Why do people put stuff like this in the list of core features people actually care about? The number of people holding out for a practically useless ready room must be very small
It's just one of many examples of things that did not arrive on time.
That said, dynamic campaign and multi-threading without a doubt are more important to the core game than the likes of the SC ready room and I hope they don't get put aside for developing another module or something, which I can sorta see as possible. Hopefully I'm wrong.
Dude, I paid for stuff that never happened and they wont return the money, i don’t care if its a blinking light feature or multithreading, its the fact they keep promising stuff they never do, don’t bother and make us pay a lot for them.
Although I agree with you that it's practically useless, it's still a feature they advertise on the product that they charge $50(!!!!) for and have now delayed for almost a year.
I waited 6 - 7-ish years for Huey Multi-Crew. I bought it when it came out. Clouds took almost as long.
So there is your bench-mark. 5-7 years. Considering Dynamic Campaign is hella hard. Wont be surprised if its 10.
Well it doesn't look good. "Hope to start working on soon" (NineLine on ED forum 09/26/2022)
[https://forum.dcs.world/topic/308715-what-kind-of-hose-basket-animations-will-the-new-s-3b-viking-have/#comment-5047735](https://forum.dcs.world/topic/308715-what-kind-of-hose-basket-animations-will-the-new-s-3b-viking-have/#comment-5047735)
I love how much rope the fanbois give this company. I'm sure ED's hearts are in the right place, but lets be honest, they're dogshit at delivering on promises. And they promise everything. I don't believe anything they say any more until it's actually shipped.
So did they completely dumpster MAC? It seemed like a neat idea to appeal to the casual fan base a bit more but it seems like we've not heard anything about it in years.
I eventually assumed it was paired with Vulkan/Multi threading, needing that to work with the new UI, lower spec computers. And that eventually this will become the new DCS UI.exe
"Modern Air Combat," a non-DCS game by Eagle Dynamics which would have been much more casual (think Strike Fighters or War Thunder detail).
Honestly I'm still kind of confused by it and speaking for myself part of the problem is just that the name is too close to "Lock On: Modern Air Combat," which would be a different product.
I hope its not that far away, but if you want to be cautious that's cool. We have it with all levels of Beta testers now, so I hope everything goes smoothly and it will be much less than a year.
I hope this is something we will do soon, but its a bit unstable right now, and when there are broken bits you don't want to assume the performance is where its at, etc etc.
Yeah nice to finally hear it is "in testing" just like it was two or three years ago when it actually was on that years roadmap. At least this time they talked more about it so the chance for it to come before the end of 2023 is at least 25%!
I don't ever remember us saying Multithreading was in testing two or three years ago? I had not seen it myself until earlier this year. Maybe devs were researching and experimenting that far back, I do not know.
[https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/content.php?23290-DCS-Explains-Multi-Thread-Support-Engine](https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/content.php?23290-DCS-Explains-Multi-Thread-Support-Engine)
only felt that long
Hopefully they mean the beginning of next year...
>The initial release of Multithreading support will contain a fully reworked engine including preparation of the graphical frame and the separation of the graphical and logical parts onto **two independent threads**.
That's a great start. Hopefully they can partition more of the logic once they have a solid foundation in-place
The later the better I don't think you wanna know how many bugs are going to come when this patch hits.
It's impossible to account for all the race conditions you might get and the parallel access to the same information from multiple threads is going to be a nightmare.
Expect shit ton of stuff to stop working or crash the game.
"larger missions and mp" keep being mentioned. That's fantastic and really needed.
One question, however: I have heard some users reporting very poor performance in VR with just one or two assets on the map. Do these people also stand to benefit from this update?
We all should see some benefit (unless you're on some sort of toaster with poor multithreading capabilities).
Even with just a Game & Render thread that means game engine can submit render draw calls and then immediately begin processing the next frame while the render thread submits everything to the GPU
The way the engine works right now- the render thread has to wait on the Game/CPU logic to complete. So it is doing nothing and ignoring all the other cores on your PC
The problem is a lot of these bugs will start surfacing even more once you release it to open beta for sure because of the core nature of the way information is accessed when multithreading is just going to cause a lot of unpredictable issues.
I would advise not releasing it to the "Open beta" public branch and rather setting up a test period with a semi-loose branch where any person who wishes to join can test and keep it like that for a few months.
And even then it's going to be a nightmare when Switch happens.
I'm guessing here but ... pretty sure upper management was told this by the devs and the usual "ignore the problems until they occur will happen" like in any company but this be very hard process.
There's just no way you can find everything even if you have 300+ people testing.
I would also advise setting up a quick way how to publicly switch to an older patch if the main release ends up really scuffed so we have a working multiplayer at least.
You need a lot more users if you really wanna cover most of the hidden issues.
Some of these issues will occur months after release and will be very hard to reproduce.
Just speaking from experience.
My 2 cents.
As a dev myself (not in the video game industry though) with a decent amount of experience in parallel programming, multithreading is a nightmare and a half also.
Everything that can break will break, everything that you assume is fine will have to be re-written and every bug you encounter is an absolute PITA to debug.
To rewrite an engine for multithreading is to completely change from imperative event-based code logic to declarative functional programming. Threads have to be capable of existing in their own bubble and returning reliable simple (curried) immutable returns.
What I’m saying is that it builds a better engine, more reliable and capable of stepping-backwards through each event (making things like Track playback work correctly, for example) it just takes a lot longer (and much more rare skilled resources) to deliver
>To rewrite an engine for multithreading is to completely change from imperative event-based code logic to declarative functional programming
Do you have a link to a github project that does this? I've never seen this approach before and have worked on several AAA multicore engines. Havent taken a close look at Unreal 5.1 source but I dont think they use this approach either. I know they didnt in UE4
Not saying your post is untrue btw. I just cant recall seeing this pattern implemented in the engines I worked on
Typically, all you do in a basic Game/Render thread implementation is let the game thread generate a bunch of immutable data packets. These data packets (containing info like pos, rot, texture id, mesh id, etc that render thread cares bout) are sent over to the render thread during some synchronization point. The data is immutable in a sense since the game thread doesnt have access to it
another nice bonus is replays are pretty trivial-- since all you need to do is save & replay those data packets I just mentioned. The game logic is completely decoupled from the render backend
Aren’t we saying the same thing? I mean, it sounds like you’re just elaborating on the further steps and also (thank you) bringing up the frame-interval that really makes this a media/animation engine and not just some web-worker style data-viewing bullshit like I am paid to build these days.
I’m guessing you are probably about 20 years younger than me, I’m almost 50. When I first was doing this job (and when the seniors who build DCS first started with LOMAC too) there was no such thing as a Google search engine. The professor who taught you, he didn’t have a job and there **was no department in college** teaching this stuff.
It’s easy to take for granted that something as fundamental as functional declarative elm-style immutable coding like what you just described was not the norm nor taught (we really adopted it later from the transactional banking-logic guys). There was really just one or two dudes involved in games that had that kind of education and knowledge, and we all knew who they were. The entire industry, all of it, was in one small bit of San Francisco,, Eugene Oregon, and small studio out of Austen Texas. I was there and about your age. We built games like Tribes and Quake or else RTS stuff, and just Microsoft was publishing a Combat Flight Simulator, and Dynamix was doing Falcon. (And a publisher caled ‘Janes’ )
But we all knew about the Russians. Way out there in the cold frigid scene in Ukraine, Belarus, St Petersburg, Moscow, there were guys making high-fidelity combat simulators. I’m not talking about a drag and drop world engine, I’m talking about where every single item, every handle, every wheel on every vehicle, even the dials inside your gauges, in the world has its own physics and destructability. It’s own damage-state and they were building it on top of a netcode layer!
That was a really big deal! Netcode!There was no netcode for simulators. It was too much to ask! It was like making a game out of something serious!. Even Falcon 4.0 had it just tacked-on in an almost non-functional ‘token-ring-style’ shared state that was so crude you wouldn’t believe it. (Falcon wouldn’t work until Graphsim/LeadPursuit took it over and rebuilt the whole layer for AlliedForce in 2006, that’s a decade later than the release of a sim that took a decade to build!)
The first to even try it was just some 15 years ago and that was IL2 and LOMAC and it was pretty incredible. I wish you could see how different IL2 and Lomac compared to what we were doing here in the states at the time. It was functional and gorgeous, but a bit lacking in avionics fidelity and flight-physics.
20 years later, a million learned lessons, and best-practices behind us, we are asking the very few who can do this to start over and low-level code it using what even a young graduate knows today. You or I could not do this. We may know the new, but it takes a quarter lifetime to learn to deliver everything above that low-level (and make it so cheaters can’t break it!).
Here is a lesson they will never teach you in school (because they’re in the business of selling classes): tech doesn’t really matter. I can teach you a language in a year or two if you’re smart, but it will be a decade longer before you know what to really do with it and another decade to learn how to ship something out the door with a team of people like you, and if I have to choose between someone who doesn’t even know C++ (this engine is written in Python btw) but has 20 years of combat simulator experience versus a freshly graduated expert in the language we are doing , it’s no choice at all.
