Thamiel

Depends on how long I will be still capable of enjoying it (aka. how many flight hours I will get in the future). My guess is: in approx. 2 years and pending no hardware upgrade or further investment will be necessary during that time, playing DCS will lose its leading role as my current most expansive hobby to learn for my RL gliding license. It was even more expensive than obtaining and supporting my local hunting license 10 years back and for Germany, that is saying something.

(*) "and complete the building with them." (- small but important addition IMHO) Thats not what happens here. There is no guarantee that EA content will eventually be finished, there is neither timetable nor deadline published. ED is notoriously known to claim months when there are years of development ahead. There are even hints that this payment in advance is not used for the build it was payed for but just for the bare necessities of keeping things going.

Of course. ED would'nt do it if we would not allow them to do it. It pays obviously for less effort. Simple choice. But as of now, the pendulum swinging back with first signs of discontent and disappointment concerning the different semantics of the term "EA", I would wager to predict that ED is realizing that this business model has its limits. At least I hope that they do, because I (and most of you too, as this sim is not known for an overall efficient performance) also invested a lot of money into my rig and DCS. But Im not throwing good money after potential bad money anymore. Yes there will always be those who still dont have enough aircraft in their virtual hangars to realize that they can fly only one module at any given time. There will always be the "first-adopters" among us throwing themselves at everything new (and not caring if it is shiny as well). Iraq is just the latest example in a growing line. One has to ask: How many modules and maps were introduced as EA content during the last years and how many modules and maps actually left this status during that time, freeing their ressources for further development and repair.

As a sidenote: it just occured to me, that building on EA to that extent shares many similarities with those of a snowball system: For a promise of the future, you cash in money (adding to your future workload in doing so) to keep your current activities alive and your only salvation is to promise even more things for the future and/or to a bigger base of customers to keep going. I wonder if ED has a clue of how long it will take to complete the current available EA content with available ressources. Or the other way around: when will be the point, that new EA content is advertised without being able to deliver it in full? As a customer, I could not say if this point has already passed or not.

You forgot to add "... again.".

Yep. This time, I will happily pay some extra bucks for the safety of knowing what I will get for the money. If at that time it still peaks my interest, that is.

After this particular journey started 1 year ago, we eventually arrived at something better before we suddenly went back to start. Evidently, ED is repeating itself here.

Back to the VR setting: Im wondering about the argument of making people sick by disconnecting FOV and head movement. Looks easy enough to solve, at least to me: for instance allow free FOV positioning but black out the visual feedback when out of bounds (out of canopy, stretched too far unter high G loads,...). What am I missing here?

Without (beta) testers impossible to do. That is why you are all experiencing this wonderful test setting free of charge. You are all essential to this process. How dare you do misinterpret that appreciation as mistreatment?

As a sidenote, those weird proportions do not stop at trees. Flying around Caucasus and Syria always gets me wonder from where they got those funny tiny windmills. Im more used to this scale:

Quoting myself, I apologize for beeing such an optimist hardly a year ago.

Well, there is at least one other side to that coin: many VRs would lose their favourite method of doing things in the cockpit if they are unable to aim the mouse cursor with their heads.

There you go.

After the Update last week it occured to me that the new slot selection mechanism is not showing CallSign information anymore. Without it, it is a guessing game to determine which aircraft is (according to CallSign) Lead or Wing in a 2Ship. As roles are preassigned in a MP PvE environment, this hampers gameplay esp. with a human ATC going nuts which 2Ship's Lead is featuring a -2 suffix in todays flight regime. Furthermore, it is impossible to check both coalitions for slotted players, making it difficult to pair 2 players quickly for PvP (e.g. Dogfight sessions). I dont know why this information is now withheld from the player, but I hope its a good one. In conjuction with that, the dynamic refresh functionality of the slot list is now rolled back to a manual refresh, hampering coordination even more without assistance of additional external communication (e.g. SRS, TS). I dont believe that was the intention, was it?

... due to current events

Just spent the last 2 hours of this otherwise beautiful morning with my VR googles on my face rechecking and remapping Thrust of my single jet modules. Helos and props are still waiting, though. Now, I'm pissed. @BIGNEWY Seriously, is it really that hard for ED to keep their hands off my personal keybindings and mappings?

Shift your camera position with assigned hotkeys to your liking.

Section 3.2 Page 43 - Aircraft Configuration and Fuel requirements 20160719 AFI_11-246_V1.pdf

As I understand, long before you receive radar echos strong enough to be used for anything, the objects creating those echos are aware of being painted. There is a fitting analogy of a car driving at night with its headlights on. It can be detected from miles away and not just by a direct LOS to the headlights or the car but also by reflections of objects being illuminated along the road. Far more objects in the vicinity of the car are illuminated than actually recognized by the driver / receiving end.

Im not sure about that. I have the nagging feeling that this feature could prevent people to use specific slots they are supposed to use. As far as I understand this announcement now, if Im supposed to fly as (shall we say) Pig-2-3, I have to wait until this slot becomes available? I hope not.

For starters: I would go with one (perhaps even invisible) static turning the ground usable for taxiing aircraft, including stops and restarts.

A pity but I can understand their reluctance to use that approach. They went great lengths to make additional information available to the pilot during flight (e.g. the manual, KB stack). But to flood the KB with lots of pages about very specific information you dont need except in certain/rare circumstances is quite invasive. If I'm going to need information about how to intercept a bandit efficiently I will research and will come up with my own kneeboard page - if I need one at all. I dont have the time to read (or click through for that matter) 3 pages of possible intercept procedures - while sitting in a cockpit with things changing every second Im reading. Its not feasible. The authority to setup that source of information should stay with the pilot.

The sheer number of built-in kneeboard pages (45?!) coming with the module can be a challenge to deal with if you rely heavily on your own, custom made pages as VR pilots normally do. To clean up / declutter the appropriate DCS Systems kneeboard subfolder is only a temporary solution because its contents get restored after every repair/update.

Interesting. Then black it should be.

... is corrupt(?)/showing default rudder texture only.