrow.

Update 7 y DCS: World WW2 ilya inverview

 

www.kickstarter.com/projects/508681281/dcs-wwii-europe-1944/posts

 

Good morning !

 

Brace yourselves. The video we're releasing now is a much less hardcore look at the game. Yet, it tries to answer some of the most important questions we have as flight simmers. 

 

Why are there so few of us? 

 

Why are millions of people playing other hardcore games, games with perhaps more of a learning curve than DCS P-51? Why are they willing to brave through hours of frustration, deaths, restarts, toxic multiplayer, and all of that for a payoff that, to me, is much less satisfying than watching your enemy go down after a dogfight? 

 

The video has my thoughts. 

 

Next, we'll do a part two of the aircraft video focusing on the modeling. There's a lot of intricacies there too. External models, cockpits, animations, damage, etc. Should be interesting, and I don't think a lot of developers usually talk about that. 

 

And a quick update on EDGE. We've been doing some color corrections this week. Beginning to look a lot more like what we want. We'll have a few screenshots soon; just don't want to muddle up this update. 

 

Here's the video: 

 

 

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/09/27/the-flare-path-toad-array/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-flare-path-toad-array-rock-paper-shotgun

 

Eight Days And Counting

 

 

 

Have you backed DCS WWII yet? While most of the stretch goals are looking distinctly pipedreamy at present, the $100,000 base hurdle has been cleared and the scent of hot Jumo turbojets is getting stronger with every passing day. Curious about the new Me 262 objective and a Kickstarter campaign that has jinked like a faulty Fritz X, I sent some searching questions Ilya Shevchenko’s way.

 

 

 

RPS: As the first major flight sim developer to use Kickstarter, do you have any advice for studios that decide to follow in your contrails?

 

Ilya: Launch a pre-kickstarter discussion with your fans about everything. We’ve done a couple of sharp turns during our kickstarter and changed our rewards and stretch goals, and we wish we could change even more.

 

You may think you know what your fans want, but they know it even better. We went the “vague hints and allusions followed by a major reveal” route, and that locked us in to some bad decisions. If you open up everything you have to the fans without being locked into anything by kickstarter, and dedicate a couple of weeks to a thorough discussion, you will be able to discover and correct a lot of completely unexpected shortcomings.

 

We had not done that and learned it the hard way. Our kickstarter campaign has definitely lost some money because we miscalculated on a lot of rewards. Our high-price rewards turned out to be too bland, while lower-tier rewards offered too many choices and ended up confusing people. Our stretch goals had to be revised twice. Even our overall marketing approach completely shifted about a week into the campaign. Had we identified and corrected this before launching, I’m sure we could have done even better.

 

 

 

RPS: Why was the Me 262 chosen as the focus for the new $150,000 stretch goal? Surely they saw relatively little action over Normandy?

 

Ilya: The project is not Normandy 1944, but rather Europe 1944. Normandy terrain is the first one we’re doing, but it’s not our primary or only focus. We want to have a generic plane set to recreate a variety of aerial battles that took place over Western Europe in that year, and the 262 is certainly a very good airplane for that.

 

With DCS, creating aircraft is a very expensive and time-consuming business. Even creating sub-variants of existing aircraft is extremely complicated. That is why we cannot make a plane set specifically tailored for any one historical battle. If we did that, moving on to Market Garden or Ardennes would require a huge effort. With a more generic set of planes, we can cover more ground.

 

However, the main reason for the Me.262 being the next immediate stretch goal is that we’re already doing half the work for it in the base tier. All aircraft in DCS contain three parts: the external model, the cockpit model, and the programming. A plane without a cockpit can still be flown by AI. That’s what the 262 will be in the initial release if we don’t hit any stretch goals: a troublesome enemy that makes defending bombers really challenging. Adding a cockpit to it and making it player controllable is not as big of a task as making an entire new plane from scratch. So, the Me.262 is the cheapest and the quickest new plane we can add to the base project, and therefore the most reachable stretch goal we can do.

 

 

 

RPS: The EDGE engine looks splendid. Do you think it’s going to make piloting easier… more naturalistic?

 

Ilya: Yes we do. There is something intangible about the feeling of flight you get from terrain. Objects of proper scale, various small details, grass, trees, all that background noise, proper colors, all create that subconscious feeling of being there. It also makes it possible to gauge your airspeed and altitude without glancing at your instrument cluster, another huge advantage.

 

 

 

It takes a tremendous effort to design and perfect, and it’s one of those things you never even notice when it works. It works on a subconscious level by adding various subtle clues that all add up to better immersion.

 

EDGE, to my knowledge, is the only flight sim terrain engine specifically designed for and tested by real pilots. Proper feeling of flight at all altitudes, realistic-looking airfields, all of that is designed precisely to feel as close to the real thing as possible.

 

 

 

RPS: If none of the stretch goals are reached will all Allied sorties start and finish in the air?

 

Ilya: No, of course not. Post D-Day the Allies built a huge number of temporary airfields all over the Normandy coast. That’s where the Allied players will be based.

 

 

 

RPS: Will hedge-hopping DCS WWII pilots need to worry about vegetation collisions?

 

Ilya: My long and painful experience with past projects forces me to add a warning here that all features are subject to change and so on and so forth. And, the answer is yes.

