Skuva

Its hard to believe, when even the MiG-21 has a safety lock, that the design wouldn't have any sort of safety system, if not mechanical, then electrical. And that this decision would be applied to ALL red aircraft as if out of a sudden the soviets decided that accidental landing gear retractions weren't a problem anymore. Anyway, this is now on my list of "FC3 weird stuff that are probably an oversight from ED" to check if they will make it different for the 29 FF.

The MiG-29's cockpit received absolutely no changes. You can check it for yourself looking into your game files how every FC3 modules got their files updated, while the MiG didn't. ED didn't update it because it already have been updated recently (if you consider 2018 "recently") to work with the newest lighting system. All other FC3 aircraft were still using outdated lighting, and it probably started becoming cumbersome to have aircraft relying on deprecated stuff, so I guess this was the biggest motivation to refresh these cockpits but leave the MiG-29 alone. There could also be something to do with the FF, but that would be an even bigger speculation. Although I wish they would at least make a "factory new" version. Welp, I guess I'll have to make it myself.

From my observations, this works on all planes. But not on helis, which is sad, because it is where the trick would be the most significantly useful (eg.: skiping Ka-50's insane alignment process). Fun fact, they Hip gets happy when you do RAlt + J.

I'm also seeing this texture overlap both on Aged and Factory New. a10acompassredpointer.trk

I would assume the marketed values are for ideal conditions and probably max altitude (5km). But still it is impossible to get 10-12km in-game, doesn't matter the mission setup and approach. Weird enough I tried from 5km, I got a flashing LA at around 12km, which means you need to point towards the target to get a proper fixed LA, but as soon as I pitch down and get within the sensor gimbal limit (~20°) the LA disappears and only comes back at around 9.5km again.

Both the TV bomb and missile got significantly nerfed in some of the last year updates. the lock range got almost halved and they lost the ability to track any moving target. I don't know if this is intentional to match irl specs, or if it is an overcorrection, or a bug, or just a mid-stage change of their saga to revamp some of the soviet/russian weaponry that is being made in parallel with the MiG-29 development. To this point I found no info from ED apart from some vague announcements of changes to these weapons. I'm inclined to think something is wrong. Given the Max Range indicator is very overestimating even on ideal conditions, and not so long ago the the 25T's missiles were behaving very weird lofting downward, or lofting into the aircraft and exploding right after launch damaging or killing the player. There is either a lot of changes going on behind the curtains that are causing these issues, or maybe negligence. EDIT: Upon doing some tests I could confirm the game takes absolutely no variable other than sun position in the range formula. And the best range I can get is at peak summer at noon, getting LA at 9.5km, and stay above 9km from 08:00 to 17:00, outside this time window it starts to drasticaly lose range until it goes under minimum range. On winter the max range seems about the same but the time window is much smaller, and it creates some silly situations in which you can't get LA even if there is still daylight and the target is a huge black dot on a white snow field. This all applies to the Kab-500kr too. And none of them will track if you force a launch even slightest further than LA range. The export catalog claims the range should be up to 12km, not sure if it consider sensor capabilities or kinetics.

Are you 100% sure you are using the default textures? Because that extremely dark cockpit with the foggy instruments is exactly the symptoms of a custom skin in the new lighting system. I know that because I made a custom cockpit for the Eagle and mine had exactly these problems, I had to do a lot of editing this week to get it working properly. EDIT: Here is an example comparing a custom texture on the left and the new default one on the right EDIT 2: In case you are sure the Default skin is selected in the Special Tab. Then you could attempt checking if the texture files really where updated. in the game directory "\DCSWorld\Mods\aircraft\Flaming Cliffs\Cockpit\Textures", see if the zip file was modified recently (all of them except the mig-29 should be modified after february 22th), if not, you can delete it and try verifying files again.

The only aircraft in the game that manages to shake more than the Su-25A/T while rolling is the MiG-21. You can have the smoothest flattest taxiway/runway in existence, these mfs will shake like they have square wheels. If they really shake like this irl, Soviets/Russians might have a very strong titanium spine disk replacement program for the pilots, because they would really need it by the 5th mission.

Because I eject the canopy.

I'm having the same problem. I managed to Delete some stuff, but not Edit. I get the green "File Uploaded" message, but nothing changes. Tried on Chrome and Edge.

For the cockpit textures: The A-10A saw a complete remake of the textures. Any older one will simply not work. The F-15C will work with custom textures but there will be serious problems with things like instruments glass. The Su-25/27/33 are working a little better with custom textures, but due to the new Lighting, they look way darker than before. I'm editing my custom translated Su-25T to have better brightness/contrast and will update as soon as the User Files come back online. The Mig-29 changed nothing, any custom texture you might have will continue to work as always.

