homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation DCS World Eno's Firehouse and Crew's Hollo Pointe Server Lounge

I stumbled into a thread over in ED that reminded me I have been wanting to remove the "event notification" from the Firehouse Server. Basically what that entails is no more "Eno killed Wheel with a GBU-12" or "Wheel took off from Gudauta"...

I'm not sure if it's something everyone wants at this point but I'm going to test drive it for a week or so and see what the general feel is. Gordo has put together a REALLY intriguing, realistic mission and I think to respect the efforts and those of others mission builders, this step is a necessary one.

A couple of things this will build:

1) Less dependence on the notifications to verify BDA / kill status
2) Better communication amongst a flight / JTAC to report damage
3) A need for flight members to relay information that was, originally, redundant with the notifications in place.

Thoughts welcome...

I admit, I do enjoy some of the gamey aspects like event notification, f10 map, external views, auto start up, and even easy radios. There's so much crap I have to remeber at my job, some details in a flight sim I'm fine with fudging.

I have no problem trying out no "event notifications" If you want.

Eno, I like how you think. So much of the "helpful" information in game design detracts from using your brains/friends/training. Being light on helper info (tooltips, instant success notifications, etc.) can really help the long-term enjoyment.

Turning notifications off makes for a very un-enjoyable game unless you are flying tactically and everyone has comms.

On an open casual server, without direct voice comms to every player, you lose the feedback of anyone else flying and any airport ops like who is coming back landed etc.

You wont know how the war is going, who is kicking ass and who keeps getting shot down. Unless everyone is on comms and giving each other BDA's as opposed to not being on comms and unless someone is typing in every kill, or you see it happen, it will seem like you are flying on an empty dead server.

I have tried it a few times on the Older Gamers server maybe? and it is really sterile and feedback is next to nothing, because no one is going to take the time or the effort to chat a detailed BDA.

Plus, I like to see you guys get that kill and prompt for the Strela that shot me down, or to see that big CBU97 kill confirmation you just got rolling down the screen. Makes it exciting, and instant feed back for good performance and tactics, or lack thereof.

For a squad flying tactically, the increased difficulty and heavier reliance on RW tactics for mission success, absolutely.

For an open server, catering to pilots of all skill levels, and voice comms not required, no way.

The master plan is complete.



Hollo Pointe will run the latest DCS World version without any mods except the Slmod for administrative features. HP is an Open server, with a Ban list. Stock.

Eno's Firehouse by nature will host mods and test changes. Overclock.

Best of both Worlds

I agree with you rider- but a person who comes in with no coms has two options: leave in a huff because nobody is telling them anything, or register for free and join the rest of us on Ts3


Who knows- maybe guys will hate it... And if the overall feedback is such I'll change it back.

I for one like being forced to actually do a BDA on what I've shot at rather than just "fire and forget." I think it'll bring that extra level of immersion and satisfaction to what we do.

I am now ready to take over the world...

I don't care what anyone says- that's awesome.

Awesome setup there WT!

As for today's run of the mission...did someone say battle damage?

Mol's jet after an intervention with a radio tower...minus wingtip..minus Mol!


WAH-64D Apache in a bad way...



F-15E having some slight issues with his nose radome!

Looks daunting... sad that I missed it!

We had a server crash yesterday but it ran through the night after a restart. I'll be submitting the error report. If any of you guys were on the server when it went down I'm going to ask that you send me your dcs.log or dcs.log.old (if you have since played a game). If you actually "crashed" at the same time, please send me the log and the crash log as well and I'll submit the logs together. It gives a good overall perspective.

Blooze has got an interesting suggestion about a "one life to live" concept that I'm very interested in from an "event" standpoint. I know not everyone enjoys this type of "realism," but many may embrace the challenge. I would be willing to set aside 1 day per week, or 1 day every couple weeks to run such an idea... It poses some challenges administratively- but with some cooperation and some true dedication to the concept I think we could make something pretty intense.

Thoughts?

Sounds interesting Eno. I'ld be willing to give it a try. The ArMa group I play with has "dead is dead" rule we all adhear to.

Eh guys...

I have been watching guys in the Playground recently and am a bit disturbed by the amount of people getting shot down by SA-13s. It is, after all- a training mission with a little extra fabric woven in.

