Aquorys

Sorry to hear that. I hope that modern medicine, in the case that it cannot heal you, will at least allow you to have as much time left as possible to spend with your family, friends and the community online. All the best!

Yeah, they implemented some data link functionality, and the short story is, you want tactical network datalink (TNDL), and then if that does not do anything useful, you can punch in the STN numbers of your flight's aircraft on the data link page using the ICP. They have to be unique for each aircraft, 5 digits octal (that's 3 bit values per digit, so each digit can only be 0 - 7, can't type in 8 or 9). Your flight's aircraft should appear in blue on your HSD once it's set up properly.

This is a screenshot of the graphics settings. VR is a Rift S. Energy management mode is set for optimum performance, I think everything else are default values. nVidia RTX2070S, i7 8-Core, 80 GiB RAM. Hope that helps, cheers!

Well, I'm gonna say, it's fortunate that the executables are just missing the icons and not the other way around

Yeah. I'm gonna be honest, I didn't believe that ED could fix VR performance anytime soon, but I was wrong. I just flew a multiplayer mission that had FPS drops to ~15 quite often in DCS 2.8, and now in DCS 2.9, it was doing a steady 80 fps. I had not even seen 80 fps in singleplayer before. @BIGNEWY, will you please say thanks to the development team for me, I am impressed!

The only documents I have seen from the manufacturer that refer to the F-35 call it the JSF. I have never heard about the F-24 name until now, but not saying it isn't true. Documents are often all over the place with naming, even internal ones, in many companies.

Not an F/A-18 guy, but VFR I just eyeball the distances. I fly runway heading, about 1500 ft above, do a 180 degrees turn (don't make that one too tight) then fly straight ahead until my wingtip roughly lines up with the end of runway, then execute the second 180 degrees turn with the nose pointed down about 3 degrees. You probably get a feeling for it after a while, and you remember what it looks like when everything is right.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I would not consider that offensive given that the context is a game that simulates combat. Yes, the symbols by themselves, as well as their associated meaning, are of course offensive, and there will always be some idiots who will misuse those symbols in the game to express their support for extremists, fanatics, fascists, terrorists, etc. - but just as much can be said about the symbolic act of destroying the forces displaying those symbols in the game, and I think that there are way more people who enjoy the latter of those two activities.

Since it's been removed, just out of curiosity, what was it?

It would be interesting to hear whether any of the ED developers actually test DCS in VR, or - even better - actually use it at home in their spare time for fun, so they would have the actual user experience. And my next question would be whether it actually gets tested or used on hardware & software that an average user would likely have, like let's say, a 2 years old gaming rig that sold for maybe $ 2,000-3,000 bought new back then. What I have seen way too often is developers stating that they can't reproduce a user's problem with some application, which starts to make sense once you realize that the user's platform is a 1,500 $ PC and the company's equipment is a 70,000 $ four-socket POWER9 with a terabyte of RAM and a RAID-10 of NVMe cards.

Where I currently live, in the north-eastern part of Austria, everyone I know just calls it the BF 109 (spoken "B F hundertneun", for the language geeks out there, it sounds like beː ɛf ˈhʊndɐtnɔɪ̯n). A literal translation of that to english would be "B F hundred nine".

Personally I think in relation to how much people complain about wanting this and that and wanting everything to be super realistic the modules are pretty cheap. Maybe some of y'all would want to look up what companies charge per hour for a decent C++ developer and then think about the modules' price tags again...

...where the pilots did some quite amazing things with them, including developing some innovative tactics. They had some surprises prepared for the USAF & USN guys who trained with them.

In somewhat recent conflicts, let's say 1990+, western technology has outperformed eastern bloc technology pretty consistently. The pioneer of AESA technology was Japan, being the first nation to introduce it on ships and fighter aircraft. The first analog FBW production aircraft was the Concorde (France), the first digital FBW production aircraft was the F-16 (USA). The pioneer of large scale civilian use of modern digital FBW system was EADS (aka Airbus, multinational western-european). The aerodynamic design was indeed very good, but that is reflected quite accurately in DCS. Of course it's not without reason, but the reason is not eastern bloc technological superiority. Even if you have superior technology, acquiring opposing force technology and material can widen the gap even more, as it lets you figure out the most effective counter-technologies and counter-tactics to employ. It is not because of technology alone that the western forces typically perform very well, it is also the result of a "know your enemy" attitude in training and tactics development.

