B25Mitch

You say you are having framerate issues caused by particles - If so, please identify which of these cause the issue! That's one of the main reasons I'm putting this up here, so we can move forward in diagnosing fps problems caused by particles. There is a common misconception that good looking particle effects kill your FPS. The effects which I have given the rating "A" do NOT kill your FPS, and still mange to look good.

I'm attempting to compile a list of the particle effects in DCS world, along with ratings, comments and constructive criticism. Lately there have been some quite good ones added, and as some of these are hopefully improved I'll update the list. Please let me know if I'm missing anything major! Explosion 1 Rating: B This effect is appropriate for larger missile impacts, such as Mavericks, and smaller bombs. Not suitable for cluster weapons due to impact on framerate and size of the explosion. Needs to be scalable. Explosion 2 Rating: D Unrealistic explosion looks like a firecracker going off. Not really suitable for anything at the moment. Explosion 3 Rating: B This effect depicts a less violent explosion, such as a fuel-air fireball with a billowing cloud of smoke. Smoke needs to last longer, and the flames could use higher resolution textures. Explosion 4 Rating: C "Ammo cookoff" explosion with flaming debris and smoke trails. Smoke dissipates much too quickly, and the ejected fire and smoke trails are low-resolution and fuzzy. Impact 1 Rating: B Ground impact plume for armour piercing and smaller calibre shells. Needs to have better scaling for different calibres - currently small-arms fire causes the same size effect as 120mm AP. Impact 2 Rating: A Armour impact effect - visually effective and well-scaled for different calibres. No improvement necessary. Ground smoke Rating: A Burning vehicle flames and smoke. Scalable, affected by wind, nicely animated particle textures and low impact on frame rate. Possible improvements include an increase in plume height, and a gradual dissipation of the effect over time. Generic dust and smoke effect Rating: F Used for rotor wash, collapsing buildings, vehicles popping smoke and MBT main gun firing effect. Noticeable impact on frame rate in some cases. Needs to be replaced with customized effects. Cylindrical fire Rating: D Animated object that needs to be replaced with a proper particle effect. Cylindrical fire is somewhat effective on fast-moving aircraft. Looks terrible when stationary on the ground. Tire smoke on touchdown Rating: D Similar to the old vehicle dust effect. Too dense, particles do not fade out properly and the wheel emits them for too long after touchdown. Needs an overhaul. Water splash Rating: F Also not a particle effect. Crudely animated splash object; does not fade out smoothly, but disappears before the splash is finished. Needs a particle effect similar to Impact 1. Vehicle dust Rating: A Dynamic dust effect, including mud spray on tracked vehicles. Visually pleasing and realistic; needs no improvement. Aerial explosion Rating: D 3-pronged explosion with quickly fading smoke. Needs a more dynamic and irregular flash and fireball, and smoke should linger for about twice as long. Aerial smoke Rating: D Currently looks like a thick grey line in the sky. Could use more variation in the smoke trail and better texturing, like the ground smoke. Aerial gun smoke Rating: B Effective for the most part, but has some peculiar characteristics, such as 'sticking' to the gun barrel while the weapon is being fired, and then letting go afterwards. Can also appear flat from some angles in the Black Shark. Rocket exhaust Rating: C Acceptable, except for being the wrong colour. Needs to be changed to an orange hue. Contrails Rating: D Lots of flickering, emitted from the engines in 'chunks' at regular intervals. Reportedly causes an FPS impact (Quirk). Wingtip vapour Rating: N/A Currently broken. Previous versions of the effect did not fade in or out - appeared and disappeared instantly. Sparks Rating: N/A Currently broken. Previously worked great and made belly landings on the runway look spectacular.

I haven't had much time to review the changes made to CA in version 1.22, but here are a few that stood out to me. Some of these changes are technically to DCS World, but they are mainly related to CA: 1.) New particle effects for vehicle dust. This is a welcome improvement and is actually quite a well-implemented particle system. I'd like to see more particle effects of this quality from ED in the future, especially in the fire and smoke department. There's also a new flash and smoke armour impact effect, but unfortunately it only seems to be triggered once every few impacts. 2.) Vehicles top speed have been fixed. Surprising that this wasn't addressed earlier on, but it should make multiplayer a fair bit more realistic. No more driving tanks around at 130km/h! The steering sensitivity has also been reduced to stop oversteer at high speed. 3.) Vehicles bounce and rock when travelling over terrain. Looks good, but unfortunately this appears to have broken the turret stabilization, making it impossible to accurately fire on the move. Turrets also now rotate and tilt with the body of the vehicle, instead of retaining their orientation. 4.) Slightly better looking compass and turret orientation symbols. Did I miss anything major? It'd be good to hear people's thoughts on the recent changes.

