Frogisis

Jetfighter II in the early '90s on the first computer my family owned. I think I was in 2nd grade. That was a good year.

F-15C is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But if it was the F-15 that got scrapped, that might have been a big part of the motivation for FC3 in the first place, to recoup some of that investment. But hope springs eternal. I want that Eagle!

Based on my own playing around in CA it does seem a little off based on those stats you look up when you're in a tank-y mood, but as an artist/writer, from simply a gameplay and "storytelling" perspective it strikes me as appropriate: Tanks were always kinda Russia's baby - all that imagery about Europe being crushed under endless legions of them during the Cold War, etc. - and conversely air power was always more NATO's point of pride. In a good war epic each side kinda has their "thing," so naturally Blue tanks would be reliant on Blue air cover to compensate against tougher Red tanks, which gives the A-10 protagonist a more important role. In a narrative medium or a more traditional game, this would be a solid move, and just because sims are focused on the technical doesn't mean we should neglect drama - We gotta have something to fight for to make it truly fun, after all, even if it's just saving the imaginary boys on the ground from impossible odds. Of couse, DCS is all about the challenge & satisfaction of doing it the right & realistic way, and in real war you want to develop your technology to make the fight as undramatic as possible, so I'm all for correcting any inaccuracies in performance, but real life has more variables than we can currently simulate, and so there are going to be occasional points where decisions have to be aesthetic rather than technical. tl;dr Let's be accurate, but being an A-10 Hero is less fun if M1s can hold their own.

I'll love it as long as it has two wings and ten toes. I mean hardpoints. Filled with AMRAAMs. That said, I'm so interested because I'm kinda holding out for this one over the 3rd party modules. Not that I'm knocking those, I'm sure they'll be great and their devs are doing a great job, I just don't have the free time to get good enough at many more aircraft to truly enjoy them or be anything but useless with them in multiplayer. Unless everyone ends up being all like "Goodness dahling, you simply must get yourself a UH-1," I'm going to hold out for the official ED modules, on the assumption that they'll be slightly, for lack of a better word, "bigger." If I turn out to be wrong on that, I'll pick up more modules on the community's recommendation.

I like CA, it's really fun, and a good way to do something low-key when I don't want to get out all the gear to actually fly. I'd be down for doing some JTAC action sometime online.

Me too; my wingman's empty A-10 broke the sound barrier several times during shallow dives from 50,000 feet.

It's your sim on your PC, isn't you doing all the work kinda the point? But I get what you mean. I usually find if I task my flight to destroy something, they go way overboard and I'm like, "hey, leave some for me." But yeah, unless I tell them to attack, they just follow me like baby ducks and don't break for anything but a missile fired at them. Is there a good way to get them to attack specific targets so I don't have to orbit somewhere waiting for them to be done to make sure we don't waste munitions by firing at the same tank? I noticed if you select "engage with" your pilot voice will say "...at my SPI..." but is there another pathway in the menu?

It is kinda weird, but just from a game design perspective I like it as a trade-off mechanic, in that you have to slow down for anything but a tiny course correction if you're really zooming. I couldn't tell you if it's more realistic or not, but it seems "right" that you can't just carelessly zigzag around at top speed in a huge armored tank as if it were a gokart. Plus I flipped a Vulcan AAA and it was crazy awesome. Got it going up to about 80mph and turned hard, and it flipped over sideways, rolled over, and landed back on its treads, ready to go. There are already buses we can line up in the ME, someone should get to work on an Evel Knievel skin...

I find fiddling with the gain and levels on the FLIR helps a lot - Gain up two steps, levels down two steps, and vehicles seem to pop out a good deal more. The video controls are the high-number OSBs in the upper left. Also, just keeping your head out of the cockpit and looking around helps a lot (I'm trying to do this more in general). Not even so much so you'll see the targets directly, but so that you'll have a much better feel for the battlefield and where you should search and where you've already covered. I think it's a lot easier to use the HUD cursor to SPI-ify a curious spot on the ground in front of you and then lock the TPG to it, instead of just orbiting and slewing around while you unwittingly lose track of where you're actually looking. Finally, I suggest binding something to easily control the zoom (I use a HOTAS rotary), so you can quickly peer out the window at an area where you think they might be hiding and see for yourself. In the same vein, I guess you could justify taking a quick look at the F10 map, since in real life a JTAC or wingman could give you much more detail. All that said, I'm still pretty crappy at finding them. Ralph2 is right, those little guys down there are not messing around. But wouldn't you rather go up against pros? Right now, though, I think a few of the landmarks that help you find targets aren't visible from far enough away, specifically roads and rivers. You can kinda puzzle out where they are from a distance, but but when you're about a dozen miles off at your IP, thinking, "Okaay, they're just south of the north-most branch of the second fork in the river where it splits in three," all you can see of the river is a strip of subtly different green, functionally indistinguishable from the border between two farms or something, and it's effectively lost from view. The human visual system is really good at picking out edges and other long, thin details (seeing the Great Wall of China from space, etc.) and I know when I'm up in a plane at those kinds of altitudes I can easily see roads and rivers almost to the horizon. Maybe I should give that view distance mod a try on 1.2.1 or play with graphics.cfg...