I had hopes today's update would fix it. Someone at ED went on making a lot of changes to the cockpit textures and lighting and didn't notice the problem. My bet is they only used the model viewer, where the problem doesn't happen, because as stated above, is an external geometry clipping into cockpit view.

fixed

I'm not advocating for all liveries to use the Default roughmet, just those that are already using a perfect copy of it, or the ones that change way too little (like in the example given in 3.2). The VF-301 is suficiently different to justify having its own roughmets. For the VF-301 my concern is, why so many duplicates? Like if all use the same helmet, why not have just one of them (ND101) carry the helmet files, and edit the others (ND104/111/113) to call those files through description.lua? {"HB_F14_EXT_PILOT_HELMET", 0 ,"../VF-301 ND101 HiVis/HB_F14_EXT_PILOT_HELMET",false}; would do the trick. It reduces the size, and if there is more than one aircraft in mission/server using those liveries it actually saves on memory. Regarding resolution, big parts like EXT_01/02/03/04, Tail and Wings make sense to use 4K diffuse, but 4K normal/roughmet becomes debatable, and for smaller parts like the phoenixpylons even the 4K diff stops making sense. As I said, this is something that could be settled by putting side by side (4K vs 2K) and trying to guess which is which. Please, take a look at the VF-301 part in Section 4, there is a lot to improve. I'm not sure if the VF-301 came first, or the others using similar assets, but it sure shares a lot of identical assets to other families of liveries. And adding to the list I just found the TF30 diff is a copy of the Default one at "Coremods/aircraft/F14/Textures/A". So this makes really hard to believe the VF-301 is entirelly made of 100% new assets.

I had totally forgot about Taz's work. I've been using his files for the Mi-24P since release. What he did to the F-14 liveries basically proves my points in section 3. He went on downscaling most of the assets that have no reason being 4K down to 2K (and 2K to 1K), and just like that he cut down the liveries folder from 13.5GB to 8.8GB, and he didn't even got rid of the duplicates/unused. I believe mixing his work with mine it can come down to the 7.X GBs. His liveries still look as crisp as the originals, because he left all the necessary 4K difuse as 4K and only downscaled for the smaller parts (like pilot suit and Helmets) and normals/roughmets. And we can play "spot the difference" all day here comparing his work with the originals, and I bet no one will be able to guess which is which most of the times.

Abstract In this article I explain how to reduce the F-14’s Liveries folder size by 2.4GB (-18%) and perhaps more, with zero impact on quality and possible positive impact on performance and loading times, by disposing duplicates and unused files. I also present other ideas on how Heatblur can further reduce the folder size. At the end I’m posting my version of the folder with most of the work done. Introduction A good portion of the community is aware of how big the F-14 liveries folder is. Sizing at 13.5GB, it dwarfs the second place, the Mirage F1 at 3.5GB. Comprising almost 10% of the entire base game size. The F-14 sure have a lot of liveries, and they all look of incredible quality. But this is not the sole reason for the files being this big. Whoever got in charge of making and organizing the liveries made excessive use of duplicates, and also left many undesired/unused assets behind. When a livery is similar to another, it will in many situations have parts that look exactly the same (eg.: Helmets, Pylons, Pilot uniforms, etc). The livery creator will normally copy an already existing livery containing all the assets they require and modify on top of it. But they most of the times end up not modifying all of the assets, leaving many of these assets as exact copies of the original livery, while also not properly configuring the description.lua file. The description.lua is a file present in each livery folder, responsible for telling the game which one of the assets that specific livery will use in place of the Default aircraft livery (normally a plain and boring gray one). The description.lua contains lines like this: {"HB_F14_EXT_01", 0 ,"HB_F14_EXT_01",false}; {"HB_F14_EXT_01", 1 ,"HB_F14_EXT_01_Nrm",false}; {"HB_F14_EXT_01", 13 ,"HB_F14_EXT_01_RoughMet",false}; This will tell the game to use the asset of name “HB_F14_EXT_01.dds” for the diffuse texture, the one with the paint, numbers and all the beautiful drawings. Then to use “HB_F14_EXT_01_Nrm.dds” as the normal map for that texture, dictating the illusion of depth in the material. And to use “HB_F14_EXT_01_RoughMet.dds” as the specular map, dictating how the surface reflects light, giving its shininess. Although, in the situations where the creator decides to reuse an unchanged asset from another livery, it is not required to have a copy of that asset in their new livery. It is possible, through the description.lua, to call that asset from the parent livery during the game’s loading. In our example was the creator willing to reuse the normal and specular maps while only changing the painting the lines would be: {"HB_F14_EXT_01", 0 ,"HB_F14_EXT_01",false}; {"HB_F14_EXT_01", 1 ," ../Livery name/HB_F14_EXT_01_Nrm",false}; {"HB_F14_EXT_01", 13 ," ../../Variant/Livery name/HB_F14_EXT_01_RoughMet",false}; In this case, the game will use the newly created diffuse texture. While importing the normal map from another livery in the same directory. And importing the specular map from a livery in the directory of a different variant of the aircraft. This functionality exists for the purpose of optimizing liveries size, and reducing memory allocation, that means instead of your graphics card holding a bunch of copies of an asset it holds just one and applies it to all the objects in scene demanding that asset. Some of the F-14’s liveries make proper use of this function, but the majority of them don’t. This could be because multiple individuals worked on the liveries, without complete knowledge of each other’s work, different philosophies or simply applying different levels of care. Some make use of assets that are already present in multiple other liveries. Others leave assets inside the liveries folders that aren’t being called by any of the description.lua’s, which means no one will ever see those while playing. This work is separated as follow. In Section 1, it is presented how was my process of finding duplicates and undesired assets. In Section 2, a simple benchmark is used to roughly illustrate how this problem can affect the player negatively. In Section 3, I grumble about inconsistencies on Heatblur’s work and propose ideas to tackle those and reduce liveries size even more. In Section 4 there is a detailing of my findings for each livery along with a link to download my version of the Liveries folder, in case anyone want to check my work and claims. 1. My method for finding duplicates 2. Benchmark 3. Grumbling 4. The Specifics Conclusions