After firing an AIM-120, you will see a countdown on the right side of the HUD, and if that shows a leading T (instead of A), the missile has transitioned to terminal active guidance. As an example, T11 means that the missile is active and the predicted time to interception is 11 seconds. If it shows A14, the missile is not active yet, and the predicted time until it will transition to active is 14 seconds. Hope that helps.

I am sure there are certainly some things very wrong with the VR code in DCS, or possibly the graphics engine in general, but it is also worth noting that it is by far not the only culprit. The worst problem of all is that modern general purpose computer architecture, like the one that a normal PC uses, and also general purpose operating systems suck phenomenally at providing predictable and consistent performance. You might ask, why? Well, for starters, there is an enormous gap between the peak performance and the base performance of the hardware. Depending on whether data is currently in one of the caches - and there are multiple caches with different performance characteristics - or just the memory, and depending on how the data is accessed, the processors can get the data very quickly or very slowly. And by "very slowly" I mean that it is not uncommon for the access to be 100 times slower than if it happened "very quickly". On top of that, add in that none of the general purpose operating systems are hard realtime capable, meaning that there is no guaranteed way to make them run your performance-critical 60 fps graphics thread exactly every 16-17 milliseconds and execute a guaranteed number of instructions to make sure that it is able to perform all calculations that it needs to do to finish a frame. All you can do is hope that things will be fast enough pretty much by coincidence. The result of that is that if you design anything for using more than roughly 1/100th of a PC's performance, you will almost certainly have latency problems every now and then, resulting in all kinds of things, from fps drops to input latency, jittery mouse movement, etc., just because the system happens to be slow right now for unpredictable and unknown reasons. And this whole story is the exact reason why it is an extremely bad idea to use those normal general purpose computers and programs to fly real aircraft, and in turn, also the reason why real world avionics systems are extremely expensive. They need predictable performance and memory consumption and hard realtime capable software. There are ways to do that, but the effort required to develop such systems is orders of magnitude beyond what's possible and affordable for a home PC running computer games.

Using a Rift S. I can't even remember how many times this thing has failed in the middle of a game. Sometimes it decides that Oculus Guardian is not set up, and that you need to do it right now. Or it might just get the idea that the (hand) controllers aren't there (which is true, but it normally works without them), and right now you need to put batteries in them and reconnect them. Or it decides to complain that the HDMI cable isn't plugged in (although it obviously is, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to see the game), and then you need to pull out the USB plug, wait 10 seconds, and put it back in. You'll never get a picture again in DCS, so you can basically go kill DCS from the task manager and then restart it. And sometimes it just dies in the middle of a game, saying the headset cannot be found, and then you have to reboot. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I always have to unplug it, wait 10 seconds and then replug it (USB only) after starting the computer, or the Oculus drivers will never even find the headset. Plus a multitude of other problems, like Guardian actually showing up, but it's 2 meters to the left and rotated by ~40 degrees. Not sure how many differences there are in the hardware and software between a Rift S and a Quest, but if the Quest is anything like the Rift S, then yeah - all of your problems sound pretty normal to me.

+1, I love flying anywhere on the Nevada map. The only two things I wish they had done are 1) modeled the USAF Weapons School building at Nellis, and 2) made the map just somewhat bigger, so Fallon would also be on it.

Stored heading or normal alignment? Did you enter the coordinates on the ground?

One simple way to prevent the interpretation of the presence or absence of a data link is to constantly emit an encrypted data link, either sending data packets marked as guidance information with target information in the payload section, or data packets marked as dummy information with random content in the payload section. Similar problems and solutions have been studied and known for decades in a field of information technology security called covert channel analysis.

There is generally a lot of hilariously detailed misinformation in this thread, and I'd say we'll just leave it at that before anyone goes to jail.

I tried this a few days ago, it seemed to work as expected.

Sounds normal and realistic to me. The flight control system does not auto-trim for roll, and trim is virtually never perfect. I'd rather say that roll trim being perfect with a balanced loadout, until you touch it, is a DCSism, as you called it.

If someone tried it in a real one, yeah. If someone can plausibly explain why something happens or doesn't happen, mostly. Otherwise, maybe. Cause I've lost count of the situations where SMEs on some complex piece of technology said, if you do X, then Y happens, and then when someone actually tries it, everyone just goes, "ok, this is interesting"...

That's not a Link 16 problem, that's an avionics limitation of the contributing platforms. Link 16 was designed with high precision time synchronization and high frequency updates in mind. Some more modern fighter aircraft that communicate via MIDS (which uses Link 16) are able to engage datalink targets.