Digital Combat Simulator (DCS) Black Shark: First Impressions

A few years back, when "Lock On: Modern Air Combat" was hot out of the oven, I would never had imagined that in the future I would be flying a simulator from Eagle Dynamics with a clickable cockpit. Neither I would have imagined a study simulator nor a helicopter one. Whatever reasons have shaped Eagle Dynamics' choice for this new flight simulator, I am thrilled to see that there are still game developers in the business of making hard core war simulations.


I purchased the english version of Black Shark, available by download. For those who are wary of copy protection schemes, be aware that the english version of Black Shark uses StarForce. I haven't experienced any issues with StarForce: my machine didn't explode and it didn't cause me erectile dysfunction as I read somewhere. Installation was a breeze and setting up my CH HOTAS, pedals and TrackIR4 was very intuitive.


The documentation included with Black Shark is extensive. There are several pdf documents included and the main two are the graphics user interface (GUI) and flight manuals. The 300+ pages of the flight manual may sound daunting, but this is study flight simulator. Both manuals are available for download at ED's website.

Black Shark can be played in two main modes: game and simulator. The differences between both modes are the flight model and the avionics. The player can also customize his experience by choosing what parameters he wants realistic and which ones he wants to be more simplified.

Black Shark is a study simulator. When playing in simulator mode, the avionics is extremely detailed and the flight model is unforgiving. There is a lot of learning to do before becoming fully competent at flying and delivering weapons to targets. Below you can see the cockpit of the bird. The red mini-display in the lower left is a simulator aid that shows the position of the cyclic, collective, rudder pedals and throttle. This little thing is very useful because of the trimming system of the Black Shark helicopter (more on that in a future entry).


The level of detail in this flight simulator is quite deep. For starters, the damage model just blows my mind. Besides the very impressive graphical candy (see my bird hit by a radar-guided SAM) in the screen shot below), the simulator models many systems that can be damaged by enemy fire at several points. If you have studied your manual good, you should be able to figure out what was damaged and alleviate the problem to bring back home your bird.




In a future entry, I will point you to some good reviews of this simulator. Also, I will share my experiences flying this simulator.


Cheers,

Close Combat Marines / Combat Mission Shock Force Comparison (Part 3)

Combat Mission Shock Force features a powerful and easy to use map editor. It took me two hours or so to to imitate the Close Combat Marines map. Again, I want to emphasize that I'm not trying to create a 1:1 replica. Although this could be done to a certain extent, it could be labor intensive.

Here is an aerial view of the CMSF map, viewing towards the south-east (image is clickable).


A few minor things to mention at this point:

1. Roads in CMSF can only be laid out at 0, 45, 90, 125, 180, 225 and 270 degrees. Creating a curved road like the one in the CMM map (see previous post) cannot be done in the out-of-the-box CMSF engine. I think there are a couple of mods somewhere that allow this, but for the time being, I'll just use the stock roads.
   
2. In the CMM map, the river bed cuts through the terrain and thus can be used as a concealed approach. Since there are no water tiles in the CMSF engine, I faked this small stream as a relatively narrow, rock-covered cut in the terrain. I think that the tactical value of the stream is preserved in the CMSF map.
3. There is a wire fence at the east extreme of the CMM map. There are no wire fences featured in CMSF, so I used a tall wall instead. It is more cosmetic than anything, to create a certain impression for the player that he is fighting east of the airport. I don't think this shortcoming of the CMSF engine has any tactical impact in the gameplay of this scenario.
   

One obvious advantage of CMSF over CMM is that the former places the player in a 3D environment. Some tactical considerations like fields of fire, good defensive positions or concealed approaches are more easily grasped in the CMSF engine than in CMM. For example, take a look at the following view of the map (looking south from the access street of the airport).




In the next installment I will add troops to the scenario and edit the computer opponent.

