Things are beginning to heat up for DCS World fans as Heatblur moves towards release of the DCS: F-4E Phantom. It’s highly anticipated and a long time coming but it sounds like we’re definitely moving towards that magic moment where it becomes available. In the lead-up, we’ve got a new interview with the Air Combat Sim Podcast talking with Heatblur CEO Nicholas Dackard about F-4E plus some talk about other Heatblur projects too. Here’s what we’ve learned!
Listen in
The hosts of The Air Combat Sim Casmo, Tricker, BD and RG joined together to interview Heatblur CEO Nicholas Dackard. The podcast starts with a roundtable of what some of the hosts are doing including a valuable discussion on the benefits of taking a bit of time off from various sims before diving back into them. Then they start the interview with Nicholas which begins about 13-minutes in.
Some of the interesting things that I learned included details about the team. Their F-4 team grew from a team of two to five or six people at various points in the project. The Russian invasion of Ukraine cut that by half for quite a while. The team is currently all hands on deck to launch the F-4E and they are getting close to doing release candidates – definitely a good sign!
Nicholas answered questions on a variety of subjects including answering the question on why a future Navy version of the aircraft would be a separate module. Says it was economically not viable to do that as that version was a very different aircraft with a different cockpit, a lot of different systems, different radar capabilities and more.
Answering a question on the clickable/interactive manual, this was a feature that was an extension of their HTML manual. Being able to display the manual in-game saves people from needing to alt-tab out. Was part of a bubbling of ideas that included doing a hot key that lets you point at something in the cockpit and then display it in the manual.
When asked about the wear and tear elements in the cockpit, Nicholas reports that he wants to do clean and dirty versions of the cockpit. Hoping for it to tie into wear and tear for the airplane.
Training missions will be in from the start as will single missions while a campaign will come later.
A customizable pilot will be coming but only after the initial early access release. Says its a can of worms and it’ll take a while to fully realize with each new pilot model requiring their own set of assets such as unique helmets that fit appropriately.
Says that some aspects of the aircraft proved more difficult than expected and the whole project ended up being a bigger challenge with internal and external challenges.
Nicholas also talked about other projects including work being done on the F-14’s TARPS pod system, and about why the Intruder is at the end of the roadmap. The short answer is that they want to solidify the new Jester and the AI assistants features before going to the Intruder. They are hoping it was worth it to do it this way. Meanwhile, the AI version should be coming very soon. He had little to say about the Eurofighter except that work was continuing!
The whole podcast is worth listening in to to get a sense of the work that Heatblur have done to make the F-4E a reality so do give them a listen, a like and a subscribe.
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