rud

besides mapping TrackIR's precision function to your joystick, the TrackIR pause button is also a really good idea. I prefer pausing it to using precision mode, never liked the extra smoothing for some reason. But it is really easy to put your head in the right place, pause it, then relax back in your chair while you make the necessary adjustments to your avionics.

you can also just make a fast mission and tell it to only put SAMs in for the enemy. Tell it to use a lot of them and I guarantee you'll get some practice! Also you can set it to airborn start if you feel so inclined, and even save the mission then edit it in the mission editor to move the SAM sites and your starting location around.

I use a linear profile on all axis, adjusted up and down for scale. It looks like a straight horizontal line across the graph. After I started using that about a year ago my experience with TrackIR has been much, much better. My real neck doesnt have any dead zones and the way the scale adjusts in most trackIR profiles as you get towards the extremes always threw me off. With a linear scale on all rotational and translational axis I do a lot, lot better when it comes to clicking switches. No one uses trackIR quite the same though! Best thing to do is continue to experiment with your profile until you find what's right for you. FYI, you can do this with the game running, just alt tab and out and make some changes, alt tab back in and try it out.

I haven't done anything but missions from the "fast mission" generator for months. Just pick a starting location, choose the density of friends and enemies that you want, then generate.

not that I'm trying to make light of this discussion, but next time someone asks me "how complex is DCS A-10C?" I'm going to tell them "well it's been over 6 months and online we're still talking about the altimeter" :book:

the emergency brake lever is actually used to actuate the brake with the right hydraulic system (or apparently the emergency brake accumulator if the right system is down). So it isn't an emergency brake like in a car, it's a handle for allowing brakes to be used in an emergency. One easy way to emulate a parking brake is to hold down the wheel brakes, pause the simulator, release the wheel brakes, then unpause. Done properly, that causes your brakes to stay actuated until you apply them again. I hope they don't fix that in a patch!

I always close mine just before taking off. I've learned to check for the canopy unlocked light when I do my final annunciator panel, standby adi, and pitot heat check. I've never lost my canopy on take off yet. Never ever ever. Well, not more than twice.

There was that option in Black Shark, a third mouse look mode where you can look around and click buttons at the same time. I really hope it comes back.

I re-enabled this in my game as soon as 1.1.0.8 came out and haven't had a crash with it yet. I think whatever bug was causing it must be worked out, or if it's still there it must happen very infrequently now. Pretty happy about that too, because I love this feature.

Besides showing the complete version in the splash screen I would really recommend it being displayed in the launcher's main menu. Personally, the corners of the main menu are the first places I look in any video game or sim for versioning info, and there's certainly no shortage of real estate in the main screen right now.

use the middle mouse button and move the mouse when you're in mouse look mode (lalt + c) to translate your head left and right as well as up and down. You can also scroll the wheel while holding the middle mouse button down to move forward and backward. You get a LOT more options than just the seat adjustment, not that the seat adjustment isn't neat too :)

CBU-87/103's don't seem like they'd be too effective against a well armored target nor is that what they're really intended to be used for. But CBU-97/105's, which have "smart" submunitions that are designed to punch an explosively formed penetrator through a tanks roof would scare the crap out of me if I drove tanks in real life.

There's an FSX addon called 737 Pilot in Command that models that planes FMC/CDU pretty well. They included a pretty handy keyboard shortcut, ctrl+k I think it was, that lets you type using the keyboard directly but of course also prevents you from manipulating the regular controls with the keyboard while it's toggled. I think that's pretty much what you're asking about. There isn't a feature like that in DCS as far as I know, it might be a pretty nifty addition at some point.

I really love the mouse look in DCS. As jpanside said, hit lalt + c to toggle between free look mode and clickable cockpit mode (I actually use this so much I set it to space and moved the cannon to enter). In freelook, hold down the middle mouse button and move the mouse around or scroll the wheel (while continuing to hold it down!) to get the extra 3 degress of freedom you're looking for. You can practically put your face through the glass of the canopy and you should be able to maneuver your view to see any thing you want, even the "Aces II" label on the side of the seat and the front side of both the throttle and joystick. Using it correctly, seeing the radios should not be a problem!

I knew about the ability to change which pages were where, but I didn't notice the CLR option either. Thanks for the tip! And yeah, of course doing this you'll obviously drop pages but that's less of a tradeoff on some missions than others. After all, what use can you get out of the MSG page if you're on a mission without JTAC?

