Frogisis

I agree completely, but the only way we have in this medium to show that is in the camera.

Right, naturally it has that stabilizer, but: This is actually a very good point. eFirehawk already mentioned this, but what I'm going for isn't so much a literal sense of one's view shaking so much as conveying the sense of the firing of the gun being transmitted up through the seat, using the only two senses current sims are capable of engaging: sight and sound. This fanbase has a tendency to be overly literal, which I think is ironically a detriment to realism, given that so many nuances are cut off from us given the nature of the medium. Flight models and avionics are a matter of research and engineering, but the sounds and visual effects need to be pure art, to truly engage with people's sense of reality.

So in FC3, when you fire your cannon in a dogfight, the camera shakes in a gratifyingly powerful way, conveying a tactile sense of the action of the gun as you spray the enemy with bullets, but in proper DCS: A-10C, your view stays stone-still when you fire the much more powerful GAU, which you are sitting directly above. I'm wondering if there's a way to import that same parameter into that jet, so I get that same tactile sense of the gun firing, as if it were transmitting vibrations up through the seat. Anyone have any leads or know anything? Maybe in real life it's so thoroughly stabilized you don't really feel anything, but since you can still hear it, you know some vibration is getting through.

Nice idea! There should definitely be a wider variety of voices, including female ones. There's this, too, which I really like and hope gets some more editing soon: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=96405 Whoever is doing the voice does a pretty good job, but it's still a little inconsistent in terms of intensity. But it's a great switch.

Really jazzed for this. Waiting for the AFM has been the big thing keeping me from fully getting into the Eagle and doing missions.

I went into one of the weapons config files and doubled the damage parameter (I think it's called warhead weight) for all rockets, bombs, and artillery shells, and I think they perform much more realistically now in terms of damaging things they explode next to, but obviously this is a stopgap solution.

Right. Call it impractical if you want; it's like those elaborate kicks in martial arts: You'd almost certainly never use it, but if you can do it, just imagine how good you are at the more practical, prosaic stuff. Besides, how is hotdogging and showing off not totally in the spirit of fighter pilotry? Beating your opponent is priority one, sure, but if you can manage, why not do it with some panache? :D

That's awesome. The basic cockpit is kinda what's been keeping me from getting excited enough about the T-Toad to learn it. For some reason it's the smoke trails that have me the most excited. Anything that makes aircraft easier to see, and lets units "dirty" the environment. I wanna see the smoke and dust kicked up by battle really linger in the area.

This, definitely. I think it's kind of pointless to get hung up on the geopolitical plausibility of the locales - Counterfactuals are built into the very nature of simulation There's nothing inherent in the patch of the Earth's inhabited surface we call "Nevada" that says modern armed forces would never clash there, it just happened to turn out so that nowadays there's nothing about it people want to fight over. But let's say otherwise, just for the sake of argument. Maybe in the world of... DCS World, Nevada is the world's most unstable tinderbox, and sim fans are wondering why they're getting boring old peaceful North Korea, and expected to defend glitzy, hedonistic Pyongyang. And also I'm a fighter pilot.

Oh boy, can't wait for Nevada. Though I fully intend to make believe it's someplace else, or a parallel universe or something. I actually would like to see people making a few maps that aren't real places, but just have a bunch of interesting and scenic terrain to fight over. Kind of an Ace Combat thing, where any over-the-top scenario you felt like making could be justified with, "Well, it's not this Earth, and they do things different there." That Backfire is gorgeous, it definitely deserved a makeover. I hope we eventually get a fancy new B-1 or B-52 as well; I know large bombers aren't the stars they used to be, but that's all the more reason they should get a workout in simulations. Any new explosion stuff this time around is just for aircraft, right?

Sounds like there are a lot of nice improvements this time around. Eager to give the ATC modifications a test run. The new detection logic sounds like it'll make things more interesting as well. Disproportionally excited for the new explosion eye candy. I hope we get some screenshots soon. I know it's a ways off but I'm also looking forward to the AFM for the F-15 and Su-27. That's really what I'm waiting for before I get really into those aircraft and do their campaigns.

Someone must have mentioned this already but a quick use of the search button was inconclusive, so here it is in any case: I'd love some kind of new logic that assigns unit names systematically. When you create new units, you get "New Vehicle Group" and it contains "unit #1, 2, 3," etc. This can make it confusing in the debriefings or when creating triggers, since a name like "unit #62" doesn't really mean anything on its own. Right now, I immediately go in and change all the names to something more descriptive, like: RED Tanks 01 RED Tanks 01 1 RED Tanks 01 2 RED Tanks 01 3 RED Tanks 01 4RED Tanks 02 RED Tanks 02 1 RED Tanks 02 2 RED Tanks 02 3 RED Tanks 02 4RED IFVs 01 RED IFVs 01 1 RED IFVs 01 2 RED IFVs 01 3 RED IFVs 01 4 RED IFVs 01 5 (supply)RED Gunships 01 RED Gunships 01 1 RED Gunships 01 2RED CAP Fighters 01 RED CAP Fighters 01 1 RED CAP Fighters 01 2BLUE Tanks 01 BLUE Tanks 01 1... etc. This makes it much, much easier to know what I'm doing with the mission, but it takes a long time to even copy-paste all this stuff in, let alone type it out, but it's such a mindless, algorithmic system of naming that I'm sure implementing something like it would be easier that most new features. Obviously if people don't like whatever system is used then they can use something else, but right now you have to do a lot of mindless toil to have any useful naming scheme at all.

