Bosun

Any word on if there's a plan to allow the Voice Chat/Radio Overlay to be exported for display on another screen? Or an API that would allow someone to build a custom interface to display on a 2nd monitor?

Exiting Multiplayer mission to debrief. At first I was worried - but -

For the huey - if you lose your prop and manage to land, the ground effect (dust and vegetation effects) still go on as if it is there.

I move to second this motion. Floor is open to discussion. ED cannot take on the project because they don't have the staff to dedicate to it, and won't for several years. I propose they release the project an interested 3rd Party developer, of which one could be found I have no doubt. Amended proposal: That ED source a 3rd Party developer to continue the work on the Huey and release an updated version concurrent with the modern modelling in contemporary designs of peer aircraft from other developers. All in favor, aye:

Dedicated server tracks do corrupt some planes. The F-14 is a good example - there is currently no way to get an accurate track in any server or client-side replay for the aircraft, except by very short, very specific tracks which cannot really be used for 'filming.' The best track you can have is to have a buddy on-server with you, who can put their spectator camera where you'd like it on the tanker, and record your approach to fueling for you.

You would have manually place a camera in the .lua file and record the mission to play it back and watch through the camera, and then it still wouldn't work becuase DCS does not have a track-replay option that is functional.

Yup, natural way for that to make it in, would be to include it in an entire map that covers Southeast Alaska, up through the peninsula and out to the Aluetians. You could get Behm Canal in there, where they do secret sub stuff.

Following the success of Heatblur's F-14 RIO voice replacment mods, and now coupled with services like Elevelabs that can generate different voices - I'd like to try replacing some of the Chief calls in the game, for ground comms. Is that possible? And if so, where in the structure are those files stored?

There's got to be a way to tie that into your head position in the cockpit so that if you lean in toward the glass, the depth of field/focus would blur out the foreground to focus on the background. Again - I'm surprised this hasn't already been done, seeing that it seems, on the outside, like something capable of doing with current tech.

Thanks for keepin' up the server maintenance! Can we have the cleared cache when it logs us out, not delete authentication certificates for, say, 72 hours? or something.

The point of this post was that I don't see how/where DCS allows me 3 days of offline access. I had access earlier in the day. They pulled their server for maintenance and I cannot access anything later that same day. How does this work? As someone above said, you've got to be online, to be offline, which makes no sense.

In order to play in the current offline mode, you've got to log in online first. That means, despite having logged in earlier today, I now cannot access my content offline. This would be an authentication certificate that lasts for a few days, that is updated every time you ping the live server, so that it is good for a full set of days after the last contact you had. This would allow players to continue to access their paid-for content offline. Perhaps even allow players to continue playing online servers that are still up, even of the main authetication servers are down. I know cheating is some concern, but I can imagine there are ways to mitigate that.

Can confirm offline mode does not work. I was logged in earlier today. Now the primary server is down, and I cannot access any content for the game. Despite having been logged in and authenticated earlier today. "You have to enter offline mode by logging in online." ^^ Read that sentence again, very slowly. This is why the whole online-games thing has jumped the shark. I should have an authetication ticket that gets renewed every time I ping their primary server, and lasts for 3 days. That way, even if their connection goes down, i can still access my content and even play with other online servers, until it comes back up. I'm not sure why this hasn't been done.

Just 5 months ago? I mean - fair. That isn't long for typical dev cycles. For some reason I could have sworn I saw them post about that a year ago or more. But maybe it was just in a thread that was that old...when you're browsing forums and start digging for specific topics, time seems to lose meaning as you hit threads that have recent posts, but were started 6-7 years ago. Wayback machine's got nothin' on an internet forum for preserving past webspace. lol.

