blkspade

When I see that high flanker they are one of two types of pilot. The new flanker driver that doesn't know any better and will keep making that same approach after each death, or the skilled one that absolutely knows better and is deciding to be bold that day. Also that skilled guy is likely to just be a decoy so his wingman can ET you from below.

I wasn't saying its impossible, just that it really isn't ideal. When it works its a matter of skill, luck, and exploit. I occasionally get guns and AIM-9 kills on MiGs and Flankers, but the process to get there is not what I should be doing in an F-15. The AIM-120 performs better against higher flying targets and even more so with a higher rate of closure. The F-15 can completely negate any possibility of a long range ET shot by simply not being in afterburner. So you'd be stacking the chips in the Eagle's favor flying higher. However an Eagle is all-in inside of 8nm of the Russian jets. Radar missiles are still able to be evaded at that range, but it requires prayer and divine intervention to escape an ET there.

The ER-ET combo kinda works, until you're flying against eagle drivers that always expect it from the flankers. The ET is really easy to beat at range when you can see/expect it coming. You'll already have 120s coming at you well before you can effectively employ the ET. Between NCTR and TEWS the eagle driver will absolutely what he's flying against. In the Russian birds you have to more or less extrapolate what you're enemy might be flying. Though with some servers having eagles on one side it might be easier to assume you're facing an eagle if you're on red. That actually increases the likelihood of the ER-ET combo working in favor of blue flankers to a greater extent as the red pilots might not think to use flares as much. They don't need them fighting eagles outside of 3nm. The other rationale behind the low flying Russians is the fact that the radar missiles don't track well at really low altitudes and the air density drag. It sometimes creates problems achieving /maintaining TWS lock. Along with notching it ends up forcing the Eagle to close within a range where the ET is going to have a higher Pk. If you can evade 120s at altitude without breaking your lock then yeah being higher will work just fine. What you get more often than not is mutually killed. Against me personally you are more likely to kill me with an ET alone than firing both. Still completely dependent on me not seeing you in the first place.

On your advice for the "Russian Driver" you should probably point out that your more or less referring to the Mig-29S here, as it is the only Russian flyable with active missiles. As an Eagle driver myself, I tend to giggle a bit when I see a solo flanker above Angels 25. Tactics are going to vary depending on what your flying and flying against. Ambush tactics are really the best approach with the Russian jets against the Eagle. In a 1v1 scenario most eagle drivers won't allow you the advantage of being higher and faster in a Russian jet if your spotted outside of engagement range.

There is an obvious bug, but the more interesting question is which of the two was ED's desired effect.

Xeon platforms in general offer you next to nothing in additional performance outside of server/workstation level tasks. The fire pro cards are going to perform even worse in DCS on any DX related task than the Radeon cards. I still remain indefinitely irked about the probability that Edge and thus DX11 is tied to Nevada. The base DCS world engine has performance issues that you can't fix by throwing more hardware at, as the DX9 API can't do anything with it anyway. DCS looks really good as it is, especially considering there isn't much else in the genre remotely up to date. It would be nice if it actually performed accordingly with some sort of scalability.

That is actually the extent of the smoke effect with HDR turned off, from most jets except the Mig29.

One thing is for certain, the inclusion of the smoke makes for a definite equalizer in multi-player. Particularly as person who mostly flys the F-15, it was all too easy to lose visibility on the Russian jets that and not have them come up on radar as they notch 'WVR'. Now I'd like to see the AI engine cheat fixed.

Yeah I feel you on the BF2 forever thing. I was so excited for BF3, then they released that beta. It immediately felt like a COD clone as opposed what I expected from a BF game. All hope was lost.

Unless there is a sudden massive surge in the popularity of the flight sim genre, I don't think you'll find many publishers interested anyway. Most publishers got out of the flight forever ago because it just wasn't a huge money maker. Ubisoft ironically would probably be the only pub with any interest at all, as they continued to back the IL2 games. EA did release that ace combat clone under the Jane's name a few years back, which I'm sure was DOA. I was excited to see a new Janes title on the self for all of 2 seconds. Edit: Actually EA sold off the Jane's license to a Maximum Family Games it seems, so it wasn't even EA.

Well the proper response as to why the AI can doing anything, is probably as old as gaming itself. The computer cheats. Beyond that I think its been stated before in the forums that rotor doppler return isn't modeled.

It may also be worth noting that the radar is sensitive to the targets ground speed/closure rate. So in the case of helis they are made more difficult to pickup the slower they go. Slow flight is already in their nature, and you basically don't pick them up at all if they are in a hover at long range.