ComradeLucifer, don't worry about the HOTAS mate. It's you who is flying the plane. It doesn't matter if your stick costs $5 or $500, whether you flail around like a kid just learning to walk or bust tanks like a pro depends on your level of proficiency with what you've got. Game is enjoyable with a keyboard even, it's one hell of a great sim. Frankly, whatever you learn with you'll kick butt with eventually. Just read, read, read then practice, practice, practice! :)

I really don't understand what that text in the upper left is there for. Can't wait to obliterate them from my install too, thanks for the tip!

I switched from using trackIR 4 to using trackIR 5 a while ago. The newer hardware makes a very noticable difference. In most games the increased resolution probably doesn't matter, but in DCS with the clickable cockpits it's much smoother and easier to click switches than with my v4 hardware. Tracking issues (the occasional loss of your head position, trackIR software sometimes not sensing a game is running, etc) occur at about the same frequency to me with either version, which is to say they're pretty rare. For the pedals, I just wanted to point out I got myself some Saitek rudder pedals for christmas but I don't use them in DCS A-10C (but lordy are they wonderful in Black Shark!). With SAS, the usage of rudders is so infrequent I'd rather just use my twist stick then bother plugging the pedals in everytime. Nothing wrong with having pedals, and they'd help a lot in a situation where you lose automatic stability control, but they are far from necessary in this sim as long as you have a twist stick and can get used to taxiing with it.

Same here. I've got an X-52 and TrackIR, but for an hour yesterday I didn't feel like plugging them in and got 14 kills with my trusty keyboard and mouse. With the A-10C, it's not what you have, it's what you know!

I've made a track. Happily, I'm mistaken about the canopy, it does drop the cockpit pressure if you open it at high altitude which you can see in the track and is really pretty neat. Dunno why it didn't appear to be working before. I'm still not seeing hypoxia though. My screen stays clear the whole time, no tunnel vision or crossed eyes going on which is what I remember from the effect last version. I've turned oxygen, main air supply, and bleed air switches off, and also ripped off the cockpit just for grins. Using the in-game clock's stopwatch to keep track of time I recorded for 12 minutes at 35,800 feet. Cabin pressure matches outside altitude and the oxygen flow light stays black. I'd be really curious to know if I'm missing an extra step to induce hypoxia, or if when others play the track back they get the effect when I'm not. It sure seems like my pilot just doesn't need air any more. HighAltitude.trk

I just did a test at 36,000 ft level flight. Put myself at that height in the mission editor and gave myself enough extra speed to stay there for a while! Opening the canopy has no effect on cockpit pressure whatsoever. Also, I turned off the oxygen and main air supply. I fell to about 33,000 feet by the end of the test, but I went 35 minutes without oxygen or cabin pressure and never saw any of the effects of hypoxia I remember from earlier versions.

I second the remark about the X-52. I have the entire A-10C HOTAS on my X-52 in a single mode, no switching required. Still had enough buttons left over to have every view I wanted, pause, time acceleration/deceleration, and toggling labels all in mode 1. Pretty snazzy for the price if you ask me! I do use mode 2 for communications just so I never have to use the keyboard for a thing. I can actually use the mic switch in mode 1 if I want to, and even a handful of the function buttons, but fitting the full F1-F12 keys in there took its own mode.

DCS Black Shark had a 3rd mouselook mode that allowed you to pan your view around the cockpit AND click switches, instead of just being able to do one or the other. I've been waiting, mostly quietly, for any news about the reintroduction of this feature in the A-10C but I haven't heard a thing about it. Why isn't it here? Do others really find it completely useless? In Black Shark it is the only mouse look mode I use. Can I really be the only one? And yes, before anyone asks, I have TrackIR. But no, I don't always use it. Call me crazy, sometimes I climb in either the Ka-50 and the A-10C armed with nothing but a mouse and keyboard and I likes it. I just don't like having to hit a key to mouse look to a switch, hit the key again to be able to click it, then hit it a third time to be able to look around again. I have mouselook toggle bound to spacebar so it's front and center, but still pretty frustrating compared to the ease of using the mouse in Black Shark.

Kenan: if you can't connect to the server you can put steam in offline mode. Obviously can't get updates, can't play multiplayer, but games still work. There are a handful of games that absolutely require internet access to play (I'm thinking ubisoft...) but that's separate copy protection from what steam uses. Still, in this case everyone wins. Don't like steam? Buy it from ED. Like steam? Buy it from steam. Edit: I also wanted to say GREAT pics on the steam store for the A-10C! I don't know who picked out what screenshots to show for Black Shark, but it's always irked me that there isn't a good picture of the cockpit on the Black Shark steam page. There's one pic where you can see a few instruments through the NVG's but that's it. These A10 pics really do a better job of showing the sim off I think, but just my humble opinion.