DCS WWII: Europe 1944

[Minoslas]

dont worry GSpector, you can fly 4 airplanes (Me-109K, P-47, Sptifire XI and Me-262) on the initial release. Other airplanes P-51 / FW-190D-9 and aditional modules can integrate into DCS: WW2 pass release.

[GSpector]

Originally Posted by Minoslas

dont worry GSpector, you can fly 4 airplanes (Me-109K, P-47, Sptifire XI and Me-262) on the initial release. Other airplanes P-51 / FW-190D-9 and aditional modules can integrate into DCS: WW2 pass release.

That's great. I just bought the P-51 add-on.

I also got the A-10a but for some reason, I see them in DCS: World but I can get any training to start and when I try to register through the Sim, I'm told my Log-in info is wrong and yet, I can still log onto the DCS website

[Minoslas]

enter into the module manager (no DCS: World Steam version), and use your login and pass into them. If login, you can install all your purchase modules.

[GSpector]

Thank you.

Actually, I think the problem was my connection with their server. After I waited awhile, I was finally able to get it to recognize my info and now all is good, Except that I went and uninstalled A-10c without verifying I new where the original Disks were (Seems the key that comes with the disk does not work with the downloaded version) But, I did get P-51 to work and tried the trainings

All I need to do is find my A-10c disks and all will be good

[Minoslas]

DCS: WW2 update

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...4/posts/723040

Good evening gentlemen!

We are finally getting back to business after the long Russian holidays.

As I mentioned in my last update, most of the team members were off from December 31st to January 10th, and the calendar being what it is, most did not get back to work until January 13th.

I have used this time to take some much-needed rest myself, spending lots of time with my children, and finally getting lots of sleep. Normally, I work on Moscow time all the way from California with an 11-hour time difference, starting my workday at 10 PM, then converting to single dad mode by 7 am. That makes eight hours of sleep in a single block, well, something out a fairy tale for me.

Anyway, I thought it would be best to begin 2014 with our most important single task from 2013, the highlight of our kickstarter drive, the cockpit for the Me.262.









Unlike most other team members, the two-man crew working on this pit worked through the holidays. With that kind of a work ethic, coupled with doubling up on projects that are usually made single-handedly, these DCS heroes are doing an amazing job staying ahead of schedule and producing consistently stellar quality work. They make the rest of the tasks look bad in comparison, but of course, the overall number of working hours for their cockpits is about the same as for the others. It’s just they need half the calendar time to do the same amount of work.

That concludes this week’s update. Please stay tuned for more next Friday!

[GSpector]

Thanks for posting the update and those pics.

[Sung]

Thats all so outstanding work. Beautifull!!

[Minoslas]

Update #26 WW2

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...4/posts/729345

Hello folks,
Wait, isn’t it still Friday somewhere?
The project is moving along. I have been putting insane hours into DCS the past couple of weeks, so much that it almost feels like a pre-release crunch.

On the development front, the Me.262 cockpit shown last week has had the last few kinks straightened out and is considered finished. Just waiting for the flight dynamics programmers, currently hard at work o the Bf.109K, to finish that plane and get on the 262.

The P-47 is also nearly there. The cockpit is virtually ready, while the external model is a bit farther along. The general pipeline for this project is a bit strange. Our cockpits are built a lot faster than our external models, and the programming time that comes after the 3D models are complete is even longer.

The order in which the planes will be completed is as follows. The FW.190D-9, in the development of which our team is also taking part, will be completed first (no ETA, not up to me too announce). The Bf.109K-4 will come next. Then the P-47. Then the Me.262. Then the Spitfire. The plan is still to release these piece-meal to all alpha-access backers as they are being done.

The landscape is also moving along. The most important part of the process is engine integration, that is, getting the DCS aircraft to fly over the new terrain, and all the other objects, vehicles, ships, and so on, to properly interact with it. This task is in late testing stages, and in the meantime creating the landscape itself has slowed down a bit. Once that task is complete, we’re going to dump an entire large team onto landscape creation, and will be looking at an alpha of a Normandy chunk in a matter of weeks.

