any thoughts on European air war, chuck yaeger's, red baron(3d), or MS combat flight simulator? Im on potato hardware RN and no money so im looking hard at this era. Wise words in the outtro as well.
There's something very amusing about how Korea seems to be a common setting for all sorts of promising/damn good flight sims. Be it regarding the infamous conflict that's shaped it or a return of it in a modern era.
@@andrewa837 TAW? Sorry but you might have to explain that to me because the thing that comes to mind when you say that is Il-2's Tactical Air War server which I feel might not be what you were referring to?
DCS World is a game, where your only real simulation is the cockpit. The joke "Digital Cockpit Simulator" is closer to the truth than official "Digital Combat Simulator" is by itself. The DCS World best offering is to learn how to perform different tasks in different environments. Example, how to use a bombing table to get the bomb dropped on target. Or how to perform a proper gun strafing at low altitude and evade without overflying the target. The multiplayer offers possibility for proper basic flight maneuvers for dog fight. To learn the energy management and learn to control yourself when to utilize stored energy and when not. But that is it, not even BVR is properly possible be tested or played. The other side that DCS World offers, is same as with any other simulator really. How to navigate. So you learn how to handle radio, how to fly route and how to find the coordinates middle of nowhere and how to get back to base. All of these things can be done without AI. And that is where the DCS World works, when you have no AI whatsoever in use. But once you add AI to the equation, DCS World becomes bloated with incorrectness and failures. As simple things as dropping a bomb on truck doesn't work right. And even less about other targets that can shoot back, like a AAA or SAM. So many incorrectness in those that better just not to even think it at all as "simulator", and only as "Target that can do something". This is reason why when I want to enjoy campaign and story etc, I turn to some old 90's flight games, as even simple story in those is far better than what it is in DCS World, because the AI is far superior.
It really isn't that difficult to make a proper AI these days for a military simulator. You only need to observe real military, take notes of the logics and write the AI to copy it. I am talking about ground units, as in what kind units there are (division -> brigade -> battalion -> company -> platoon -> squad -> team -> pair -> fighter) and then what type of (air defense, MBT, transportation/logistics etc) units there are. Understanding that there are human soldiers as basic mechanic for each unit, example MBT has 3/4 soldiers in it. Driver / Gunner / Commander / Loader. Each has their own sensors, that are "vision, hearing, voice and feeling) and functions as duty and performance, and capabilities. You use old RTS games implemented mechanics, as in Close Combat had for each soldier: Moral (Fear vs Courage) Awareness and physical (Fatigued vs Rested) Healt (Normal / Injured / Wounded / Incapacitated / Unconscious / Killed). And you build a individual AI based those small factors, that affect its sensors, its speed, its communication capability (precision, accuracy, memory) etc. In very simple manner with example 0-10 scale. And sum all up to overall value for larger unit. Every such AI is designed to be put on process status. It doesn't need to run all the time consuming real CPU etc. Lot of things are simulated by assuming that unit will perform its duty when in normal condition. So example if you send a few soldiers to walk 5 km one direction and come back, you give them a expected time schedule when they need to be there and then when to be back. So Estimated Time of Arrival. The ETA is not exact. It is estimation. So when no one is looking, you just know that X number of soldiers were sent from A to B and back, through route Y or X. And you expect them to be back in 90 minutes. You put that unit as zombie that will be simulated and checked only when estimated to be back. As nothing odd will happen in there. Nothing is calculated etc. But if there comes something on their path, in their location, that zombie unit is recalled and some CPU is used to check do they detect something, do they do something (make a radio call, engage etc) about it, and where they really were estimated to be. As AI location that is zombie doesn't need to be known exactly where they are, just like you don't know exactly where someone else is when you send them to do something. So you can have thousands of zombies just somewhere, guarding a bridge, observing from a hill, patrolling the road etc. And nothing will happen to them unless some other unit gets close to them. When you do some estimation etc and simulate things. Lot of soldering is really about waiting, doing something irrelevant. 6-8 hours goes to sleeping when only few are awake for guarding. Transportation is just moving stuff or men from A to B. Maintenance for vehicles etc. Nothing that is really requiring anything else than roleplaying that it would be done with schedule. And only when someone gets close to it, needs it to be simualted in more detailed manner and it starts taking some CPU time. A real combat is slow. It is hours work to assault a small town. Not seconds or minutes like now in in DCS. Because everyone is afraid for their life. So combat is slow. And most of the time in combat, you move slowly, carefully, hold position and observe and shoot and pin other down. There is no much of a combat all the time, it is slow hours or days lasting process. And there is no need to simulate everything all the time. What players don't see, we do it with simulation in simple form like paper-rock-scissors. Unit on hill has opportunity over one coming at it. Unit in foxhole has benefit over assaulting. Unit inside building as advantage etc. There is reason why then artillery, air support etc are used to break the locks and take away the advantage and opportunity for own troops to advance and proceed. DCS could very well have hundreds of thousands AI units formed by single soldiers with each having a own capabilities and duties, as > 90% of those would be zombie/sleep while player is cruising 200 miles from carrier. Only when the player gets close to something, they get waken for checking every few seconds to roll dices etc. When player has targeting pod on something, those units gets rendered and animated etc. Only then does the units get more "alive" with more detailed simulation. And that is slow process. Not real-time processing with extreme simulation, but careful military operation.
