Biggus

I've had my Orion since April 2021. Never had an issue. Use it a minimum of two hours a day, five days a week.

It depends on what you're wanting to do. If you're doing productivity stuff and simming isn't your main focus of your build, yes, a 7950X3D is probably the better choice. But if you're building for flight sims, no, the 7800X3D is the better choice. The higher clocks don't necessarily mean better performance.

I posted a day or two ago about my perception of spotting at 3440x1440, and I've spent some time experimenting with my G2 today. The dots in the G2 are far too large from 3nm out, and the LOD change at 3nm is far too dramatic. At 3.1nm, it's a great big blob. At 2.9, it's a speck that you probably can't see even when you know where you need to be looking. The original spotting fix mod seemed a good bit 'gentler' (for lack of a better word) at the point where the LOD changed. I'm still pretty impressed at the devs for a first pass at this. Options.lua

Yes, this is a real problem for me in VR still. I hope the tool is updated for MT soon.

I agree, I've seen some horrendously priced boxes with a very small number of inputs lately, and the fact that they're often sold out is somewhat mindblowing to me. I think a modest button box is really the realm of the DIY-inclined. It's a really difficult niche when it comes to pricing. I have my own 1000x1000mm CNC and I make my own panels and things as a hobby. If I were to factor in my panel design time, my toolpath design time, my PCB design time, my fixturing and machining time, my tool costs, my raw material costs, my programming time costs, etc, I'd end up at a prohibitively large number that I cannot ever let my wife know about. I look at some cockpit panel producers and cannot see how they could possibly be making a profit at the price they are selling them. Then I look at the price of racing sim oriented button boxes and what must be their 100-to-200% profit margin and I scratch my head. Market size is a hell of a thing, I guess.

Because that's not what everybody sees. It varies with software settings, hardware and resolution. ED's task is to now find a way to provide spotting parity across all of those variables.

The improvements are noticeable for me. I still get some exceedingly large frame rate drops near Ushuaia (much of the map for me is over 100fps and I'm seeing under 35 on a low pass over the town), but I can see some nice changes. Well done!

As a very enthusiastic adopter of the dot fix mod when it passed IC, I've got to say this is a large step in the right direction. 3440x1440, I am able to visually pick up a Fencer at just under 20nm if I know where to look. This is probably a bit too far away to be seen, IMO and I don't think the original dot mod would have rendered an aircraft at that distance. At ranges under 8nm, the scaling seems pretty reasonable. I still have a hard time spotting aircraft, but when I'm able to visually track one, I feel like I haven't had any of those moments where a LOD change renders them invisible. I also have a G2 but I haven't yet tested that properly. I'll report back when I get a chance to do so. Good job so far, ED. Options.lua

I'd go with whoever was offering me the longest chipset longevity and hope that they actually followed through with it.

Fooling around with the cinematic camera.

I wonder if this is related to the ping doubling when we slot in. Weapons view has the same issue.

I'm seeing that too. Seeing quite a bit of jitter when I use F2 on other players and F6 on my bombs.

I suspect this is because of the configuration of the 7900X3D and 7950X3D. They are dual CCD, with the stacked cache only on one of the CCDs. The 7800X3D is a single CCD. For DCS, the 7800X3D should be the pick of the bunch because of this.

Any chance of an update for the Apache and Mudhen?

This is the biggest thing holding me back from using the F1 as my daily driver. I really hope it's added soon.

It's a real struggle at the moment, I've been going through the same thing. No luck with much of the seat data beyond Diesel Thunder's incredibly helpful thread. For the consoles, I've been working from the publicly available 1F-4E-1 but it's very poor in terms of resolution, so I've been supplementing that with the 1F-4G-1 from 1993 which is much higher resolution, and I've been using some guesswork based on images I've seen of earlier F-4E and even F-4D panels. Even then, there's block-to-block differences and configuration changes as the plane was upgraded through the years. Some of the recent teaser images helped enormously with the left side console layout, but there's still plenty of mystery. Fingers crossed that we get the scanned reference from HB in the not too distant future.

I'm not sure if it's just me, but I'm under the impression that the EW aspect of DCS is ever so slowly improving, partly through work by third parties and partly by ED. I agree that it's enormous work and I'm not sure it'll ever reach what would be considered "realistic", but I'm hopeful that one day I'll be assigning a standoff jamming mission to an AI EA-3D in the editor, or a chaff barrage mission to a flight of F-105s.

I'd like to think that it wouldn't be a factor. But at the same time I'm not expecting to see an official A-4 module any time soon, because the mod is such an incredible piece of software.

If it generates risk for the developer in terms of whether to continue development of the module, then I would not only prefer to not have the mod, I would be actively resentful of the maker. "Years" isn't a concern. Everything in DCS takes years.

Question arising from ignorance: How confident are we that the HTS on the Viper is actually accurately modelled? I know DCS strives for realism in most things, but EW related topics seem to be something of a fudge at times. If the Viper HTS is a simplified abstraction of reality, would we as a community accept something similar in an F-4G?

Good video. Not just because it's a solid refresher, but because it's very short and covers the concepts quite well. Perfect for both newcomers wanting a basic explanation while they're overwhelmed with learning everything.

Air-to-air intercepts is probably worth a refresher, at least within the context of the dearth of situational awareness tools at the Phantom crew's disposal. But honestly, with the limited functionality of the AWACS scheme in DCS, I can completely understand why you'd hesitate to revisit the topic.

Pretty much what I suspected when we discussed this a few weeks ago. I'd like to know whether the E birds picked up the ability to slave -9L/M seekers the radar around the same time.

I would not read that '3 months' literally meaning every single weapons guy spending every minute of the working day for 90 days, it was likely more sporadic bursts. "Get it to work" is a pretty loaded statement and there's plenty of room for interpretation, but given that it's in the 1993 manual, evidently they did get it to work and were able to use it within a relatively short time. Retirement from combat use was 1996 for the E, btw. It took until just before Desert Storm for the F-4Gs to have the -7Fs launch envelope integrated into the FCR. They'd been carrying it for a long time by that point. But it wasn't completely integrated for the better part of a decade. We don't exactly have mountains of evidence for -7F usage. We've got two sources in the public domain supporting it. Both of which were dated at the very latest a couple of years prior to the events related in that conversation. There's a 1995 F-4E -34 that would be extremely helpful in this conversation, but as I said, I'm of the opinion that the lack of appropriately dated and publicly available documentation means that we can't form a definitive answer and so we have to wait and see. Whatever modification was made to the G could equally have been applied to the E. There's no hardware or software reason that it couldn't. There could be budgetary reasons, doctrinal reasons, chronological reasons, etc. But up until that modification took place, they were identical systems. I completely understand your point of view, it's generally one that I share. I think HB will come to the correct conclusion, whatever that may be. If there is no evidence that the -7M was integrated on the E at any time in USAF service, that's fine by me. If there's evidence that, say, South Korean F-4Es received the missile around the mid to late 1990s but it did not see service with the USAF Phantoms, perhaps there's a grey area that might have some wriggle room for options. It's really a very minor issue in the grand scheme, and the average Flogger driver won't really know the difference between eating a Mike or a Foxtrot.