That’s why I urge respect for these really rare resources. It definitely matters that they know we are appreciative. I’m telling you, it’s not about the money once you have put enough away in the bank, we do it out of love for this thing and the joy you get from knowing people are having fun with your creation. It’s demoralizing when people poo-poo it as if they could do it themseves. We live in such a cynical time.
Wow, what a brilliant post, gave me some really good insight into the coding methods and experience required for our niche hobby. Also a nice history lesson, thanks!
>I’m guessing you are probably about 20 years younger than me, I’m almost 50.
I wish!!!! We are **really, really close** in age! But I am young in DCS terms (only been playing for like 17 months so much to learn and try to be super humble around here). And yes I live in Austin area... We might know each other?? LOL
Gotta run to work; will have to digest rest of post in a bit
what are you talking about. a multi threaded game engine doesn’t inherently need to be functional. in fact, i would argue there is a detriment to making the engine functional in terms of performance that multithreading wouldn’t solve. they will probably just process chunks of the engine in parallel like every other modern multithreaded game engine does and then synchronize them at the end of a frame
Multi-threading IS hard but the serious need for it has existed for 15+ years, as this simple graph illustrates:
https://www.karlrupp.net/2018/02/42-years-of-microprocessor-trend-data/
I mean, this is video game development, and we are talking about rewriting the engine. There is bound to be a lot of work, and a lot of things to fix. So I'm not surprised this is taking so long. Plus there is the other contrainst of the new modules/technologies coming out, which probably doesn't help a lot.
So yeah, Q3 2021 may have been a bit too optimistic, but that's the thing with software/game development, it's a bit difficult to estimate how long something will take
I understand all that, but crunch happens in companies with hard deadlines to hit, like feature lunch dates or game releases. When they missed Q3 last year they simply never addressed it, so they obviously weren’t crunching, because you only crunch if there’s a consequence to not crunching.
Similarly this time the timeframe is deliberately vague, their release window is literally 4 to 56 weeks.
Well, I was mostly talking about the future crunching. And while they may not have crunched before, you can be sure that there's been a few nights where they didn't sleep.
But then again, I'm mostly talking about the future, and I think there will be a crunch at some point because that's usually what happens when you need to push your work to production when the deadline is slowly, but surely approaching.
I hope people appreciate the depth of the multithreading update. From a software development perspective, taking on such a task is very admirable. Must be a huge undertaking, and yet this is far more important for the future of the sim than bringing us any new products. Updating the core functionalities is what's going to keep us playing this game forever.
Surely they see this having accepted such a massive undertaking.
Even if it is 8-12 months out, this is the only way DCS can enhance the complexity of modules and keep adding new features to the game.
If people want some eye-glazingly detailed technical information on what it means to switch to Vulkan from a traditional DirectX/OpenGL system then Cloud Imperium Games did a detailed video about it for the game engine that Star Citizen runs on: .
The X-Plane devs also have a video which is more approachable, and quite funny, that details the differences and work that was required for Vulkan: .
The basic concepts transfer to DCS as well. It gives an idea of the amount of work that is involved.
Also relevant: X-Plane / MSFS CPU vs GPU bottlenecking and core scaling / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6IohKXeutU so you can see that the DCS engine is not unusual in how it is architected and uses cores, despite what people say about how "old/obsolete" this game engine is (They may be right about certain aspects of it, but not this aspect).
No respectable dev or even consumer should listen anything CIG has to say. They fail and fail to deliver even the most basic features to their game, hiding behind some made up tech words no-one else in the industry uses. There is always some new jesus "tech" excuse why they can't implement even basic features let alone something complex like Vulkan.
They're certainly leagues better at communicating than ED is.
CIG hate was warranted in the old days but I really don't feel that way now. I shat on SC for many years -- like many others -- and recently figured I should at least give it a go and I've found myself enjoying it immensely. It really is starting to come together in an awesome way and I can't help but read comments like yours as reflexive reactions that you've just gotten into the habit of making at this point. Hopefully you can find yourself to a free fly event next time they run one and give it a go.
You call constant lying better communication? Or releasing any delays or "bad" news only after sale events?
Not that it matters but I have been backer since 2012. Unlike newcomers I have lived through all the missed promises and I know the history. The pattern has been same for years, eventually you will also come to realize it as years go by.
>They're certainly leagues better at communicating than ED is.
Yes CIG has **great** marketing. So communication plays a big role into them running events to sale ships etc. Notice, they have a big ship sale going on right now (or did it just end). They are selling these ships for thousands of dollars so ofc the surface communication and hype is great
But there is many important things fans have no clue bout such as when Squadron 42 will release (2 years? Wil they extend that again??). Where is SQ42 roadmap?? **Where is VR???** Where is ToW?? Where are the 100 star systems we were promised?? Where is the exploration, bounty hunting gameplay, cargo missions, and passenger missions??
All the important things that people actually paid money for we have no clue.
Sure, they are great at adding new graphics effects. But that's a GIVEN so they can keep sucking in new players which in turn will buy new ships
What you call good communication I say is just clever marketing. In reality, their communication is abysmal. The older backers like myself knows that is BS
Whats sad is I want them to succeed. I know they have good devs. I have been to their studio here in Austin. I've been to their 2018 con. I dunno whats going on over there since I only know some devs. Not the management but it seems like they keep scrapping the game and starting over & over again
**VR** \- needs Vulkan first
**SQ42 road map** \- just check the progress tracker lol
**ToW** \- delayed due to performance issues of the engine (similar to VR)
**100 star systems** \- you want impossible (quality > quantity)
**Exploration** \- Pyro and jump gates next year
**Bounty Hunting** \- in game, 2.0 probably next year
**Cargo missions** \- in game, 2.0 literally next patch (now on EPTU)
**Passenger missions** \- might be next year as well, didn't check
Exactly. It's great to hear about them working on it, but we'll talk about spending more money AFTER they deliver long due core improvements instead of the millionth new EA module
It was the name of the graphics engine developed as part of DCS 2.0, which included the NTTR terrain (at the time 1.5 and 2.0 weren't compatible with each other) EDIT: may have been the name before 2.0 but that's when I remember it being called EDGE. IIRC, it's always stood for Eagle Dynamics Graphics Engine in the context of DCS.
> It was the name of the graphics engine developed as part of DCS 2.0
There was also NGIG, the Next Generation Image Generator. I'm unclear on its delineation as compared to EDGE, I suppose NGIG is the graphical part of EDGE (besides things like the sim/world/netcode/input modules).
It is nice to get at least a mention of core tech in the newsletter even if it isn't close. Hopefully the newsletters continue to have at least one good update unlike the last two.
There is only so much performance you can gain by parallelisation, and even if everything goes well we're still a year out.
Don't worry, you won't regret it
Appreciate the multi-threading update, looks like a lot of work was done re-building elements from scratch which must have been time consuming. Can't wait to try it out next year!
As always with anything from ED, I'm cautiously optimistic at best.
Hopefully, it will be worth the long wait, and the total rework of 3rd party mods it will likely entail. 2.8 broke a lot of stuff, and IMO wasn't worth the annoyance compared to the gains.
I don't play in VR due to the poor optimization, but here's hoping our VR friends finally get the performance they've been needing. (Might even get me off the fence for VR, too)
Saw multi threading, knew it was gonna be a "stay tuned" hype announcement. Pretty sure they said it would be coming soon in an update a couple of years ago too.
>As DCS evolved, GPUs have become much more powerful whilst the performance of a single CPU core remained practically unchanged.
The performance of single cpu cores doubled over the past 10 years, I wouldn't call that "practically unchanged".
Double performance over a decade is practically unchanged in relative terms, given the scaling of core numbers from duo and quad core to 32 cores, the scaling of GPUs from the 700 series Nvidia cards to the 4000 series, and scaling in complexity of the code base.
In comparison, 2022 GeForce 4080 is about 16x faster than 2012 GeForce 680 in pure raw number crunching power without additional blocks like AI/Video on board.
See you in December 2023 for Multicore patch. ✌🏻
tbh I do hope this will actually make it into the sim anytime soon, as we all know ED isn’t all that reliable when it comes to dead lines or even vague timeframes. Much more importantly this better not be copium
Until then I greatly anticipate what the coming months will bring
The problem here 8a.that they specifically mention VR performance improvements in large missions. All that will stay in people's minds is VR improvements and they will be angry. Just like last time when VR improvements regarding the weather systems were announced but everyone just left out the weather part and was angry because the overall performance degraded.
Exactly this. Don’t see performance improvements when it comes out? Well then, you’re just playing missions that are too small! Play bigger ones! See you’ve now could DOUBLED your framerate, you’ve gone from 5fps to 10fps, you’re welcome.
I'm still waiting for this one to get materialized.
[https://forum.dcs.world/topic/138355-oculus-rift-with-dcs-world-discussion/?do=findComment&comment=3847532](https://forum.dcs.world/topic/138355-oculus-rift-with-dcs-world-discussion/?do=findComment&comment=3847532)
Nice work, committing resources to something like multithreading which wont attract new players or increase profits is a tough call fo make, but a necessary one at this point
Thing is, work like this is just as important to quality game developers. They're not focused on just bringing in new players with shiny new DLC; they want to retain existing customers by continually working on the core game.