Il-2 1946 had an interesting debug feature where you could turn on visualization of damage vectors. This allowed you to see where bullets (and in the case of explosions, shrapnel) penetrated certain parts of the airframe. If too many vectors pierced a certain component, it would be destroyed. Damage vectors passing through the pilot would result in 'red screen' or pilot killed (recent patches have actually introduced 'leg hits', and 'arm hits'), and depending on how many arrows went through the engine it would take damage, fail, catch fire, or be blown off completely. I imagine the DCS damage model computes damage vectors similarly, although sometimes I think the IL-2 damage model feels a bit more robust and predictable.

Most particle effects, including these, aren't animated at all. They're just a bunch of transparent images ('sprites'), which according to code are ejected , sprayed or drifted around in 3D space to give the illusion of a volumetric effect. It's a simple but effective technique which has been in use for decades now. ED's particle effects are a real mixed bag. Some of the more recent effects show signs that there is indeed a workable particle effects engine in DCS... it just hasn't been used with much artistic flair yet. And some effects, such the fire and smoke from burning vehicles, actually do use animated particles, where the sprites themselves have dynamic textures. This is pretty advanced stuff, and it's a shame that this capability hasn't been used more. I'm a bit disappointed that the cylindrical fire object is still in use when great-looking fire already exists elsewhere in the sim.

This effect has been recycled in DCS now so many times I'm starting to lose count. Originally designed as the rotor wash effect for helicopters, it was then used for dust around explosions, then for tanks popping smoke, and now the very same effect is even used for smoke coming from a tanks main gun. We've seen from the new burning vehicles that great looking particle effects are certainly possible in the DCS engine... I think now ED just needs to create more of them!

The new F-18C and Mig-31 models look very nice, but unfortunately either their damage models don't work, or they don't have damage models at all. They can still get shot down and experience engine fires, but the plane will meanwhile look like it's in pristine condition. Furthermore, I very often encounter a bug where after the crew ejects from an F-18 or Mig-31, the pilotless aircraft continues to both gain airspeed and climb, practically all the way into space. It's obvious that the aircraft isn't behaving realistically at all. Notice the info bar: 3702 km/h and almost 30km altitude. Seconds after I took the screenshot, DCS froze and crashed.

Sounds like a bit of a fluke. In BS1 I've emptied my entire magazine into T-55's at point blank range with no effect. Very occasionally I've managed to kill MBT's (including the M1A2) with the gun, but it was pretty rare. Looks like it's possible to get a lucky hit sometimes, even in this sim. I'm going to try this again in the latest version of DCS World.

This has just started happening to me tonight. Pretty annoying, although even if I could connect to the master, chances are that all the servers would be too unstable (or unpopulated) anyway. On the very few occasions that it has worked, DCS World multiplayer has been awesome, but I think I will be waiting until the next patch before I go online again.

I think that is just Z-fighting on the overlay textures that show the 'hedgerows' between fields. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-fighting The same thing occurs with crater textures on the ground, and it's generally pretty hard to avoid in a flight sim, where the possible Z values are huge due to the large distances - when two planar objects are extremely close there may not be enough variable precision to determine which is in front of the other, resulting in the flickering.

So now the Russians will have 3 tanks superior to the Abrams!:lol: Seriously though, I'm looking forward to having it in the sim and the 3D model looks great.

Sorry for stealing your original screenshot paulrkiii, but I couldn't resist:D

Some shots from a great MP session on Sunday - the mission started just before sunrise and went until mid-morning. Scouting out the road to Kutaisi: Sunrise - 6:00 AM: 7:30 AM: Sometimes this game just looks beautiful.

