Jet Thunder silently buried?

[JediMaster 451]

Check out Flaming Cliffs. The atmosphere isn't really any different from the DCS line, but the planes are a lot easier to learn.

[+HomeFries 29]

I think DCS is overrated. Sure it's fine for the hardcore folks but for those of us who don't care for clickable cockpits and ultra-sterile atmosphere it's not an alternative.

I'm a DCS fan from the Flanker 1 days, and I still knocked Lock On for being sterile, but the truth is that the environment is as sterile or as kinetic as the mission designer makes it. I've seen some missions that have the JTAC making tactical calls with small arms audio in the background, making it sound as if he is in the middle of a firefight. It's not easy to do, and this sort of immersion isn't the priority of the developer, but it definitely has a lot of potential. I think it's a matter of time before we start getting more audio packs.

 

Of course, there's only so much you can do without a dynamic campaign or dynamic mission generation (which can add the "unrelated" flights for more radio comms and immersion), but ED has also indicated that the DC engine is more a matter of "when" than "if."

Edited May 18, 2013 by HomeFries

[+Julhelm 266]

There's a lot more to immersion than just generating other flights as what goes on outside the missions is a big factor as well. Devs understood this in the early 90s but today we get some crapass menu screens and cheap text briefings.

[+HomeFries 29]

Devs are in kind of a tight spot on that one.

 

Back in the day, you could get away with this:

 

With the 386 being king and full motion video not yet mainstream, devs spent time on polish because they didn't have as much time to spend on the stuff that we have today (texturing/skins, complex 3D models, flight dynamics). Now devs have a huge bar just for in-sim realism, and not only does it reduce the time available for interface polish, truth is that the next version of Windows or DirectX may break that polish anyway (see Jane's F-15). Compound this with the fact that sims are no longer mainstream (we became our own worst enemy at the time that Doom started the FPS craze; the perfect storm) and no longer command a huge budget, and the interface/briefing system becomes secondary.

 

The other problem is that we've become spoiled with Call of Duty type briefings that if a dev decides to try a bit of polish, it will be laughed at as second rate (not to mention it does absolutely no good for 3rd party missions).

 

Personally, I would love to see some of the old school immersion back, but I would rather just have devs put hooks in the code for custom interfaces and have the mission designers be able to do what they want with this.