Request: Join CMO and DCS and Falcon BMS

[Sardaukar]

Idea using CMO as "scenario editor" for flight sims is not bad. CMO user could then play OPFOR to fligh simmers, if sims could take input from each other.

Just not very high on my wishlist.

[serjames]

I do understand where the OP is coming from. I enjoy modded ARMA 3 (blatant plug for 3CB!) playing as grunts on the ground. I love flight Sims (but don't have a rig or seating position capable of playing these) and I also really enjoy the strategic overview - e.g. CMO. Combining them into some dream Mil-sim-UBER-lator (TM) would be brilliant.

I accept it's never gonna happen due to publishing rights, resources etc. But it's still nice to dream eh

[Rory Noonan]

ORIGINAL: i224747

Actual a basic simple solution exists already. A Chinese flight fan is able to steer CMANO aircraft with his throttle and joystick: dive, climb, accelerate, slow down and route/course change. Combine this with TacView and you will have a simple flightsim. But don't count on the devs. They are too exhausted with constant bug fixing.

[Gunner98]

I recall some fleet/ship simulator games in the early 80's that tried something like this (Guadalcanal I think) - you operated a squadron of ships and could jump into the gunner's chair or the engine room or whatever in one of the ships. Problem is as soon as you did that you tended to lose the battle - at least I did - because you got focused on the ultra tactical.

If I want to crash aircraft, because that's what I tend to do in flight sims, I would get a flight sim. If I want to design and play scenarios with dozens or hundreds of subs, ships & aircraft I fire up CMO.

My day job involves designing and organizing simulated military exercises on a large scale, we usually federate (well the tech team does) 4 different sims through some proprietary software, VBS is one of them for the ultra tactical, for formation simulation we use a high level simulator, we then use JCATS to fly UAVs giving the training audience full motion video of what the high level simulator is telling VBS to do. For helicopters we use another simulation system strapped onto JCATS to fly them through the high level world while seeing VBS. It gets tricky.

So this is possible; but takes a team of dozens of people and lots and lots of effort (I'm sure it can be scaled down but...). Why on earth would you want CMO to do all that? To what end? Sorry I'm missing the point of the OP - I just don't get it.

[1nutworld]

ORIGINAL: Gunner98

I recall some fleet/ship simulator games in the early 80's that tried something like this (Guadalcanal I think) - you operated a squadron of ships and could jump into the gunner's chair or the engine room or whatever in one of the ships. Problem is as soon as you did that you tended to lose the battle - at least I did - because you got focused on the ultra tactical.

If I want to crash aircraft, because that's what I tend to do in flight sims, I would get a flight sim. If I want to design and play scenarios with dozens or hundreds of subs, ships & aircraft I fire up CMO.

My day job involves designing and organizing simulated military exercises on a large scale, we usually federate (well the tech team does) 4 different sims through some proprietary software, VBS is one of them for the ultra tactical, for formation simulation we use a high level simulator, we then use JCATS to fly UAVs giving the training audience full motion video of what the high level simulator is telling VBS to do. For helicopters we use another simulation system strapped onto JCATS to fly them through the high level world while seeing VBS. It gets tricky.

So this is possible; but takes a team of dozens of people and lots and lots of effort (I'm sure it can be scaled down but...). Why on earth would you want CMO to do all that? To what end? Sorry I'm missing the point of the OP - I just don't get it.

amen.

[Ethenal]

My day job involves designing and organizing simulated military exercises on a large scale, we usually federate (well the tech team does) 4 different sims through some proprietary software, VBS is one of them for the ultra tactical, for formation simulation we use a high level simulator, we then use JCATS to fly UAVs giving the training audience full motion video of what the high level simulator is telling VBS to do. For helicopters we use another simulation system strapped onto JCATS to fly them through the high level world while seeing VBS. It gets tricky.

I've always thought this was a novel idea, and I knew it exists in military applications via something called DIS (Distributed Interactive Simulation), but as your post makes clear, I figured that wasn't remotely feasible to implement in a video gaming setting, nor would anybody really use it.

If anything, integrating CMO with a game like Dangerous Waters would be a lot cooler. DW is a pretty sophisticated ASW simulator and simulates a few different platforms like the Akula, Los Angeles, Seawolf, MH-60R, P-3B, etc... however, all CMO integration would really accomplish is essentially a fancy scenario editor. CMO takes place on a (potentially) enormous scale and Dangerous Waters' time compression is like 16x or 32x at most, which is a joke if you're even a few tens of NMs from the target... how much time do you have to play a game?

that said, it's a neat idea, but surely won't happen given the enormous development effort involved.

[Rory Noonan]

This was just demonstrated in the Command Professional Edition live stream.

It was in development at the time of this thread and as you might now see I was nearly biting my tongue off not being able to comment [:)]

[Gunner98]

Great stream Rory.

[DWReese]

....