Unfortunately because the various convoys come in every 45 minutes or so, they could all- if not intercepted at the border- be roaming around in proximity to some of our air bases.

This has happened to me, and to many others. I'm sorry I hadn't clued into the ACTUAL problem earlier...

I have subsequently removed the SAM threat in the mobile convoys to give people a bit more opportunity to work down low with the gun.

I've also modified the briefing somewhat.. added a few extra CA vehicles to control (practice in AAA, M2, TOW, and Abrams) I've made also got a few red ground attack aircraft to ruffle feathers.

Anyway, just changing things up a bit.

yeah i got fed up with getting shot down without any warnings, so I played some Tomb Raider for a bit... YUM

The middle/starting pointe of the Shampain Campaign is fini. Nothing fancy - with a battle zone through a familiar river run between Zestafoni on the west and Agara on the east - Khashuri is the biggest city on the highway route.

Blue does dominate the northern battle zone with a HAWK missile site, while Red has unconfirmed ADA assets near Agara in the east.

There are JTAC slots that should make a difference, and armor and ADA units available to drive around.


Win this mission by clearing out all opposition forces. It's set to Fog Of War, Full Moon and 0300 start with Fall weather. This one is A-10Cs, Su-25Ts and Ka-50s with Combined Arms. Other missions in the campaign will include F-15Cs and MiG-29As and MiG-29Cs. Each mission's script was written out before I started.

If Red wins then the scene shifts left to the west to The Streets Of Kutaisi mission.
If Blue takes the ring then the campaign shifts east to Gori Gap (did I mention that TGP inventory is critically low in Gori Gap?).

Here's some teaser screenies. I will complete all five missions before these see on-line play, so a couple of weeks...


The opposing forces in this Zesti Highway -




After the missions are done,,, if there's interest in modifying one of the five, let me know which one you want to work on. I want to get the concept working - then we can play around with it. I started with a master template with all FARPS and initial a/c in place with waypoints and loadouts. That was a big initial effort that should pay off in development speed for the remainder of the scenarios. Give me a couple of weeks to complete this, while you think about what you'd like to model.

WC

Hmmmm- pics broken?


On another note- yeah, sorry about that Wild. There's really no mention of it in the brief either so it wasn't fair considering it was supposed to be a training mission.

Anyway, that's changed and the Su's on red side will show up to hassle the armour at some point.

Okay... well- that's it... I've had it. Done... gone... finished. I can't do it any longer.



I've been working off a 12" eeepc netbook while I'm gone (basically half a month, a week at a time)... working on my mission building on crappy internet connections through TV on the server machine... unable to join anything going on from the SAME limitation, 2GB ram, 32 bit OS...

No longer.

Just bought this:

http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX44572


Certainly not the mightiest in the lineup but has a very competitive combination of power and screen... yes an HDD but enough SSD cache to get me by. Small enough for me to transport easily (14") and will allow me to participate in action while I'm gone (as a CA / JTAC contributor).

Anyway... I'm sitting here minding my own business... thinking- you know... I spend so much time away to make any money at all... I think I owe it to myself to be able to follow up my hobby. The price is right... the time is right.

Sorry boys- you may be having to hear me gobbing off on TS3 more often now while on the ground. In the meantime, mission building will be MUCH easier- and I'll be able to spend twice the amount of time doing it because it won't depend on an internet connection.

Looking forward to it! I really am.

Tonight on Eno's server we had some air to air action:



A strange BLU-108B that thought it was a rocket ship:

And Skoop working over a convoy from my perspective as a crashed pilot:

^ Nice having the crashed pilot giving BDA and calling out targets. Can't wait till we have dcs UH-1 and we could sim a sar mission to pick you up.

The frames were aweful with all that smoke going up. It seems there's some smoke performance issues with the latest update and smoke from what I hear. I was feeling the slide show flying over this, and I'm using a pretty good H100 cooled 3570 IVY, asus maxamus formula V mobo,16gigs of ram, and a gtx 690. Might have to switch to the medium settings until this gets sorted.

Yeah, I jumped on too after you Skoop and while departing north from Batumi, the FPS were terrible. I saw the walls of smoke ahead in the distance and it was unplayable. Hopefully this gets sorted.