They casually mentioned that in a response to a thread many months (maybe even a year) ago. We've not heard any word about it since. I'm genuinely curious about the problem solving going on here, because my limited perspective would be a simple change in how LOD are rendered, and the size of those assets at a certain range, that is then a scale factor tied to the resolution you choose, is the answer. I say 'simple', not to imply the work is simple, but to imply the concept of what needs to happen is relatively straightforward, and the work involved should also be straightforward, even if it is complex. I'm also assuming that LODs and sizing are modular constructs that can be changed via one part of the code. The fact that a casual modder achieved a fix for this should speak to the potential approachability of this issue. But I'm guessing by how long it has taken, that isn't the case, and they're needing to re-write some piece of the game engine from scratch in order to accomodate this. Likely because those LODs, or the size of assets at a range, isn't something modular within the code that, but a hard number baked into to several modules across separate instances, requireing all 3rd party developers to update their core-engine components as well. I'm genuinely surprised at DCS, IL-2 and other flight sims for not tackling this 10 years ago, when it became obvious this would cause disparities as resolutions continued to get finer. Sometimes developers amaze me (most of the time, actually.) But sometimes they look like the US Congress trying to get rid of daylight savings time. Or pennies. They just can't get around to it and no one knows why. lol.

While we're at it can we do something about the timers on "Pre-Contact" conditions? Just because I lagged out of range for a second, shouldn't make the basket retract while I'm on approach less than 10 feet away from it with the probe simply because I didn't hook up in a prescribed amount of time. it'd be great to have a feature that 'overrode' the timer running out if the plane is within a certain distance of the basket. The basket should never retract when I'm actively attempting to make contact and inside a range of like, 70 feet or so.

I actually wasn't being sarcastic - I don't and have never owned a VR headset. I have no idea what they're capable of, and what was described initially, was not clear enough for me understand the effect that you then went on to describe much better. "No, you can just focus your eyes on anything beyond the glass in VR. Impossible to implement on monitor - even with eye tracker the game only knows the area you're looking at but cannot know what distance you're focusing at." - Draconus The above line was not speaking, in my understanding, about how the dual-rendering of a scene can allow for each eye to see two different angles of light, thereby allowing you to ignore the angle with highlights on the scratches and thus see past them, as if one lens of a glasses pair was dirty and one was not. That makes perfect sense. To me, it sounded as though you could 'focus your eyes past the glass texture' in VR, and in response to my query about "blurring and transparency filter for focal length' not being possible...for someone to reply with "No, that's possible" would indicate to me that, well, that's possible. That's a different response than the effect that you described. I entirely grant that is what Draconus meant, but sarcasm was not in play. It was my own misunderstanding of what Draconus was saying, with no experience or evidence to conceptualize or challenge it. Had Draconus explained more what the effect he was speaking too actually manifested as, that would have helped. Responding to something that isn't currently possible in technology with, "No, that's possible," can only lead me to believe it is. Afterall, I feel like it ought to be possible...in fact, I'm certain it is possible, it just hasn't been done yet. So to imply that it was possible, was entirely believable to me. So apologies if you felt I was being sarcastic. Not at all. I genuinely thought perhaps we'd made that leap somehow. Because, in my mind, it's only a factor of zoom and head position, and filtering. It ought to be easily acheivable. In fact, I wonder if you couldn't mod it. All the information is already in game you'd need for it. Also - not owning a VR headset - I could absolutely believe that there was some sensor in headsets that can detect the muscle movements of your eye and gauge how you're focusing. Again - another aspect of them that would almost expect to be possible at this point. All it'd take is something to 'train' from your muscle movements and a sensor or someway to detect the movements. You can already do this 20 years ago with lasik-surgery prep equipment. It's how they gauge your correction when they consult you for eye surgery. You look into a visor, and it runs a program that determines your focal needs at various lengths. No reason at all why that likely couldn't have been adapted by some fancy tech start up. Just saying. Seemed honestly believable to me.

I've already submitted a bug report months ago about this. I didn't know that VR headsets could detect your eye's focal length and adjust the image to match it. That's incredible.

Home now - the scratches I mean below. These do not go away, but stay as you zoom in so that they become effectively blockers to anything beyond. I've never flown in anything, nor seen any footage of anything, that looks like these scratches. As deep as they appear, I'd be worried about the integrity of the glass.

