JCTherik

Will do next time, thanks a lot!

I've read that too, but sometimes there are some bug reports that linger around for years, and are brought up again and again before being acknowledged. And since there's no [REPORTED] or [INVESTIGATING] here, I'm worried that it fell through the cracks. I'm not asking for ETA, or progress report, just a little "Filed" reply, or [REPORTED] flair. But anyway, if you say it's filed, it's filed, I'll leave it.

Eeeh, I don't know what to say, really. I'm talking about the IAS in the HUD being shown incorrectly on takeoff and landing, which is... kinda important... I made sure to put an effort into this bug report, there is a description, screenshots and track replay, all together with a probable cause, and a description of expected behaviour. It's been a month without any response. Is this being worked on or is it being ignored?

Any news on this?

Ok, this may sound weird and completely unrealistic, but after a lot of positive feedback, I have to point out that a Quake-3 style no-rules, air-spawn, multiplayer PVP, BFM, instant-respawn, free-for-all, deathmatch if-you-see-it-shoot-it kind of server is SURPRISINGLY fun, and great for practice of confusing fights, because it's in essence just one giant constant furball. The only downside is that it's not possible to do this within the rules of DCS, as everyone is always either on RED or BLUE, thus we're forced to explicitly repeatedly state that yes, you're allowed AND encouraged to shoot friendlies. As a result, stats don't mean anything and any kind of AI gunners, jesters etc, those just won't work properly. Would it be possible to add "neutral" as a faction too? Or some other way to mark an aircraft in mission editor to tell the game that this plane doesn't belong to any team and is a fair game for anybody?

1. Comms menu cursor highlight and configurable bindings for Enter / Back/ Up / Down. Would make it possible to use the comms menu with a simple 5-way hat. 2. Allow the bindings for the F1-F12 of comms menu to be reassigned 3. Make the white cursor in VR match the position of the green cursor in VR. Seriously, why do we have two mouse cursors in VR to begin with? EDIT: 4. *Hold* C to transfer control to your crew member, if the crew member presses C while I'm holding C, they'll immediately get control. Or press another shortcut to decline. If I don't have control but I want it, I start holding C, and the person who's currently in control will press C to give me control. In other words, any time both players are pressing C simultaneously, the controls switch. ..No need to mess around with mouse while hovering the hind. 5. "XXX wants to join your RIO position. <Accept> <Decline>" Again, confirm with C, decline with another shortcut. No need to mess around with the mouse when refueling the cat.

Think of any 3-way switch that has Top/Mid/Bot positions. Those are the possible bindings that I've seen in DCS for such a switch: 1. Top 2. Mid 3. Bot 4. Toggle Top <-> Mid 5. Toggle Bot <-> Mid 6. Toggle Top <-> Bot 7. Toggle Top->Mid->Bot 8. Toggle Bot->Mid->Top 9. Hold for Top, else Mid 10. Hold for Mid, else Top 11. Hold for Bot, else Mid 12. Hold for Mid, else Bot 13. Hold for Top, else Bot 14. Hold for Bot, else Top 15. Switch up 16. Switch down ... i hope I didn't forget any... But developers do, and lot of those are missing in many airplanes. Not everyone of those bindings will be very useful for every switch if you're looking at the virtual airplane switch alone, but when you look at the variations of people's hardware, I'm sure pretty much every combination has some use, and there may be even more that would be useful but don't even currently exist. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just open the switch bindings, see that it has 3 positions, and then be presented with 3 separate sets of keybinds, one for each current position of the switch, and define which other position each keybind should lead to? As a great bonus, it would greatly benefit if the bindings could specify OnPress, OnRelease, OnPressRelease, OnHold, etc., and if the same physical hotas switch could be bound to multiple keybinds with different events. Example: A switch has 3 states, thus I get presented with 3 separate profiles for that switch When it's in the Top position, I set that my Button1 would move the switch to the Bot position. Once it moves to the Bot position, the binding profile for that switch changes, and in the "Bot" profile, I may have the same Button1 bound to this switch moving to the Mid position. And in the mid profile, I'll set the same Button1's function so that it moves the switch to the Top position. Thus, I get a binding that cycles Top->Bot->Mid. This is pretty simple, but I can freely choose which direction it cycles and I only need 1 button. In other words: State - Binding -> NewState Top - Button1 -> Bot Bot - Button1 -> Mid Mid - Button1 -> Top For more complicated switches, like covered switches, those would need more profiles, and the menu would have to be aware of all the possible states. The dust filter in hind has 2 positions and a cover that will force it down, thus it's a 3-state switch: Up, Down, DownCovered. Tomcat's master arm would be a 5-state switch: Up, Mid, Down, MidCovered, DownCovered. Obviously, UpCovered state for that switch doesn't exist, since upon closing the cover from the Up position, the switch will flick itself to the MidCovered position. This kind of system would allow people to simply set sensible bindings which would for example use a single button for the tomcat master arm, by binding a long-press to cover/uncover and a short press to toggle between the possible states, like this: MidCovered - short -> DownCovered DownCovered - short -> MidCovered Mid - short -> Up Up - short -> Down Down - short -> Mid MidCovered - long -> Mid DownCovered - long -> Down Down - long -> DownCovered Mid - long -> MidCovered Up - long -> MidCovered (the tomcat switch is moved to master-arm off if the cover is closed while master-arm is on) ( Up, Mid, Down are the uncovered positions, short = Button1.onPressRelease, long = Button1.onHold ) Those kinds of simple macros would be super useful, would definitely drastically reduce the amount of people posting bugs/wishes about missing keybinds and would make it much easier for players. On a related note, can we get a finer control over the curves, setting saturations from left and right, etc? I know all of this is probably going to get forgotten anyway, since there's a lot of important stuff to do, but we can dream

