DPTST 4 is coming

IT' S COMING BACK!!!!!!!!!!

IT' S COMING BACK!!!!!!!!!!

You’re all observant people, I hope. If you used that situational awareness of yours and saw on the Campaign page, that I was announcing Codename: Knife Fight, some of you were probably a little confused. Especially since, I said multiple times the next match would be Falkland War Based. Shoutout to Fangirl who provided enough info on the militaries of Argentina and Chile for me to start a military coup and conquer South America.

I want to be clear, that DPTST map does exist. The problem is that the map is not yet very common amongst our player base, and I don’t think it’s gameplay is all that different from DPTST3’s. With that in mind, I think we want to switch it up a little bit. So bring on the knife fight, which if all goes well should play out like DPTST1 (If DPTST1 ever worked). I’ve been rolling this idea around in my head since the Reading PA Airshow a year ago. Basically after performing a Post-Mortem on DPTST1 I realized, we actually had most of it right. When the AI got into fights with players, it would often be tough to beat, an scary to fight. I still have great memories of escorting Luckayla’s MIG-21 deep behind the big red line. Special shoutout to the time Starstranger and I knocked out a SA-15 with MK82s while a SA-2 was shooting at us.

It was that kind of fun that meant that revisiting DPTST1 was inevitable. Now that we’re DRAMATICALLY better at putting this kind of software together, we can introduce some better working features. There’s some exciting quality of life improvements. Live in game radio was supposed to ship with DPTST3 but the tech wasn’t working. Every day I grow more overconfident that it might work. Generation 3 of our tactical AI is ready to ship, featuring an always on day or night combat ops dispatcher. Airboss is also seeing some improvements, including a recovery tanker that needed to be around sooner. And last but not least: Better briefings and prep material. Shoutout to Alien for harassing me into reworking how I do that.

I’m also excited to mention some website improvements. Our shop page underwent a minor rework. More usefully though, we’ve added a mission calendar. Why oh god why did we not have this sooner. Now we can plan ahead like reasonable people instead of endlessly pinging each other on discord. Who am I kidding, we’re still going to endlessly ping each other.

Oh well, the calendar will still be nice.

- Spaceman