Frogisis

The IR modes on the TGP also work much, much better if you set the gain (arrows in upper left corner of display) to something like 6 and the level (switch by pressing the button next to "gain") to 2 or 3. It washes out the landscape and makes vehicles really pop out as contrasting dots. It was much harder for me to find targets before I started doing this.

Hahaha, now I can't stop imagining all sorts of weird JTAC mods like "Gilbert Gottfried" or "really stoned guy." Actually, in all seriousness it would be neat if the voices were kind of like skins, and chosen randomly for each unit of that type, so for example your wingman would have any of a number of voices you had downloaded and placed in the appropriate directory. Recording all the little lines might be a pain but it'd be a simple way to add more variety. I'd be weird to listen to yourself, but you could have a friend with a cool voice over for an afternoon in exchange for a case of beer or something, then edit the timings so it flows and upload it for everyone to use. (Maybe this is already possible and I'm just ig'nant.)

I will inevitably get this, but I think I'll wait till after the new jet comes out and the community has had a chance to explore this a little and maybe create a few add-ons for it to interact with. Free-for-all deathmatches where everyone's flying a P-51 would be pretty interesting, though.

Maybe it's just because I upgraded my video card around the same time and can turn on the HDR now, but does anyone else think the explosions in 1.1.1.1 look a little better? I turned off the HDR again and took another look and still thought so, but it might be my imagination. But yeah, whenever ED has enough slack to think about something visual, more photogenic and realistic pyrotechnics would really bring the experience up a level. Everything else is so well done that with the flat black puffball explosions it's a little like replacing the cannons in the 1812 Overture with a guy yelling "boom!" If they were upgraded overall I would actually be down with what someone mentioned earlier about having some hits (shaped charges?) be very subtle, where it'd be difficult to tell if a target was destroyed, since it would then be clear that it was modeled that way intentionally and still fell under the umbrella of "well-made explosions." As long as I'm dreaming, how about a "Hollywoodize" slider in the options menu, where you can increase the size and fireball ratio of explosions and smoke clouds till your heart's content, or if a friend who asked you to show him what that baseball cap with the 3 metal prongs on it is used for starts talking about how much he likes HAWX?

I was actually thinking about this same thing earlier today. People have mentioned labels aren't necessarily unrealistic since in actuality you'd be able to see much higher resolution and glints of light of the metal and glass of enemy vehicles, etc. I can't bring myself to use labels, but still have trouble finding enemy units, so I think an interesting feature would be something like a highly-reflective array of sprites superimposed over "active" objects like tanks and cars and planes, which would catch the light from far away but become gradually more transparent as you approached, so that it would have disappeared by the time you could really resolve any detail on the object. That might end up looking tacky, but I think if it were subtle enough it'd be both helpful and acceptably realistic.

It gets my vote. Gender-blind comms would make me feel more like I'm fighting for the good guys. Er, on the side of good. V Haha, touche. But I think most people think of that as "neutral," and "blind" as "doesn't matter which one."

As a starving artist, that very joystick has also been my only control setup beyond the keyboard, but I didn't feel like I had any major barriers to control once I'd evolved a completely new key layout centered around an FPS-style "WASD" that I mapped to the coolie hat, and put other important functions radiating out from it (e.g. China hat at Q and E). I used the modifier keys to make the joystick hat into several different hats, for trim, the DTS, etc. as well. So you don't need a HOTAS to control the plane competently, but I think "competent" is about as far as you can go. Ironically I actually got an X52 from a relative as an early Christmas present but have been too busy with a big, looming deadline to try it out with the A-10 or Ka-50 yet, though I've been occasionally mentally assembling profiles while waiting in lines or sitting on the subway. Want finish work; blow up tanks.

A right-hand orbit gives me that kinda icky, antsy feeling like holding the phone in the hand you're not used to, so I think I'll try putting it on the left wing a few times and see if it helps with avoiding masking and just generally having better SA while peering into the thing. It seems like you have to turn much tighter if it's on the other wing to still keep the ground in view, and so if I'm setting up weapons I usually end up doing more of a level "away and back" pattern than a nice circle that keeps me looking at what I'm going to attack. I won't give up on doing it right-handed, though - I did it for batting, shooting, and golf, I can do it for Hawgin'.

When you aren't sure your car has come to a complete stop because you didn't see a little green line shrink down to nothing. When pointing something out in the distance to a friend, you barely stop yourself from saying "you might need to make the bracket smaller" when s/he still can't see it. You reflexively turn toward a loud noise and then look down to your left to see if the button is lit.

