Archduke

Hello there, I'd like to purchase a module as a gift for my son but it's meant as a christmas present. Of course I've found the "buy as a gift"-button, but if I understand correctly he will receive an email with the details. So how can I buy a module as a present for his account and give it to him later? Would be great if somebody could suggest a solution! Thanks! Archduke

Wow. Just wow! Take your time, we will wait patiently however long it takes… well, maybe not patiently, but the wait will absolutely be worth it.

+1 Seems there hasn’t been any news of development. For various reasons I’m not into MP, an aerobatics module would be an instant buy.

Ok, maybe we should remember that DCS is and will remain a game, regardless of how much some of us invest in this game. So just let’s calm down. I don’t intend to say much more on the topic since there already has been said enough. Just so much: I may be a quite bad virtual pilot but I really do know teaching because that’s my job. I know teaching one on one as a violinist and teaching groups as a teacher. And the hardest part of teaching is to understand what it is exactly that my student needs. I need to see and understand what he does, how he does it and why he does it. So I need to see as close as possible everything he does. And then I need to show him as exactly as possible what he should do and how. This is why I think an instructor mode would be a great addition to DCS. Will there be lots of non-professionals teaching other newbies? Of course. But even this will help people to become better. And the nice thing is, this works in both directions: teaching really helps you to think things through and become better yourself. Last of all, this like many other possible additions to DCS is about choice: Don’t like it? Don’t use it.

I think this would be a great idea. Generally I’d love ED to enhance the „learning“ part of this study sim to the quality level of the simulated planes. Bottom line: learning complex skills is hard. A good teacher and good lessons will often make a halfway competent students better than a natural prodigy without proper instruction. So everything should be done to make learning more efficient. And after all almost none of us are prodigies and many potential customers are likely discouraged by the steep learning curve. An instructor mode might translate into a bigger customer base, so this would be a win win situation for ED and for learners.

Yep, I guess that’s the difference between an academic „workstyle“ (don’t know a better word) and what ED is doing. In academia I‘d expect active research as soon as I get contradicting information. But I understand that this may be quite unworkable in this case. It’s just that it seems almost a catch-22, because ED is better positioned to get correct information than we are and additionally they (necessarily) enforce rule 1.16 strictly. From an academic viewpoint rule 1.16 is close to sacrilege.

Thanks for pointing this out. As I said, I don’t want to be adversarial. I’m just surprised, since indeed I‘d have thought that ED had definite documentation regarding such functionality and BNs reply sounded like „We don’t know, give us more information.“

Sorry, I don’t want to be adversarial, but I’m a little bit surprised here. Generally speaking if I do research on a certain subject as a historian and I‘m pointed at facts that could amend my previous information then I have to take these facts and actively try my best to verify or falsify them. What I can’t do is dismiss them out of hand if I want to lay claims to the historical correctness of my work. Which is what you seem to do if you say „this is not how it works“. But tbh the most important thing for you is selling your product since ED is a company not academia, so I think it would be nice to err on the side of usability if in doubt.

Whoa, I guess we should all take a deep breath. Let’s not derail this discussion by semantics, one man’s „assists“ seem to be another man’s „cheat“. Personally I would like a trainings course and configurable assists. If you want to call this a „cheat“, I can understand your reasoning, even if I don’t agree. But: What is it to you? You won’t lose a single mp dogfight because of this. And I will wholeheartedly agree that you’re certainly a better pilot than I will ever be. But you won’t ever notice me using these assists to learn. So I repeat: What is it to you? You still can be proud of your accomplishment of having learned to AAR without any „cheats“. The existence of configurable assists won’t take that away from you.

Of course I know that my position isn’t unique, which is exactly the reason for ED to implement such assists. Wouldn’t make sense for them only to please one Archduke. But I bet ED really would like to have more customers. So they should make their game more accessible by offering assists — which n.b. isn’t the same as making the game „arcadey“ or „simple“. Incidentally this touches my biggest beef with DCS: The training missions may be training (most of them are just a quick how-to) but there‘s no real consistent curriculum and no real instructor. For people who can’t join a virtual squadron eg because of time constraints this means haphazardly stumbling through a highly complex learning process. From a teaching perspective I really shudder to think about this. So I would love to see a consistent, gradual training curriculum for learning to fly these planes. Banklers Case I mission is a good example but it’s only one single mission. That’s like me giving someone a violin and and telling him „You figure it out yourself.“ Sure, he might figure something out but the result would be crap. So in DCS either you already know what you do, you don’t care if it’s wrong what you do or you have to join a virtual squadron. This is where I would spend a lot more money than for the aircraft and terrain modules. Give me a well made flight school campaign starting with real basics and then going on to teach AAR and stuff and I’d happily pay monthly or yearly subscription fees. Sorry, I just had to get this off my chest. I love DCS but the unnecessary lack of consistent instruction bothers me.