Close Combat Marines / Combat Mission Shock Force Comparison (Part 2)

This is a general description of the mission from Close Combat Marines that I will try to create in Combat Mission Shock Force Marines (image is clickable)



The action for the player focuses on the east of the airport. A close-up of this part of the map looks like this:



There are a couple of graphical glitches on the right side of the map and this is due to the stichting I had to do from in-game screen shots.

Digital Combat Simulator: Black Shark

Now available in English, by download only.

From Eagle Dynamics' webpage:

"DCS: Black Shark" is a PC game of the Russian Ka-50 attack helicopter and is the first title in a new Eagle Dynamics and The Fighter Collection simulation series: "Digital Combat Simulator" (DCS). Following Eagle Dynamics' tradition of excellence, "DCS: Black Shark" will bring an even more realistic simulation experience than its predecessor "Flaming Cliffs". "DCS: Black Shark" will offer an unprecedented level of realism in regards to flight dynamics, instruments modeling, avionics systems, and weapon systems. The artificial Intelligence of ground vehicles and helicopters has been improved dramatically as well as weapon modeling. A new Mission Editor includes a powerful electronic mapping system that allows user to easily create missions and campaigns. A new campaign system allows the front line of the battlefield to move back and fourth according to your mission success or failure. Due to the increased flexibility of the DCS system, additional fixed-wing aircraft and helicopter add-ons will follow shortly.

From the previous quote, you can see this is a study flight simulator. I'm looking forward to sink my teeth into this simulator.

Close Combat Marines / Combat Mission Shock Force Comparison (Part 1)

Since the release of the Marines module for Combat Mission Shock Force (CMSF) I have been wondering how it compares to Close Combat Marines (CCM). CCM was released in the September 2004 issue of the Marines Gazette as part of program to train Marines in tactics. CCM is based in the Close Combat popular series by the now defunct Atomic Games. CCM was released with a workbook that serves as a guide on the scenarios featured in the game.

In this series of entries, I'm going to try to adapt one scenario of CCM into a CMSF scenario and find out what are the most outstanding differences and parallels between both games. It's not my intention to replicate everything exactly from one game into another, as that would be at best very time consuming .

Stay tuned.

The Rules of Game vs The Chaos of Reality

While researching for an un-related issue I stomped into a wonderful chapter book by John F Schmitt ("Command and [Out of] Control: The Military Implications of Complexity Theory"). The piece goes on the line of Western civilization being completely pervaded by the Newtonian view of the universe as a machine, whose mechanisms should be perfectly known and controllable. This view of the universe has driven military thought until today. Professional military leaders view command and control as a clockwork in which they should always be in control of the more minuscule aspects of an operation. This needs not further confirmation, just watch how the Pentagon invests the taxpayer's money in more and more sophisticated ways to know exactly where every platoon of a brigade is located. According to Schmitt, this vision of command and control is folly. Warfare is always in the edge of chaos, and not only chaos in the street meaning, but in the most strictly scientific one. Warfare with a commander in perfect control of the situation is the acme of generalship for many professional military leaders.

Classical war gaming doesn't fare any better. Hexes, tables of movement, combat result tables, specific intervals of times in which to intervene (turns), etc. Everything fits into the tidy, comfortable, "clockwork" frame of thinking. There is a written, well documented mechanism for everything in the little wars we play.These mechanisms (not surprisingly called "rules", the parallel with Newton's "laws" comes immediately to mind) provide the comfort of knowing exactly what could happen next. Despite their appearance, dice throws or any other mechanism to add chaos into turn-based war games follow the same philosophy of keeping control of things. The unknown and uncontrollable in our war games comes only at specific times in the game play. You know exactly when you will be out of control and paradoxically you are in control of when and how much you will be out of control.

There's no substitute for reality, but that's not a good excuse to ignore it.

