VincentLaw

And Ka-50 if you want to curse at the trimmer all day. The P-51 is by far the easiest full DCS module to learn from a systems standpoint, UH-1 is second place. A-10C is the easiest to actually fly, but all the buttons, switches, and displays might overwhelm a new player. Also, all three of these are American, so the labels are in English.

I think Real Life has a blue screen. What am I supposed to do? I don't want to lose my progress.

DCS: Cursor confirmed! (lovely video though)

Better yet: Advanced Foliage Model (AFM). I would also like to see an Advanced Fauna Model (AFM) to accompany all of the new Advanced Flora enhancements to EDGE.

There was a new update on Friday that added an inertia damping toggle, so I decided to try building a space ring. Switching inertial damping off doesn't disable the rotation damping, so the gyros still have to be manually disabled to keep it spinning.

I like how they only showed him press one button in the startup procedure. Home cockpit builders could use one of these:

Cool concept, but they cut too many corners for my taste. Their "a few sacrifices to “realism elitism” " is the understatement of the year. If I am playing a "physics-sandbox" in space, I want to be able to orbit planets. According to one video I watched, the max speed in the game is 70.1 m/s no matter how many engines you put on your ship. That is about as fast as a Cessna 172. If it was $5 I would give it a shot. Oh, what a cruel world. It was $5 on Wednesday. Oh well. Actually, this does still look fun if I just suspend my disbelief on the whole orbital-mechanics-are-completely-missing-and-I-am-flying-a-giant-cessna-in-space thing. I'm going to go ahead and get this anyway, and I can always go back to KSP if the physics bothers me too much. The fact is I want a game like this that doesn't throw orbital mechanics out the window, but there isn't one that I know of (KSP leaves much to be desired on the EVA/IVA front), so I might as well deal with it.

No, he is actually cancelling because the forum mods moved this extremely vague thread to chit-chat and told him to be more specific when he has a question. That made him upset at DCS in general so he wants to leave forever. This thread is much more concise, so he seems to have learned.

My reputation is actually pretty evenly split between helpful posts, stating my opinion, and making jokes. The system could certainly use some revisions, but I think it has a valid purpose of encouraging people to make posts that other users will approve of (even if that means more witty one liners around). I imagine this would be difficult to quantify, but it would be interesting if someone did a study on the nature of posts between forums with and without a reputation system to see if there really is any correlation in post quality. Some things that I think would make the reputation system more effective: New members with 0 rep should be able to +rep. The people that need help the most are new people, but they can't actually reward people that help them. Rep should have a floor. If people get huge negative rep because of a "lynch mob" or they made a really offensive statement, their rep should not be able to go negative. People with negative rep might quit caring about the reputation (defeating it's purpose), or they might be proud of their "infamy meter," and actually try to rack up as many red squares as possible. Reputation should be multidimensional. The reputation system would be more useful if users could be rated separately for helpfulness, humor, cordiality, significance, relevance, grammar, and style (how about those bullet points). Then people would not get rated the same way for witty one liners as they would for saying something profound. Users should get points (on a separate tally) for rating other posts, that way people are encouraged to actually use the system. Everyone likes scoring points right? The F-35C doesn't have an internal cannon! That's right, I went there!

If it makes everyone feel better, I just checked my copy of DCS 1.0 and there were no tree collisions.

That was totally my idea first.

Think of it this way: If trees can stop your helicopter, then they can also stop enemy bullets. DCS: Golf will be impossible until tree collisions are a reality.

I'd like a closeup of that facility over there.

You will need to go bigger than that. All of the fast mover pilots will complain about having to fly in circles. If it takes me longer than an hour to figure out how to make an ocean map, then something went seriously wrong with the SDK. I'm not a "map guy," but I had fun throwing together random stuff with the old Battlefield map tools. The main problem for the casuals will be lack of generic preset buildings (Assumption warning, and not a problem for water world either way), but maybe some nice people will make a free map assets project or something. That would go a long way for rapid community map development.

If noone makes Waterworld when the SDK becomes available, then I will do it myself for the principle of the thing. I guess a question relevant to this thread is if we will be able to stitch any existing maps together into a Frankenmap, or if doing so would require the "source" of the map. Even if it is possible to weld a Sea of Nevada onto the map, it would probably not be legal to redistribute for multiplayer unless it is possible to make metamaps that get map data from other maps.

Because marketing works. Turns out money can buy people. Does EDGE have SkyActiv technology? Is EDGE gluten free? Is EDGE in "the cloud"? etc.

I believe he is referring to airplanes automatically despawning an hour (or something) after they park. This can mess with mission triggers and, for example, cause inappropriate mission success or failure. I do not know if there is a solution to the problem though.

It has since been confirmed to be capable of both flat and global maps. (after I made that post.) In any case, the Normandy map for DCS WWII will most likely be flat, but this opens the possibility for future maps, so I am happy.

It should be a C-2A® Greyhound module instead then.

This is technically possible to write into the AFM of vechicles with the old terrain, and is apparent to a limited extent with existing modules (eg. drive off the taxiway with the A-10), but there are very few unique surface types specified on the Black Sea map (I discovered a total of 6, though interestingly the highest index value was 23). It would probably require modification of the wheel model, not just the terrain, to add more terrain types for vehicles in general. I don't think friction or roughness information is specified by the terrain data.

NAS Fallon, home of TOPGUN, NSAWC, TOPDOME, The Navy Rotary Wing Weapon School, and SEAL CSAR training. It is off of the map to the northwest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Air_Station_Fallon

Do you assume everyone dislikes something because you dislike it? Nevada may not be the best place for F-15 vs. Su-27, but it certainly has a place in DCS. There is/was an F-14 simulator at the National Naval Aviation Museum at NAS Pensacola, and Las Vegas is one of the maps they run for visitors, so obviously they thought it was worth flying a military naval fighter simulator over. I wonder how many people thought "I can't believe I had to fly over Nevada! What a waste of money!" You never know, there could be a Russian sub in Lake Mead.

I think Nevada could make a good location for an expanded Mexican Drug War campaign, where the cartels have expanded operations in the area around Las Vegas... or you could do a scenario like Rainbow 6 Vegas. This wouldn't be very good for fighter pilots, but there could be some plausible COIN ops or police missions in the area, which would work well for something like the Huey.

This is a graph of my system load while running DCS for a few minutes. (not at max graphics) Now remind me why I should be offloading my CPU physics calculations onto my GPU again? If anything, I should be offloading my graphics calculations from my GPU onto my CPU. The GPU isn't just some magic box that can take anything you throw at it, and Physx is not magic either. All of the special effects and physics calculations that Physx does can be done without Physx. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should, even if that something has really good marketing.

But I can't properly reenact Star Trek IV with DCS: Huey until they make it to San Francisco. This is obviously an important reason to expand the map West. Flying through cities is more fun than desert.