Same for me, and I genuinely want more players to learn AAR, but I also think that if there's no reward, most people just wouldn't ever bother. Which is exactly why I'm in principle not opposed to any training crutch or assists that would make people learn faster, I'm only opposed to assists which: A. Would instantly allow virtually everyone to refuel without much training, and B. Are likely to end up permanently enabled in multiplayer. Anything else I don't have much of a problem with.

As tends to be the case sadly. Sorry, but that's a wee bit unfair. I took time to put together a list of many possible assists, with varying functions and varying degrees of acceptability. It's really not my fault that you guys keep focusing on the most outrageous forms of those assists and won't give an inch or even acknowledge that there could be problems and that there are objections to those assists from other players. Feel free to come up with different forms of assists, or a way to ensure that the assists stay in single-player only. This^ I've lost in dogfights against keyboard players who have less in-game time than me, and then I've seen the same guy use that same keyboard to refuel his plane. The excuse of "AAR is impossible" is only really impossible for people who "don't have time to practice it", because every time they log into DCS they'd rather fly combat. It's about priorities and willingness, there's nothing impossible about it.

That is there to allow skilled players to have a close game with less skilled players, it's a very different thing. As I said before, if I as a low-skill combat player go in a PVP server against high-skill combat players, the only trump card I have there is that I can refuel quickly, thus I can use throttle more generously. I'm still probably going to lose, but if you give everybody access to fuel, you're putting the handicap on the wrong player. So, my point still stands, since golf doesn't use variable difficulty to create unfair playing field, but really quite the opposite.

