Frogisis

I foresee infinite waves of X until you complete objective Y... It could also be another way to make infantry relevant without setting them to "invincible." But I'll never know at 15kb/s aaaaaaaugh

Surprisingly none that I can see. My system isn't a monster but it's decent, and particle effects don't seem to weigh it down much, just (what I'm guessing are) RAM bottlenecks. I turned down the number of particles in the effects a little bit just to be sure (same thing I did with the new vehicle trails I made), but I think I still want to go in and make the building smoke a tiny bit more beige instead of just gray, so it looks less oily... Building smoke is the only one I've noticed that looks any different, though - I can't tell if the airplane crash sites are thicker or not. If they are at all, some other file is an even bigger influence on them anyway.

Hiyoooooooooooo! ;) Yeah, I'm at 340mb, second attempt. 15kb/s. Ugh. I think I'll go torrent. Really want to hear how the Huey is. Was going to pass at first, and fifty bucks is a lot for someone still in the instant ramen phase of their career, but on the other hand I can't get "Fortunate Son" out of my head... (at least it's a break from "Fat Guy in a Little Coat"...)

I like it, it's a huge improvement. Looks much more like flaming jet fuel and less like a festive carp streamer.

I use that label mod, too, but made the aircraft dots 25% gray instead of pure black, and increased their minimum range a bit. Makes dogfighting (and SA) much, much less frustrating. Labels are off for everything else, though - Somewhere along the way finding ground units just kinda clicked for me.

New particle effetcs? [squeal] It's true, I copied the ship fire .lua over (almost) all the other fire effects, and with some tweaks everything looks so much better. I can actually set a city on fire now. Can't seem to find any files that affect the aircraft fires, though, either in the air or once they crash. I want some huge fireballs like you see on The YouTube.

Haha, I've actually had that same thought (at least I think it's the same). It's the idea that the pilot's arms and legs are already represented outside the cockpit, by your own in real life. You moving your hand on the HOTAS really is a hand moving on a HOTAS instead of just a representation of it, like the rest of the plane is of an actual plane, so why double up? It's a bit like if you had a perfect A-10 sim pit, you might want to export all of that to the pit and have the sky be the only thing on the screen.

Obviously. But that's an annoying little step to have to make each time. I'd rather be able to leave it on and forget about it, and just have it work in a way that limits the downsides. Hm, maybe... I can see that ending up in a lot of cartoonish flailing, though, as TrackIR or whatever sweeps the unmoving cursor over the arm, plus there's the question of how to animate it - Does the hand let go of the controls and go into the lap, or does the elbow move, or what?

I dunno... Sometimes I like it and sometimes I don't. It's immersive and the kneeboards are useful, but oftentimes the arms get in the way of one or another switch I want to hit. I suppose you could just have the legs, but that might be kind of weird, or the arms could be semi-transparent, but that would also be kinda weird. What if they just became semi-transparent when you mouse over them?

I do think that ultimately some kind of smart scaling needs to be implemented (hopefully not quite as extreme as Falcon BMS's, though, which makes everything feel like the scale of a biplane fight) but in the mean time this label mod is a helpful stopgap: http://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/270020/

After some consideration I picked Western Europe - Pretty rolling terrain, a few mountainous areas, some ocean, and more than anything lots of big, famous cities to fight over.

Lemme just say these are fantastic... CAS work feels so much more alive now, and vehicles actually seem to stick out more. More than anything, though, the new up-close noise texture really makes everything seem more like real ground. I have to ask about the "r_for_t" textures, though - Are those actually supposed to be alternate default tiles, with little hedgerows and things? The stock "r_for_t" is just a translucent fuzzy dark green carpet to pick out a forest at a distance, but with the new ones they're essentially blended into the rest of the terrain and the physical trees seem to materialize out of nowhere as you approach. I switched the "r_for_t"s back to the stock, and am going to try the new ones as default ground textures just to see what happens and how it tessellates, but I was wondering if anyone else noticed or had any thoughts on this. Anyway, fantastic work, and I can't wait to see what other pieces of soil you can transform.