I don't understand the problem here. Both KOM and OFP2 are being fired, flying a parable, and hitting random crops far away, like it should. Now if you are talking about their range being different, its because the OFP2 use a newer and stronger booster. Images for KOM <--> OFP2. From 32° pitch. the OFP2 has about +50% range, and has about +50% area covered, makes sense to me. If fired at a lower angle to hit the same distance as the KOM, it would have approx the same dispersion

An astonishingly quick and easy Search on FC3 subforum leads to this

The general belief is that FC3 have simplified systems, but the flight model is on par with the FF modules, given ED's own words on the subject and their PFM sticker stamped on all but the Su-25A/T. The thing is the Mig-29 is the one FC3 aircraft with the most recently updated FM, and still has weird stuff going on (eg. flight perf far from matching data, Autopilot problems). If the FF release end up making these problem more evident, we can start questioning what about the other ones? F-15C and Su-27? Are they in an even worse situation? Do they realy deserve their PFM stickers?

My fear is finding out how many things are wrong with the FC3 29 when the FF comes, specially the flight model. I imagine they will update the flight model of the older one, just like they did with the A-10A, to be a copy of the new one. But I wonder if ED will be upfront with this or just stealthly make the change afraid it could affect the quality perception of the other FC3 modules.

On Su-27/33 the selected weapon is shown at the left side of the hud. On translated cockpits it normaly shows as RKT (RocKeT).

Easy? probably. But the real problem is getting this thing at least reported. Mods enter the FC3 subforum once every full moon and pick one or two threads at random to report, and mostly from the "Bugs and Problems" section.

It seems this problem has already been reported more than 2 years ago. Maybe ED is planning to fix it alongside the FF 29?

I tested many of the more common a2a missiles (including aim-120B/C), they behave normal in this regard. I got some more testing comparing the S-25L and S-25OFM, being fired at the same target in quick succession. And this time used tacview data to ilustrate the flight profile. Data captured from this track S-25L_O_OFM_test.trk Although it may look like the L is smoothly transitioning into that constant speed regime, it's a tacview's quirk thing. When looking in-game and into raw data, we see it is a very sudden change from accelerating, and then imediately a flat line. As I mentioned in that S-25 post, I managed to find no clue that these rockets use different burners, they both weight approx the same, and everywhere I managed to find specs values points the L variant should reach close to mach 2. All the SAM missiles I pointed in this Thread presents the same behaviour as the Blue line. The Patriot used to show the same, but after ED fixing it, it started to look like the Green line. EDIT: Throwing the kh-25 into the mix shows even more the problem. It is a different missile, but has very similar T/W to the S-25L. From this we can see this speed limit could not be caused by simply drag or a slower burner.