[kevinkins]

I am coming to the conclusion that Command is very well suited to both retail and military environments. But the new interface with flight sims seems to be not that valuable in an operational setting. While Tacview does. It's almost like the add ons should have been reversed. Tacview = Pro; Flight Sim = Retail. Frankly, these things mean little to the old harpoon players. The database is everything and everything else is glitz. However, we all all love the new map layers!!

[exsonic01]

Interesting. So this idea was actually seriously considered in dev's mind and they already tried it. It is possible and doable.

But they just don't do that in normal version, only in pro edition...

[SeaQueen]

I knew you'd get this eventually! LOL

[CV60]

I am coming to the conclusion that Command is very well suited to both retail and military environments. But the new interface with flight sims seems to be not that valuable in an operational setting. While Tacview does. It's almost like the add ons should have been reversed. Tacview = Pro; Flight Sim = Retail. Frankly, these things mean little to the old harpoon players. The database is everything and everything else is glitz. However, we all all love the new map layers!!

I can see some utility of the flight sim to military training-If you want to teach comms/doctine/coordination, especially across serivces. However, I really don't see much utility in the civilian market. The computing/communications power would be beyond the ability of most personally owned systems and would likely be useable for only the smallest scenarios. Additionally, modeling on the "flight sim" level all the aircraft in the database would be damn near impossible. Only a few platforms would actually be playable.

[1nutworld]

ORIGINAL: CV60

I am coming to the conclusion that Command is very well suited to both retail and military environments. But the new interface with flight sims seems to be not that valuable in an operational setting. While Tacview does. It's almost like the add ons should have been reversed. Tacview = Pro; Flight Sim = Retail. Frankly, these things mean little to the old harpoon players. The database is everything and everything else is glitz. However, we all all love the new map layers!!

I can see some utility of the flight sim to military training-If you want to teach comms/doctine/coordination, especially across serivces. However, I really don't see much utility in the civilian market. The computing/communications power would be beyond the ability of most personally owned systems and would likely be useable for only the smallest scenarios. Additionally, modeling on the "flight sim" level all the aircraft in the database would be damn near impossible. Only a few platforms would actually be playable.

There are so many people that seem to have the ability to upgrade or replace their current computers - desktop, laptop, whatever and good for them if that is the case.

I know for sure that I'd never be in a position to enjoy that functionality even for most simple scenarios, so if this becomes a CMO priority, I will be out of the market eventually, without a doubt.

Personally, I hope the developers continue to add things like better ground warfare adaptability, better air combat defense AI. (just catching a snipet of the CMO Professional twitch stream the other day, and in the scenario presented where the fighters in the air lost "comms" their default action was to spin in 360 degree circles within a very tight radius) Sorry that to the best of my knowledge isn't default fighter tactic to the best of my knowledge. Former or current pilots, please correct me if I am way off base. Just using that as another example of things that "should" be worked on...before attempting to cross-platform CMO with a DCS-type simulation, in my humble opinion. Not that I am an "important" figure in the CMO universe or anything.

[SeaQueen]

Just using that as another example of things that "should" be worked on...before attempting to cross-platform CMO with a DCS-type simulation, in my humble opinion. Not that I am an "important" figure in the CMO universe or anything.

That's what I think too. I'd be much more interested in things like discrimination of live and dead targets, smoke, land mines, obstacles, breaching, chemical warfare, improved logistics (e.g. destroying or running out of fuel on an air base means no more aircraft can be readied). Right now that sort of stuff is either assumed away or isn't there.

[Primarchx]

I'd like to add Sim Life and Lemmings to the interoperability matrix.

[Gunner98]

That's what I think too. I'd be much more interested in things like discrimination of live and dead targets, smoke, land mines, obstacles, breaching, chemical warfare, improved logistics (e.g. destroying or running out of fuel on an air base means no more aircraft can be readied). Right now that sort of stuff is either assumed away or isn't there.

+1

Lemmings - now there's a concept...

[Rory Noonan]

I don't think I had time to articulate this properly during the stream; this is something that is and has been possible with Command PE ever since the TCP socket was implemented (well before my time on the team).

As Sharana highlighted earlier, an article from January 2019 made mention of this capability. It's not like we dedicated months of man hours to getting this to work while foregoing other development work (the constant updates should be an indicator of that), it's a tech demo to highlight what can be done with the existing features of Command PE. There had been significant interest in the idea from the community so we decided to publicly demo it. No need to get your undergarments tangled [:)]

[Uzabit]

While I certainly love the idea of "A game that does it all", I highly doubt an interface between CMO and DCS or Falcon BMS would be that much fun gameplay-wise in the end. It could be interesting to see how each system interacts with each other but a lot of work would be needed on both ends to implement all the details to reach a satisfactory level of immersion. Would it really be fun to play infantry in an ARMA-like game and have CMO-controlled cruise missiles strike a target kilometers in front of you? I'm not so sure about this.

[thewood1]

I'll just point back to the Tacview integration. Whether it was simple or not to implement, it sure consumed and continues to require some significant time from the devs to to support it. And all that time spent on supporting something only a few people asked for who seem to have already moved on.