There’s quite a bit to this week’s DCS World Weekend News update including talk about their new Dynamic Campaign, the Eurofighter Typhoon being done by TrueGrit Simulations and some updates on Eagle Dynamics only P-47 Thunderbolt. Let’s have a look!

Updates to the P-47 Thunderbolt

The P-47D-30 Late Thunderbolt in DCS World right now is good fun to fly but it is missing some features and so with this weeks’ update we’re hearing about some of those features that are projected to arrive soon:

• Bomb arming controls are first up as the model currently has few options for controlling what happens to bombs once off the racks. Delay fuse options will be great for low altitude attacks.
• Updates to the damage model is next to get a mention as, again, the model is fairly simple in this regard.
• The P-47D-30 Early and D-40 are also being worked on right now. The D-30 will have a fixed, non-gyro gunsight while the D-40 will feature a fin-fillet meant to improve directional stability and the ability to (eventually) carry HVAR rockets.

All of these updates are apparently due in the next significant open beta update.

TrueGrit Typhoon updates

Not too much is new with the TrueGrit Typhoon updates but Eagle Dynamics update does make mention of the recent IRIS-T air-to-air missile update that TrueGrit themselves reported on recently. Today’s update makes mention of the collaboration between TrueGrit and Diehl Defence GmbH who are responsible for the manufacture of the missile.

Diehl Defence GmbH is located in Überlingen, Germany and is the manufacturer of the sophisticated IRIS-T missile. They are offering us full support in bringing the most realistic version of the IRIS-T to DCS World – as always within the limits of what can be released to a public platform like DCS. It will be available to you with the initial launch of the German Eurofighter Typhoon Version and will be your main heat seeking missile. With this collaboration we have come one step closer to bringing you the most realistic experience of the Eurofighter Typhoon
possible.

Exciting to see and a unique feature of the module.

Dynamic campaign update

It’s been asked about for years and it will likely have the biggest impact on single player experience for DCS World since the release of the sim – it’s the dynamic campaign system. This is a sort of ‘holy grail’ of combat flight sims with the Falcon 4.0/BMS version being hailed as the gold standard.

Eagle Dynamics is well underway on their development of the system reporting that they have completed the core of the logic system that drives the campaign and are implementing it into the DCS World engine now. That’s a major step but there are two other big steps to come.

Planning for the in-game economic models is still underway and are being finalized. Then they will be working on finalizing the logic and win situations that help to underpin the system before finally working on the client-server architecture that will be able to support large campaigns.

All of this is working on a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) style engine that could, perhaps, be described as something like Command & Conquer but with real world ships, vehicles, and aircraft and driven in a complex 3D real time flight and combat simulation. It’s all very exciting as is the connection to multiplayer and how that could be a transformative experience (let’s hope they don’t fully lock away that experience behind a paywall) for both single and multiplayer DCS World.

I see a dynamic campaign as one way to solve DCS World’s content issues offering unlimited replayability opportunities for both their modern and WWII aspects of the sim. At this point we don’t know the rest of the details on how this will work but I hope we’ll find out sooner than later.

Read the rest on the DCS World forums.