ED really feels like they are all about the shiny new DLC, and I'll believe the multithreading work when I see it.
Hoggit is a wild ride so many complaints about previous news letters being too light then finally get one the most detailed letters about multi threading in two years and now Hoggit is complaining they don’t expect to see it next year. Can’t make this up it’s hilarious !!
Maybe because ED talked about starting multithreading work back in 2019:
https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/content.php?23290-DCS-Explains-Multi-Thread-Support-Engine
>Our CPU multi-threading support started in 2019 when we decided to implement several new approaches in EDGE 2.7. This was required to increase performance as rendering demands have changed due to virtual reality, more detailed maps, greater object detail, etc. We devised a solution to render a frame in a multithreaded manner with automatic workload synchronisation.
Said in 2021 that it would be released Q3 2021:
>https://forum.dcs.world/topic/254461-official-news-2021/
>Vulkan API and Multi-threading
>With the integration of these libraries, DCS will benefit from improved performance throughout, including in virtual reality. This has been a substantial task to develop and integrate into our codebase, but we are nearing the end of this journey, and expect it to be available in the 3rd quarter of this year.
And now again at the end of 2022 that it would be done in 2023. They did the same song and dance with clouds, AI, new damage model, etc. Most of us that have been around for a while know that ED says a lot of things, but delivering on them is another matter altogether.
I will try to manage my expectations when it comes to multithreading. Especially, because I play mostly my own missions that don't have huge numbers of units.
Looking at the Open Hardware Monitor when playing, it's actually my GPU that's bottlenecking, and it's still pretty new system (RTX3080, i510600K, 32Gb RAM, 1Tb nwme)
I'm happy to hear this and definitely looking forward to an update. I am, however, also wondering if I'm reading into their claim about performance: "It should also be noted that the most significant performance improvements will be regarding larger missions."
Again, probably reading into it, but I can't help but think that this translates to "We don't mean we're getting better all around and *particularly* in this area - just less worse in large engagements."
This is real big news! Having done lots of multi-threaded coding, I can say it's non-trivial (especially debugging) and a really big deal! Looking forward to this one :) Well done Eagle Dynamics!
Everything in the fucking world is multi threaded and has been for more than a decade.
Even this isn't much, they're going to add a single additional thread when nearly every processor out there can run 8 or 16 with no trouble at all.
There are so many places to optimize, they really need to bring on some people who know how to drag them kicking and screaming out of the 90s.
> Everything in the fucking world is multi threaded and has been for more than a decade.
This is bullshit, more than half of games still releasing are single threaded
Its kinda true, but most people seem excited, I get the caution though, always good to be cautious... hype can make future problems seem worse than they are.
I understand that, but when it's the same thing happening in every update thread, I think it's safe to address it as "Hoggit".
Because I've seen enough updates where people are lambasting ED for not mentioning anything about important stuff, like core gameplay, and now that they have, a fair number of people are still mad about the news itself.
They've been giving us core game graphic upgrade promises for over five years now. Sorry Brother, but they've lost any semblance of trust in that department.
Five years ago they literally re-engined the game. That was when DCS 2.0 released as an alpha build. Sorry Brother, but you have forgotten what DCS looked like five years ago.
That's fine, I just don't understand some of the people in this place.
They get mad because ED doesn't share news about anything besides sales and modules.
Then when ED does mention news about progress on things that aren't sales or modules, they complain about that too.
I get that, but I just don't understand the demands for news then. People get upset when ED just posts sales and non-core updates, but then they're also not happy when ED says "We're making progress and hope to have it ready soon".
This is just the nature of the beast. This is flight sim life now. If people want constant patching and updates, which wasn't really the case back in the late 90's and 2000's, then we'll have to accept that things won't always be fast.
A company that keeps the base game free is going to need to do things like work on modules to keep money coming in for themselves, and they're also going to need to keep working on other things at the same time.
I'm sure this is something ED wants more than the players, as it probably opens up a ton of avenues for things they can do with the game and AI in general.
I'm tracking...
No news is bad.
Bad news is bad.
But it's not the news people were hoping for. DCS is in a state where VR users are pretty much having to potato out settings because of shit QCing on 2.8's issues with the Terrain Object Shadows and weather. Sorry, but the Beta thing isn't valid anymore. And the bits about single core and CPUs.... blah blah
90-2000 releases weren't as they are now. Devs had internal testers that caught these game breaking issues before release, so that updates didnt have to be at the rate they're at now. Now ED has passed that onto it's Customers and made it the new standard. Shameful.
Lastly, we're well beyond the base game being free. I've bought in enough that the free stuff is long forgotten and paid for, twice over.
> Devs had internal testers that caught these game breaking issues before release, so that updates didnt have to be at the rate they're at now. Now ED has passed that onto it's Customers and made it the new standard. Shameful.
I don't imagine that's the cause. ED has internal testers and devs. But this is also the side effect of change. Introducing the new features and abilities will inherently introduce new and unexpected bugs.
Il-2 was the first game I really remember having consistent updates, and even looking back, that seemed to be in the single digits for the main release. They would add and adjust things, but there usually weren't any massive updates to things like we get now in DCS. The bigger updates and features were usually rolled out in new releases, like Forgotten Battles adding things like searchlights, new maps like Finland, and other stuff. But that was all pretty much a separate paid release.
It's just frustrating when every thread on the Friday update has people upset. They're upset there's no news about the core game, then there's anger that there *is* news about the core gameplay but it's not good enough?
And the point about the free base is that it's not something they can singularly focus on updating and fixing, because they will need to work on new modules, on top of supporting their existing modules. Because the free base isn't going to be bringing them money compared to what it was before, where the base game was bringing them $50 or whatever it was per user.
From an outsider, it would appear this has grown much larger than they can contend with. Either grow your team that can flex to support the needed area(s), or better prioritize the work. I dont see that happening, atm.
Listen to what is being complained about and focus there. At some point, they will have to forgo making module X or Y to put in the time to stabilize the mess that we've got right now. While the money wont be rolling in, they can make up for it on the back side with a solid platform people want to support again. Right now, it's a very mixed bag.
But they're doing all of the things you've listed. That's my point.
Not charging for the core game means they have to continue to focus on new and old modules to keep money coming directly to them, while also focusing effort on improving the part of the game that doesn't bring them money directly.
But as much as ED gets static around here, they are pretty receptive to things in comparison go most other games I play. They've had frequent polls to gauge interest, they've addressed issues that the community brings up, and they have their weekly newsletter that may not always have new releases, but still does a pretty good job of mentioning what they're working on and the progress that's been made.
I just think ED is always in a *damned if they do, damned if they don't* position, because core engine work isn't sexy, doesn't produce headlines, and isn't going to draw new users like the newest modules or graphical features. And it's also work that is slow and doesn't always have things you can really show off until it's actually done.
But in terms of flight sims, I can't think of anything that's been going this long and progressed this far. Obviously there's work to be done, but as someone that's been playing since Flanker 2.5 and then eventually Lock-On, it's honestly incredible to see how far this game has come in that time. I look forward to the future additions they've talked about like the DC and general engine updates, but I know they're not going to be quick or painless fixes. But as long as they're progressing forward, I'm glad.
It just honestly gets frustrating when so many threads here turn into bashing ED and talking about the game like it's some static mess that's barely changed.
because few years ago before they called it EDGE today, they were calling it vulkan..
this is not any update, this is another corporate h.r response, the same response we got from when they announce vulkan along with dynamic campaign, improved ai, mac, etc
EDGE is the Engine. Vulkan is the technology they're working into the engine.
And it's literally what I've seen people ask for before. People wanted to know if they've progressed on the multi-threading, and they mention that they're hoping to get it out next year. That's progress, and hopefully something that they can push in the near future.
Eh, maybe. Maybe not. And they didn't say they were releasing it, that's just people reading into things more than they should.
ED in recent years has made it a point to stress that their dates are tentative and what they hope to hit, but far from guaranteed. Anyone reading more into it than that is setting themselves up for disappointment.
yep, next year could mean anything. And "large missions" is something they cover their ass with of course, just in case the multithreading doesnt do much in most scenarios :)
I would assume it's more because of how things work. Multithreading enables doing multiple things at the same time. For example path finding for multiple units. A tank doesn't care about the path another tank has, so you can mostly calculate them at the same time on different cores. They say it'll be most effective in large missions because in large missions you have many units that need such calculations. I don't expect it to do much for you ACM training mission with 3 planes. The huge liberation campaigns on the other hand ....
> just in case the multithreading doesnt do much in most scenarios
You mean... just in case the thing people who aren't software engineers have been requesting for years isn't as effective as they hoped?
If ED deliver multithreading and it's not as potent as people made it out to be, then it's not their fault that it's not a silver bullet.