Great Stories, The Tides of Warfare and the Unappealing Single Player Experience of Battlefront’s Combat Mission Shock Force

On its June 5 2008 issue, the science journal Nature published news about a "script-reading software designed to help writers create blockbusters rather than flops". Although the script-reading software cannot guarantee a particular script will be a huge success or not, it can actually identify patterns in scripts of movies that have been very successful, like Casablanca. Apparently, great movies build tension in short waves, which are then resolved in a conclusion. Maybe the secret of appealing story-telling is a wavy pattern of ups and downs, eventually leading to a conclusion where everything stabilizes?

Wavy patterns are ubiquitous in competitive environments. Predator and prey populations go up and down over time. When a new species appears on an ecosystem it will initially thrive until it finds a lack of resources or a new species as competition. It’s all ups and downs since life has been around in this planet. Maybe we are hardwired to deal with environments that show these type of wavy patterns, sort of a survival software. Maybe we are also hardwired to enjoy these patterns in environments where survival is not an issue, sharpening our coping abilities through play and story-telling. We are competitive creatures and we enjoy competition.

Among human activities, warfare is the most extreme forms of competition and is no exception to the patterns of ups and downs. A particular force attacking will eventually have to pause to protect its flanks, refit, re-arm, rest, etc. This gives the defender an opportunity to counter-attack. The relative military power of the attacking force will then have a wavy pattern: going up during the attack and going down when the flanks are extended or the force is refitting. The cycle will repeat until one of the forces cannot stop the other from gaining more and more advantages. This wavy pattern has been described by Clausewitz in his On War classic (see the On War's section about the opposing principles of continuity and culminating point). If some of the things I proposed in the previous paragraph are true, this patterns of up and downs during wars could explain in part why we find war stories and games so appealing.

Let’s talk about war games then, specifically Combat Mission Shock Force (CMSF) from Battlefront. As opposed to previous Combat Mission iterations, CMSF never got a single decent review score anywhere. The majority of old guard of Combat Mission 1, 2 and 3 players have moved in droves into something else. In other words, I don’t see the furious enthusiasm I saw with Combat Mission 1, 2 and 3.

Why?

This question has been discussed to exhaustion elsewhere and everybody has a take on the question, takes that I respect a lot. However, I will spare you a recount of the many views about this issue, as this blog entry is just my tiny, personal point of view on the seriously lacking single player experience in CMSF.

It all boils down to this: interesting/appealing competition only happens against an adaptive opponent. If you extend your flanks, your opponent should notice it and act on that. Otherwise the relative power of your forces would always go up, never to come down, making the competition .. Well .. There is not much of a competition in such cases. For Combat Mission Shock Force, Battlefront created a scripted computer opponent that knows nothing else but moving around, target, fire its weapons and evade enemy fire. Decisions on when or where to attack or defend are completely left to the scenario designer, who must guess beforehand what the player will do, where and when. When you come to think about it, you realize that no-matter how smart the scenario designer is, he will always overlook something the player can do that will make his computer opponent look beyond silly. Every time I play a single player battle in Combat Mission Shock Force is like I’m playing against an opponent who is fighting another battle, not the one I’m presenting him with. The computer opponent in Combat Mission Shock Force is a non-adaptive one and there is no way around it, no matter how good the scenario designer is. If one of the parties in a competition has no clue on how to adapt to the opponent’s actions, that whole thing is just dull.

That’s my story (pun intended), and I’m sticking to it.

War Gaming the Fight Against Al Qaeda

Many off-the-shelf computer war games have scenarios featuring US military forces against irregular forces (I will post more about this at a later time).
In this regard, ProSim's latest "Air Assault Task Force" war game is just outstanding. In a series of four scenarios entitled "Operation Anaconda", the player can test his tactical wisdom while fighting irregular forces in the challenging terrain of Afghanistan.

Screenshot of one of the "Operation Anaconda" scenarios of "Air Assault Task Force". Click the image for an expanded view.

From the screenshot above, you can guess this ProSim war game is not for the casual gamer. For example, all blue lines are authentic military operational graphics. Since its first war game, ProSim has raised the bar in terms of realism. But in the case of this particular series of scenarios, there is an additional treat: the scenario designer was involved in the planning of the real "Operation Anaconda". In the game credits the "Team Afghanistan Project Lead" is listed as "name witheld".