At 44.6%, 75.7kB/s... Will seed when I've got it... Edit: And now I do, and I am.

Yeah, more or less. Right now the mountains look kinda like huge piles of road slush as opposed to the real Caucasus mountains with all their little ripples and crags. OK, that's a relief. So you're saying those eight spots on the bottom half that represented the trees from the top will now (essentially) be eight more trees seen from the side? Cool, looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.

Well...dang. I think maybe I can wait a bit on EDGE after all. Two questions: - Are you doing the mountains, too? I think that's one of the least convincing textures at the moment. Even some phony shadows would do wonders for them. - Are the stock trees also usually just little "X"s from directly above? I know they've got a "top down" aspect but checking back with the stock textures now I can't remember if it was hardly used anyway or if I've somehow screwed them up. If I never noticed enough to even recall, it's not a big deal, but at the moment I can't unsee it. Like when you notice your own breathing. Presumably it's omitted with these new trees to save FPS and because normally a cockpit is preventing you from looking directly down at them anyway, but I just wanted to be certain.

It would be awesome to have more DCS-level Russian anything, but for my own part I would probably pass, though mostly out of time/brain space limitations as opposed to lack of interest: I'm really jonesing for a fighter, and a second CAS aircraft would have to take a backseat. On the other hand, if the stock "Freefoot" is any indication, a lot of Ka-50 stuff might transfer over...

Thanks, I plan to put these in a package with several variations and some instructions on the files so that people can experiment a little. ...The explosions are frozen as-is, but I wonder if it would be possible to add a separate smoke generator to them. Vehicles, jet/rocket engines, and wreckage have something "on" them that gives off particles, so maybe you can make a new one and stick it on explosions... No idea how to do that at the moment, though. I'm more of an idea man.

I think the radio messages could eventually use a bit of an overhaul. Right now they're a fair amount choppier than they need to be, given some good voice direction and clever editing. A subtle trail-off in the preceding preposition, like someone quickly double checking a number before saying it, would make it sound a lot more naturalistic in those instances where the seam between clips is too obvious. People's voices naturally rise somewhat like the start of a new audio file after slowing down. You hear it a lot in recorded radio traffic - Someone drags out the last phoneme of a word and then abruptly jumps back in. A few little occasional random hesitations and disfluencies might be neat, too, like how you sometimes hear people starting with "Uh, [callsign]..." which I think could be a cool random touch, but it might be confusing or annoying if not done well. If I really dare to dream, more voices in general per unit type and more possible information per "character" would be great. Maybe even something from ground units if you're on the right frequency - Calls about beginning artillery fire missions or spotting units or passing waypoints, or whatever else they might believably say. I'm trying to imagine an extra little layer of "qualitative" situational awareness statements, as well, to the effect that there's "a lot" of AAA, etc. or even once-in-a-blue-moon cracks in discipline or courage if things are going really poorly, but off the top of my head I can't think of a way to usefully implement something like that. More simply, though, I think one of the response menu options should always be "say again."

Is there any place that's got a general collated overview of Edge? The ED wiki and Google provide glimpses here and there, but from some of the things people are saying in this thread I'm getting the impression that it's more comprehensive than just more naturalistic scenery and optimization/multi-threading changes. Really looking forward to it, in any case - The current way of doing things has been starting to show it's kludge-iness.

Really relieved to learn some of those ME issues were bugs and not my own incompetence. Looking forward to getting my Mustang back out now that it's got an appropriate opponent, too. And maybe for some more wacky experiments like "how many 190s can I simultaneously fight in an F-15?" Also for learning the Flanker and the Toad now they've got a nice cockpit in which to do said learning. And for some reason automatic transmission for ground vehicles also has me more excited than I would have expected.