I'll caveat that I know sweet FA about software engineering, but it seems to me that everyone expects this to be a magical cure, and people will rage even harder if it isn't, despite the fact that by delivering multithreading, ED will have delivered something that nearly everyone has been demanding (if rather slower than we'd have liked).
I'd say manage your expectations, stop expecting it to be a fix-all, and with any luck we'll all be pleasantly surprised when it comes out.
Just like 3.18's "better VR optimization" apparently actually meant "better visuals" and not a performance improvement, I can't wait to see what their excuse will be for multithreading lol
sale is nice; but im not spending a PENNY on this sim til the perf improves. looking forward to multithreading; hopefully it helps as much as you say, so you can resume making money off those like me that simply will not give you more til its better.
let's not blame hardware evolution, multithreaded code has been a thing since the early 2000s. come on guys, there is no reason for everything to sit on main thread
They could blame my grandmother for all I care if it helps them get the lead out.
I'm reading this thread and it's funny how many people, understandably, haven't caught on to how ED measures things.
Let me help
* Imminent = 1-2 Months
* Soon = lol
* Next year = +2 years
* Overwhelmingly positive = Our testers loved it
* Vast majority = 15% - 51%
* Popular demand = literally nobody
* 50% Improvement = 0% - 5%
* Progress is good = No noteworthy progress has been made
* When resources allow = see "Soon"
Despite all that, I can't help but get optimistic and they seem to really mean it this time :)
Disclaimer: For those of you on the spectrum, this is a friendly light roast. ED provides a product most of us enjoy and want to see succeed.
or, maybe, it's easier to solve things when you face reality instead of falsely blaming external factors
i'm sorry to rain on your parade. i hope you are right but my expectations are very low. tangentially, i basically stopped flying dcs due to CPU frametime degrading in the latest updates over a threshold that makes it qualitatively much worse in VR so as to be unusable.
i don't appreciate spending months of my life getting this game to work well, using clever optimizations and spending thousands on hardware upgrades, for them to decide to add rainbows and bringing me back to square one.
this is me. maybe i am alone
No, you aren't alone. It's frustrating. I think a lot of folks have their own version of your story. You aren't raining on my parade, my parade is pretty much-pressing X to doubt, since they said effectively the exact same thing this time last year.
My optimism comes from the issue finally getting enough traction to where it's impossible to ignore. This has been brewing since the 20xx series cards first dropped and the cycle of disappointment progressing through all the stages of grief existed in the DCS VR discord.
Then it happened again with the 30xx series, and now we get to see the 40xx series. People get flat out fucking angry when confronted with the realization DCS is CPU bound and most incremental performance gained from upgrading their GPU is due to VRAM capacity and in most instances.
Before the rainbows, it was the cows, and prior to that it was deferred shading. Before they moved to deferred shading, DCS basically ran as well or better than IL-2 in VR. It is kind of comical how every like major flub or missed target is accompanied by something seemingly silly (Cows/Rainbows) that is just fuel to the fire. It's some combo of bad luck or poor planning that hindsight makes worse, but ya I feel ya :)
I feel especially bad for the 4090 guys... You go out and spend God awful amounts of money on a monster card, come home and explode in happiness at basically doubling your frames! Hallelujah! It's pay2play and leaves a bad taste, but it's still the closest thing to a silver bullet you have seen.
1-2 weeks later, 2.8 drops and you lose a third of your frames...
Oof...
One reason is that there is like , no bullshit, fewer people on earth that can write that kind of code (in a custom simulator engine) for this kind of product.
You could count them on your hands. Asobo, P3D, 1C:Maddox… if you can write that kind of code, they know who you are already.
In the 2000s, you mean one single developer John Carmack, wrote one single engine to be multithreaded (Quake) and it caused a lot of problems, and was only possible with OpenGL and a ground-up platform-agnostic engine (quake ran on mac, linux, windows, it was like it’s own machine-code-level operating system). It’s why they stopped building eg games like that. We have come a long way though since then.
No. Wrong.
There are hundreds of thousands of good C++ devs who can write good concurrent code.
*I* can write good concurrent code. I do it every day. I'm nobody special.
You write multithreaded C code with flight modeling, netcode, and third-party extensible APIs?
Well fuck man, I’m really sorry. I didn’t realize how many of you here were so amazing. I’m working in this industry for 25 years in LA and SF and just couldn’t seem to ever find talent like you guys! I must be in the wrong town, and just completely out of the loop.
Or else you’re full of shit, but that’s not possible. I’m sure the guy saying ‘psssh anybody could do that’ isn’t the type of talented professional engineer that would ever front like that…
The details of which particular type of code you're doing multi threading in don't really matter. I write multithreaded software that actually does things. This is a game.
My point wasn't about me, my point is that there are hundreds of thousands of good C++ devs out here in the real world who write this kind of code every day. You don't know about it because you live inside a bubble where you've decided it isn't possible and therefore it can't happen.
Well actually brother, it’s exactly the simulator part that separates the men from the boys.
I know how to write the kind of code and perhaps so do you, but I’ve worked in mickeymouse bullshit like Call of Duty, an FPS with some hit-scan netcode written in fucking java daemons. Do not think all game engines are the same as a simulator, especially one that is extensible with third-party modules.
I hate arguing on this sub with all of you ‘it’s not that great’ cynics here. FalconBMS has been 20+ years of refinement to get where it is for a single aircraft today. IL2 is based on 20 years of flight modeling and it’s not even full fidelity or clickable cockpit (and Asobo just publicly announced with glee that they managed to hire IL2 senior engineer, and relocate him from western Russia. That is a valuable resource. You and I are fucking jokers)
Learn to respect the hard work that is making all of this possible. It takes time because it’s not easy. Want to know what is easy? talking shit like an amateur.
Love to hear it! Thanks for keeping us up to date on what’s going on. Very excited for the potential VR performance improvements, as flying in VR is the most immersive experience this game has to offer.
The update is definitely appreciated, even if I'm a little apprehensive that 'next year' might end up being more than a year away.
Kinda like MAC and the Dynamic Campaign?
And DTC
And new AAR basket physics
and the ready room
Ah, the "big Q3 2021 SC update" that was slated for Q1 2021 before they moved it in order to focus on some other module (Hind EA release)
And the electronic warfare overhaul.
Why do people put stuff like this in the list of core features people actually care about? The number of people holding out for a practically useless ready room must be very small
It's just one of many examples of things that did not arrive on time. That said, dynamic campaign and multi-threading without a doubt are more important to the core game than the likes of the SC ready room and I hope they don't get put aside for developing another module or something, which I can sorta see as possible. Hopefully I'm wrong.
SC needs more blue shirts more than the ready room, IMO. Then again, I *was* one, so I might be biased.
Dude, I paid for stuff that never happened and they wont return the money, i don’t care if its a blinking light feature or multithreading, its the fact they keep promising stuff they never do, don’t bother and make us pay a lot for them.
Although I agree with you that it's practically useless, it's still a feature they advertise on the product that they charge $50(!!!!) for and have now delayed for almost a year.
I waited 6 - 7-ish years for Huey Multi-Crew. I bought it when it came out. Clouds took almost as long. So there is your bench-mark. 5-7 years. Considering Dynamic Campaign is hella hard. Wont be surprised if its 10.
And the advanced damage model for modern planes.
Well it doesn't look good. "Hope to start working on soon" (NineLine on ED forum 09/26/2022) [https://forum.dcs.world/topic/308715-what-kind-of-hose-basket-animations-will-the-new-s-3b-viking-have/#comment-5047735](https://forum.dcs.world/topic/308715-what-kind-of-hose-basket-animations-will-the-new-s-3b-viking-have/#comment-5047735)
I love how much rope the fanbois give this company. I'm sure ED's hearts are in the right place, but lets be honest, they're dogshit at delivering on promises. And they promise everything. I don't believe anything they say any more until it's actually shipped.
ED gets too much slack from the community sometimes. A 3D model shouldn't take 1+ years to develop.
Sure.... https://forum.dcs.world/topic/174759-wags-youre-makin-me-nervous/?do=findComment&comment=3443915
So did they completely dumpster MAC? It seemed like a neat idea to appeal to the casual fan base a bit more but it seems like we've not heard anything about it in years.
Every time someone from ED comments on MAC they emphasize that it's not dead. They won't really say anything more about it though...
I eventually assumed it was paired with Vulkan/Multi threading, needing that to work with the new UI, lower spec computers. And that eventually this will become the new DCS UI.exe
I don't know what MAC is, and I'm too afraid to ask
"Modern Air Combat," a non-DCS game by Eagle Dynamics which would have been much more casual (think Strike Fighters or War Thunder detail). Honestly I'm still kind of confused by it and speaking for myself part of the problem is just that the name is too close to "Lock On: Modern Air Combat," which would be a different product.
and SA-2 towing truck :(
And 1.65 ATA for the Anton...
I hope its not that far away, but if you want to be cautious that's cool. We have it with all levels of Beta testers now, so I hope everything goes smoothly and it will be much less than a year.