Yes, I get what you mean. But this is your choice. I love to fly but I simply do not have the time to practice AAR and everything else that would make me a real fighter pilot. This is not about not wanting to learn AAR, I need to choose what to do with the limited time I have. If you’ve got more time on your hands, I‘m happy for you. After all this is not some binary thing, either arcade game or „true“ simulation. It simply makes sense to implement assists that make the learning curve less steep and enable more users to learn gradually instead of being turned away. Let me put it like this: I was a professional violinist and so of course I’m able to play even the hardest orchestra scores, because I’ve practised several hours every day for two decades. That is my standard in music. But there are lots of amateur musicians and orchestras who simply play for fun. They will never amount to anything according to my professional standards, sometimes they even cheat and make some parts easier. Now, should I simply tell them to practice, practice, practice because they aren’t good enough (and won’t ever be because they aren’t gifted enough and don’t have enough time to practice)? Or should I be glad that they are happy making music? So simply let’s have choice: For you realistic AAR, for me some assists.

I can't really see from a players perspective why having an AAR assist or refueling cheat would be a problem. It's not like it helps you winning dogfights in multiplayer. For me having to AAR instantly rules out a mission/campaign. I'm simple unable to do AAR atm. Maybe with enough practice that may change. But I've got a quite time demanding job and DCS is only one hobby. If I find time for DCS there are more important things to learn for me than AAR. I realize that's my own problem but from a business perspective it might make sense for ED to add useful assists that make this game more accessible, thus widening the customer base.

Well, I for one would like a less used cockpit. But then, this should be easily solved by a mod and tbh it’s quite far down my list. There are so many things I’d like to see fixed/implemented like the FM, bullseye, all DED & MFD pages…

No, both actions need to be an action condition. Joystick Gremlin just always defaults to Keyboard condition, so it looks in the screenshot like it were not an action condition. Glad it works now! A last thing: If you want to try long and short button presses: these work with „Tempo“ instead of Macro. Then you can simply assign two virtual buttons to a single physical button and define a time delay before a long press is activated. I live this for switching FCR range in the F16.

Could you maybe post your Gremlin profile? I've attached my own standard profile. Only thing is, it won't work on your system out of the box because Windows assigns different device GUIDs to the physical controllers. You would have to look up the GUIDs of your devices in Joystick Gremlin and change these values in the xml-file. Just open it with a text editor, search for "device device-guid=" and change the strings in the brackets. Eg the guid of my throttle is {761A6510-BF58-11EA-8007-444553540000}, simply change this to the guid of your own throttle. Do this for throttle and joystick, save the file and open it with Gremlin. Then you should be able to use my Profile. It's just not my newest one, because I'm not at my PC at the moment, so there might be small errors in there, but nothing major. Thrustmaster Combined.xml

Yes, I had seen his post, he just posted it about 10 seconds before I posted my initial reply. But I also believe it's better to have different solutions to choose from. Target simply didn't work for me, so I had no choice besides Gremlin. It took me quite some time to get this stuff right, I thought it would be a shame if others also had to figure it out on their own.

Ah, just saw something: If you simply remap a single button (not a toggle switch), you only need to remap to a vjoy button. But if you work with toggle switches (Step 4), you don't select "Remap" from the left drop-down menu at the beginning. You only need to select "Macro" from the right menu. Otherwise you'll get a "remap"-Action aditionally to your Macro and that wouldn't work right.

Okay, that's no problem, I guess I wasn't clear enough. First: You have to set the POV hats to continuous, otherwise they don't work. In Gremlin you set them as 4 way hats, because thats the way they are used normally, e.g. the trim switch. Your second question: First you have to add actions, that is the small button in the vertical row in the middle: Afterwards you can configure this action.