Playing single player campaigns and single missions in Jane’s Fighters Anthology was the most fun I’ve had in combat flight sims. The AI wasn’t perfect, made mistakes that I could manipulate. Even the ground AI would miss. DCS AI is getting better, but still very predictable.
Can you provide a link to the superpak patch for falcon 4.0? I have spent 2 days trying to find any sort of patch that will let me run 4.0 on windows 10, with no success. Everyone tells me to just play BMS but I dont want too, I want to experience the classic version that is less complicated in terms of systems.
andrewa837 Thank you for your reply. I cant seem to get that to work, when I run the installer it just removes my falcon4.exe file for some reason. bummer
andrewa837 Ahh I see. That works but for some the game does not respond to my keyboard inputs when im actually in a flight. I'll have to look into this on my own, as this is a weird issue. I might end up just busting out my old pentium 3 rig to play this game on lol. I will say this though, Falcon 4 allied force works perfectly with my modern system after finding a patch online. Thank you for this video! I cant wait to try all the games you listed here. Wish more people made content on this subject (90s combat flight sims) as there is so much content to try out.
@@runninggames771 most games had static button mapping, so I constantly had to have the keybinds pulled up, joystick was just for control of the aircraft. I used vjoy and joystick gremlin to get the stick working.
One you missed was "Back to Bagdad" - it was interesting in that it did a VERY accurate simulation of the radar system in the F-16, and if you had an old CGA card and monitor laying around, you could put that into your PC and use that as a dedicated radar display! The manual was like 70% how to work the radar. But I don't think it was widely known about and didn't get as much market as Falcon 4.0.
@@andrewa837 Yeah it wasn't well known. I got in on the beta program for it, but my PC was so marginally capable of running it at the time. But that CGA radar display was really cool IMO and something you just didn't see anybody else even consider.... Almost an early home sim cockpit setup.
You should change the title to "fixed wing aircraft combat flight sims" as you missed out all the great helicopter sims from the 90´s (well, you mentioned Hind and Apache Longbow by DI). Glad you came up with Fleet Defender in the end, but i´m still missing F-15 Strike Eagle III, Jane´s F-15, USAF, IAF and a few others. And imo, DI´s F-16 Fighting Falcon is very much worth to list, as it was pretty close to Falcon 4.0 in terms of realism. Besides that, i agree with the list. Played all of those (except JSF) plus those i just mentioned.
Yeah, I regret not including EECH or Mig Alley (which I just included in another video). DI's F-16 doesn't have anything too unique to make it worth it here. IMO.
@@andrewa837 I have to disagree. F-16 Fighting Falcon was part of DI´s digital battlefield project wich made it possible to play Hind, Apache Longbow and F-16 Fighting Falcon all together on the same server, in coop and PvP. A early try of the concept what DCS is today and way ahead of it´s time. Sadly too much ahead of it´s time and failed, but that was pretty unique at the time.
@@r4dio4ctiv3man9 I'm not sure if that was fully fleshed out or not. I know HIND can play with Apache. Funny enough the lead dev of EECH mentioned that he wanted to also do that, but better, and made the game multiplayer focused from the start. I'll get around to making that video, I even interviewed him for it, but yeah. Probably D tier if I were to put them on the list (Hind, Apache, F16)
@@andrewa837 Well it still suffered from problems, but worked in general. There was even a box that included all three games (and Tornado as a bonus) for this purpose. I still have the CD-ROMs of that box laying around here. Played this for countless hours with my brother via serial connection. I think they even planned on a russian/soviet aircraft simulator to complete the concept, but DI died proir to that IIRC.