As for myself, well, I have been doing a whole lot of writing and graphic design, and brushing up on my German as well. I’ll just show a single screenshot for now.



I am catching a flight to Moscow tomorrow afternoon. My main priority there is to finish the English version of the manual as well as its Russian translation, and to get started on the Bf.109 manual. I also want to get back to doing video updates, and hopefully give you guys a much better look at what’s happening with terrain and the 109K in video format.

[Minoslas]

Update #27 WW2

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...4/posts/734565

Hello folks,
A few things for today’s update.

First of all, it’s a bit cold in Moscow right now. Catching a LAX-MOW flight is always fun in winter, especially in late January – early February. Board the plane in balmy LA with +82 F outside (+27 C), bam, 12 hours later walk out to -16 F (-27 C). It’s so cold inside my apartment, I literally have to sleep wearing outside clothes under two sets of blankets. Managed to land here during the coldest week of the entire Russian winter. Eagle Dynamics offices are a bit better, especially during the day when the outside warms up a bit. Early in the morning when you just get in though, well, today we’ve been joking about working at Igloo Dynamics.

The FW.190 manual is progressing very well. Been keeping me very busy. Sometimes jet lag is a good thing, gives me so much more time to work on those charts and graphics, but working from home at night with the world frozen stiff around me and the winds howling outside, well, it’s quite an experience.

The Bf 109 is getting along nicely. Two programmers are working on it at the moment, one dealing with various internal systems, and the second one doing cockpit gauges and animations. The internal systems are pretty much done, there’s just a bit of work left on the engine model. The cockpit is kind of half-baked at the moment, the visuals are a bit messy, especially the connection between the external and the internal model that’s all glitchy. That’s why we’re just going to look down today. I’d rather not show the gunsight and the canopy framework.




The P-47 external currently looks like this. Very long process to get the model to this point because so much of the work cannot be shown with screenshots. The model is fully articulated, and has all the internal parts that are all mapped and animated. There’s also a few sub-variants all in there, with and without the dorsal fin, a couple of different propellers. Only one variant is going to make it into the final game, but it’ll be decided later once the programming begins. Otherwise it’s at least a month of extra work for each of the changes in airframe or the propeller.







With that, I’m off to the exciting world of Triebswerkanschlüsse and Kaltstartvorbereitung.

[Minoslas]

Update 28# DCS: WW2

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...4/posts/741085

Friday Development Update - February 07, 2014
4 comments Like 16 likes
Hello everyone,
A very busy week here in the office. I’ve finished the alpha version of the Fw 190D-9 manual. Really enjoyed it. Starting on the 109K-4 manual next week, should be easier and quicker. Had a lot of fun scouring gigabytes of scanned original documents looking for info on cockpit controls, system diagrams, procedures, numbers, etc. Totally new experience for me, even after what, 14 years of doing flight simulations.



Thanks to the manual and a certain button in the Dora cockpit, we have a new office meme. We’ve always been a memetastic group. Most people don’t realize just how juvenile a bunch of flight sim developers can be. One minute we’ll have an aircraft designer with 20 years of experience designing real planes fill out the whiteboard with formulas in order to double-check some flight test curves, and the next minute he’s bellowing animal sounds and making Gumbys faces.

We were woefully short on a DCS meme, and now, thankfully, we have one. We could not be happier.

There is a little thing stuck in the far back corner of the Dora’s left console that the manuals call the Flugzeugvernichter, that is, Aircraft Self-Destruct. Somehow the word Vernichter just really stuck, and now the entire office presses invisible buttons and yells “Vernichter”. We also have to add it to the end of every German aviation term we can. Spreizklappenanzeigen? Spreizklappenanzeigen Vernichter! Kraftstoffverneblerleitung? Kraftstoffverneblerleitung Vernichter!

What do you call a device that destroys your ability to disable the self-destruct button for your aircraft? A Flugzeugvernichtervernichtervernichter.

As any inside joke, it’s probably weird to anyone outside out small group of old friends, but, well, we enjoy the heck out of it right now.