It doesn't get any better than this.

Military Grade: Off-the-Shelf War Games Used by the US Military and Military Simulations Available to the War Gamer

In this entry, I will list some war games that were mainly designed for the civilian market and are used ( most of the times with modifications) by the US military services. And vice versa: military simulations that are available for the civilian hobbyist. This list is by no means comprehensive. Please comment below if you know of more.

Initially targeting the civilian market were:
-Steel Beasts, then modified into Steel Beasts Pro and then made available to the public as Steel Beasts ProPE
-Close Combat The Road to Baghdad, then modified into Close Combat Marines and then made available to the public as Close Combat Modern Tactics
-Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault, the modified into the VBS1/2 series both of which can be purchased by the general public

Initially targeting the military student and then made available to the public were:

-TacOPs
-Point of Attack 2
-Decisive Action
-Wargemes from Prosim: Brigade Combat Team, Armored Task Force and all titles that came after these

Then there is this game series which was developed under a US Army contract, aimed towards both US Army trainees and the civilian market (?!): Full Spectrum Warrior.

Cheers,

CMSF AAR: Counter-Recon, Part 2

Lt. Hall climbed to SSG Giessen’s Bradley with such a momentum that the young subordinate was forced inside the turret as if buttoning up. “Where is it?”, Lt. Hall demanded, lying flat on top of the Bradley’s turret and trying to adapt his eyesight to the darkness of the vehicle’s interior. Both Hall and Giessen were looking at the FBCB2 display, trying to make sense of the situation. SSG Giessen was inadvertently de-centering the map by holding the screen with his right hand. His right thumb was right into the mini-map section of the screen, making the touch-sensitive system jump all over different map locations. Lt. Hall slapped Giessen’s right hand out of the screen, as a father would do to keep his child out of the power tools. “There it is … what the f**k … who made this entry into the system?”, Lt Hall asked at the sight of a single enemy tank icon in an un-named Syrian village, three to four hundred meters down the road from the platoon’s position. Visibly disgruntled with Giessen’s lack of response, he jumped through the vehicle’s bustle rack towards the rear of the hull, knocking a couple of empty coolers down the road below.



The third vehicle in the platoon’s column was SSG Olson’s Bradley CFV. Olson was already standing on the hull of his vehicle, waiting for Lt Hall’s orders and trying to cool down with a bottle of water pulled out of wet sock (an improvised cooling device). “You got that tank in your thing [the FBCB2]?”, balked Hall. “Sir, after we cleared a jam in our coax we haven’t been able to boot it up”, responded Olson. The FBCB2 is mounted right in front of the Bradley CFV’s coaxial gun service panel, which means that the FBCB2 keyboard, screen and CPU have to be removed before servicing the gun. The question about the enemy tank was then passed to the last vehicle in the column, SSG Dorn’s Bradley CFV. “L-T, my unit [FBCB2] has been attempting to update during the last four miles, I don’t even have my vehicle’s icon in it”, responded Dorn. “Damn engineers they made these things with less bandwidth than a 1985 dial-up modem from RadioShack”, thought Lt Hall. He then gestured the team leaders to follow him for a hasty briefing in his HMMWV.
The lieutenant pulled a single map sheet out of the HMMWV and spread it on the wide engine lid. His orders were usually brief and this time was no exception.

“I want to develop this [situation] within the next half-hour. There is an enemy tank reported in the village just around that road bend. The village is split in half by a river and connected by two crossings. Go there and take a peak, but leave the tracks out of sight until there’s no tank threat. Giessen, killer [team], left. Olson, hunter [team], center. Dorn, killer [team] right. Giessen and Dorn, pack some Javs [Javelin missiles] after dismounting. Olson, SITREP me good and often, you call the shots.”



To be continued ...