 

 

 

RPS: Do you foresee DCS WWII growing in a similar way to DCS: World? Might we, one day, see third-party aircraft from the likes of Belsimtek, and simple Combined Arms-style tank simming?

 

Ilya: We hope so. RRG is certainly not taking over the DCS WWII market. We fully understand the value of cooperation, and, as hard as that may be to believe, we care about fan experience more than about anything else. Happy fans equal series longevity. If we sit on DCS WWII by ourselves, we can only make a certain amount of content per year. We do not have the resources to expand the project into all theaters of WWII and cover even all the major aircraft, not to mention all the less important or obscure ones we really enjoyed having in our past projects.

 

A large 3rd party or even community-run effort to create aircraft, maps, ground objects, etc can and should turn DCS WWII into a comprehensive all-around flight sim that almost has more than any single fan would ever need. That’s our dream.

 

 

 

RPS: Creating single-player campaigns that are both involving and replayable seems to be something the flight sim industry isn’t especially good at these days. How are RRG and ED approaching the task?

 

Ilya: I’ve been doing flight sims for a very long time, and we’ve tried a whole bunch of things over the years. We’ve played with static campaigns; these allow for more immediate wow-factor, but virtually no replay value. We’ve played with dynamic campaigns. These offer nearly unlimited replay value in theory, but in reality begin to feel generic and empty rather quickly. Dynamic campaigns are also a lot more difficult and expensive to create. Bland cookie-cutter missions are perhaps a feature of a poor dynamic campaign engine, but we’ve never had the luxury to create a great big full-featured one. So we won’t try it in Europe 1944.

 

For now, our solution may not be perfect, but at least it’s novel.We plan to release regular content updates that include new missions and campaigns, some for free, and some for a small cost.

 

We also plan to work with our community. DCS ships with a powerful campaign and mission editor which allow anyone to create their own single- or multiplayer content. We’ve noticed with our past titles that the quality of some user-made content easily eclipses that of our own. We hope to engage the best of the community and actively promote their content through our official channels, making it available to a larger slice of our player base.

 

In short, we will have static campaigns. We’ll deal with replayability by consistently releasing new content.

 

 

 

RPS: Disappointed by the last major WW2 flight sim release, some potential backers seem to be hanging back. Do you have any words of reassurance for this group?

 

Ilya: If there’s one thing we learned from that is that we should not agree to make games cheaper and quicker than we feel we should.

 

The only reassurance I can add though is that we are making a free-to-play game. If the quality of the initial release is not stellar, we are all out of a job. No one wants that. The reason we’re doing this again, the reason I have my old colleagues back on board, is that we really do feel like we finally, perhaps for the first time in our flight sim development careers, have enough time and money to properly build and test a game.

 

Finally, we are working with Eagle Dynamics. We are putting their hallowed DCS name on our title. ED has industry-best reputation for quality. There is no reason for them at all to release an inferior product.

 

 

 

RPS: Viewed from the outside, creating high-fidelity light sims looks to be a pretty stressful and high-risk business. What aspects of the process do you find most enjoyable and satisfying?

 

Ilya: I like planes.

 

My enjoyment went through several distinct phases. If we’re going to get a bit sentimental here, well, why not.

 

The very first time I did something concrete was when we were alpha testing Oleg’s first flight sim way back in the year 2000. I remember sending a bunch of suggestions, then launching the next build and suddenly seeing my corrections right there in the game. Having tangible input on a project of that scale and quality just blew my mind.

 

I just surfed that rush for the next couple of years. My involvement with the project grew, and I ran a site that managed all 3rd party mods for the title, an effort that took more time than my full-time paying job. It completely devoured me, and I enjoyed every second of it. I just really enjoyed seeing the progression of an aircraft from a blueprint to a vague 3D shape to a beautiful textured model and finally to a roaring in-game war machine.

 

My role continued to expand and by around 2003 I was basically allowed to steer the ship. That gave me a new thrill. I realized that I was creating entire worlds. I could just point at some idea and say “let’s do this”. Then all these people were suddenly working to implement my vision. A few months later, my vague fantasy suddenly became something tangible, something that existed on its own. It’s such a complex emotion I’m having a hard time putting it into words. I felt like I controlled this huge complex machine whose final end-product was my own videogame! The four-year-old in me enjoyed it on one level, while the more grown-up me, I guess, enjoyed the intricacies and ups and downs of being able to put such a complex plan into motion.

 

 

 

Another huge factor, and perhaps the most important one for me, is simply working with friends. We’re a bunch of people who love the same thing, are obsessed with the same idea. We’ve known each other for over a decade. We work well together. We like each other. We have fun. A group of life-long friends who have been through thick and thin, all working together and doing something they truly love, that’s just extremely powerful. And like I said, I just really happen to love WWII aviation. If I had been doing the exact same thing I’m doing except my games were about elves or post-apocalyptic battle mechs, it wouldn’t have been the same.

 

RPS: Thank you for your time.

illya prepare a EDGE SDK video:

Hey guys,

Quick update. Just to get some of you a bit more excited.

We finally have a decision on the EDGE SDK.

It's a YES!

I'm doing a quick video about it and recording some footage from inside EDGE. Should be a quick video to make, look for it later tonight.

Hopefully we can organize a community effort to create more landscapes for DCS WWII. This can mean a community-created Southern England, or Ardennes, or Market Garden, or Ruhr, there are tons of options and I really look forward to a discussion on this topic!