Now, another really exciting thing we’re doing this week is playing with Oculus Rift. It’s pretty good, although the implementation is pretty basic at the moment. No 6DOF yet, and the world outside is a bit warpy and it looks like you’re inside an egg, but the immersion of being inside the cockpit is just superb. It is such an incredible breakthrough, the feeling is so life-like, that words simply cannot describe it. Once I put it on, I don't want to take it off. Could spend hours just flying over the landscape and watching things move around.


Great Scott!
Also, it’s really fun to bug people wearing a full face mask while playing a game. As you can see everything they’re doing on the screen, we love to add extra immersion by kicking and poking the player at the right moment. Also, it’s extremely annoying and maddening when those louts at the office break my immersion by kicking and poking me while I’m trying to enjoy an awesome gadget.

And finally, here’s a sneak peak at something else that's really beginning to shape up nicely.


Hope you guys have a good weekend!

[Minoslas]

DCS: World WW2 1944 Update #29

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...4/posts/755666

Friday February 21, 2014 Development Update – The Importance of Planning Ahead
2 comments Liked 16 likes
Afternoon gentlemen!

Sorry, I was traveling back home last weekend, had to skip out on the update.

This Friday, my usual practice of selecting something to show on Friday morning proved very near-sighted. My plan to show the Bf.109 as it is in the engine came to a screeching halt.

As DCS WWII is part of the general DCS development environment, a bug introduced on Thursday made the entire environment look off. Very off. Everything is black and shiny.

I have screenshots and I’m still not sure what’s worse, to show them or not to show them.

This is pretty normal for a development environment, that’s what keeps it less tedious and gets the developers chuckling, but I’m not sure if publicly showing silly bugs, especially someone else’s bugs, is really appropriate.

Basically, imagine the entire game world covered with black lacquer, and you’ll get the rough idea of what everything has looked like for the past two days.

Perhaps, the best solution is to keep these for now, then do a non-Friday update early next week once the bug is fixed, where we can show what the bug looked like, and what it looks like with the bug fixed and the cockpit systems working.

Other than that, the work is progressing. The two-man team making the Bf.109 are ticking off their tasks. The systems programmer is currently finishing up the FuG 16ZY implementation, and the aerodynamics programmer is doing the MW 50.

The best bit of news for this week is that the web programmer our team is sharing with a lot of other development tasks has finally jumped back onto our web interface, the work that had lay dormant for some time. He’s been doing nothing but our stuff since Monday. I’ve made some overly optimistic predictions before, so I won’t today, but the plan is to stay on the task until it’s complete and released to the public.

On the Fw 190D-9 front, we’ve hit a bit of an unexpected barrier. While we have gigabytes of original factory documents on this aircraft, as it turns out, some of the less important systems just don’t have a good enough technical description in any of the sources available to us. It was a lot easier with the P-51 because we had access to a living breathing aircraft and to the men who fly it. With the Dora, we don’t have that luxury.

We have a list of about a dozen questions on things like the circuit breaker panel and the oxygen system and info plates like deviation tables and Baumusterkartes. We need to have one last internal discussion Monday, and then we’ll probably post these publicly. Hopefully someone in the community will have some rare bit of knowledge that we don’t that will allow us to close that final tiny gap in our references.

On a final note, several of our external team members are located in Kiev, Ukraine. I’ve been to that beautiful city many times. Clean, green, always pleasant, wonderful people, great food. One of the few cities in the world I’m always glad to visit, always sad to leave. I was actually looking forward to flying down there for a couple of days this trip, and I’m absolutely crushed by the recent events. It breaks my heart to see the streets I’ve often walked on fire.

I really hope that somehow, some way, the situation will deescalate, things will come down, and people will stop dying in the streets. How incredible to even be writing these words.

Let’s all hope for a speedy resolution to this crisis.