Ah, alright. I changed the contrails and vehicle dust trails that way, but the explosions don't seem to follow the same logic. Screw it, then - I'll just wait until ED gets around to it. They already look decent, I can wait a while for "excellent." Making the craters larger and visible from farther away now is the only other change I want to make. There was a mod by Teka Teka a few years ago called "Bomb Holes Visibility Mod" that apparently did the latter for LOMAC, but the download has been allowed to expire, so I can't reverse engineer it to springboard a DCS World version. .edm files seem to be the key, but google isn't forthcoming with what it takes to open and edit those. Have to say, though, I'm really satisfied with the results of increasing the shell and rocket damage parameter to the same "2x warhead weight" value the bombs use - It clicks with the AI unit behavior in a way that makes me think it was always intended to be that way but just slipped through the cracks, given all ED is working on. That could be completely wrong of course, and they've been carefully calculated to be exactly what they are, but now, for example, the way tanks start with HE instead of AP rounds from far away results in them actually hurting each other a little bit. Before, I could jump into a tank and "headshot" the opposing column with AP rounds from like two miles away, but now the way they start off with shells instead actually makes a bit of sense. And artillery feels more believably effective, as well. To be honest, the bombs also strike me (ahem) as a little weak, especially the big ones like the Mk.84 and the FAB-1500. In video clips they create these immense, apartment building-sized explosions, so maybe kicking the bombs to "3x warhead weight," or even 4 (back to their original proportion re: shells/rockets), would be an interesting experiment. Some of the AA missiles with shaped charges have multipliers of 5 or more for their little 11kg warheads, so it's not completely unprecedented. Once I separate all these out into purely cosmetic MP-compatible packages vs. incompatible ones, I'll upload them for people to play around with/argue over. Someone with first-hand experience could probably come up with an interesting alternative set or two of realistic damage values once pointed to the right lines of code. I think that "Well, change it and see" option is one of the things that makes simulations uniquely fun, along with the potential to realize all those whimsical "never were" designs that were axed for practical, back-end reasons that don't have to concern us. *AHEM*

In the abstract I think that's true, but until we get to the point where simulations are generating worlds at the level of particle physics, these are all essentially artistic problems. A better engine would kick things to an entirely new level, but even some 8-bit games had explosions and other effects that really popped just by virtue of a good visual imagination. Assuming we can find the right knobs to twiddle, there's a lot more we can do with what we already have. Unfortunately, it seems like the current explosions might just be rigid stock animations, with every puff of smoke hard-coded to follow its one little pre-taped dance for all eternity, and no outside parameter can modify it. Maybe. Theoretically you could change the code in the .lua file to change the animation, but when I say "you" I mean that literally in the sense of "not me."

Oh, OK - I knew there were reduced smoke motors in the later AIM series, but being the newer missile I figured the 9X would be more reduced, since that feature always seems to be mentioned in any description I read of it. Maybe they couldn't swing it or didn't prioritize it in that version, though, and I'm all turned around on the matter. Thanks for the heads up, I will bump it back to the same proportion right now... EDIT: Oh, turns out it was originally set to "tail_solid", which is pure white at 100% opacity, same as the 9P, big SAMs, and all the Russian AA missiles (See!? Visible smoke must not be a big deal after all ha ha ha!). Looking it up on several sites just now, it looks like the reduced smoke is actually really more of a 9M thing, anyway. I must have dreamed that about the 9X or something.

Hope you enjoy it - It's being updated right now and still waiting to be approved, but keep checking back. No real leads on the craters or explosions... I tried messing with the .lua files in config/effects/explosions but except for "ShellOnObject" they don't seem to change anything. I'm really satisfied with the way the dust trails now fade away, and I'd love a similar effect for the dust puffs from the explosions. Messing with the crater parameters in bazar/SmokeTable.sht made the sim not start, so... There are several "vorodki" .edm files that presumably control their appearance, but I can't find any coherent info on how to open that format.

Awesome, thanks for putting this together. They've certainly got a lot on their plate. Also hoping for EDGE as the next major addition. I also hope there's a plan to just "consolidate" for a bit - Tweaking the things they have now to get them running as smoothly and elegantly as possible before slotting in new modules.