Stuck at home with a cold and decided to try my first shot at AA refueling tonight... Dang, that is hard. I think I got the hang of it, though, more or less. Enough to actually refuel my plane, anyway. "Gentle movements" is one thing, but it seems to work better if you don't think of moving it at all, not even like during landing. Pretty much any conscious attempt to move the controls had me overcorrecting. And of course remembering to hit the nosewheel button if you get disconnected - I chased a tanker around for 20 minutes swearing at it before I figured that out. It's pretty satisfying when you can pull it off, though - I can usually get about 5 seconds of connection now unless the tanker suddenly starts turning on me.

That's gotta be it. I read somewhere you're not supposed to use them while strafing but I just can't help myself. At least this'll break me of that habit.

I think this might be a ship thing - I once made a little mission to play with triggers and see how effectively the AI performs SEAD, and put a carrier in a bay because I thought it'd be neat and I'd have it launch planes against my SEAD flight, but it kept firing missiles and scaring away my recon plane I was using to trigger the activation of the SEAD flights, no matter what I set its ROE to. Maybe ships have so many different things on them that some of them aren't "reached" by the ROE commands but remain on automatic.

I was going to make a new post about this but it's kind of on topic - I noticed with the new updates the PAC doesn't seem to stabilize the aircraft much or even at all when firing the gun. I checked to make sure my joystick trigger was still bound properly, so I know it's being activated, but before when I'd squeeze it a little it'd be like a firm hand was holding the plane in the air while I fired, but now the nose jerks up from the recoil. Is this more realistic, do I have to hold the first stage trigger for longer, or what?

I'd like to know this, too. Yeah, I'm not worried about it being dead, either - It's a big shift on top of a lot of other things, and considering the whole organization of DCS just changed to be closer to the modular system it was originally envisioned as, there's probably a lot going on under the hood with EDGE that they have to clear so that it can have the same kind of adaptability once it's made public.

I think what they do is they set up a giant ramp in the Pacific, and then get the carriers going real fast... Usually happens on a Sunday. Sunday! Sunday!

This smoke, which I think is a must: http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=1487523&postcount=51 And this soundpack: http://www.lockonfiles.com/index.php/files/category/422-complete-sound-packs/ But otherwise I leave it alone... I've got a little folder on my desktop with everything in its proper place I can just copy into the DCS World folder after each update, once I take a look at it to see what's changed and how it's running.

Awesome, good luck with this. I looked into those sound files and can tell this is quite an undertaking. Looking forward to hearing how it comes out.

More information for the player in general, I think, is all CA is really lacking at this point, hopefully including things like radio calls such as you currently get from your wingman, etc. And I suppose some input into what air and sea forces are doing - Maybe just "requests," since full control might actually seem a little cartoonish. Back to the reloading topic, I'm eager to see what they'll do with logistics... I hope if they do implement ammo in the field there'll be unit templates to put in missions so we don't have to manually create a supply chain each time. It'd be not just tedious but way too easy to forget something important otherwise. But trying to safely direct unarmed trucks and their escorts to embattled troops near the front (or take out the enemy's convoy) would add a lot of depth, I think.

All I could find were health packs, but my friend who was Player 2 got the scatter shot, so we could finally beat that Hind on the Sukhumi level. [serious reply: I do wish there were something in the F10 view to give you a sense of how much ammo each unit had left without you having to teleport into it.]

I've tried it for artillery, and it doesn't seem to make any difference so that probably hasn't been coded yet. It could be that it was the wrong kind of truck, or that it has to be a different squad instead of part of the same squad, but I doubt it.

I think it's supposed to represent someone coming to you with additional magazines after you've used up all the rounds you actually have in the vehicle. I wouldn't be surprised if they've got something in the works using that logistics system to cut down on the reload times if you've got the right units on hand, though. At first you were just SOL once you'd used all your ammo, so this is certainly a step in the right direction.

I like the CBU-87, though... There's just something about a textbook cluster bomb without all this parachute and skeet business. But I do have a great deal of trouble killing anything with it, even some practice trucks. I'll have to see about setting the release height lower.

Two little things I think we need after putzing around with Combined Arms earlier today: - Craters. I noticed certain civilian buildings will explode and explode, throwing "flares" into the air as whatever's inside them continues to burn, and they leave little craters all around their base, but artillery strikes, bombs, tank shells, etc. leave the landscape totally unmarred. Not sure if this was skipped for performance reasons, but FPSs have a long tradition of persistent bullet holes in walls, which makes me think there's a way to pull of a large number of those kind of decals. It's just a little thing, but it makes firing weapons seem less "cheap," since you can see you're actually ruining Farmer Oleg's crops, there. WWI is famous for its haunting artillery-scoured moonscapes, and if you could see one of those start to build up, it'd be good visual feedback for how effective your bombardment is. Would also be a good visual for destroying a runway - I'm sure you could recycle the ground handling logic for rough off-road terrain and it'd make them just as unusable. - Burning smoke columns for crashed aircraft in addition to vehicles. A quick Google image search shows they definitely do smoke after a crash, but right now they just turn into a little puff of fire on the ground, which makes them seem like holograms or something, as opposed to the physical ground vehicles. Something I noticed about the terrain damage decals that do exist, however, is some z-fighting as your perspective shifts. Probably a known issue, but just in case I thought I'd point it out.

Even though I wasn't before, with this one now I'm getting a frame hit with multiple explosions - GAU-8 impacts and both kinds of CBUs, that sort of thing. Win7 x64 GTX 570 AMD Phenom II x6 @3.8GHz 16GB DDR2

That F-15 cockpit for me is a hopeful clue... I'd much prefer the 15 since my interest this time around is "epic furballs," but I suppose the 18 can dogfight well, too.