I stumbled on something and found myself in the DCS world. Before I grew bored in the lack of a living experience I met some stellar individuals. Ziptie, Bull, Spaceman, devdev, Trashbag Chariot, Crash and Shotgun Dexter. These names you will become familiar with if you join our community and these guys are keepers. Here we are over 4 years later with a thriving community and something unique and not to be found anywhere else in DCS. A battle simulation that spans months from start to finish with the simulated opponent completely automatous and severely murderous.

High level summary

When I started playing DCS 5 years ago, I was left wanting for something that felt alive, had no idea how it would play out, and would never play out the same twice. I searched but I did not find it. So, I began making it.

Feedback for my ideas were that my ideas were not possible, so what did my concept look like?

A dynamic battlespace with an opponent that thinks about its next moves to create a realistic, challenging, unpredictable and perpetual war.

However, as it transpired, my idea was far from simple, but it was possible.

4.5 years later, and several thousand hours of development have brought together a unique DCS experience where nothing is scripted, nothing is determined and the war spans months from start to victory.

The players involved in the early days dubbed it ‘Skynet’ however, it has no name. It’s a set of 10 Lua modules c. 40,000 lines of code supported by a custom 10k Cpp Binary and a further 50k in Lua and Python to create a GOAP inspired, hardcoded Neural Net. All together this creates;

A fully autonomous, action planning and learning opfor opponent. Runs in the runtime environment and codes itself, reads the state of the entire battlespace in real-time, weighs its possible decisions, responds to emerging threats and plans its strategy calls over days. Real days.

I’m often blamed for scarily well thought out and devious strategic plays made by it yet I rarely log into the server these days, and I know better than to play with it’s units. That's a huge compliment, because this AI feels like a person at times.

I’m incredibly proud of the experience this gives players that come fly in my server and I quote an active serving Weapons Commander, U.S. Air Force: “I go elsewhere and I own the AI, I come here and I die. But the death is legit. Seems like everywhere else I go is just training for this.”.

Technical overview

It is a GOAP inspired AI model, with a defined set of tools, constrained by rules that I pre-define and all it needs are goals and it can be set free without any more thought. It is incredibly optimised and in a multi play situation does not de-sync, band, or stutter despite 1200 ground units, up to 120 of them pathfinding at any given time, 30-40 aircraft in the air filled with Clients.

If you want to support me I would be massively grateful, it motivates me to develop more and more and it will motivate me to continue with this project at times when I come close to throwing it all in the bin (happens often)! We've grown from a handful of founders, to 70 people, to near death and now to over 1600+ strong in our Discord. A dedicated 24/7 server and a testing server, with a regular weekly op, and all we ever wanted was a regular turn up of some people to fly on Saturday nights. Well we got that and then some.

If you enjoy what I do, and would be comfortable supporting me to continue I'd appreciate the sub so so much, it validates my work and my passion to constantly learn and make this better. Thank you!