If mantle can do whats promised, it puts AMD in position to really crush Nvidia. The reason being is console gaming. The current gen of consoles are AMD hardware. If mantle improves on the capability of the PS4 and XB1, console games dev would be stupid not to use it. When those games are multi-platform including PC, they'd have to be going out of their to not continue using Mantle. This potentially creates a catch 22 for Microsoft because supporting Mantle on the Xbox puts DirectX in a bad place. The bulk of PC games end up being exclusive to Windows because Direct-X is proprietary, and often the 1st and only choice of API. The idea of mantle being open could be more of it being OS neutral than GPU vendor neutral. PC games with predictable results on Windows, Mac and Linux. Nvidia last stand here would be binding it's TWIMTBP group to not support mantle. PC exclusive developers would be the outliers not readily jumping onto Mantle. Those are few and far between, but most likely to benefit the most. Simulation and strategy games are often the most CPU limited, so shifting more work to the GPU with reduced overhead makes so much sense. It already seems that part of ED's goal with edge is basically to do that anyway, but with DX11. From the video, it sounds like a task more suited towards Mantle, but DX11 should still prove to be vast improvement for what we need compared to DX9.

I can't recall ever taking significant damage from infantry, and I've come in pretty low at times. Its such a chore trying to engage infantry as most ordinance seems to require direct hits on tiny specs that you can barely see. My own experience at an airshow with an A-10 showed me that if aren't already looking at the patch of sky its coming from, you won't know about it until its right over you. That A-10 probably could have strafed the beach 3x before flying over us giving so the shock of a lifetime.

I don't know how well the AFM changes could be conveyed in a video. Aside from the obvious ground handling changes, belly landing in grass without instantaneous explosion. Oooh, maybe they can do donuts with the differential braking. Perhaps no one can be shown what the AFM is, they'll have to experience it for themselves.

My "unless" part was more or less a joke, as someone else was doing the speculating some pages back. Like in the case of the F-16s and F-15Es the loadouts are seemingly incomplete more so than unrealistic. Which ever is more accurate to describe the loadouts, how much does it help mission builders when there is still a particularly high probably of AI failing at the task anyway. I actually try to work my way through the F-15 campaign missions on occasion, just to be absolutely frustrated by the AI not getting their rounds on target.

What I was mostly getting at, is loadout changes concerning AG ordinance for non-flyable (AI) craft are so transparent they're almost novel. Only one of those jets are known to be becoming a module. Yet it seems to entice speculative posts about the others, unless...

The rationale I perceive from this is that similar functions between different objects share a single (Code)Function. So there is one section of code somewhere that defines the EOS (MiG standard), all jets adhere to it equally. Anything they fix or break could be expected to work across the board to reduce testing. So a quicker fix than implementing new code for the Su-27 specifically. I kinda suspected the same sort of thing when all the A-A missiles were broken.

Realistically those changes probably won't offer much change to how the AI performs or fail to perform their tasks.

You're playing with fire trying to maintain lock while trying to avoid an active missile. Its completely pointless against the F-14 since they are engaging from well outside your launch capability. You'd be better off sticking to the notch until they are in ET range.

At a of range 18nm in your example you should pretty much have visual on the airfield. In overcast conditions you'd want to be relying on ILS anyway. In either case just select ILSN and cycle though. You'll eventually hit a waypoint in the direction and close to the range given to you by the ATC. This is only confusing if your trying to get to Kras center or Kras-Pash because they are so close to each other. You can do the math if you like, but this works basically 98% of the time. Where it fails you can rely on your eyes and some knowledge of the terrain.

The problem is what you're looking for just doesn't exist. No one produces a monitor that would meet your criteria. So you're stuck just using your laptop, or having to compromise on your requirements.

Since the majority of games now use software based audio engines, the only advantage of an ADD-IN sound card is better quality over analog outputs. Now if you've got crappy analog speakers or headphones the point of diminishing returns might make the card even less worth it. If you wanted to go out over a digital interface like optical or coax, then audio quality benefit goes away. You do gain the option dolby digital or DTS live encoding for surround sound over one of those digital outputs, with certain Creative cards.

The fundamentals of flight are immediately applicable across every aircraft. After that understanding flight characteristics of a particular aircraft are very important. Then completing what ever task that craft is intended for. We're just adding the lengthy approach of putting a key in an ignition on top of the more accurately modeled systems. So the FC craft successfully fulfills the bulk of what you need in a simulation leaving out perhaps 10%

Never said to stop dreaming, just going by the evidence of current and trending DCS behavior, some things are likely to be unattainable at least in our lifetime. Yeah a base target of 50 instead of 250 is at least somewhat conceivable.