aaronwhite

I'm sure a lot of that will come. Jester keeps you aware of the airspeed in the F-14, which is really handy, especially if you're getting slow while looking outside.

I could swear at one point, someone made a little list of the differences between the two, and things you may need to turn off/on on the templates, but I can't remember where I saw that to save my life. That said, I've been using the template for my F-14A's and haven't run into any problems...at least nothing my casual eye is smart enough to notice.

I appreciate it! They have been a lot of fun to make and lead me to a lot of interesting articles. I think after I finish the basic "Asia Minor" one, I might start a few of the Asia Minor and Blue camo with some weathering and wear on them, since the F-4 template's still in the works.

Finally approved and up on the site. Download link for anyone who's interested. Almost forgot, I got bored on lunch break yesterday and figured I would complete the set, so here's a preview of things to come.

In case you're interested, the IRIAF Splinter Camo version should be up before too long. Just waiting on approval for the upload.

Just need to finish up the pilot's helmets, and this thing will be good to go and uploaded tonight.

How it started vs how it's going: I swear I'm going insane now. But I do like the lessened weathering on the wing panels, and re-doing all of the NO STEP markings.

Getting closer to pushing this thing out the door. I've added some reflectivity to the leading edges for the tail surfaces, so they match the leading edge of the wing itself a bit better, and I'm messing around with the covering behind the wing fold joint that seems to be pretty light and collect some grease streaks on the real aircraft. I've got some alignment issues to touch up on the wings and a few other places, but I think it's getting to the "final touches" stage where I can line things up and then get it uploaded.

Thanks! I appreciate it!

If you don't mind some shameless self promotion, there's the blue IRIAF skin I made for the Heatblur F-14A, after noticing that the really solid work from the guy who made the previous IRIAF skins. It's generic in the sense that it lacks the numbers that match the real ones, and I'm working on the splinter camo version at the moment to be uploaded hopefully sometime next week.

Awesome work! Work continues on the splinter camo. I haven't quite decided if I like the colors or not, but I'll finish the camo pattern and worry about that after, since it will be a simple change at that point.

I've been taking little breaks from my F-14 IRIAF camo to mess around with an F-4 skin until the paint kit drops. It's basically just a "what if NATO members backed Georgia and gave them some old F-4's back in 2008" as the inspiration. I'm going to mess around with trying to weather it and give it a bit of a worn and used look to it. First step was the emblems and then recreating the panel lines, rivets and screws to allow me to not just have it look pasted over. Naturally, there's pretty much no way to see that in the pictures so far, but, oh well.

I guess it's not fully a solution, but I wanted to mark this as solved, just in case the Heatblur crew are sorting threads by unsolved or anything. The F-4E doesn't appear to be the cause of my crashes, just the unfortunate accomplice since I was trying to fly it a ton when I finally got DCS on the new computer. Anyway, DCS appears to be crashing due to some combination of my hardware and the game not working well together. It seems the crashes are largely due to a few settings and multi-threading. Running the older single-thread.exe from the /bin directory seems to have eliminated 95% of my crashing issues, along with turning of SSAO and SSLR. It seems my system is still handling things fine, as it's pretty easily getting ~110 fps, but I'll just have to keep trying to adjust the settings as updates are released.

Having finally figured out some magic combination of things to get DCS to not crash on me, I've been able to actually get into some flights with the F-4, and it's been a blast! Looking forward to actually learning the thing. I've tried a few "who needs to learn?" landings, and they have gone about as expected...thankfully, I'm not on the financial hook for all of the bent landing gear that the F/A-18 conditioned me to not worry about.

Yeah, I've just completely abandoned MT for now. I think the number of times I got more than 15 minutes of flight out of MT was maybe 2 or 3? The rest pretty consistently crashed. Oh well. I'll keep trying for a bit, and if it doesn't get better with the next update, I'll probably just have to shelve DCS for a little while and try another time.

Your issues are appearing to be pretty similar to what I'm running into. I've thrown a few threads together now, and seems at the moment that running single-thread specifically through the .exe in the /bin directory and turning off SSAO and SSLR seem to be helping, but I'm still not entirely sure. It's certainly confusing, because I'm able to run the game with the settings below and I think the lowest FPS I've seen while running with the FPS counter up has been high 80's, while it's usually comfortably hovering around the ~120 mark, without too much struggling as far as I can tell from not hearing my fans spinning up through my headphones. I've played with performance monitor up and watched the in-game FPS counter and resource monitor and for the life of me can't figure out what's causing these crashes. But so far the settings below seem to help, along with specifically selecting the black DCS single-thread .exe launcher. I guess I'm hopeful that if it was working previously, it's something that might start working again, because DCS was the thing I was most excited to get my new computer for, and so far it's been tough to enjoy the game with the constant crashing and trying to chase down bugs. I guess a quick summary of what I've tried so far: Downgrading GPU drivers (included also stress testing the GPU, and finally updating the drivers back to the current release), creating a ton of page file space between my 3 physical SSD's, moving the game from the C drive that's an NVME to a different SSD to make sure that wasn't an issue, running the game as Admin, excluding Saved Games and the DCS directory from Defender, I think 3 or 4 fresh installs and probably double that number of repairs.