Me too:D

I was in a multiplayer server last night and blew a tire while cornering too fast on the taxiway. It's a good feature - discourages people from driving recklessly:thumbup:

But you can't assign an axis to steering, accelerator or brake controls, can you? From the look of the control options setup it looked like there was only a "steer left" button or "steer right" button.

I had a blast earlier today taking command of the Red forces on one of the China servers, and driving a T-80 to Batumi, where I absolutely slaughtered the A-10's attempting to take off. A couple got airborne and started strafing me and firing rockets - I managed survive for a while and even disable the gun on one of the A-10's with my coaxial turret... before I was unexpectedly hit by a Maverick. Still, it gave me smug satisfaction to catch those tank-killers on the runway :D That sort of armoured exploitation has been my favourite aspect of CA in the short time I've had it, and I consider it worth buying. Even if you choose not to buy it, the existence of CA has already made multiplayer games more interesting for everyone.

I just had a play around with this now. I'm using a GTX570 (standard 1.25GB) and the performance hit wasn't too bad - the worst I got was 40FPS near the ground, and I think that was because of the trees. Usually I run DCS World at 60FPS, at 1920x1080 and mostly high settings. I think I'll turn it back off though, since there are indeed a few issues. The darkness of the shadow seems to depend on the angle of the camera, so when the camera is near perpendicular to a surface the shadows are too dark, and when it is almost parallel the shadows fade away altogether. Apart from that, it's quite pleasing to the eye, and it's a promising feature that looks like it has potential.

Too much AO? Perhaps, but it sure does look a lot better than none at all. Imagine how good it would look in cloudy weather, where the standard shadows are not visible. I think kyletiernan intends this as a proof of concept, and it's very convincing. I should probably be more clear: The scenes in which texture-based, baked AO is not practical (such as aircraft sitting on the ramp) benefit the most from this real time AO rendering. Another example is when weapons are hung under an aircraft - currently, it's not practical to bake AO into the texture, because when the weapons are released they would continue to show a dark shadow on top. The cockpit, on the other hand, is a static object(relative to itself) and already makes heavy use of baked AO in the textures. For this reason, the addition of real time AO to the cockpit would merely be giving the shadows double exposure, and as kyletiernan said, it's not a huge improvement(not sure why this is a problem - the DCS cockpits look fantastic anyway).

That's probably because the cockpit textures were rendered with ambient occlusion pre-applied in 3dsmax.

Wow, that looks fantastic! I've never seen ambient occlusion add that much to screenshots - I'll have to give it a try on my machine. The soft shadows under aircraft on the ground are particularly impressive.

That's it unfortunately. Personally I'd rather they just left it out, since it looks so unrealistic (blatantly recycling the rotor-wash dust effect), and since the tanks don't seem to use it strategically - they just pop smoke whenever they take a hit of any kind. AI units are not affected by it and it hardly conceals the tank from human eyes either. I rather hope they've put some effort into fixing this for Combined Arms. *Edit* this is the default effect - I didn't change any files.

Tanks do pop smoke in DCS World. Unfortunately, it looks nothing like the video above - it's just a very enlarged version of the particle effect used for rotor wash on the ground. It looks so bad it took me weeks to figure out that's what it was meant to represent - I initially thought it was just dust being kicked up from my GAU-8 rounds.

+1! I think the new power cables look very cartoonish - as if someone's drawn them on the screen with a marker pen. Not sure why they changed the look in the first place.

I've seen plenty of Youtube videos (like this one: ) from previous patches where tires burst during a hard landing. I've only had the sim since patch 1.1.1.1, but I've never had this happen to me, even when I deliberately slam the plane down into the runway, bending the gear up. It appears this feature has been broken. Another issue: When performing an emergency gear-up landing in a flat field, the tires snag on the terrain, usually causing the aircraft to spontaneously explode. See the first attached track for an example (all 3 tracks are less than a minute - watch them!). If, however, the tires have been punctured, like in the second track, there is no explosion bug and everything goes smoothly. So if you're looking to belly land your A-10 in a flat field somewhere, and your tires happen to be still intact, you should opt for an upside-down landing (third track) - at least you'll save the plane!:lol: The solution is both simple and realistic: implement a trigger which bursts the tires when they come in contact with non-runway terrain at speeds greater than 100km/h. WheelsExplode.trk NoWheelsLanding.trk UpsideDownLanding.trk