We’ve got a mammoth sized development update from the folks at Heatblur tonight with a status update on the DCS: F-4E Phantom broken into two parts. The first part deals with the news that you probably have already guessed… DCS: F-4E is delayed. The second part goes into detail on some of the module’s core features and what comes next. There’s even a video about navigation thrown into the mix too. Here’s a summary.
The perfect storm
What Heatblur have aimed to do with the DCS: F-4E is nothing short of spectacular. Every time this team comes up with a new module, they push the boundaries of what is possible and they have consistently impressed us with the DCS: AJS-37 Viggen and then the DCS: F-14A/B Tomcat. F-4E is pushing the boundaries yet again… but that has lead to some challenges and ultimately delays.
Nicholas Dackard, whom many of you know as Cobra<><, provided a heartfelt update on the F-4E and their decision to delay. The delay isn’t long with April or May at the latest now being the new projection by the team. Nicholas goes into detail about all of the issues that the team have faced with the most recent being a one-two punch.
The first issue was sickness on the team which saw what they report as being 90% of the team affected by Covid infections in just the last few months. That has kept people sick and not working or working at reduced levels from normal. Not ideal when you’re working towards a module release.
The second issue is a feature that Heatblur call HBUI (Heatblur User Interface) which, sparing some of the technical details, lets them render webpages and information in the DCS World window. Heatblur developed the technology to do things like let us click on an instrument and bring up the user manual. Heatblur are also using it for the new interface for Jester 2.0 which has the Commo-Rose style from the first one but with more capability and also paired with a new conversational system that has Jester interact with you proactively in some situations. It all sounds incredible.
Apparently this new HBUI works great for most people but 5-10% of their tester group ran into game breaking performance issues. Nicholas sums it up best with this line:
It took us hundreds of hours of debugging and bombarding the affected hardware and individuals with experimental builds, and in the end, despite also reaching out to industry contacts, we found no solution but to rewrite significant parts of our UI layer to solve the issue. Not only did we spend an inordinate amount of time trying every combination of solution we could think of, seemingly at the brink of a breakthrough, but in the end found no reasonable solution other than to go back and rewrite this key piece of the F-4.
Heatblur dev update: Of Delays and Silence Part 1
From what the update reports, none of the development team had the issue and only when they went to the testers did they start to find user configurations that had the issue. It was so essential and game breaking (you need Jester’s UI screens to start the aircraft) that it has to be fixed.
The end of part one talks about their commitment to launch and the need to break their initial release window and replace it with the April-May one mentioned above. They are planning to offer refunds to those who want it and are willing to extend the pre-order discount for two weeks past release day as a thank you for support.
Optimism in part two
The second development update launched this evening is more upbeat about the good things that are happening. And there are quite a few.
The HBUI delay issue aside, it sounds like Phantom has reached a mostly feature-complete for early access phase with the art, sound, and systems all done. There’s lots of discussion about the good features of HBUI, multi-crew synchronization, as well as additional liveries, missions and campaigns all being worked on – that includes training missions.
One thing that is ready to go is a new training video. Episode III is focused on navigating the Phantom and the challenges associated with managing this complex aircraft.
The second part of the update also talks significantly about performance. And this is timely as a lot of speculation, some of it baseless, has been going on recently wondering if all of the complexity of F-4 would lead to poor performance.
Heatblur are upfront that the F-4E will be heavier than the average module because of the depth that they’ve gone to. But some of the charts released suggest that its actually in not too bad of a place.
The first chart, and probably the least optimistic one, shows off a CPU limited scenario (rather than a GPU limited one) showing the F-4E performing slightly worse in frame rate than the AH-64D Apache which is one of the heaviest modules in the sim. In most of that, the spread between them is fairly low…. but it will still be a bit difficult to run on more CPU limited systems.
The second one is a bit more optimistic with a higher end system with a better balance between GPU and CPU where Phantom rides down the middle between the F-15E performing the best of the three and the AH-64 performing the worst.
Delayed, but I feel fine
I kind of expected that this might happen. Heatblur are often optimistic that things will come together as they hope but they also push the boundaries of what is possible and that means invariably running into something that is both unexpected and a major block to the project.
Putting a DCS module together isn’t like assembling a Lego-kit, you have to do the work and then you find out if it will even work correctly on all of the different systems that it then needs to run on. Sometimes its a bit of a miracle that all of this works at all. Heatblur obviously went down a path towards a great new feature (HBUI I think will be a game-changer when they get it work), one that became a core fundamental for the module’s function, and only then learned that it didn’t work in some very specific but critical circumstances. That’s got to be demoralizing.
The Phantom is delayed but not for too long if things start to go right and it’s not the end of the world. The sun will rise, Meteor music will still play on your favourite music streaming service, birds will chirp, and one day we’ll wake up and it’ll be release day for DCS: F-4E. Just not today.
Read Of Delays and Silence Part 1 here and Delays and Silence Part 2 right over here. And as always, stay tuned for more DCS: F-4E coverage as we get close to launch!
Stormbirds 
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