DocHawkeye

Lots of notional baggage packed in yours. The kind of mission you're describing sounds specifically like a "seek and destroy" which for many decades was the only kind of mission combat flight sims were modeling at all. This is precisely the kind of western thing where combat commanders are expected to know what kind of birch trees are in the forest and what kind of swallow nests in them-but don't know much else about the forest. Yours not mine. This 100% "own goal" kind of stuff and DCS isn't made just for you anymore than it's made just for me. Otherwise i'm not interested in the game featuring any of the above granularity. I'm not against it, but it's pretty low on the list of priorities to me. There's plenty of "good enough" going on in DCS as far as modeling of non-aerial units goes. I'd certainly like to see more in the way of entrenchments and bunkers but what we have is also suitable. No see you want better KILL CONFIRMED kind of stuff which isn't what i'm talking about and even when true in real life is far from the only kind of context there is for missions. Buzzword drop lol. Anyway I don't normally get into boat rocking on forums anymore so you got your views I got mine. Nice day!

I don't know I think the weapons modeling is fine-enough for a flight sim. It's not Steel Beasts. If I want Steel Beasts i'll go play that. I think the solution is much easier than something as intricate as damage modeling. It's really just "winning is in the eye of the beholder". If you drop your ordinance where you were told to do what do you care was there? Like DCS has the tools to do objective scoring rather than unit scoring as far as I know-but even if it doesn't I don't really care because I just fly out on missions and ask myself what's reasonable to expect of a 1970s attack chopper. If I do that, as far as i'm concerned I won. I could certainly cripple my own experience with the game by saddling myself up with expectations taught to me by video games like K:D, like accuracy, like health. Or, I could contextualize my missions based on things like my own survival first, damage done second, and achievement of objective dead last. Adds quite a bit to the game if you remove a lot of the mentality trained into all of us by generations of awful games and sims lol.

Nobody expects a 30mm round to stop an MBT. But people expect it nonetheless because they're informed by other video games to get kills and then accomplish their mission. 30mm rounds will not stop an Abrams-but they will degrade it and that's important for the next guys who run into that Abrams platoon. Westerners are deeply attached to their notions of precision and surgical strikes and there's a visible inability to digest the way the Hind and other Russian weapon systems prefer to just bombard locations rather than fiddle around trying to see what's there or paint kills on the side of a fuselage. Just shoot there and maybe you'll hit something. Probably not but who cares, dump your ordinance, RTB, then come back and do it again until ordered otherwise. A 30mm cannon works just fine against 99% of the targets you can run into irl. Unfortunately DCS like many games and sims is a bit tank and armor heavy so in game it's fine against more like 90% of what you'll run into.

SO. It looks like no bombs whatsoever can be dropped off the inner most hardpoints as long as there are AT-6 racks on the middle hardpoints. I tried taking off from parking, the runway, hot and cold, in the air etc and couldn't find any correlation between those. It looks like its just using the middle hardpoints for AT-6 causes issues for bombs in the inner hardpoints. Any other mounting allowed bombs to drop normally.

Possibly related, I couldn't get FAB-100s to drop off the inner-most racks on the Hind even with a hot start from the ramp. I would also look into if this issue is tied into being overweight for takeoff or not. You can still fly doing a running takeoff in the Hind "over" the safe ramp weight but I wonder if that's affecting the game's logic somehow.

Pilots in demo videos you see aren't noobs. They're select. They make it look easy as the saying goes. There are some oscillations that seem to crop up occasionally that i'm unsure are actually inherent to the helicopter. At least a factory fresh one anyway. I've seen autopilots do some pretty weird stuff before so i'm unwilling to describe something like a "pot stirring" autopilot as necessarily "unrealistic". Not desirable I guess but clicking the autopilot off and then turning the various axes back on seems to solve it for me. I get why this isn't desirable but to me it's sort of amusing that a lot of the more challenging issues ED tends to face with their modules are-pretty real issues with systems in real airplanes lol.

It's more sensitive than-but still feels a lot like- the Mi 8. I'm sure there's some issues that need to be worked out of the control but for the most part little about the Hind's stick and rudder feels off or inexplicable. It's a big-powerful attack chopper, it's not optimized for being a "helicopter" in the conventional sense of like a simple transport chopper, it's got a lot of power (ergo torque) and is designed as a weapons platform in a time when helicopters were in many ways still brand new and a bit of novelty in aviation. I also agree that the Hind is uniquely stable in cruise flight, and lends itself to instability more at low speed or in a hover. Based on what i've read that doesn't seem inconsistent.