You have mentioned DI's Super Hornet and Jane's Super Hornet, I would like to mention Hornet 3.0 by Graphic Simulations. It was a superb and realistic sim, but today to make it run, I need to use VirtualBox with Windows 98 installed.
this video came into mind after i watched growling sidewinder playing BMS and mentioning multiple times how the graphics werent that great, meanwhile the entire f4 campaign is so fleshed out its like multiple games in one
The cpu in the other game was nothing to write home about, literally reverses the turn to cross your nose for no reason except to give you the guns kill. Strange how it was on a flat map with no hills to account for.
Well that's just falcon 3 for ya. But you're right, no hills can make a difference. I will say though that this AI put up more of a fight no matter what. That's why I said "almost as good" - it's not a big difference.
@@andrewa837 it didnt though, it handed you the kill on a silver platter, while the cpu in dcs tried to fight in the 2 circle while defending fox2s and guns. Falcon 3 just felt better because you didnt brute force a manuever kill and got the dopamine hit for scoring a guns kill.
@@FrankStallone42 Probably - but the DCS AI was on ACE. Meaning best of the best. If that's the BEST it can possibly do, that's sad. Also, this game is 33 years old. One would hope a massive improvement.
@@andrewa837 bruh, this is the industry standard with cpu enemies/opponents... its either broken with cheats to the point that it isnt even fun, or its easily exploitable. Ive been playing games for coming up on 30 years and there hasnt been any significant improvements across the board in any game/simulation. Look at gran turismo, project cars, assetto corsa, none of the cpu opponents are at all realistic, they just run their programmed lines and thats it, theres no competitive racing to be found. No improvement at all to the cpu. AGAIN you have unrealistic expectations for what programmed logic is capable of. Stop calling it AI that doesnt exist, its a complete misnomer.
@@camberiu my gaming rig, nothing special. Amd GPU is preferred. I think people are having issues with Nvidia ones. Just use ddrawcompat and it should "just work"
Vulture Kinetics™ is a company firmly having isolated itself from everything all the time, no exposure to the sofware industry, the gaming industry, chipset-affiliation, launcher affiliations, code language affiliations, procedures and practices.. nothing. they to this day call multiplayer "network play" (not a translation error), their Western CM staff see its sole mission to silence feedback, censor and delete bug reporting, stalk anyone they deem dissidents on a purely personal level. The owner has decided to first not replenish personell on gulag level after an exodus of most of the actual talent (hint.. they were internally referred to as khokhols) - that was not allowed to do anything progressive core functionality wise anyway - but also embezzle turnover money away from the company into his decrepited dad's shitty private warbird collection, while preserving the teamworking-inept in a colab scenario across many countries after having not having had any sort of internal organisation or true and tried PM practices. And as for AI, there is none, not colloquially, DCS has no AI, only script-based if-else sequence conditions, based on the flightsimulator (the real hardware one) "waypoint mentality" of the 1980's. Vulture Kinectics™ also openly states that they do not care about "network play", despite PvA being the future for everything and even apart from that this warrants the question: *"If DCS is a singleplayer product, why is it then so abysmal at being one?"* (and I am a DCS "network play"-er btw, and have no other flightsim installed)
Thanks for this video. The Falcon franchise was awesome from day 1. I love this comparison. I recently returned to Falcon 1 on the Commodore Amiga and loved it. Awesome sim. I was doing link up PvP.
This is pretty much a wide issue to most games these days, AI improvements are stagnant and in fact developers have chosen to make AI worse because good AI "is not fun game design" Thats their argument, in games like STALKER where AI can flank you and even use stealth against you, its brutal which means you have to deliberately use superior firepower, grenade spam to take them out quickly so they never get a chance to flank you. Which is imao, realistic, you rather hit them all if you can, or wait for a chance to do so. Its interesting to see sim games also suffer from same issues, developers prioritise fun over realism.
Good ai is impossible to program, dcs is the premier simulator because of its high fidelity and extremely accurate models not because it has good or serviceable ai. Thats why dcs youtubers showcase pvp, and not single player sorties outside of ground attack. Edit: the cpu is serviceable for everything but bfm, i was wrong in saying dcs youtubers dont showcase single player sorties when growling sidewinder uploads bvr and ground attack/cas videos relatively frequently.