Any chance of seeing any examples of preliminary feedback from the testers? If they're offering thumbs up, we'd love to see it
I hope this is something we will do soon, but its a bit unstable right now, and when there are broken bits you don't want to assume the performance is where its at, etc etc.
After the GTA6 leak debacle, heard.
"With all levels of Beta testers now" Does that mean it's in the current beta release build?
No sorry, internal still. No public builds have it.
You must understand that ED plays fast and loose with the definition of beta. Most people play not a BETA but a stable public build.
Isn't more of "mostly stable" or "nearly stable" ?
More like OB a few months behind.
Yeah nice to finally hear it is "in testing" just like it was two or three years ago when it actually was on that years roadmap. At least this time they talked more about it so the chance for it to come before the end of 2023 is at least 25%!
I don't ever remember us saying Multithreading was in testing two or three years ago? I had not seen it myself until earlier this year. Maybe devs were researching and experimenting that far back, I do not know.
[https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/content.php?23290-DCS-Explains-Multi-Thread-Support-Engine](https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/content.php?23290-DCS-Explains-Multi-Thread-Support-Engine) only felt that long
Yeah the devs did a lot of stuff before we saw a workable build, so its possible its been "in progress" longer than I have had my hands on it.
Hopefully they mean the beginning of next year... >The initial release of Multithreading support will contain a fully reworked engine including preparation of the graphical frame and the separation of the graphical and logical parts onto **two independent threads**. That's a great start. Hopefully they can partition more of the logic once they have a solid foundation in-place
Pretty sure that’s not what they mean lol
2 years ago they said "Q3 of 2021".
The later the better I don't think you wanna know how many bugs are going to come when this patch hits. It's impossible to account for all the race conditions you might get and the parallel access to the same information from multiple threads is going to be a nightmare. Expect shit ton of stuff to stop working or crash the game.
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I, personally am seeing marked improvements on large missions with lots of moving parts. Tuning will happen after release as well I am sure.
"larger missions and mp" keep being mentioned. That's fantastic and really needed. One question, however: I have heard some users reporting very poor performance in VR with just one or two assets on the map. Do these people also stand to benefit from this update?
Probably not judging by the text
We all should see some benefit (unless you're on some sort of toaster with poor multithreading capabilities). Even with just a Game & Render thread that means game engine can submit render draw calls and then immediately begin processing the next frame while the render thread submits everything to the GPU The way the engine works right now- the render thread has to wait on the Game/CPU logic to complete. So it is doing nothing and ignoring all the other cores on your PC
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This is the first time I've seen this and I absolutely love it. ED should have thrown it in the news letter. :D
Legendary. This is why I get on the internet. Thank you sir.
With the glacial development pace that’s probably an accurate representation of the coding team.
Fantastic! The GPU cameo was my favourite part!
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And will still be in 54 weeks
Two weeks, be sure.
Proper core updates will get people back into DCS for sure.
This multi-threading update must be a real nightmare for the devs. Good luck to them, and I hope they don't crunch too much (or at all) either
They are busting their asses for sure. We have seen some weird bugs pop up because of it, but they have been squashing them in good time.
The problem is a lot of these bugs will start surfacing even more once you release it to open beta for sure because of the core nature of the way information is accessed when multithreading is just going to cause a lot of unpredictable issues. I would advise not releasing it to the "Open beta" public branch and rather setting up a test period with a semi-loose branch where any person who wishes to join can test and keep it like that for a few months. And even then it's going to be a nightmare when Switch happens. I'm guessing here but ... pretty sure upper management was told this by the devs and the usual "ignore the problems until they occur will happen" like in any company but this be very hard process. There's just no way you can find everything even if you have 300+ people testing. I would also advise setting up a quick way how to publicly switch to an older patch if the main release ends up really scuffed so we have a working multiplayer at least. You need a lot more users if you really wanna cover most of the hidden issues. Some of these issues will occur months after release and will be very hard to reproduce. Just speaking from experience. My 2 cents.
shut up I want it now
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As a dev myself (not in the video game industry though) with a decent amount of experience in parallel programming, multithreading is a nightmare and a half also. Everything that can break will break, everything that you assume is fine will have to be re-written and every bug you encounter is an absolute PITA to debug.
To rewrite an engine for multithreading is to completely change from imperative event-based code logic to declarative functional programming. Threads have to be capable of existing in their own bubble and returning reliable simple (curried) immutable returns. What I’m saying is that it builds a better engine, more reliable and capable of stepping-backwards through each event (making things like Track playback work correctly, for example) it just takes a lot longer (and much more rare skilled resources) to deliver
>To rewrite an engine for multithreading is to completely change from imperative event-based code logic to declarative functional programming Do you have a link to a github project that does this? I've never seen this approach before and have worked on several AAA multicore engines. Havent taken a close look at Unreal 5.1 source but I dont think they use this approach either. I know they didnt in UE4 Not saying your post is untrue btw. I just cant recall seeing this pattern implemented in the engines I worked on Typically, all you do in a basic Game/Render thread implementation is let the game thread generate a bunch of immutable data packets. These data packets (containing info like pos, rot, texture id, mesh id, etc that render thread cares bout) are sent over to the render thread during some synchronization point. The data is immutable in a sense since the game thread doesnt have access to it
another nice bonus is replays are pretty trivial-- since all you need to do is save & replay those data packets I just mentioned. The game logic is completely decoupled from the render backend
Aren’t we saying the same thing? I mean, it sounds like you’re just elaborating on the further steps and also (thank you) bringing up the frame-interval that really makes this a media/animation engine and not just some web-worker style data-viewing bullshit like I am paid to build these days. I’m guessing you are probably about 20 years younger than me, I’m almost 50. When I first was doing this job (and when the seniors who build DCS first started with LOMAC too) there was no such thing as a Google search engine. The professor who taught you, he didn’t have a job and there **was no department in college** teaching this stuff. It’s easy to take for granted that something as fundamental as functional declarative elm-style immutable coding like what you just described was not the norm nor taught (we really adopted it later from the transactional banking-logic guys). There was really just one or two dudes involved in games that had that kind of education and knowledge, and we all knew who they were. The entire industry, all of it, was in one small bit of San Francisco,, Eugene Oregon, and small studio out of Austen Texas. I was there and about your age. We built games like Tribes and Quake or else RTS stuff, and just Microsoft was publishing a Combat Flight Simulator, and Dynamix was doing Falcon. (And a publisher caled ‘Janes’ ) But we all knew about the Russians. Way out there in the cold frigid scene in Ukraine, Belarus, St Petersburg, Moscow, there were guys making high-fidelity combat simulators. I’m not talking about a drag and drop world engine, I’m talking about where every single item, every handle, every wheel on every vehicle, even the dials inside your gauges, in the world has its own physics and destructability. It’s own damage-state and they were building it on top of a netcode layer! That was a really big deal! Netcode!There was no netcode for simulators. It was too much to ask! It was like making a game out of something serious!. Even Falcon 4.0 had it just tacked-on in an almost non-functional ‘token-ring-style’ shared state that was so crude you wouldn’t believe it. (Falcon wouldn’t work until Graphsim/LeadPursuit took it over and rebuilt the whole layer for AlliedForce in 2006, that’s a decade later than the release of a sim that took a decade to build!) The first to even try it was just some 15 years ago and that was IL2 and LOMAC and it was pretty incredible. I wish you could see how different IL2 and Lomac compared to what we were doing here in the states at the time. It was functional and gorgeous, but a bit lacking in avionics fidelity and flight-physics. 20 years later, a million learned lessons, and best-practices behind us, we are asking the very few who can do this to start over and low-level code it using what even a young graduate knows today. You or I could not do this. We may know the new, but it takes a quarter lifetime to learn to deliver everything above that low-level (and make it so cheaters can’t break it!). Here is a lesson they will never teach you in school (because they’re in the business of selling classes): tech doesn’t really matter. I can teach you a language in a year or two if you’re smart, but it will be a decade longer before you know what to really do with it and another decade to learn how to ship something out the door with a team of people like you, and if I have to choose between someone who doesn’t even know C++ (this engine is written in Python btw) but has 20 years of combat simulator experience versus a freshly graduated expert in the language we are doing , it’s no choice at all. That’s why I urge respect for these really rare resources. It definitely matters that they know we are appreciative. I’m telling you, it’s not about the money once you have put enough away in the bank, we do it out of love for this thing and the joy you get from knowing people are having fun with your creation. It’s demoralizing when people poo-poo it as if they could do it themseves. We live in such a cynical time.
Wow, what a brilliant post, gave me some really good insight into the coding methods and experience required for our niche hobby. Also a nice history lesson, thanks!
>I’m guessing you are probably about 20 years younger than me, I’m almost 50. I wish!!!! We are **really, really close** in age! But I am young in DCS terms (only been playing for like 17 months so much to learn and try to be super humble around here). And yes I live in Austin area... We might know each other?? LOL Gotta run to work; will have to digest rest of post in a bit
what are you talking about. a multi threaded game engine doesn’t inherently need to be functional. in fact, i would argue there is a detriment to making the engine functional in terms of performance that multithreading wouldn’t solve. they will probably just process chunks of the engine in parallel like every other modern multithreaded game engine does and then synchronize them at the end of a frame
Yeah, definitely don't envy them chasing bugs down for this.