Yeah, see I figured it was a PD setting. Not just a resolution setting. This is how hard it is to figure all of this nonsense out if you're new to VR lol. I had to look carefully to see the reduction in screen-dooring (jaggies?) with MSAA but i'm...still not crazy about it. I want consistent performance under load, so i'm inclined to ditch it just to stop stuttering and frame drops from happening as much as possible. I'm still trying to push resolution and PD up wherever possible, but I think the way it sounds is that I should push those up first and then try to see if I can sneak in MSAA. I didn't think it improved the situation enough to warrant whatever performance hit it's making at some settings, but I did not in fact know that PD and Oculus Resolution are not the same thing. (The way the values are expressed in both DCS and Oculus Software on a 0.7 to 1.7 scale fooled me.) I might try out messing with the settings in the Debug Tool.

I think it does. A few months ago I was playing the game with OQ PD turned all the way up. It would run acceptable framerates with most airplanes like the P-51 and Su-25, but it wasn't very stable and then some other airplanes like the F-14 were just postcards. When I turned MSAA on, even 2x on a small mask of like 0.10 it would just crash the game entirely. Eventually I could achieve stable play by turning everything in DCS way down, mainly textures and such but I didn't want to do that because the Flaming Cliffs airplanes I also fly a lot and they look awful at any texture setting lower than high. F-14 looked fine on medium textures though, and ran way better. So I could just switch the textures between medium and high depending on what airplane I was flying-the game doesn't even need to reload then but....phooey to that I want to reach a point where I don't need to tweak things anymore and can just play the game. Last week I was playing around with OQ PD at 0.9 and MSAA on 2x and while it worked it was a bit fuzzy for my taste. Framerates and stability were great though, no Link disconnects or other issues.

I tried MSAA out again today and I might've noticed what I felt like was a small difference...but for OQ it's not worth the performance hit and I have better results just turning OQ PD up slowly and seeing what's stable. Up to around just under 1.2 at 72hz today and it was very stable. Jaggies don't bother me much but that's just me. The gains in situational awareness are more than worth the resolution issues.

I still don't have a clear idea of what the "Use DCS System Resolution" option does on the VR page myself. After testing MSAA I can't say I noticed any particular improvement in image quality with it in 2x or 4x. Adjusting the mask size over .40 gets rough on my system fast though. I'll dabble with it a bit more but I might go back to just disabling it and pushing the Oculus Quest PD up instead.

I had a link disconnect again too, but for the usual culprit of rapidly switching between external views. I've decided to leave textures way up, terrain textures low, and reduce Quest 2 App PD to 1.1 and have had consistent performance now. Before I could play the game with the Quest 2 cranked all the way up-with most airplanes. A minority such as the F-14 were causing problems and tbh I think i'm going to settle for consistency over anything else. I mainly want settings I don't need to keep tweaking and want stability in the headset. Later on i'll try pushing Quest 2 PD up again-slowly-and see what I get until I start running into frame drops. One thing I noticed with PDs on both DCS and Quest 2 set to around 1ish-MSAA works now and is stable at 4x.

So with 2.7 I am seeing the cloud jittering problem-but it's not that bad and it's being worked on. I had to reset my graphics and run new settings ground up. PD is set to 1.0. I still have to run terrain textures low and disable MSAA though. I'm not much bothered by either and for now i'm unsure how useful the Forest/Scenery Detail sliders are. I have had no link disconnects thus far, but switching between external views still leads to occasional stability problems.

Performance has mostly been fine but im still majorly bugged that running the F-14 cockpit on high textures causes massive FPS drops and no other condition seems to. I've tried different V-sync settings, lowered display res and refresh rates, turned on and off shadows. Nothing consistently affects VR performance for me more than cockpit textures.

Not really talking low-level automation per se, something like an autoloader is reasonable enough since it enabled them to economize on crews. Thinking more along the lines of a FADEC or digital flight management system.