Well, I've had two flights now, one just flying around in my AH-64 through a busy Caucasus map, and another successfully completing the Takeoff and Navigation F-4E tutorial. No stutters or crashes. It looks like, for me, my magical solution was as @kfrasson suggested to go into the \bin folder in the DCS core directory and manually run the single-thread DCS.exe file. With that, I also seemed to need to disable SSAO and SSLR. I might try turning one or the other on to see what happens, and I guess I'll keep an eye on future DCS updates to see if someday I can actually take advantage of multi-threading and the other graphics updates that my computer should be able to run with the specs I've got. But at least in the meantime, I'm able to actually fly and enjoy the game again, so thanks kfrasson for the suggestion!

Can confirm the landing gear collapse. Just did a quick "I'll just try landing at Kutaisi without knowing what I'm doing" and managed to slam it down and only slightly bent the gear. Felt pretty carrier appropriate.

Hey Cobra, Out of curiosity, what in the logs is indicating that? I've been having crashing issues myself, and so far it's seeming like maybe switching to launching the Single Core launcher specifically, and turning down settings seems to be helping, albeit a bit confusingly as the computer I have now since I've got 64GB of RAM and a decently sized VRAM for the GPU as well, but that happens. I'm able to get steady frames of around 100fps (sometimes going up to around 140 and down to 90 or so). Anyhow, initially, I thought it might be the F-4, since that's when I was seeing crashes, but then I slowly realized it was just a DCS issue in general, and I've been working to pinpoint what specifically might be the issue. If you're curious, here is just my general post featuring some logs, and some (hopeful) progress getting things working by knocking settings like SSAO and SSLR off, and was able to fly without crashing for about 45 minutes over lunch, which has been my most successful flight so far. This thread is from when I thought it was tied to the F-4, before figuring out it wasn't, but still has some logs available. I think I may have sorted it, but I'm all for any advice that'll help me parse the log if it does crash again. Sorry to hijack this one!

Alright, you may be my hero here on this. I forgot that the default launcher I guess is multithreading now, but it looks like specifically launching the single thread DCS version has prevented my crashing and fixed a lot of the choppiness I was having. I'm going to keep investigating today and see if I'm able to complete the training with the F-4 and fly around without crashing. Before I was always hesitant, because I could let my created mission run in the background without me doing anything, and it might run for an hour or so, but as soon as I went and rolled out for takeoff or got the thing setup, it would crash. But so far, today, trying your suggestion, I've been able to fly the AH-64 for about 30 minutes, including a startup and flight over/through some high density Georgian areas, and then fly my Hornet over the same region with some pretty thick SAM coverage running the Skynet script and not crash (yet). I'll try and get some more flying in at lunch and see where I am. Thanks again!

I think they are still pretty active on their Discord. Probably just easier for daily conversation than a thread on the forums.

Hey, I'll give that a shot. At this point, I'm desperate for anything that will get me flying again. Appreciate it!

Another day, another crash. Any chance there's any idea what to do next, @BIGNEWY or anyone else with ED? The crash logs all seem to be the same, but I'm running out of solutions on my end. I hate to think the only idea left is to just uninstall DCS and try again another day. I was looking at grabbing the Kiowa and Kola maps, but it doesn't seem like there's any sense in that if there's no way to know if I can play for more than 10 minutes. At this point I've rolled back drivers, re-installed them, I've repaired the game more times than I can count, done about 4 clean installs of DCS without anything added or changed, tried running with multithreading and without, run as Admin and without, and checked all of my components as well. I've excluded the game and saved game directories from Defender and tried a variety of game settings. Everything on my end seems to be fine, I've plugged my computer directly into the wall and the GPU, RAM, processor and hard drive all checked out without problem. DCS seems to be the only game running into issues, but I'm out of ideas on what to try now. dcs.log

That's what I've got at the moment (well, the DCS and Saved Games anyway) so that's hopefully not an issue. I'll have to keep digging.

Another mixed bag. This mission did last way longer. I was able to take off and fly around in the Apache for a bit. It's not too much going on, just overcast and some artillery and a few other AI units scattered around. I think I flew for maybe 20 minutes or so before the game stuttered and then locked up and crashed on me. I could hear my fans working, and pulled Task Manager up just to see if anything caught my eye. I think I launched the standard single core, and per the suggestions of the Discord log checking bot, I turned DLAA on, SSLR and SSAO both to off. Watching task manager while flying, it looked like GPU was sitting around 100% utilization (not sure if that's normal or not, though I assume maybe, since Model Viewer runs the same way) while the GPU's dedicated memory usage seemed to hang around 13.6 of 16GB during the flight If I remember correctly, GPU temps were around 63F. RAM usage seemed to hit around 40% of the 64GB available, and seemed to hang there pretty consistently, and I didn't notice a ton of CPU usage. I'll throw the log in here, but oddly, after just running it through the Discord log analyzer, it's showing that it's failed IC check again, which is odd, since nothing's changed since the last boot that didn't show that. @BIGNEWY Any ideas on what might cause the random IC issues? I see a bunch of errors for failed checks on resources like the Apache's external FLIR dds texture, and being unable to load ED_SOUND files that look to be tied to the Mi-8 (Shared sound file for the Apache, perhaps?). I just can't figure out if DCS thinks these files are missing, can't access them for one reason or another, or what. This is after a clean install and two full repairs now at this point, so I would have to assume the odds of a missing file should be slim, but my time in computers has taught me they can always surprise you with their nonsense. Obviously, it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, but scrolling through a log someone just uploaded to the LogAnalyzer, they don't show any of those same missing element errors, so I'm definitely puzzled over this one. I'll keep testing, but I'll also throw the latest log in below. dcs.log