@@andrewa837it isnt cope, the us air force literally uses the a10c model for the a10 pilot training pipeline... if it wasnt accurate, they wouldnt use it for FAMILIARIZATION. Judging dcs for its ai is ridiculously stupid, that is nowhere near the selling point of the game. Play online against human opponents if you want a challenge or stay malding over an actual nothingburger.
@@FrankStallone42 yeah as a simulator DCS is fine. But they definitely don't use the AI for dogfight training. Lol. DCS is very realistic for simulating a cockpit. Of course.
@@andrewa837 dog fighting and bfm are obsolete... nobody is dog fighting anymore... certainly not the a10 with its angled guns... Do you also like to judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree? You realize tgat says more about you than it does about the fish, right? The ai from the foot soldiers in arma3 can headshot you from a click out with iron sights, does that mean its good ai??? No, its cheating... your logic is completely flawed. If you want a good dogfighting experience im dcs, go play online, its better than any ai from any simulator ever, because no ai can compete with human input.
Just because dcs is “ooh DA BEST HIGH FIDELITY SIMULATOR IN DA WORLD” does t mean it’s good, It’s like saying “c’mon Everybody’s Doing it” that makes me NOT want to do it or try it
How does one leave out Janes Fighter Anthology? The ability to fly so many different aircraft was amazing. Also left out TFX.. USAF.. Not sure how many others you missed out on.
DCS is a ponzi scheme. The *only* thing it really has IMO is decent helicopters, but everything else is extremely shallow. DCS is nothing but a cockpit museum really... They should update it to just be "Digital COCKPIT simulator"
Why no F-15 Strike Eagle 3, a true sim classic, or Flanker? If I recall correctly, the Strike Eagle had the most authentic avionics modelling of its time, and mastering the systems and planning the missions was quite crucial. The massive manual was hence quite necessary.
@@mechantl0up funny. I'm just hearing about it. From what I hear it's a bit flawed, missions are just you versus enemy without wingman, missions are bland compared to falcon3 too. But it caught my eye and I might do a video of it in the future.
@@mechantl0up by that I mean I heard about it and was interested in playing it a week ago. Damsonn made a steam forums post comparing it to fleet defender. And I put that in D tier.
A couple of other memories I'd love to see revisited - that F117A game (can't remember its name)? Also what about Flight of the Intruder? Also -loved the EF2000 music tracks that came on the CD!
I grew up on JSF, thanks for mentioning it! For me it was so hard to get into any other flight sims because the fractal-based terrain engine made every other game look like ass by comparison. You're entirely right in that the world feels a bit lacking; a lot of the time the game feels more like a tech demo than a simulation. A couple of things to point out: It is actually possible to capture enemy air bases to land on. All you have to do is destroy all nearby enemy units (AAG, SAM, and any stray hostile vehicles or fighters); the SLS landing assist will turn green and you'll see the message "Allied Airbase" on touchdown. So at least there's that, in terms of campaign progression. As for the damage model it does indeed include avionics (and there's even trim plane settings you can use to compensate for damage), the engine and even the landing gear, it's just that damage tends to insta-kill you more often than not (like you pointed out). When it comes to the JSOW the A variant is pretty useless, however the AGM-154B releases IR-tracking sub-munitions that home in on vehicles; enabling a single JSOW to knock out most of a convoy if you place it just right. Good video :)
9:00 -- RE: Falcon 3.0, LoFi Graphics, and a Math Co-Processor; Funny thing, but you've kinda glossed over the "amazing" part here. *No Dedicated Graphics Acceleration,* that's why a Math Co-Processor would have been required to draw wireframes with vector information. *AND* Math Co-processors weren't something which you purchased as an expansion or an add-on. As 386s gave way to 486s and Pentiums the co-processor became standard equipment on all CPUs. It wasn't until 1996 or later that video cards which were specifically meant to handle accelerated 3D graphics and/or mind blowing particle effects entered the consumer marketplace. Nvidia and ATI had their true heyday in the 21st century, 10 years later.
@@andrewa837 If they used Vector graphics it would have been faster with a coprocessor. I was reminded of another pair of games when you were going through the list, both of the stealth fighter games released by MicroProse (F-19 and F-117). As I recall, both were tiny and didn't need more than a couple of floppy disks to install, and F-117 boasted of having an improved 3D rendering system which is probably dependent on a coprocessor whereas the earlier game will basically run the same on a 286 or 386.
Unfortunately it won't work on Nvidia is what I'm hearing. But check archive.org for the 1.1 iso and patches. Install 1.23 then BDG. Then ddrawcompat dll.