I guess you’ve seen my how-to thread but just to be sure: hth

First of all, all this is based on postings in this forum or on reddit. Credit goes to the original contributors, I just stumbled through until it worked. So, since I deem TARGET to be quite unreliable for some people (and restricted to Thrustmaster devices) I will try to explain how to create a Joystick Gremlin profile that enables all toggle states of switches. I recommend creating this profile once and then just copying and experimenting with it for different games as needed. So without more ado: Step 1: Configure vJoy You have to configure a vJoy device with at least 7 axes, 2 continous POVs and lots of buttons, I use 100. Step 2: Regular buttons and axes In Gremlin you remap the axes and normal buttons (e.g. pickle) to the corresponding axis or button of your vJoy device. Remap -> Add -> Select a new virtual button. Note: If you press a button or mover an axis, Gremlin shoud select the corresponding physical button/axis in the left pane. Step 3: POV hats From the »Basic« pull down menu select »Hat buttons« -> add. Then remap North, East, South, West to different virtual buttons, just as you did with regular buttons in Step 2. Step 4: Toggle Switches This takes a little bit the first time. Afterwards it gets really simple. Warthog toggles switches normally only send a signal in an on-state. That means you only can use it for a single function. But with Gremlin you can make these toggles send a signal in each state. We will use button 24 (EAC ARM/OFF). ARM send a signal, OFF does not. a. Now in Gremlin select Basic -> Macro. Then »Add a new action«. Set »Action Settings« to »vJoy«, »vJoy Device 1« and select an unused button (in my example: vJoy button 1). Set this button to »Press«. This is the normal on-state (switch up). However at the same time we need to define another button (switch down). So again: »Add a new action« and select another unused button (here: vJoy button 2). Set this to »Release«. b. Then under this create a second macro by selecting »Macro« -> »Add« (in the row under this first Macro!). Below the first Macro a second one will be created. Now you do the same steps as before: Create buttons 1 and 2 again, but this time reverse »pressed« and »released«. This is the state for switch down. c. Now on the right side select »Condition«. Apply conditions to »Action«. In the first Macro-Box (for the first Macro = switch up) select »Action Condition« from the pull-down-menu. It should read »Activate when this virtual button is Pressed«. In the second Macro-Box do the same but set it to »Released«. d. For 3-way toggles you do the same thing as above. The only difference is that these switches (like the AUTOPILOT switch) have 2 on-states: up and down, middle is off. So you do exactly the same setup as in steps 3a-c for middle+up. If you set the switch up, Gremlin will select it for you in the left pane (up is Warthog button 27, down is 28). Note the number of the virtual button that you used for the middle position (off). Once you did that, set the switch down (Warthog button 28). Now do exactly the same setup as before, but this time you have to set the middle position to the same virtual button as before. Only the »down« position is a new virtual button. That means, you simply create the middle position twice with the same virtual button for both physical Warthog buttons (Warthog buttons 27 + 28). e. Thats it. You can use the Input Viewer (from »Tools«) to see if it works as advertised: Activate the profile by clicking the »Gamepad« button. It shoud turn green. In the Input viewer select »Throttle - Buttons + Hats« and »vJoy Device #1 - Buttons + Hats«. If you toggle a switch you will see that the physical switch will only send a signal in the »on«-state, but the virtual button will always send a signal according to the position of the switch. I hope this was a. useful and b. understandable. It's also possible to create long button presses like in the A10. Regards, Archduke

Do you mean you can’t get on/off switches to work with Gremlin? Look at the pictures that I posted in the other thread. I have On/off switches working absolutely reliably. If my explanation is too short, I will try better. (Sorry, non-native speaker). But I would do so only if you would like to try it. I don’t want to get on anybody’s nerves talking about Gremlin.

Of course, if it works. I can’t speak for the OP but I had massive problems getting TARGET to work reliably. With Gremlin I had to do this setup exactly once for each toggle switch. That was a little bit of work but now I can use this as a template for everything I want to do including long button presses, shift states and macros. If Target works, fine. It just seemed to me that since the OP has some problems with target maybe trying an alternative would be a good idea.

Sorry if I sound like a broken record, but I had similar problems like you and couldn’t get target to work reliably. I really suggest you give Gremlin a good look, I’ve never had any problems since I made the switch. It can do everything that target can and it’s absolutely reliable.

TBH I think TARGET is a huge pain in the backside. The only thing Gremlin can't do (and do better) is setting the LED states on the throttle. Since I fly exclusively in VR that's not a problem for me.

I think I can help you there. After lots of problems with TARGET I made the switch to Gremlin and haven't had any problems at all since I found advice how to configure switches and buttons. With Gremlin you can also simulate 3-way buttons, it's extremly flexible once you have it figured out. The trick is in using macros. For 2way toggle switches you need to create 2 virtual buttons and set them to alternating active/inactive states. Additionally you have to set the correct conditions. I will just post some screenshots of my setup.