Well, no, aim assist adjusts your aim slightly to compensate for controller play. Again, that's more along the lines of having custom curves. Aim assist doesn't automatically aim, walk and shoot while you walk away to make a tea. It's not an autopilot for aiming, it's more like an SAS for aiming. And I'm not particularly happy about those. But in any case, the existence of one assist doesn't justify the existence of two assists, if anything, i'd say it's the opposite. Also, note that those assists, startup/rudder/takeoff may be used by people who struggle to get the airplane off the ground, because without ever getting into the air, you miss the main point the DCS. Most of the gameplay is only accessible once you get into the air, but there's no hidden gameplay content that would require AAR to access, it's just fuel. Some airplanes have trim resets, some don't, some have autothrottle, some don't. I'm not aware of any of those being accessible outside of what the airplane can already do IRL. I wasn't aware of that, but after some reading, this looks like it puts you in a position of a manager that's instructing a driver. Doesn't seem like the point of this is to skip a difficult section of a track. I can't really see why this is relevant at all. I meant that as a parallel to a bigger AAR box. Progress towards realism though, not away from it. It seems like real pilots usually manage to get refueled pretty quickly, but they also train general flying much more. If ED updates refueling so that it's more realistic and it turns out to be easier that way, it will be a win for everybody, but AAR autopilot is not a realistic way to achieve that, that is no progress at all, it's a step towards ace combat. But this will adversely affect DCS. You refuse to accept what we're saying here, there are plenty of people who will be negatively affected by this if this is available in multiplayer. I do formations a bit, and just generally fly around as well as I can. I usually don't fly combat, and most people would wipe the floor with me in both BVR and BFM. Other people who fly combat every day, and their practice involve searching things on radar screens and drawing perfect circles in the sky, those people are going to be better at dogfighting. Unless you invest your time and effort into both, you shouldn't get the reward for both. So, let me play a little devil's advocate here. I do find dogfights kinda difficult, but if there are autopilots for AAR freely given to people, well, I'm just going to ask for an autopilot for dogfighting, then I'm gonna go make myself a coffee, and when I come back and my plane is sitting in the bandit's 6 low, i'm just gonna press the trigger. Why should I have to spend days or months practicing dogfights? Why can't I just get an autopilot assist for that? ........... Can you see how that would degrade, if not outright invalidate all of the efforts of the thousands of players that spent months learning dogfights? You may think that AAR doesn't affect anything in multiplayer, but it does. If I can find and rejoin with a tanker faster, plug quickly, stay in and fly away without too much effort, I can refuel faster and more often, which gives me an advantage. Other players may have spent the same amount of training on fiddling with their radar, and they get really good at it, and that gives them an advantage. If you now take my advantage and give it freely to everyone else, you're disrespecting all the effort that I've put into it, you're skewing the playing field, and you're removing pretty much the only real reward that a player in DCS has for learning precision flying.

Notice what kinds of assists we're talking about here. Clutch, racing lines, traction control, ABS... An analogy of those in AAR would be something along the lines of overlays that tell you which way to go, or curve adjustments to make the response smoother. That's very different from AAR autopilot. One thing you won't ever find in any semi-serious or competitive driving sim is an assist that will drive through a difficult section of the track for you, while you go AFK, which would be the driving sim equivalent of AAR autopilot. You may have driving sim assists that improve the responsiveness of the car, make it less slippery, more smooth, shift better, but there aren't any assists that steer for you, let alone fully take over. I'm also yet to see a car racing assist that makes the road wider for you. Some assists may be more acceptable than others, and I think the problem is to a large degree about the kind of assists that you're asking for, for which an equivalent just straight up doesn't exist in racing sims.