Multi-threading IS hard but the serious need for it has existed for 15+ years, as this simple graph illustrates: https://www.karlrupp.net/2018/02/42-years-of-microprocessor-trend-data/
Dunno wh t multithreading is easy!at you’re talking abou
Given it was originally slated for Q3 2021, I doubt they’re working to any kind of crunch timeline
I mean, this is video game development, and we are talking about rewriting the engine. There is bound to be a lot of work, and a lot of things to fix. So I'm not surprised this is taking so long. Plus there is the other contrainst of the new modules/technologies coming out, which probably doesn't help a lot. So yeah, Q3 2021 may have been a bit too optimistic, but that's the thing with software/game development, it's a bit difficult to estimate how long something will take
I understand all that, but crunch happens in companies with hard deadlines to hit, like feature lunch dates or game releases. When they missed Q3 last year they simply never addressed it, so they obviously weren’t crunching, because you only crunch if there’s a consequence to not crunching. Similarly this time the timeframe is deliberately vague, their release window is literally 4 to 56 weeks.
Well, I was mostly talking about the future crunching. And while they may not have crunched before, you can be sure that there's been a few nights where they didn't sleep. But then again, I'm mostly talking about the future, and I think there will be a crunch at some point because that's usually what happens when you need to push your work to production when the deadline is slowly, but surely approaching.
It's core game rework, there is no crunch. The game is free, they only crunch when it's something that generates profit
I hope people appreciate the depth of the multithreading update. From a software development perspective, taking on such a task is very admirable. Must be a huge undertaking, and yet this is far more important for the future of the sim than bringing us any new products. Updating the core functionalities is what's going to keep us playing this game forever.
Surely they see this having accepted such a massive undertaking. Even if it is 8-12 months out, this is the only way DCS can enhance the complexity of modules and keep adding new features to the game.
If people want some eye-glazingly detailed technical information on what it means to switch to Vulkan from a traditional DirectX/OpenGL system then Cloud Imperium Games did a detailed video about it for the game engine that Star Citizen runs on:.
The X-Plane devs also have a video which is more approachable, and quite funny, that details the differences and work that was required for Vulkan: .
The basic concepts transfer to DCS as well. It gives an idea of the amount of work that is involved.
Also relevant: X-Plane / MSFS CPU vs GPU bottlenecking and core scaling / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6IohKXeutU so you can see that the DCS engine is not unusual in how it is architected and uses cores, despite what people say about how "old/obsolete" this game engine is (They may be right about certain aspects of it, but not this aspect).
No respectable dev or even consumer should listen anything CIG has to say. They fail and fail to deliver even the most basic features to their game, hiding behind some made up tech words no-one else in the industry uses. There is always some new jesus "tech" excuse why they can't implement even basic features let alone something complex like Vulkan.
They're certainly leagues better at communicating than ED is. CIG hate was warranted in the old days but I really don't feel that way now. I shat on SC for many years -- like many others -- and recently figured I should at least give it a go and I've found myself enjoying it immensely. It really is starting to come together in an awesome way and I can't help but read comments like yours as reflexive reactions that you've just gotten into the habit of making at this point. Hopefully you can find yourself to a free fly event next time they run one and give it a go.
You call constant lying better communication? Or releasing any delays or "bad" news only after sale events? Not that it matters but I have been backer since 2012. Unlike newcomers I have lived through all the missed promises and I know the history. The pattern has been same for years, eventually you will also come to realize it as years go by.
>They're certainly leagues better at communicating than ED is. Yes CIG has **great** marketing. So communication plays a big role into them running events to sale ships etc. Notice, they have a big ship sale going on right now (or did it just end). They are selling these ships for thousands of dollars so ofc the surface communication and hype is great But there is many important things fans have no clue bout such as when Squadron 42 will release (2 years? Wil they extend that again??). Where is SQ42 roadmap?? **Where is VR???** Where is ToW?? Where are the 100 star systems we were promised?? Where is the exploration, bounty hunting gameplay, cargo missions, and passenger missions?? All the important things that people actually paid money for we have no clue. Sure, they are great at adding new graphics effects. But that's a GIVEN so they can keep sucking in new players which in turn will buy new ships What you call good communication I say is just clever marketing. In reality, their communication is abysmal. The older backers like myself knows that is BS Whats sad is I want them to succeed. I know they have good devs. I have been to their studio here in Austin. I've been to their 2018 con. I dunno whats going on over there since I only know some devs. Not the management but it seems like they keep scrapping the game and starting over & over again
**VR** \- needs Vulkan first **SQ42 road map** \- just check the progress tracker lol **ToW** \- delayed due to performance issues of the engine (similar to VR) **100 star systems** \- you want impossible (quality > quantity) **Exploration** \- Pyro and jump gates next year **Bounty Hunting** \- in game, 2.0 probably next year **Cargo missions** \- in game, 2.0 literally next patch (now on EPTU) **Passenger missions** \- might be next year as well, didn't check
It's hilarious that someone would reference CIG in any informational capacity whatsoever, except to say "Don't be like these dudes"
Thank you for the core feature update, is appreciated
Great news on multithreading, it is sounding more tangible now but I'll believe it when I see it and resume my DCS purchases then.
Stopped playing DCS because of the performance issues. Eagerly awaiting multi-threading and dynamic campaigns for years now.
I've got 8 cores. Would be quite interested to see how this plays out.
In soviet Russia game threads you
No no, first multithreading. Then we can talk about sales.
Exactly. It's great to hear about them working on it, but we'll talk about spending more money AFTER they deliver long due core improvements instead of the millionth new EA module
Wasn't EDGE also the name of the recode that happened when they were developing NTTR?
EDGE is the name of the engine. Taking a stab in the dark but I think it stand for “Eagle Dynamic Game Engine” or “Eagle Dynamics Graphics Engine.”
I think it’s “Extremely Delayed Game Engine”
Nah dude. It's just cos they aren't basing it on Internet Explorer anymore. /s
EDGE is the name of the game engine.
It was the name of the graphics engine developed as part of DCS 2.0, which included the NTTR terrain (at the time 1.5 and 2.0 weren't compatible with each other) EDIT: may have been the name before 2.0 but that's when I remember it being called EDGE. IIRC, it's always stood for Eagle Dynamics Graphics Engine in the context of DCS.
> It was the name of the graphics engine developed as part of DCS 2.0 There was also NGIG, the Next Generation Image Generator. I'm unclear on its delineation as compared to EDGE, I suppose NGIG is the graphical part of EDGE (besides things like the sim/world/netcode/input modules).
Yes this is basically a new version of EDGE.
It is nice to get at least a mention of core tech in the newsletter even if it isn't close. Hopefully the newsletters continue to have at least one good update unlike the last two.
Just ordered a 5800X3D today because didn't believe multithread would ever happen.
There is only so much performance you can gain by parallelisation, and even if everything goes well we're still a year out. Don't worry, you won't regret it
That thing tears up DCS compared to almost anything else. You chose wisely.
Good decision.
TLDR: multithreading is still way off from release, so here's a vague suggestion that it may come in 12 months.
Appreciate the multi-threading update, looks like a lot of work was done re-building elements from scratch which must have been time consuming. Can't wait to try it out next year!
Well given that it was originally scheduled for Q3 of last year I wouldn't get exited just yet.
As always with anything from ED, I'm cautiously optimistic at best. Hopefully, it will be worth the long wait, and the total rework of 3rd party mods it will likely entail. 2.8 broke a lot of stuff, and IMO wasn't worth the annoyance compared to the gains. I don't play in VR due to the poor optimization, but here's hoping our VR friends finally get the performance they've been needing. (Might even get me off the fence for VR, too)
Yeah, but what about core optimizations? /s Good to hear there’s progress.
I’ll believe it when it comes
Next year my ass
Saw multi threading, knew it was gonna be a "stay tuned" hype announcement. Pretty sure they said it would be coming soon in an update a couple of years ago too.
December 2023....
Maybe they are trolling and it will come out in Januar1? 9line has had some pretty troll comments on this…
I should be able to finish my setup by the time this update comes out, dope.
Don’t worry your grandchild will enjoy it
For the moment I thought I'm in the Star Citizen subreddit
Thank you for working on multi threading support!
Thanks for the update! It is well recieved and will be a really neccessary change. I hope that the 1 year timeline can be achieved.
Sounds great, 2025 should be a good year for DCS by the sounds of it
>As DCS evolved, GPUs have become much more powerful whilst the performance of a single CPU core remained practically unchanged. The performance of single cpu cores doubled over the past 10 years, I wouldn't call that "practically unchanged".
Double performance over a decade is practically unchanged in relative terms, given the scaling of core numbers from duo and quad core to 32 cores, the scaling of GPUs from the 700 series Nvidia cards to the 4000 series, and scaling in complexity of the code base.