[Minoslas]

Update #30 WW2

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...4/posts/770277

Friday March 07, 2014 Development Update – We're Getting THere
6 comments Liked 17 likes
These regular updates are really hard to do when you’re in pre-alpha. If there’s one thing I learned during this project, it’s that there really was a very good reason for the industry standard to announce and market projects after they’re ready and playable.
I yearn for the days of yore when I could just boot up a game, set up a quick scenario, snap a bunch of action screenshots, and be done with a Friday update in an hour.

Actually, I yearn for the day of even yore-er yore. Seems like it was just yesterday when I could say, hey, I’d like to fly plane X. And a month or so later I’d be flying it. It’s only been, what, 10 years since that was the case. Of course, there’s no going back to that. Even the simplest flying games of today probably can’t do an airplane in a month. I myself can barely stand to look, much less to fly, airplanes from 10 years ago. But I am still a bit sad about all the work that goes into the extra quality. If you were to draw a graph on work hours vs simulation quality, the line grows exponentially.

And while you’re here, close but not quite at the self-imposed 100%, progress is very hard to show.

First of all, here’s where we are with the backer rewards section. We really tried to have it operational last Friday, but internal testing showed that once again we had a logical flaw for larger reward tiers with more than one copy of a stock plane selected. Had to drastically redo the flyable selection this week. Lost all the prettiness and ended up with a painfully simple design, but at least it works.

I guess the page is ready for the world, we just have one final task: to merge the kickstarter and paypal database of backers with the DCS site member list, the hardest part of which is dealing with accounts for backers that do not currently have a digitalcombatsimulator.com user profile.



On the aircraft front, we finally do have a delay on one aircraft model, the P-47 external. We had a long unpleasant saga with trying to get high-quality original blueprints for it last summer. That took longer than anticipated, and what we got was not as thorough as we needed. Once we finally got into animating all the bits and pieces of the aircraft, we’ve realized that our data was not good enough, and that some parts would go out of alignment when moved. We had to go chasing pixels, and start fitting parts back together, animating, measuring, refitting, and trying again. This, again, goes back to my earlier point about standards. In an older game, we’d never care that an aileron slightly clips through the wing when fully deflected. We wouldn’t care that a gear strut does a physically impossible warp a few inches to the side in order to move to the down and locked position. And so with DCS, we have to go and make sure every movement is absolutely perfect, spending more time on these details than on the entire model in an older project.

The 109, our flagship, the pinnacle of our hopes and desires, is still a bit shiny everywhere. Not nearly as bad as two weeks ago, but it still fluctuates. Graphics programmers are slowly but surely moving DCS over to DX11, and it’s a process.

The choice for me is extremely painful - show nothing, or show something that does not look great.


Shiny!


From switch to shining switch

The cockpit programming is complete. All the gauges and switches and systems are working, except, annoyingly from the point of a Friday update, you cannot see it in the cockpit yet. We can see it all in debug mode. However DCS cockpits are done in a peculiar complex way, different from what we’re used to from before, and a programmer cannot simply tell a certain needle to rotate a certain number of degrees. As it is during most of the process, the cockpit mesh is a monolith. In our previous projects, we would simply make each moving part a separate object with a pivot, and the programmer would move that object about that pivot when needed. In DCS, we have to do a lot more work on cockpit animations, doing them manually, and we’re still waiting for them to be complete.

In the meantime, all the gauges gauge, and the switches operate all the systems, the radio talks, the AFN2 guides you to airfields (the only objects at the moment you can guide to), everything works, and this would have been a great time to make a cockpit procedures video, except you can only see all of that happening in debug readouts and not in the cockpit 3D model.

So, since I’ve made too many overly optimistic predictions in the past, I won’t this time. I will only say that it’s very frustrating for me to write these kind of updates, that I really want to have a fully functional plane I can take for a spin and screenshot away, and that we really are tantalizingly close.

[Minoslas]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...4/posts/784976

No Guts – No Glory
1 comment Like 7 likes
Well folks,

Frustrating couple of weeks.

The entire office spent all of last week trying to figure out what was up with the 109. Kind of a standard thing with all DCS planes when they suddenly begin doing something absolutely unexpected.