Yes, I've read everything you said, which is why I said that if you're a campaign designer, the single-player-only AAR skip does have merit. ----------------------- Since we keep arguing about various different AAR assists and they have vastly different consequences, Here's a list of all the proposed AAR assists: (which I saw mentioned so far) Each with some details. I'm trying to be objective in the advantage/disadvantage parts in all of those, but the whole list is ultimately based on my own opinions, and while I hope that many would agree with me, I obviously have no say in what gets or doesn't get implemented by ED. Note: For all of the following, with the exception of the last two, I assume that whatever options and mechanics are used in the implementation would also be available in multiplayer, and thus, I'm assuming that most of the popular servers will leave those enabled and up to people's preferences, and my opinions are based on that. AAR Autopilot: ..as in, a button that takes over the airplane and refuels for you, either before rejoin, after "ready precontact", or after a one successful plug Advantages: Easy to do Cinematic and immersive for the player Hands off (AFK time) Looks normal from third-person view Disadvantages: Cheap, requires no effort Cheaty Unrealistic in execution Doesn't help teaching AAR at all A slap in the face of everyone who spent hours practicing to do it manually opinion: this isn't ace combat. Hard NO Wireless AAR: ..as in, flying somewhere in the vicinity of the tanker would magically refill your tanks Advantages: Easy to do Still technically involves some flying Disadvantages: Very cheap and cheaty looking Very unrealistic Breaks immersion for the player AND people around Doesn't teach how to fly tight formations Even bigger slap in the face of people who spent hours practicing to do it manually Looks ugly from a third person view opinion: my least favourite, hard NO More forgiving refuel box: ..as in, longer boom, more telescopic boom, longer hose, bigger basket, etc. Advantages: Teaches formation flying Still somewhat realistic depending on how much the box size is increased If adjustable, could help people become progressively better Disadvantages: Looks ugly from third person view for people who don't have the same settings May look grotesque for the people who do have the same settings Doesn't teach proper position opinion: I'm not a big fan, but it's the least evil of the proposed ones so far Boom tanker lights screen overlay: ..as in, an overlay similar to the meatball overlay to better see the lights under the airforce tankers Advantages: Very non-intrusive Only fixing a graphics issue of hard-to-see lights Still involves fully manual refueling Disadvantages: If it's a square moving smoothly up and down like the meatball overlay does, it will allow people much higher precision than the 5-step lights under the tanker, thus slightly unrealistic Only applicable to boom tankers Only a minor help opinion: I'd prefer if the graphics glitches get fixed instead, but otherwise, no problem A button for quick curve preset change: ..as in, having the option to set two sets of axis-tune, ie. curves and saturations, for stick and throttle, and switch between them with a click of a button. One normal with full range for general flying, one precise with highly limited range of motion for AAR and formations Advantages: Could still be considered fully manual AAR Functionally equivalent to temporarily changing the curves in the settings Disadvantages: Could mess with people's muscle memory Throttle would have to be treated somewhat uniquely, treating the current throttle position as the new center of the axis, and then applying curve/saturation onto that. Sometimes you're refuelling with 20% throttle, other times in 70% throttle, so the range of the throttle would have to dynamically shrink around whatever position the throttle is in when the button to change the curve is pressed opinion: You can already do this fully by adjusting curves, so, it's technically just a quality of life thing. No problem Screen overlay showing hints: ..as in, an entirely new overlay that shows how far you are from an ideal position in each direction, and which way you're currently moving Advantages: Fairly non-intrusive, just an overlay Would help teaching refueling Disadvantages: Overlays look ugly on the screen People may focus on he overlay instead of the tanker too much opinion: no problem Better representation of small G-force changes ..as in, exaggerated head bob or some other screen effects that would show small changes of G-force Advantages: Very non-intrusive Actually realistic in terms of what information a real pilot would have, since it's substituting for seat-of-pants Disadvantages: Won't necessarily help refueling that much Depending on how it's represented, may look nonintuitive or ugly opinion..I'd welcome this change everywhere Depth perception substitute: ..as in, an approximate distance and closure readout of whatever's in the middle of the screen Advantages: Brings some of the advantage of VR onto pancake thus leveling the playing field Realistic in terms of what information a real pilot would have, as long as the measurements aren't too precise Disadvantages: Won't make refueling that much easier, may require some getting used to it May clutter the screen/look ugly opinion: no problem Progressive practice missions: ..as in, a series of strictly single-player missions for practicing formation with any sort of assists that progressively increase in difficulty Advantages: People learn AAR progressively Won't affect multiplayer Disadvantages: Won't make actual AAR any easier, it will only make the learning more approachable opinion: As long as the mechanics can't leak into multiplayer, no problem Single-player only built in AAR skip mechanics: ..give campaign designers a built-in way to skip AAR Advantages: Solves the single-player campaign issue Won't affect multiplayer Disadvantages: Won't teach people AAR at all opinion: As long as the mechanics can't leak into multiplayer, no problem Those are all I can think of that I've seen being talked about. Any other ideas?

Does it mean we can continue to have a civil debate, or that we should rather close the subject?

it's getting slightly heated there, we'll be bit more cucumbers. Thank you, please don't. At least not any unrealistic "AAR autopilot".

including AAR, so you don't need any assist.

No, I don't care. I do care though. Some people I fly with are now in the process of learning AAR, doing better after every hour of formations, invested lot of time and effort on trying stay calm, adjusting their setup to be just right and just plain learning the aerodynamic behaviour of their airplanes. I'd say it would be pretty huge slap in the face if tomorrow, that reward for the challenge would just be given to everybody for free. Plenty of people feel that way. I and other people do though. Sadly, that's not implemented, and as with any feature that gives a competitive advantage, this will get abused. Nobody's saying you must do AAR, it's still the same as it's always have been. Learn AAR and you'll get a full tank of fuel at 30k feet. It's a take it or leave it transaction. Why aren't you asking for automatic landing, automatic takeoff automatic taxi and automatic PVE autopilot too? Would that be a step too far for you? Perhaps you too don't want to play on servers where 90% of the people aren't actually playing the game. Yet it's in many games. So apparently not? Which competitive game have varying difficulty that's forced on people who don't want it? I explained multiple times why and how does this affect me. You still haven't explained how does this affect you or why do you care. The only thing I can understand would be if you're a campaign designer and you want a built-in way to optionally skip AAR purely in single missions only, only as a part of a campaign.