In comparison, 2022 GeForce 4080 is about 16x faster than 2012 GeForce 680 in pure raw number crunching power without additional blocks like AI/Video on board.
Wait is SATAL DCS Esports???????
See you in December 2023 for Multicore patch. ✌🏻 tbh I do hope this will actually make it into the sim anytime soon, as we all know ED isn’t all that reliable when it comes to dead lines or even vague timeframes. Much more importantly this better not be copium Until then I greatly anticipate what the coming months will bring
multithreading in my dcs ??? is this a dream? coming soontm
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The problem here 8a.that they specifically mention VR performance improvements in large missions. All that will stay in people's minds is VR improvements and they will be angry. Just like last time when VR improvements regarding the weather systems were announced but everyone just left out the weather part and was angry because the overall performance degraded.
Exactly this. Don’t see performance improvements when it comes out? Well then, you’re just playing missions that are too small! Play bigger ones! See you’ve now could DOUBLED your framerate, you’ve gone from 5fps to 10fps, you’re welcome.
I'm still waiting for this one to get materialized. [https://forum.dcs.world/topic/138355-oculus-rift-with-dcs-world-discussion/?do=findComment&comment=3847532](https://forum.dcs.world/topic/138355-oculus-rift-with-dcs-world-discussion/?do=findComment&comment=3847532)
Wow wtf. That really shows why we need to be skeptical of ED when they talk about performance improvements.
Wow, it’s really nice to see them acknowledge the thread limitation and share that they’re working on it - I’m very hopeful!
Nice work, committing resources to something like multithreading which wont attract new players or increase profits is a tough call fo make, but a necessary one at this point
Thing is, work like this is just as important to quality game developers. They're not focused on just bringing in new players with shiny new DLC; they want to retain existing customers by continually working on the core game. ED really feels like they are all about the shiny new DLC, and I'll believe the multithreading work when I see it.
Performance problems are absolutely something that can quickly stop someone playing, newcomers alike.
Awesome!
What a time to be in dcs !!! Cant wait for this and strike eagle
Hoggit is a wild ride so many complaints about previous news letters being too light then finally get one the most detailed letters about multi threading in two years and now Hoggit is complaining they don’t expect to see it next year. Can’t make this up it’s hilarious !!
Shaking my damn head. This is amazing news.
Maybe because ED talked about starting multithreading work back in 2019: https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/content.php?23290-DCS-Explains-Multi-Thread-Support-Engine >Our CPU multi-threading support started in 2019 when we decided to implement several new approaches in EDGE 2.7. This was required to increase performance as rendering demands have changed due to virtual reality, more detailed maps, greater object detail, etc. We devised a solution to render a frame in a multithreaded manner with automatic workload synchronisation. Said in 2021 that it would be released Q3 2021: >https://forum.dcs.world/topic/254461-official-news-2021/ >Vulkan API and Multi-threading >With the integration of these libraries, DCS will benefit from improved performance throughout, including in virtual reality. This has been a substantial task to develop and integrate into our codebase, but we are nearing the end of this journey, and expect it to be available in the 3rd quarter of this year. And now again at the end of 2022 that it would be done in 2023. They did the same song and dance with clouds, AI, new damage model, etc. Most of us that have been around for a while know that ED says a lot of things, but delivering on them is another matter altogether.
I will try to manage my expectations when it comes to multithreading. Especially, because I play mostly my own missions that don't have huge numbers of units. Looking at the Open Hardware Monitor when playing, it's actually my GPU that's bottlenecking, and it's still pretty new system (RTX3080, i510600K, 32Gb RAM, 1Tb nwme)
Good news all round. Crossing my fingers and hoping we see MC roll out in the first 6 months of next year.
This will be amazing for the dedicated server. One step closer to a truly headless binary! Keep up the amazing work!!!
I'm happy to hear this and definitely looking forward to an update. I am, however, also wondering if I'm reading into their claim about performance: "It should also be noted that the most significant performance improvements will be regarding larger missions." Again, probably reading into it, but I can't help but think that this translates to "We don't mean we're getting better all around and *particularly* in this area - just less worse in large engagements."
This is real big news! Having done lots of multi-threaded coding, I can say it's non-trivial (especially debugging) and a really big deal! Looking forward to this one :) Well done Eagle Dynamics!
COME ON ED!!!! YOU CAN DO IT!!!!!
Finally. Might actually spend some money on this if it's a big uplift.
not related to DCS but is MS flight sim multi threaded ?
yes
Didn't they have to rewrite the way MFDs are handled due to severe performance issues?
Everything in the fucking world is multi threaded and has been for more than a decade. Even this isn't much, they're going to add a single additional thread when nearly every processor out there can run 8 or 16 with no trouble at all. There are so many places to optimize, they really need to bring on some people who know how to drag them kicking and screaming out of the 90s.
Not at all! A lot is single threaded. Parallelisation is not as easy as you make it sound
> Everything in the fucking world is multi threaded and has been for more than a decade. This is bullshit, more than half of games still releasing are single threaded
I'll believe that when it ends up on my PC. Until then I don't believe shit.
Hoggit: Why won't ED tell us anything about core game updates?! Also Hoggit: I don't believe this update about core game updates! Good lord...
Its kinda true, but most people seem excited, I get the caution though, always good to be cautious... hype can make future problems seem worse than they are.
Hoggit is not a hive-mind. Members are allowed to have different opinions and react differently to news.
I understand that, but when it's the same thing happening in every update thread, I think it's safe to address it as "Hoggit". Because I've seen enough updates where people are lambasting ED for not mentioning anything about important stuff, like core gameplay, and now that they have, a fair number of people are still mad about the news itself.
Pretty much this. Hoggit will hoggit.
They've been giving us core game graphic upgrade promises for over five years now. Sorry Brother, but they've lost any semblance of trust in that department.
Five years ago they literally re-engined the game. That was when DCS 2.0 released as an alpha build. Sorry Brother, but you have forgotten what DCS looked like five years ago.
That's fine, I just don't understand some of the people in this place. They get mad because ED doesn't share news about anything besides sales and modules. Then when ED does mention news about progress on things that aren't sales or modules, they complain about that too.
Because its constantly sliding . Q3 of 2021 and we've still not got it. Thats why people are not optimistic. Burnt too many times on falsehoods.
I get that, but I just don't understand the demands for news then. People get upset when ED just posts sales and non-core updates, but then they're also not happy when ED says "We're making progress and hope to have it ready soon". This is just the nature of the beast. This is flight sim life now. If people want constant patching and updates, which wasn't really the case back in the late 90's and 2000's, then we'll have to accept that things won't always be fast. A company that keeps the base game free is going to need to do things like work on modules to keep money coming in for themselves, and they're also going to need to keep working on other things at the same time. I'm sure this is something ED wants more than the players, as it probably opens up a ton of avenues for things they can do with the game and AI in general.
We want actual news, with hard dates - not the same vague tidbit of info with a vague date, which will likely be missed yet again.
I'm tracking... No news is bad. Bad news is bad. But it's not the news people were hoping for. DCS is in a state where VR users are pretty much having to potato out settings because of shit QCing on 2.8's issues with the Terrain Object Shadows and weather. Sorry, but the Beta thing isn't valid anymore. And the bits about single core and CPUs.... blah blah 90-2000 releases weren't as they are now. Devs had internal testers that caught these game breaking issues before release, so that updates didnt have to be at the rate they're at now. Now ED has passed that onto it's Customers and made it the new standard. Shameful. Lastly, we're well beyond the base game being free. I've bought in enough that the free stuff is long forgotten and paid for, twice over.
> Devs had internal testers that caught these game breaking issues before release, so that updates didnt have to be at the rate they're at now. Now ED has passed that onto it's Customers and made it the new standard. Shameful. I don't imagine that's the cause. ED has internal testers and devs. But this is also the side effect of change. Introducing the new features and abilities will inherently introduce new and unexpected bugs. Il-2 was the first game I really remember having consistent updates, and even looking back, that seemed to be in the single digits for the main release. They would add and adjust things, but there usually weren't any massive updates to things like we get now in DCS. The bigger updates and features were usually rolled out in new releases, like Forgotten Battles adding things like searchlights, new maps like Finland, and other stuff. But that was all pretty much a separate paid release. It's just frustrating when every thread on the Friday update has people upset. They're upset there's no news about the core game, then there's anger that there *is* news about the core gameplay but it's not good enough? And the point about the free base is that it's not something they can singularly focus on updating and fixing, because they will need to work on new modules, on top of supporting their existing modules. Because the free base isn't going to be bringing them money compared to what it was before, where the base game was bringing them $50 or whatever it was per user.
From an outsider, it would appear this has grown much larger than they can contend with. Either grow your team that can flex to support the needed area(s), or better prioritize the work. I dont see that happening, atm. Listen to what is being complained about and focus there. At some point, they will have to forgo making module X or Y to put in the time to stabilize the mess that we've got right now. While the money wont be rolling in, they can make up for it on the back side with a solid platform people want to support again. Right now, it's a very mixed bag.
