Eagle Dynamics, the folks behind the amazing military flight simulator DCS World (digital combat simulator) have released the eagerly anticipated version 2.8 – To give those less familiar with their version numbers, it’s been 18 months since version 2.7 dropped, which added volumetric clouds into the sim. The latest update, affectionately known as “DCS open beta 2.8” which dropped 28th October has these clouds “moving” or “blowing according to wind speed and direction”.
Until now, clouds were essentially a single, massive 3D object, in the sky that never moved. The reason it appeared as individual clouds, what clouds really look like, was down to a 3D volumetric fog effect, but it was ALWAYS the same. Think of it like a map, that told the graphics engine where to “draw clouds”, and this allowed every player in DCS to see exactly the same clouds all the time, especially important when 2 players are dogfighting – the clouds gotta be (and more importantly) also NOT be, in the same place! The simplest way to solve this issue, was keep all the clouds in the same place and still for everyone all the time, no matter what winds were set. The illusion held well in almost any single mission, but…
Play a few missions, over a few servers, and you’d soon notice, like the runways and towns below, the clouds were always in the same places – and that’s because they were. Sure a few pre-sets helped a bit, but there’s only 3-4 in each category (light, scattered, overcast, high etc) and as presets were chosen mission editor side, once made, the mission had the same fixed clouds – until now. I’ve tested it myself with strong winds, the clouds move along in a surprisingly realistic way. I was expecting to see the entire “cloud object” just move along, like a gigantic blimp made of unevenly distributed fog. This isn’t what happened though, the front and back appear to manifest and dissapate in this strange, almost vortex swirling effect like manner. If you’ve ever seen hi speed footage of real clouds blowing in the sky, you’ll have seen the same thing happen. It’s not a single cloud blown along, but rather a single cloud that constantly morphs size and shape, with bits breaking off here and enlarging over there.
Quite how ED have achieved this, by itself isn’t that much of an achievement, when you consider the other 2 of the “big 3” already had this. But where ED works some magic, is, like with static clouds, having these moving clouds all sync up in the same place on every players machine. Much easier to do with static clouds – no wonder it took them 18 months to figure out how to do this
The other most notable changes have been the addition of rainbows – which viewed from high up, arc all the way over AND under, to form a complete circle – something the landscape usually blocks when viewed from the ground. They also added various sun light effects, like halo’s and sun dogs. In addition a host of less graphically noticeable changes to the back end came with, including the much publicised bug fixes, and the less publicised new bugs that ALWAYS get introduced after every update.
i have had the pleasure of flying DCS maxed out in 4k thanks to the Nvidia 4090RTX, and it looks and runs incredibly well. VR users however have been disappointed for some time with poor performance, and I can sympathize with them. They appear to have been given a lower priority over regular flat-screen trackIR gamers. I’ll leave you to guess why that might be!
I’ll see you in the skies on various servers. As with most other content creators, I keep my name unrelated to blend on in.