Ok, despite me being against any of this, I still have to throw you an olive branch and say that expanded boom box is a lot less intrusive than AAR autopilot or wireless fuel transfer. On the other hand, howbout instead of trying to use an imprecise stick movements to maneuver the plane into a bigger box, we use a more precise stick movement to get it to a smaller box? What I mean by that, if the assist is in a form of "precision flying button" that instantly adjusts your stick curves and gives you +90 curve on all axes, plus it reduces the range of your throttle to, say +/- 15% throttle around your current position, so that you can make bigger throttle and stick movements, but get much more precise results... ? And once you get done refueling, you click it again and you're back in full range. The end result is the same, makes refueling easier, but one teaches the players the proper position and reference cues, the other doesn't. Not with AAR autopilot or wireless fuel transfer, because there's nothing to practice about pressing an autopilot button. \, F6, F1. There, that's the practice of the comms. Navigation, well, since most easy servers have F10 map, I doubt you're gonna get much navigation practice either. Formation flying is the part that requires practice, the rest of the procedure requires reading the manual once. Well, apparently, both you and cfrag do ask for AAR assists without really wanting to do AAR using those assists. I don't know why does the most vocal demand of AAR assist in last few days come from two people who can already refuel and thus don't need to use it, but it makes your sentence pretty hilariously wrong.

If you add a button that lets you win minecraft without fighting the dragon, the dragon ceases to be a challenge. Yes, cheat AAR does remove the challenge part from the AAR. It's not a challenge if you can do it with a press of a button. Those kind of options split the community, and since there's barely enough people to fill a few servers, any sort of watering down of difficulty leads to everybody being forced to either play on empty servers, or play on servers that allow those cheats. If there was 50k active users in multiplayer across thousands of servers, it would be a completely different story. Currently it's arguably AAR. Unless you come up with an even better challenge first, don't water down this one. End of story. That's pretty thick if you need to call me arrogant. I'm not in awe, and I don't think many players are, when they see someone refueling. But a "well done dude, you did it" is well deserved when someone refuels for the first time, it is a show of skill, a right of passage, it's been an iconic final boss of DCS for years, and there isn't anything else there in DCS like it. I don't need to be admired for AAR, but I like to admire people's AAR skills. I've seen people struggle hard for 40 minutes, learning refueling and then eventually successfully refueling, while on a keyboard. Hats off to them. That is some dedication and I do think that deserves some admiration. I've seen plenty of people struggle, struggle, struggle, then struggle the next day and next day, until eventually, they get "transfer complete". It is a magic moment, and you know that from that point on, you and your buddy won't run out of fuel anymore. And that's his and your reward. Do you think any of this would ever have a chance to happen if a full tank was but a button click away? Enough with watering down of challenging tasks. Next you'd be asking for a fly by wire handling in every plane and an assist that holds your corner speed. There are other games where those kinds of assists fit well. DCS has always been game where realism takes hard precedence over steepness of learning curve, and it is very unique in this way. Those kind of gameplay skipping assists have no place here. As I said before, this either fractures the already tiny community, or it forces people who want more realistic servers to choose between an empty server, or a populated but easy one. Except in this situation, you're not saving abused children here, so hold your horses there. All those people who struggle with AAR can come here on their own accounts and bring their own arguments and desires to the table. It seems like the most active people arguing for AAR assists here are people who can already refuel, which pretty much disqualifies them from asking for an assist. Why would you ask developers to spend their precious time on a feature you yourself would not even use? Unless you have an ulterior motive, and actually want to use the feature to park yourself next to a tanker as a way to "pause" a multiplayer game. If you really want to help others, go teach people AAR. What most people need to be able to AAR is just an hour or so of practice, with somebody next to them saying "you got this bro, relax relax, you're getting better". It's not too difficult for this task to be impossible, but it's just difficult enough so that you probably won't do it in your first week or even month of playing. Those "assists", which actually aren't assists but straight up gameplay skips, don't make people better at refueling, but instead will take away the motivation for people to ever attempt to learn it.