Ultimately as long as it fires AMRAAMs I'll be happy. I have a strong supposition it'll be the F/A-18, and while I always thought that plane was too noncommittal yet at the same time trying to be slick to be especially lovable, I guess there are a lot of different things it can do and it'd be fun to fly and fight in, and might be more challenging than doing it in a plane dedicated to just that mission. Someone mentioned SEAD, which was a good point, and yeah, with an F/A-18 I guess you could cover the rest of the easily-overlooked missions a modern pilot is most likely to face (as much as it'd be fun to have a dedicated chariot to plow through epic furballs over the desert, or intercept extreme-altitude strategic bombers as TIME IS RUNNING OUT MR PRESIDENT).

Well that was a very satisfying and thorough explanation. Why you gotta go taking the challenge out of everything??

C'moooooon F-15C...! I'm sure this has been asked already, but is there some specific technical or legal reason they're keeping it a secret, or is it just good old fashioned showmanship? (Or a combination of both.) Either way it bodes well for it being a "cool" plane, being either fancy enough someone out there thought they needed to make a rule against divulging it or awesome enough they feel confident letting it get built up. ...Or I guess it could just be one of those legal idiosyncrasies and right now someone is waiting for a call back from the intransigent company that owns the rights to the name and image of the E-9A Widget.

Awesome, thanks. I'm always forgetting the airfield stuff. While I'm out later today I'll swing by the copy shop and get this laminated along with the A-10 one, and grab a couple of those erasable markers.

I put it off and put it off but one day when I was putting off work instead and decided to learn the startup sequence it only took a couple runs - It's actually very easy and natural if you think about why you're doing what you're doing, and you'll feel like a beast when you can start it up completely from memory.

Same here, and I was wondering the same thing. I always thought, when I saw the ripple option, "Why would I ever want to do that?", but then I dropped 3 Mk82s on a convoy of trucks and utterly obliterated them in one pass, answering my question.

I would like to state my hope that the Combined Arms addon will be structured in such a way that will result in the absolutely unironic use of the phrase "We can't hold them off much longer." Whether by binding player(s) to a specific ground unit or building or some other kind of mechanic, I think having them be able to be in immanent danger would make things exponentially more fun.

Oh man, those screen shots are making me all squishy inside - The first PC game I ever played was Jetfighter II, when I was probably about 8 and our family got its first computer. It was when the whole YF-22 vs. YF-23 thing was going down and you could fly the YF-23 in it which I just thought was the most boss thing ever (That was the one I was rooting for, and back before I fully understood actually becoming a fighter pilot would probably involve getting up before noon and doing what I'm told). Excited for the Nevada terrain - Totally going to pretend it's the Middle East. And I guess I'll save Vegas, but only because they let you drink in the street.

Came here to post this, actually. I really like the new sounds - Even if they aren't 100% what the real thing sounds like, they help compensate for the other sensations you'd experience if you were actually hearing the real thing.

You mean if you take off, land, take off, land, take off, land in a single mission after treating it like a toy? That's a really nice touch. I finally have the confidence (read: printouts of emergency procedures on the bookshelf next to my computer) to turn on random failures, so I'm just waiting till they spring something like that on me at startup. I felt kinda silly testing things during startup before I switched it on, but now it's fun, because YOU NEVER KNOW.

As easy as I'm sure it would be to get perfect information on a trainer jet I don't know how interested I'd ultimately be in something that's a simulation twice over... I, for one, hope we never find out what the jet is, even when we're flying it. That way it could be any plane. DCS: Schrödinger's Tomcat.

I find 2200 (2300? The next one after 1800) can work well for the 97/105 anti-armor kind. Those little skeet are picky about what they'll shoot at and I find I usually get better coverage with them by popping them higher, especially if I don't know what else is out there and I'm trying to stretch out my stores.

"You have been promoted to 'Wikileaks Star!'"