What an awesome idea - I love being surprised by the weather now, and it gives the Caucasus map a bit of a new lease, too, since the feel of it totally changes with a storm or snow or even just heavy fog. Before, I was always pretending my CO was calling up their CO all like, "It's supposed to rain tomorrow, you wanna fight Thursday instead?" and then s/he's like, "I can't, it's my kid's piano recital," and then they hash out a good, sunny day on which to have a battle.

OK, well, this is amazing. The A-10 feels reborn - It's so much more homey and cozy in the office now.

Hahaha awesome! This kind of thing is why sims are so fun. Please tell me you're going to do the Ratte as well.

FSX is very impressive visually and in terms of the variety of aircraft, but civil aviation sims leave me pretty cold - If I'm gonna fly something, I want to fight in it, too.

It seems like mortars (both the regular tube kind and that Russian self-propelled one) will attack targets on their own, but all the others need to be deliberately aimed. Not sure how you'd program it ahead of time... Maybe something about each target zone setting a flag to true when targets enter and turning off all the other flags that would affect that artillery group, and it's the flag that determines which fire-at-point task is activated?

I'm no ace but I think I'm pretty good with the Hog and passable with the Eagle, and not entirely helpless in the Mustang or Shark, though still crummy enough I would be a drag on an actually skilled team. I find the core skill is patience. Most of us have probably built up a lifetime of expectations and reflexes for more traditional video games, and they come to the fore when you're sitting in front of a screen with any kind of controller in your hands, but you have to unlearn a lot of them for more serious flight sims. Most games (and media in general, actually) are structured - as they should be - to eliminate all the fat and show you only the interesting parts you came to see, so you get the idea that what you're supposed to do is fight fight fight, but DCS is almost in slow-motion in comparison, so you'll really screw up if you try to get ahead of yourself instead of taking the time to back off and line things up right, or easing off on the stick to keep your plane at the apex of its flight envelope in a dogfight (I think this is part of the appeal - Staying balanced is a more interesting challenge than mindlessly pushing everything to its extreme). Keep your eyes on the enemy, but at the same time have the patience to know they won't ever magically teleport behind you, either. You're also entirely responsible for your own situational awareness, so before you even start the mission, learn what to expect and where (this is big - It feels somewhat unsporting, but it's exactly the 'intelligence' that's so often the MacGuffin in action stories), and if you're not sure what's waiting for you in an area, treat it like a closed door in a horror movie and just don't go in. At least not until you've taken time to hang back and look around (with your radar or eyes or RWR or an AWACS) until you're confident you won't be surprised, or that you can use terrain well enough to stay hidden and safe. To use the more traditional video game metaphor again, think of a 'sneaking' level instead of a straight-up battle.

And I thought I had crappy summer jobs. (thanks for all the specific info on this, it's actually rather interesting)

Augh, you and Blaze and your fancy custom HDR...! What files are you modifying, and is there any resource that would point me towards the relevant parameters? I can't make heads or tails of those .fx files.

Yeah, I always thought that had to be pretty exhausting for importers of content in Germany, given how much WWII-themed stuff is out there. I wonder how model airplane kits are treated... And the meetings for localizing "Metal Slug" must have been interesting... Sort of like how in Japan you're not (or at least weren't) allowed to have the protagonists of your work use nuclear weapons... So of course writers just call them something else, like "reaction weapons." Given that those tail textures will never be encountered in it as released no matter what you do, but are still there for anyone to find, I figured they were Europe-friendly enough to point out without getting anyone in trouble, like it would be the legal equivalent of you modding it yourself (which technically you are) for your own exclusively private use or something (i.e. not "displayed").

Oh good, it's not just me then. Never mind the lead cue, it's seriously hard to fight in a tank without even any ranging info. Maybe you have to turn the "radar" on and it's off by default, but there doesn't seem to be a key binding for it in the options menu, and I can't be bothered to comb through all the control files to see if one exists at the moment.

The skins are in mods/aircraft/FW-190D9/Textures/FW-190.zip There are two - One with the default gray underside and one with red. In fact, there are even backup tail textures called fw-190_01_s.bmp.dds and fw-190_01_red_s.bmp.dds that have the real tail markings (guess what the '_s' stands for! Just remove it and overwrite). I was actually looking for the textures to to put them in manually because it makes me really uncomfortable when unpleasant realities are tiptoed around or shied away from (also because Accuracy), but they probably figured lots of people were going to do it so just saved us the trouble while still being legally copacetic by making it opt-in.

Seriously. I don't want to go on a mission and have it just be one big sausage party :mad: I use this mod in the mean time and it except for some inconsistent intensity in places it sounds pretty good, but it'd be nice to have a few more: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=96405 It's easy to speculate about why more women aren't into hardcore flight sims but I think the number one reason is not knowing it's even an option, since it seems to overlap more with the aviation and/or military world than the video game world, which if my Facebook feed is any indication already contains oodles of women who like both intellectual challenges and blowing things up.

An AI Spooky would be great for a little CAS variety. Maybe you'd have to protect or destroy it depending on who you were... Would also seriously love a Gripen (and a Rafale!). And Israel's Merkava tank - That thing just looks so cool... In the distant future I'd also love to see armed forces from China and maybe Japan join the fight, too. Oh, and India. Duh.