The Hind is the product of an Army that was still configured like a 1945 Tank Army-a configuration which was by no means an unwise one until around 1985 or so. Westerners think of everything in terms of squads and individual tank aces winning local battles. Soviet leaders did not think about minor setbacks these threats could manage. Germany's reliance on Ace Fighters and technical sophistication did it no good in 1944, there was no indication much had changed in 1965 or even in 1975. Battles were still likely to be events of what were fundamentally numbers and arms match ups. The Soviets did not need or want gimmicks, they wanted Armies. Precision was not important, being clever or shrewd were not considered valuable skillsets. (They were not played down as much as some Western observers tend to believe either) The Red Army functionally remained a 1945 Army throughout the rest of its life-although they were aware that they needed to initiate reform before the 80s-mainly because up until around 1983 or so it is likely that they were absolutely correct about their assessment of the geopolitical/military situation in Europe until just before the Warsaw Pact ended. ie: Not all that much had changed from the Operation Bagration and a big tank army crashing through the Fulda Gap was likely to rout NATO forces, seize West Germany, potentially invade France, and isolate Britain. In such a scenario Soviet Leadership also (correctly) guessed that Western Leaders would be unable to accept the conquest of continental Europe and would resort to a nuclear exchange, so no attack was ever launched because it was by no means certain in the Warsaw Pact that they would survive a WMD slug out while they assessed that the US probably would although with lots of damage. In this line of thought you ended with an Army that desired both mobility and firepower and got all the weapon systems with a balance of both. You got the T-62, the BMP, the Su-17, and the Hind. The Army of Deep Battle. Precision was not mentioned or asked for. Gadgetry and computers and automation just sound like things that'll break all the time. Soviet leaders thought about fundamentals. Hey not only should this thing be able to out-shoot enemy positions, but wouldn't it be cool if it could dismount an infantry squad to capture the position it just flattened too? We're not grounding anything because of a stupid malfunction light. Sortie.

It never fails to amuse me how westerners react to foreign equipment once they learn about it. Imagine being shocked that a first generation attack helicopter from the Soviet Union might not in fact have GPS guided munitions. The Soviets just didn't approach their tactical problems with as much blind faith in technical sophistication as the west did. You don't send one or two of anything you send many and just totally pulverize the grid square. Guys saying the Hind is closer to the Su-25A than the Apache are completely right. It was designed to be an integral part of an overall combined arms strategy-an operationally waged battle-not a tactically opportunistic one like westerns see it.

Haven't been experiencing problems in VR with helicopters on the Quest 2.

It's the Operation Yashima scene of Rebuild of Evangelion 1.0. Someone mentioned the S-300 being able to vaporize around 30+ HARMs at a time and the scene seemed pretty applicable.

Fo real

I wonder if they're going to co-release Mosquito along with 2.7 as sort of the "killer app" for the 2.7 patch...

Well a big thing to consider here are the real world reasons Russian weapons development has actually lagged behind western development and why so much legacy Warsaw Pact stuff is still relied upon. When the Soviet Union collapsed the region's priorities shifted to more immediate problems like civil order and food supply, so super-abstract stuff like fighter development got shelved for a period of at least a decade, and it was already in danger of falling behind western competing western developments in a number of places. This is not to say that aircraft like the Su-27/33 and MiG-29 weren't competitive, they are still quite competitive-but they're still gen "3.5-ish" airplanes that hit the end of their useful development potential sometime before NATO ran out of places it could take the F/A-18 or Rafale or Typhoon etc. Another thing to consider here is the Russian Federation's new laws prohibiting the release of information on weapons systems, and discouraging the collection and dissemination of knowledge related to just about all of the post-Soviet stuff that is gradually showing up in the RF's garages. So we can expect more and more necessary "guesswork" to simulate Russian Federation equipment going forward with commensurate variability in accuracy and performance. Basically "your mileage may vary" when we go forward with simulating newer Eastern weapons systems.

Stable changelog (digitalcombatsimulator.com) Stable release full notes. More than campaigns, of particular interest to me is that the DDD's shaders in the F-14 were changed for better performance. I have suspected something in the RIO cockpit was being a performance hog. The DDD still might not be it, but before this patch I couldn't play F-14 with VR texture packs. Now I can play it fine at medium. High is still too demanding.

The patch just released by ED for DCS. It looks like it threw out my VR texture packs and im not sure if I can just reinstall them since I assume they need to be upgraded now as well? OTOH Link disconnects totally went away when I just dropped textures to "Medium". Before I had pretty rough performance with the F-14 even at medium textures but now it's much more smooth. All-around performance between modules is more consistent now after this patch. Only trouble is that the Flaming Cliffs airplanes start getting pretty ugly at Medium textures and I was playing on High to accommodate them. I want to emphasize again that my "configuration" is that I have Oculus Quest 2 App running at 90hrz and resolution cranked all the way up. I'm also using Beta-Test updates from Oculus. I am not using Tray Tool or other 3rd party apps to intermediate between Oculus and DCS. Too much complication and no problems solved by em. PD in DCS set to 1.0 because it hurt performance and didn't improve image quality better than the Oculus itself did. Textures seem to be the bottleneck because the only time I had measurable improvements in performance is when I turned them down or used VR texture packs. Moving DCS to an SSD didn't improve anything.

Today's update started giving me tons of Oculus Link disconnects...