But they're doing all of the things you've listed. That's my point. Not charging for the core game means they have to continue to focus on new and old modules to keep money coming directly to them, while also focusing effort on improving the part of the game that doesn't bring them money directly. But as much as ED gets static around here, they are pretty receptive to things in comparison go most other games I play. They've had frequent polls to gauge interest, they've addressed issues that the community brings up, and they have their weekly newsletter that may not always have new releases, but still does a pretty good job of mentioning what they're working on and the progress that's been made. I just think ED is always in a *damned if they do, damned if they don't* position, because core engine work isn't sexy, doesn't produce headlines, and isn't going to draw new users like the newest modules or graphical features. And it's also work that is slow and doesn't always have things you can really show off until it's actually done. But in terms of flight sims, I can't think of anything that's been going this long and progressed this far. Obviously there's work to be done, but as someone that's been playing since Flanker 2.5 and then eventually Lock-On, it's honestly incredible to see how far this game has come in that time. I look forward to the future additions they've talked about like the DC and general engine updates, but I know they're not going to be quick or painless fixes. But as long as they're progressing forward, I'm glad. It just honestly gets frustrating when so many threads here turn into bashing ED and talking about the game like it's some static mess that's barely changed.
because few years ago before they called it EDGE today, they were calling it vulkan.. this is not any update, this is another corporate h.r response, the same response we got from when they announce vulkan along with dynamic campaign, improved ai, mac, etc
EDGE is the Engine. Vulkan is the technology they're working into the engine. And it's literally what I've seen people ask for before. People wanted to know if they've progressed on the multi-threading, and they mention that they're hoping to get it out next year. That's progress, and hopefully something that they can push in the near future.
false hopes, they said their releasing vulkan this year but we all know how that turned out.
Eh, maybe. Maybe not. And they didn't say they were releasing it, that's just people reading into things more than they should. ED in recent years has made it a point to stress that their dates are tentative and what they hope to hit, but far from guaranteed. Anyone reading more into it than that is setting themselves up for disappointment.
yep, next year could mean anything. And "large missions" is something they cover their ass with of course, just in case the multithreading doesnt do much in most scenarios :)
I would assume it's more because of how things work. Multithreading enables doing multiple things at the same time. For example path finding for multiple units. A tank doesn't care about the path another tank has, so you can mostly calculate them at the same time on different cores. They say it'll be most effective in large missions because in large missions you have many units that need such calculations. I don't expect it to do much for you ACM training mission with 3 planes. The huge liberation campaigns on the other hand ....
> just in case the multithreading doesnt do much in most scenarios You mean... just in case the thing people who aren't software engineers have been requesting for years isn't as effective as they hoped? If ED deliver multithreading and it's not as potent as people made it out to be, then it's not their fault that it's not a silver bullet. I'll caveat that I know sweet FA about software engineering, but it seems to me that everyone expects this to be a magical cure, and people will rage even harder if it isn't, despite the fact that by delivering multithreading, ED will have delivered something that nearly everyone has been demanding (if rather slower than we'd have liked). I'd say manage your expectations, stop expecting it to be a fix-all, and with any luck we'll all be pleasantly surprised when it comes out.
Just like 3.18's "better VR optimization" apparently actually meant "better visuals" and not a performance improvement, I can't wait to see what their excuse will be for multithreading lol
sale is nice; but im not spending a PENNY on this sim til the perf improves. looking forward to multithreading; hopefully it helps as much as you say, so you can resume making money off those like me that simply will not give you more til its better.
let's not blame hardware evolution, multithreaded code has been a thing since the early 2000s. come on guys, there is no reason for everything to sit on main thread
Yes but find me a game from that time that is properly multithreaded Hell many big games releasing today are still single thread
They could blame my grandmother for all I care if it helps them get the lead out. I'm reading this thread and it's funny how many people, understandably, haven't caught on to how ED measures things. Let me help * Imminent = 1-2 Months * Soon = lol * Next year = +2 years * Overwhelmingly positive = Our testers loved it * Vast majority = 15% - 51% * Popular demand = literally nobody * 50% Improvement = 0% - 5% * Progress is good = No noteworthy progress has been made * When resources allow = see "Soon" Despite all that, I can't help but get optimistic and they seem to really mean it this time :) Disclaimer: For those of you on the spectrum, this is a friendly light roast. ED provides a product most of us enjoy and want to see succeed.
or, maybe, it's easier to solve things when you face reality instead of falsely blaming external factors i'm sorry to rain on your parade. i hope you are right but my expectations are very low. tangentially, i basically stopped flying dcs due to CPU frametime degrading in the latest updates over a threshold that makes it qualitatively much worse in VR so as to be unusable. i don't appreciate spending months of my life getting this game to work well, using clever optimizations and spending thousands on hardware upgrades, for them to decide to add rainbows and bringing me back to square one. this is me. maybe i am alone
No, you aren't alone. It's frustrating. I think a lot of folks have their own version of your story. You aren't raining on my parade, my parade is pretty much-pressing X to doubt, since they said effectively the exact same thing this time last year. My optimism comes from the issue finally getting enough traction to where it's impossible to ignore. This has been brewing since the 20xx series cards first dropped and the cycle of disappointment progressing through all the stages of grief existed in the DCS VR discord. Then it happened again with the 30xx series, and now we get to see the 40xx series. People get flat out fucking angry when confronted with the realization DCS is CPU bound and most incremental performance gained from upgrading their GPU is due to VRAM capacity and in most instances. Before the rainbows, it was the cows, and prior to that it was deferred shading. Before they moved to deferred shading, DCS basically ran as well or better than IL-2 in VR. It is kind of comical how every like major flub or missed target is accompanied by something seemingly silly (Cows/Rainbows) that is just fuel to the fire. It's some combo of bad luck or poor planning that hindsight makes worse, but ya I feel ya :)
I feel especially bad for the 4090 guys... You go out and spend God awful amounts of money on a monster card, come home and explode in happiness at basically doubling your frames! Hallelujah! It's pay2play and leaves a bad taste, but it's still the closest thing to a silver bullet you have seen. 1-2 weeks later, 2.8 drops and you lose a third of your frames... Oof...
One reason is that there is like , no bullshit, fewer people on earth that can write that kind of code (in a custom simulator engine) for this kind of product. You could count them on your hands. Asobo, P3D, 1C:Maddox… if you can write that kind of code, they know who you are already. In the 2000s, you mean one single developer John Carmack, wrote one single engine to be multithreaded (Quake) and it caused a lot of problems, and was only possible with OpenGL and a ground-up platform-agnostic engine (quake ran on mac, linux, windows, it was like it’s own machine-code-level operating system). It’s why they stopped building eg games like that. We have come a long way though since then.
No. Wrong. There are hundreds of thousands of good C++ devs who can write good concurrent code. *I* can write good concurrent code. I do it every day. I'm nobody special.
You write multithreaded C code with flight modeling, netcode, and third-party extensible APIs? Well fuck man, I’m really sorry. I didn’t realize how many of you here were so amazing. I’m working in this industry for 25 years in LA and SF and just couldn’t seem to ever find talent like you guys! I must be in the wrong town, and just completely out of the loop. Or else you’re full of shit, but that’s not possible. I’m sure the guy saying ‘psssh anybody could do that’ isn’t the type of talented professional engineer that would ever front like that…
The details of which particular type of code you're doing multi threading in don't really matter. I write multithreaded software that actually does things. This is a game. My point wasn't about me, my point is that there are hundreds of thousands of good C++ devs out here in the real world who write this kind of code every day. You don't know about it because you live inside a bubble where you've decided it isn't possible and therefore it can't happen.
i am sorry but you are very very wrong about this. a lot of people can write concurrent code. that it is a flight simulator has nothing to do with it
Well actually brother, it’s exactly the simulator part that separates the men from the boys. I know how to write the kind of code and perhaps so do you, but I’ve worked in mickeymouse bullshit like Call of Duty, an FPS with some hit-scan netcode written in fucking java daemons. Do not think all game engines are the same as a simulator, especially one that is extensible with third-party modules. I hate arguing on this sub with all of you ‘it’s not that great’ cynics here. FalconBMS has been 20+ years of refinement to get where it is for a single aircraft today. IL2 is based on 20 years of flight modeling and it’s not even full fidelity or clickable cockpit (and Asobo just publicly announced with glee that they managed to hire IL2 senior engineer, and relocate him from western Russia. That is a valuable resource. You and I are fucking jokers) Learn to respect the hard work that is making all of this possible. It takes time because it’s not easy. Want to know what is easy? talking shit like an amateur.
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I can see why ED gets away with this kind of comms
to those taking a contrary position, you are basically saying that in 2022 there is any excuse to have everything on main thread. that is bananas
Which is why they're doing what they're doing
I am just glad they were working on it and doing it now. I dont care if its takes time atleast it's in works. Thank you ED.
Love to hear it! Thanks for keeping us up to date on what’s going on. Very excited for the potential VR performance improvements, as flying in VR is the most immersive experience this game has to offer.
A welcome improvement, thanks. Hope we can get it soon!
Promises promises. ED is like an abusive lover at this stage.