blkspade

I see what you did there btw, good one.

Could always go in for guns, and then everyone's happy.

Like I said personally, I don't care for them. Your POV though is as DCS customer already though. With that comes a certain level of bias that makes DCS Cessna an easier sell for you. Its not likely to sell particularly well inside the DCS community, let alone tapping into the incumbent civilian sim arena where people don't even realize DCS is a thing. That turns into a ROI issue at that point. I realize there are people into both sides of flight simulation, that wasn't the point being made in my statement. Its a niche genre on the whole that just has fewer people in that middle area, and graphical detail isn't the highest thing up on the list for most on either side (BMS?). Nothing wrong with ferry flights, but you don't lose the ability to do them with combat aircraft. Heck I fly the TF-51 around occasionally. For me generally any combat aircraft is fair game regardless of theater as long as a contemporary enemy module exists. Which is made more important when the AI is stupid, broken, or owrks on "cheats".

While you don't need flares versus radar guided missiles, any flanker pilot worth his salt inside of 10nm is going to be following up with an ET anyway. Doubly true if you go defensive with AB. Ideally launching 120s from an advantageous position would force the flanker defensive when they go active, leaving the ER dead. They can continue trying to guide the ER just to take the 120 in the face, also leaving the ER dead. If you are talking about AI flankers, they will always ditch the ER to evade. Humans not so much. If you are jamming however, semi-actives have a habit of continuing to guide on the jammer by themselves.

I am personally completely against non-combat aircraft in DCS, due in part to some conceptually broken elements in DCS that don't translate into a worthwhile civilian flight experience. Most obviously is the "Theater of Operations" map model. Many who are already primarily focused simulated airborne ordinance delivery, have complained of growing tired of Georgia, and yet upcoming maps will be smaller. Still functional for combat operation with crafty mission design, yet indefinitely bland when all that is left is going from Point A to Point B. Made especially worse if you're a transitioning sim pilot from a more thought out civil sim, where you've basically already learned to fly the plane. I don't think the ATC needs much elaboration. There is really zero reason from a consumer point of view to invest in a DCS civilian flight module, if said consumer has only civilian interests. Besides that fact they probably have a large investment in FSX or X-Plane, Digital Combat Simulator doesn't even sound like the place they'd looking for their Cessna. It'd be like releasing DCS:CA Greyhound Bus, though the scaling is actually more appropriate.

Well technically it works at as long a range with the ET as the effective range of the 120 in game. A range that is also amplified by altitude.

The most immediate change in the sound is that the cockpit not longer goes silent when supersonic.

DX11 did offer a sort of low level access via direct compute but only good for specialized rendering tasks, still had CPU overhead but provided improved multi-threaded rendering. Slow adoption and poor developer implementation didn't allow DX11 to shine as much until Dice's Frostbite engine and Crytek's Cryengine 3. Realistically anyone that is planning on playing DCS 2.0 has/needs Win 7 or better, which makes Win 10 free. Not that it should have any bearing on what ED does with Edge, but the supposed DX11->DX12 conversion SDK could be of some benefit.

Lower level GPU access and CPU overhead reductions are pretty much key features to DX12. With MS facing genuine competition this time around, it would be stupid of them to not accomplish those goals.

The real catch is SLI is fixing the problem of limited GPU processing, where performance doesn't depend on an total available framebuffer. I doubt there is even a way to get DCS to use that much VRAM. If there was a scenario that required SLI for processing and more than 3.5GB VRAM you'd still be screwed by the limit in SLI. Nvidia's possible driver workaround for disabling the last bit of VRAM indicates that the hit is probably worse than having to pull from system memory.

You guys should probably realize its an issue overlooked when concerned with most AAA titles would probably never see the issue. We however are in a niche genre that actually stands to be greatly effected by such an issue. As far as current DCS is concerned its not an issue. Those who like something like X-Plane or FSX with massive texture mods, and/or multi-monitor flying it could turn into a problem fast. Who knows how it could ultimately effect the new maps in DCS 2.0, which could very likely require more VRAM than what we're used to.

Basically the way the sim operates now, you should never be thinking about taking a HOJ shot without AWACS. Short of you having seen the contact clean that then began jamming (which could still be a random friendly popping up in between) you have no idea if your engaging friend or foe. With that in mind, asking the awacs to give you a bogey dope and declaration on jammer would give some concept of when to fire HOJ. If the missiles performed properly at range anyhow.