Our 109 flight model started as a copy of the P-51, and then we began slowly replacing all systems and all data with Messerschmitt stuff. Well, after another round of replacements something somewhere happened with something that made the 109 decide to crabwalk through the sky rather than fly straight like the Mustang. Check each new system. Nothing. Replace each P-51 system with each new 109 system individually. Nothing. Replace all together in conjunction – screech!

This is the kind of stuff we really can’t afford to be spending so much time on at this stage of the project, especially as it really looked to everyone that we really put more than enough time for the unexpected into the project in the first place. Still, the 109 still doesn’t want to fly right, and it’s not the question of our skills or experience. Like I said, the entire office, including all ED veterans, spent this whole time trying to figure it out alongside our programmers. If anything, their experience had a slightly calming effect. We want to pull our hair out, while they chuckle and say “yup, happens every time.”

To give you a better idea of the kind of work that goes into all of this, here’s some details of the P-47.












To make matters worse, the P-47 is documented so much worse than the P-51, and, surprisingly, even worse than the Bf 109. For example, check the tail gear shots above. This was all done from photos.

The best blueprint we have is this:



Obviously, not nearly enough data to fully model the mechanism. And with all parts that need to move in complex animations, making sure everything fits and doesn’t fall apart or clip through when animating, well, let’s just say that lately the P-47 modeler has had very little joy in his life.

[Minoslas]

Update #34 WW2
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...4/posts/808060

Update #34 Apr 11 2014
Friday April 11, 2014 Development Update – The Two Messerschmitts
4 comments Liked 23 likes
Hello folks,
Ooh, how the time flies, another Friday already? My job is the least predictable of all in the project it seems. I tend to have a huge variety of tasks in my lap, all with five alarm bells ringing, and with no one to give them to. I’ve spent all week doing emergency translations and documents. Doing that while also trying to be a single father to two young kids means that there’s literally no time for anything, especially sleep.

When Friday comes around, Friday morning my time, Friday evening Moscow time, that means a very sudden silence. The kids go to their mother, and there’s no urgent work that has to be completed by tonight – Moscow’s off until Sunday night my time.

Then it’s time for me to relax, sit back, and write a Friday update – and after that, most incredible of all, I can finally go and catch up on some z’s.

Work-wise, we’re moving ahead full speed getting the 109 to a stable alpha stage. Tasks are getting smaller, while the results are becoming a lot more noticeable. We’ve spent all week on the cockpit, on animating the gauges (about a third of all objects now move properly), recording new sounds for Dora and Kurfurst, completing an authentic electrical system, writing out the entire set of keybord shortcuts for the K-4 mostly based on the Mustang. Runway take-offs are finally nice and straight.

The new render is still a bit wacky, and that’s completely outside our control, ED guys are putting crazy hours into it as well.

So, the best we can show on screenshots is a couple of interior shots with needles properly pointing at things other than zeroes.





Also, here’s where we are with the Me.262 external. Hope you guys have a great weekend!

[Minoslas]

WW2 Update
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...4/posts/815537

Friday April 18, 2014 Development Update – Landing the 109

Hey everyone,
Here’s some more on the Bf 109K-4.

We’re pretty much done with the cockpit and external animations. The last remaining set of cockpit tasks should take no more than 2-3 days; plus we’ve compiled a final list of fixes and updates needed to the cockpit and external models based on internal testing, which should take no more than 10 days or so for the modeler to implement.

We’re having an internal discussion on what exactly to consider an alpha stage for the 109. Obviously we owe our backers an alpha version. My own feeling is that we’re pretty much at alpha, while some at ED feel that this is very far from a version that can be given out. Next week, our plane will look like a 109, sound like a 109, and all the gauges and internal systems will operate as those of a 109. However it will not fly exactly like a 109. The engine model and the aerodynamic model is what takes the most time to perfect in DCS.

We’ll have another big internal discussion on this on Monday.

For now, here’s some screenshots of some more cockpit animations, working AFN2, and a near-perfect three-point landing.

(please note that the new render is still in development, so you're seeing some glitches in trees and shadows and other components)