I'm no marketing director - But I would think that if you wanted people to get interested in the game, allowing users the ability to record and replay their flights for entertainment may be a huge free advertising boost. The fact that there is no viable re-watch feature in a modern sim where over 30 years of simulations have provided exactly that, isn't a lack of resources or time. It is a conscious choice. If I had to venture a theory - it is meant to gatekeep ordinary players from making content, and likely the pressure from the community to have this tool is probably offset by larger stakeholders such as the military or government, holding them somewhat accountable for creating a simulation that, under certain conditions, can entirely pass for real video footage and lead to a lot of misreporting and grey area in real world news. Not having that tool easy, and available to every player, thus, is a conscious choice. Whether or not it is the right one is debatable - but were this tool a priority, they'd have had ample time and resource to change it. The fact that it isn't a priority is not from lack of interest on the playerbase, but directly from lack of interest on the developer side. They don't want to open that can of worms any more than it already is.

I know exactly the phenomena you speak of. When I zoom into the landscape or a target, I can absolutely tell. What this means is that distant contacts get washed or stutter'd out when looking around. Not until my head is stationary, will they reliably remain on the screen. Close up, it can cause issues with tracking movement of moving objects accurately and breaks the immersion, as well as blurs the contact moving, so that it is difficult to ascertain its aspect, velocity or ID. This is present in every simulation I play with TrackIR, including IL2 and others. 1. It only happens when I look around, not when head is stationary 2. It does not occur when I pan with mouse, keyboard or other control I've long attributed it to the refresh rate of TrackIR itself, being not synced or otherwise not tuned well. TrackIR hasn't had any significant updates in, what? A decade? The software and hardware work - yes - but it amazes me that they no longer support it. I think it would be well worth a more modern company to buy them out and update it. They don't even offer a wireless version of the trackclip pro, which is ridiculous because you can get home made versions of it on Ebay or Etsy and they work great. Why on earth would they not carry one? All in all, I love TrackIR but it is an outdated, un-updated system that deserves better from NaturalPoint, perhaps better than NaturalPoint, and the day someone makes a competing system for it that has the fidelity and feel of its interface and tracking reliability, I'm buying it.

The scratches blur and become more transparent when you 'lean in' in VR? I'm playing on a monitor. If that's true, I wonder why this feature isn't implemented for regular graphics?

@NineLine You mentioned many replies ago that the team was working on internal spotting and dots. Any word on this? Also - any word on 4k resolution parity? Currently, as we know, those playing at lower resolutions will have 'larger' dots that allow them to spot from further away. Being that many monitors now, and cards run at native 4k dimensions, it'd be good to finally be able to use that 4k to properly compete, either by bringing 4k dots up to the similar physical screen sizes of lower resolution dots - or - to simply start having lower resolution dots come into vision in shorter ranges. Also - regarding cockpit scratches - I'll upload a file when I get home this evening. On the F-14, F-5, and a few others, the 'scratches' on the glass are so dense and patterned, you cannot see out of the cockpit. Without the cockpit glass mod, in low-angle sunlight, all I can see are fat, densely packed, patterned scratches. Either it is a bug, or we need to reconsider how to texture those effects to better mimic real cockpit scratches. As others have said - you can see thousands of them...but...not like this. Also, my eyes are capable many times of focusing past a lot of the scratches on up close glass. I can't do that in game. Is that something that could be modeled into texture asset? When you lean in close to the glass, or use the "Zoom" feature, could it apply a blur and transparency shift to those scratches, to mimic 'focusing' your eyes past those close up assets? Similar to a depth of field effect, sort of.

@Manhorne So, ah, I guess I'll send you my Venmo, there bud?

I'm echoing many here, in that it only works intermittently for me, and there's no set of conditions that I can reliably point to, mission to mission, that give me any predictability as to whether it will. If I'm flying at 24,000, and I want to set the AP for that alt, and I'm trimmed and flying it already, when I hit AP on and have alt selected, I expect the aircraft to darn well stay there. But it doesn't. It'll either slowly sink, slowly loft, or bobble. But rarely does it actually stabilize on the altitude that I've commanded it too. This makes formation flying ridiculous. I can't imagine that the actual AP of the real plane was this finicky, was it? Who would have ever used it?