Then don't do the challenges, nobody's telling you you have to practice AAR. It's entirely up to you whether you do it or not. What I do not enjoy is when challenges get removed. Minecraft is a game, and you gotta kill a dragon in the end. What if minecraft added a button to skip killing the dragon and went straight to the "you won" page? As you say, everybody should be able to do whatever they want right? But that won't stop a large online multiplayer community AND the entire speedrunning community to be rightly upset about the decision to water down the final challenge of the game and turn it into a participation trophy. As I said repeatedly before, if this automated AAR stayed strictly within the realm of singleplayer campaigns, I really wouldn't care at all, but that's not how any single difficulty setting in DCS works. There is not a single option in DCS, to my knowledge, that's limited to single-player only, so, assuming that this would go to the same menu as every other option, we're not really talking single-player only here. If you want to keep this only in single-player, that would be something entirely new, and so you would have to explain how do you guarantee that it only stays within single-player. If you add auto-AAR cheats in multiplayer, then you effectively remove the final challenge of DCS from the game, because doing AAR won't mean anything anymore. Everyone will be able to click a button and do it. You will discredit the achievements of people who worked hard on the skill of AAR, you'll give free fuel to people who didn't actually learn how to fly the plane well and you will give an actual advantage to people who use the cheats, because people who do it by hand spend 5 minutes sweating, while the people who cheat it can spend 5 minutes scanning for enemies on the radar, have a stretch, if not a hop in the loo and get themselves ready for the next engagement. It will also remove any reason for people to actually practice precision - why would they when the reward for precision has been removed? Varying difficulty is unacceptable in a multiplayer game. Hold on. Do you yourself need the AAR cheats to refuel? Or can you do it? Because if you don't need AAR for yourself and you're just arguing on behalf of newcomers based on what you believe other players might want, then that's not really a fair representation. If you're not the target user of that feature, I don't think you should be asking for that feature.

Options split the community, unless you can guarantee that it's single player only. But then, in singleplayer, you can edit the lua files or get some mod and do whatever you want anyway. Since the community is very small, what we actually need is less options.

It's called cheats. What you want is a cheat menu that allows you to refil tanks at will.

It doesn’t do this unless you get all outa control. Stay on station and it won’t do this. Lot of people wobble way too much to stay in station, because they get way too close before they're ready and try to plug. I always tell them, stay 100 meters behind, stop thinking about plugging, just follow the tanker in position, and if they can't even do that, to practice keeping one axis at a time still and in position. Until they can stay still on all 3 axes behind the wing in the position, it makes no sense even trying to plug. BUT NOOOOO, 3 seconds later you see them oscilating around the basket again, while making frustrated noises, while proclaiming that "they've got this". Obviously, in the futile attempt to forcefully keep themselves more still than they're ready for, they burn themselves out in frustration in 5 minutes, utter some expletives and give up.

In theory, I don't disagree. If it's single-player only, you can edit the lua files and give yourself whatever you want. But in practice, giving an optional easy refueling in the settings menu means server admins will be able to choose the same settings on/off, and what tends to happen is that most new players come to the easiest of servers, and since the playerbase is relatively very tiny, barely enough to fill few servers, that means that the players who would enjoy more realistic environment are either forced to play alone on an empty server, or give up on realism and join the easy servers. That means the more realistic servers end up empty most of the time. EDIT: Which means, if the option to add a 30 meter magnet to the basket is available, I'm very worried that sooner or later, I'll be forced to choose between playing on an empty server, or playing on a server with this setting on.

It's not magnetic, you have to touch the center for it to snap. Also, proper basket physics aren't implemented yet, but the plan is to add it. But the goal is to make it more realistic, not less. What you're saying is that A isn't realistic, therefore B shouldn't either, which is not how it works in DCS. You're saying you personally can refuel. So, why do you need assists? There are some people who say that AAR is more difficult than in real life, and if that happens to be the case, then AAR should be changed to be more realistic, and if that makes it easier in the process, so be it. That, realism of the task, should be the ultimate goal. Not a basket that snaps onto your airplane from 30 meters away because kids want to burner and spamraam 24/7. Again, as I said, I think some assists may be acceptable depending on what kind of assist we're talking about, so, perhaps if you explain how you imagine the AAR to work, that would move this discussion further.