WWSmith

I wish I was exaggerating, but for me attitude hold really does nothing. Here's the track I posted in an earlier thread. In it, I trim so that I can easily hold a hover with just occasional fingertip pressure, engage attitude hold, and let go of the stick. The moment I let go, the heli starts wandering. It's the same in forward flight, although I don't have a track of that. Me and several other people have also noticed that it's finicky to engage. I think you need to engage within a few seconds after trimming. Are you using a force feedback stick by any chance? ApacheBug.trk

Same for me. It worked fine until 2 patches ago, now ATT hold seems to do nothing, even with the heli well-trimmed. I posted a track in another thread, which seems to have gone dead for now.

I was using instant mode in that track, which is what I use in all helis, but center mode has the same result. If I was having trouble trimming it, I'd understand, but it flies great, and I have no trouble hovering on my own. I can't say that this is exactly game-breaking, because I only use attitude hold when I need to work with the displays, and I can always switch to the CP/G seat and have George take over as pilot, it's just annoying that it's broken. There's no way that I'm rolling back to the previous version, either, because the update that broke the Apache's attitude hold for me also fixed the Tomcat AI freeze bug, which had been a major thorn in my side for many months, so I can live with occasionally handing the controls to George.

I just checked, and there was nothing assigned to pitch, roll, and yaw axes except my stick and pedals. I never said anything about altitude hold, although I noticed that it might disengage more easily than it used to. It's attitude hold that's not working for me. It engages and stays engaged, but doesn't actually do anything to hold attitude. What controllers are you using? Given that I've had trouble with fixed-wing autopilots and FFB, I have a feeling that FFB is the issue here, too, but I can't figure out a solution. With fixed-wing, the solution is to set a small deadzone, but that doesn't work with helicopter force trimming.

I've wasted at least 3 hours trying to troubleshoot this, and I tried various combinations of trim mode, curves, and deadzones to no avail. (Found it harder to trim with deadzones, in fact.) I didn't think to check if any bindings got screwed up, because in the past that's always been something really dramatic, like collective=roll axis, whereas right now the Apache flies fine. Anyway, I'm at work now, so I'll check that tomorrow just in case.

I should add that attitude hold isn't working any better in forward flight, either. In fact, I suspect that it isn't doing anything at all, and that the time I got it to work in a hover was actually just a case of really good trimming on my part. It used to work fine for me, and the Mi-24's autopilot hover mode still works, so something has changed with the Apache. Since not everyone is experiencing this, maybe it's related to force feedback. Just a thought.

I've been having this trouble since the last patch, too. I trim the heli so that I can keep it in a hover with just an occasional light touch on the stick, engage ATT hold, let go of the stick, and it instantly starts to drift. This can be a growing oscillation, like you describe, or a growing drift in one direction. In about 3 hours of trying, only once did I get it to work like it used to, and that was a random occurrence which I haven't been able to reproduce. I'm using FFB, by the way, in case that might be relevant. I just attached a track. I take off, hover, engage the attitude hold, and let go of the stick, at which point the Apache just goes and does its own thing. ApacheBug.trk

I just test-flew the F-14 mission "Bone Strike," which has so far frozen 100% of the time for me at some point between the RTB call and the carrier. Here's my report on the fix:

Gonna bump this thread, having gone a month without an update on the problem, and having experienced this freezing bug since I bought the Tomcat at the start of July. (Yes, I did the free trial, but I only flew training and instant action missions during that time, just to see if I liked the plane, and none of those triggered a freeze.) For the past couple of months, I've done nothing with the Tomcat but practice carrier landings and AAR, just to keep my skills sharp, because there's no point in trying to fly actual missions when I have about a 1/3 chance of being unable to complete them.

I've most often had it happen in the F-14 when I'm far from any carrier, sometimes over 100NM away, but that isn't to say that there wasn't an AI Tomcat near the carrier at the time. I've given up trying to troubleshoot it. Back on November 1, Iron Mike posted that Heatblur had finally been able to replicate the freeze in the debugger, but there's been no news since. I was thinking of buying the Hornet during this sale, but then I found this thread, and I see some people have had freezes with the Hornet, too. Were those of you who've seen freezes in the Hornet able to fix the problem by disabling the Tomcat module?

I didn't think to mention it along with my system specs, but I've excluded both the main DCS folder and the DCS Saved Games folder from Windows Security, just in case that was the culprit, but without success. Based on some other posts claiming that the freezes are related to camera movement/changing views, etc, I also tried flying the F-14 without head tracking, staying in-cockpit, and keeping the view straight ahead, all without success. (Obviously I can't actually play the sim that way, but I thought I'd give it a shot with the Bone Strike mission to see if it cured the problem.) I've monitored performance leading up to a freeze, and none of my hardware is anywhere near full usage when it happens. My GPU had the highest load of anything, at around 70% last time, and the temp was hovering around 85C. The weird thing is that it never freezes when my system really is being heavily loaded, such as when I'm following along behind a huge wave of cruise missiles--in those situations, I can't compress time very much without getting heavy stutters, yet it never freezes. Instead, it always freezes when there's very little happening in-game. I can't even say that it's related to RTB calls, because Operation Reforger--MIGCAP and Cage the Bear--Cargo sometimes freeze before getting the RTB call. I've had it freeze when I'm trying to rendezvous with a tanker, and once when I was plugged in to a tanker, but I've also refueled the Tomcat 104 times without a freeze, so I can't say that it's tanker-related either. There are missions in which the tanker TACAN doesn't seem to work. I don't know if that could possibly be related. Just throwing all this out there in the hope that it somehow helps your troubleshooting efforts. Thanks for trying.

I really don't think it's related to the view, because I've most often had it freeze while I'm in-cockpit, looking straight ahead, cruising from one waypoint to another. I've even tried without head tracking, just to eliminate any possibility of any camera movement whatsoever, and it still happens. No mods at all, by the way.

I'm running an AMD Ryzen 7 3700 X processor at 3.6 GHz, 32GB 3600 MHz DDR4 RAM, an AMD RX 5700 XT GPU with driver 22.5.1, Windows 10.

I just had my first chance to try out 2.8 since its release, and I tried Mission 6 of Operation Reforger. Unfortunately, it froze at more or less the same point as always. As much as I love flying the Tomcat, it's starting to feel like an old Alfa Romeo: brilliant fun... when it runs.

If Joe1978 is talking about the freeze issue, I had that, too, with the MIGCAP mission. I remember playing through a few times, eventually made it to the RTB call, and immediately quit. That's the only way I can make it through a campaign, which is definitely not as satisfying as actually landing back on the carrier.

I tried IronMike's fix, but sadly it hasn't worked for me. I just flew mission 6 of Operation Reforger (it's always frozen on me in the past, but it's a pretty quick and easy mission, so good for testing), and it froze when I was trying to rendezvous with the tanker, as always.

Unfortunately, I'm also still getting freezes since the update. As before, they always happen after combat on my way back to the boat. If you fly the mission "Bone Strike," you should be able to replicate this 100% of the time, because I've never been able to complete that mission out of maybe 10 tries. At some point after the bombers reach Turkish airspace, it always freezes. Sometimes I can refuel and make it to about 100 NM from the carrier, other times I can't even reach the tanker before the game freezes. Maybe it's when an AI plane lands or something, I don't know.