I've been looking at YouTube footage taken by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq of these various weapons' effects seen from the ground, and they're definitely massive and spectacular enough that the soldiers' extreme excitement isn't just due to their now being safer. If the real deal can inspire that kind of reaction and violently shake the camera from over a mile away, I don't think upping both the scale and the flashiness of the effects is unwarranted at all. Of course, the after effects shouldn't be forgotten either, and I once saw an interesting method where in addition to a nice, large crater "terrain decal", there was a ring of sprites of dust "jets" and particles projected up and outward that would then fall to the ground and become flattened into terrain decals of debris where they hit, creating a nice spray of dirt and dust outward from the center. It'd be a much more convincing image than dropping a 2000lb JDAM on a runway only to leave a neat arrangement of burning wrecks on a still-pristine tarmac. If intact vehicles can be swapped out for a "wreck" mesh, though, I wonder if a crater rim could be similarly added. Or maybe several "blobs" of material generated at a specific radius from the center so that they'd appropriately fit the terrain? And if something is hit with enough force, skip the wreck mesh and just scatter some twisted chunks around (Does that happen? Presumably some vehicles hit by some weapons would just be completely blown away but I don't know). I just wanted to see that runway properly excavated, and maybe some of those big, wandering, ground level "thunderheads" of dust you sometimes see in footage of battlefields. Another thing that might be interesting is the reactions and "value" of the civilian traffic. I once targeted a Zeus that was part of a column on a road and then locked my Maverick onto the tiny white dot I thought corresponded to it, only to see the missile obliterate a random truck that just happened to be weaving through the column. "Ohhh, sorry dude. But what were you doing in there?" I don't know about you guys but I probably wouldn't try to pass a bunch of tanks on the road no matter how slow they were going if I'd been hearing distant explosions for the past hour and jets overhead. They're just decorative of course, and right now they seem to just wander basic fixed paths, but it might be interesting if there were some kind of trigger or threshold of violence that would cause most civilians to try to evacuate (maybe there is and I just haven't noticed, that guy could've been rushing into danger to rescue his daughter or something), with some very basic behaviors like heading away from smoke columns, not going in the same direction as fighting units, etc. There could even be a radius where some units might stop or even seek out a high point, representing the percentage of people who would still try to watch a battle go down, and maybe even a tiny, occasional percentage who try to be heroes for whatever reason ("Muffins is back there, we can't just abandon her!") or are reporters, I guess, and rush toward the action to get in your way for an extra layer of friendly fire challenge. I think a lot of "personality" could be added to the world with just a few simple, processor-friendly rules that shouldn't be any more taxing than having them follow the fixed paths they already do (since they'll go around things they clearly get some autonomy already and aren't just beads on an invisible string), and which could add some wrinkles and replayability with emergent events like friendly units suddenly encountering and having to go around a small traffic jam as people try to flee the area, or in the same vein as the ground clutter maybe some little sprites of people if you fly over a populated area, etc (I've always wanted to see fleeing pedestrians in a combat sim). Thankfully I've never been trapped in a war zone so I don't know how most people behave and if it would be visible from the air, but news footage always seems to show how people can be caught up in it and not just hide - even dashing across the street during a break in shooting - and the legions of doleful babushka or burqa-clad grandmothers interviewed in front of peeling walls make it clear these places definitely aren't empty.

Just watched some of the B-17 vids on the A2A site and dang. That is impressive. Hmm, my dad actually sent me FSX last year for Christmas and it's been sitting in my closet pretty much this whole time (I think I asked for health insurance). I might have to take it out again and reinstall it. Can you actually fight (or otherwise have adventures) in these addon planes, or do you just fly around and challenge yourself with the mechanics of it? Orbiter is pretty much the only "just fly around" sim I can get into, and that's because it's in space and very different from atmospheric, 1-planet flight - Chilling in the back of an airliner or the occasional Cessna joyride scratch the itch to just be in the air for me (even if air travel does sometimes make me wish for Orbiter's 100,000x time acceleration). Speaking of shifts in time, some people in this thread (Nate, was it?) have implicitly said as much, so I'm sure the first of the Legendary planes will also be given something appropriate to do, beyond just throwing it into "Philadelphia Experiment"-style craziness where you see how many P-51s you can take on simultaneously in an F-15 or other schoolyard thought experiments. Anyway, looking forward to seeing and hearing more. Especially intrigued by the "battlefield commander" component, which I'm sure will have to touch on all kinds of invisible aspects of the DCS world and open up unexpected avenues to mission creators as well.

These all sound good to me, and $20 is like, what? A case of beer? A large pizza? Tickets to see some band or comedian your friends really want to go to but you're only lukewarm on? I'm sure we all regularly spend that much money on something we can only enjoy for one night (or at, like, Family Dollar when we need detergent and sponges) without even thinking about it. Will definitely be getting the Commander part and the next jet like everyone else, and I'm one of the privileged Beta preorder people so I'll take that Nevada thank you, but we'll see on FC3 and FL. I'm fully behind both ideas and as much as I love old WWII planes and silk-scarved, leather-jacketed, square-jawed dogfighting, I'm still not sure how much I'd actually (have the time to) fly either of these, unless the new jet turns out to still be more air-to-ground focused: I really want some dedicated, high-fidelity modern air-to-air combat since that's the biggest piece of the puzzle that's missing. Getting a hi-fi F-15C or F-14 would make me squeal like a sugar-addled tween fangirl, but I'll take FC-level detail if that's my only option. And if Flying Legends turns out to have a lot of new "support" stuff beyond just the planes, or just a lot of planes, that'd definitely win me over, too. --- Reading through this thread, I'd never heard of A2A or AccuSim before... I really like that idea of having a plane that's "your baby", and stays consistent with your profile, instead of loading a new one from Platonic Ideal space at the start of each mission. I'm sure this is old news to everyone else, but it's new to me. Plus I'm sick of feeling superior to my friends who play Pokemon.