Anything that basically exists in code already from functional perspective is not complicated to apply elsewhere. The fact that datalink is a thing in the sim, means the additional work is a matter of the differing graphical representation. Backend vs frontend. While there is obviously no incentive to enhance the FC3 aircraft in this respect, this existing work on the datalink is obviously going to spill over into the upcoming DCS modules that have it. F-18C?

The lack of a datalink in the F-15 does have a cascading effect that I can see getting worse whenever missile performance gets fixed. Not so much in 'fairness' vs the Russian craft, but in not having a reliable enough way to see friendlies between you and the bandit. Particularly for those not making active use of the PRF settings (which doesn't function absolutely accurately anyhow). I know I've 'evaded' a number of friendly 120, intended for an enemy I was near or engaging, as by product of the poor missile performance. Flankers tend to only get IR teamkills from a blatant disregard of IFF with radar. When Russians have datalink they get double assurance, along with the Mig knowing whether its wise to employ the R-77. There will (probably?) be a point where we can start taking 20nm+ long shots with realistic Pk, with actives that will have the performance left to kill any friendly in between.

Well the year of the in-sim F-15C was never really established. In fact its been claimed to be an amalgamation of variants. The use of what has been designated as the AIM-120C-5 implies that its from 2000 at the very least. FDL capability would be 2004.

I haven't flown online in like a week, so its probably in one of my last 4 tracks. If it isn't corrupt maybe I can get more specific info from a playback.

You are asking the wrong question actually, from not having a proper understanding of the technology. Game devs and games themselves don't really 'use' 3d vision. Its a driver level feature that generally happens to work fine if the dev doesn't have something hardcoded at a depth that obviously breaks from not having stereoscopic 3d in mind. There was a point in time where HUDs in DCS were broken in stereo for basically that reason (could still be the case without needing a mod). The very few (2/3?) Nvidia endorsed games that explicitly 'feature' it, obviously tested it and can maybe activate it in game. The Oculus integration is certainly about more then just the 3d effect alone, but its likely the parts that make sure its rendered right could spill over into just working for 3d vision.

Yes I realize its not technically random, so not the best choice in wording. It'll pick what it sees first. I wasn't exactly head-on trying to shoot past the friendly either. With the friendly nearly passing my 10 and the bandit closer to my 1, I was amazed the 120 could guide to the friendly.

Yeah in game, the 120 picks a target at random in all scenarios. Something I rarely do just recently was STT a target and fire between 4-6nm head on. Said target was chasing a friendly with about 2nm separation. 120 went for the friendly right off the rail with solid lock on the bandit.

What seems most likely the case to me, is that there isn't enough groundwork yet in place for anyone to commit to a DCS: F-16. Logically, every completed project bleeds some useful code in to the next project, so something had to picked as a framework. If ED wanted to pick a fixed wing, supersonic, multi-role 4th gen US aircraft, out of say 3 choices, the F-18 brings the most to the sim. After that anything with similar feature sets, should be way less work.

Sounds like you're just engaging your radar without actually going into BVR mode. 2 on the keyboard activates BVR.

In a sim where too many people would sooner respawn than wait to re-fuel/arm/pair, waiting to be picked up in most public MP servers would not be popular. They'd just disconnect and rejoin, or just say F' it and not rejoin.

When I was thinking of what ways that could realistically be achieved (in vendor agnostic fashion) I remembered DirectCompute. While most uses of it are still to provide some graphical effect, offloading physics is a very realistic option. AI has only ever been mentioned as a theoretical capability of DirectCompute, with zero examples implementation so far. That said there are examples of DX11 games, that do way less than DCS, that scale up in performance with more cores. Multithreaded rendering is basically already provided by the API, and does what it needs to do as far as rendering. I'd be amazed if they opted out of using it if they managed to leverage DirectCompute that much.

See the mention of no cpu multi-threading bothers me because it has potentially 2 different meanings. Especially when you factor in "Higher object counts". As that could be from the benefits better DX 11 instancing, but really means rendering a lot more of the exact same object (probably a given anyway). If we're talking unique objects granted explicitly by multi-threaded object calls natively supported in the API, then that's great. Though they could be choosing the single threaded code path, meaning where getting more trees. Now they could just be talking about the core engine remaining single-threaded, but they didn't specify.

The idea in my head was it being more of an additive force in the A-10 as opposed to subtractive in other cases. Oh well I don't fly the A-10 so much though and the only time I'm inclined to be inverted so long in a fighter is for top gun shenanigans.