mmaruda

I think most of us here build our own computers - nothing straight from the store shelf will run DCS. ;) The problem here is customer awareness. Most people do not have any idea about these things, they buy laptops from the shelf of a store already with Windows (the cost of which is included in the price tag), at some point they might learn that Linux might be more suited for their needs (my mom for example finds Ubuntu easier to handle than Win 7). Now, this new Microsoft idea will prevent users who bought say a laptop with Win 8 already on it from installing any other OS. It's hard to buy a mobile PC without an OEM M$ system (which I as I said is included in the price), now you probably won't even have the ability to have any other OS, if you do not like Win 8. I think it's good to be aware of Microsoft's attempts at monopolising the market again, in an unfair way I might add. Don't you think it's about time software developers stopped telling us how to use the stuff we paid for though licenses and other crap? DRM is a problem and if someone does not see that they become part of that problem. All in all, software is intellectual property no more than a book is. How come, when I buy a book or a movie, I can do whatever the hell I like with it (sell it, lend it, give it away), but if I buy software, suddenly there is a license telling me what I can, and what I cannot do with the stuff I paid for. It should be mine, but it really isn't. So now I want to buy I netbook and surprise! The one I want comes only with Windows 8 and I have no possibility of installing another OS on it. This is not extremely little, this is similar to communism! Anyway, this could be the beginning of an end for MS. They got into serious trouble once with the browser thing. But hey, if we all just keep quiet they might get away with it!

All that I have learned while flying WWI and WWII sims is this - you pick your fights. Only attack when you have the upper hand and when you get bounced use all your aircraft's perks to get out of there ASAP. In this case - the Mustang is superior due to being faster. The Spit can try going for a turn fight, but assuming the P-51 has the energy advantage, the pilot would have to be really stupid to fall for that. IL-2 is generally a bad example of comparing aircraft as it has this propaganda feel about it. The Spit and Mustang fly as they should in theory, but they cannot compare to Russian Lavochkins for example, which were a lot harder to fly in RL (too many levers to operate, sometimes bad production quality resulting in failures, no radio or problematic radio etc.). IL-2 is a great sim, but anyone who thinks it represents proper balance of WWII should get their head examined. It's a good skeleton basis, where planes feel generally as they should, but in an offline scenario it's ridiculous even with the latest AI updates. All in all, a head to head duel scenario is not realistic. Engagements were far from gentlemen's rules. During WWII the Mustangs had better trained pilots, teamwork and superior aircraft maintenance most of the time (we're talking 1944 here), not to mention the advantage in numbers. As for the pilot vs. the machine - even the best fighters are crap when they are flown by crappy pilots. A good pilot has a good understanding of the general situation, thinks 3d and knows how to best use the advantages of their plane to win or escape a tricky situation. Anyway, if you look the top scoring aces of WWI and WWI like Hartmann and Richthofen, they got their kills by surprise attacks with significant advantage, they did not get into fair fights and they knew how to use their plane's advantages to win.

That's actually easy, once you remember to pull a little on the stick to lock the tail-wheel. Too much throttle (if any at all), and too much speed will also cause problems

It's not the HOTAS, it's the way you approach. I usually do well on landing, but in some scenarios the plane feels different and you need to adjust. There is an instant action scenario with an evening landing on final approach. With this I crash 60% of the time. When normally the plane seems to glide well, here it falls like a brick, bounces off the runway and crashes. It's obviously possible to land, but more power is required and flaring is just weird. You need to go straight and level above the strip and reduce power to gently touch down. I would assume this is due to fuel quantity/wind conditions or something. Anyway practice, practice, practice. Also, the X-52, while it does well on default setting in other sims, with DCS you need to adjust the curves. I discovered it recently with Black Shark as I could not fly properly without 'bumps', smoothing curves did the trick.

I don't thinks so. When ED's Flanker got released the jet was pretty much a mystery and soon after that most of the stuff about it was known to everyone who knew where to search. The Migs and Sukhois from LOMAC are pretty much quite old versions of these aircraft and info on them is available. IMO, it's not lack of info, but marketing. Western jets are better known around the world, and ED seems to be focusing on the western market as well. Another problem might be the AFM. Russian jets have some incredible manoeuvring possibilities that may be hard to simulate properly (remember the scripted cobra from LOMAC? they dumped it in FC2 cause it was unrealistic). Anyway, as an old Flanker 2.0 pilot I wish this would change.

Personally I'd be very happy if ED made every fighter they have in the collection for DCS. Nevertheless, we need German fighters first. How about that 190?

For a WWII sim that has the full setting - maps, planes, campaign etc., the lack of start-up procedure is something you can live with (the sim is old mind you). The main problem is that it feels very sterile during campaign. Dynamic campaigns are terrible and missions are repetitive, there is no sense of immersion and that is the fault of the AI. All you do is take off, time skip to objective, shoot some planes/bomb some stuff get back to base ASAP disregarding the wingmen and forcing yourself ahead of the landing queue to make sure noone crashes into you on approach. End mission as soon as you land. Pick up your medals and praises. Rinse and repeat. You do not have to play that way, but the fact that you can (and in an 80+ mission campaign on the Eastern Front you will sooner or later) is a total immersion killer. Online is different I hear, but it depends on the people I guess.

I'm currently using the Saitek X52. It still lacks buttons for all the HOTAS controls in the A10C, but this can be overcome by using 2 buttons as modifiers. This all in game setup, no profiles used. That way I am able to have all the HOTAS controls on my stick assigned according to the real HOTAS (makes it more intuitive to remember them). Theoretically, you can go with an ever cheaper stick, provided it has enough buttons to use as modifiers, but I imagine that anything less than an X52 might be problematic. You can also go with the old school HOKAS set (hands on keyboard and stick), it's still possible to play. Anyway, unless you get a TM Warthog (plus pedals), you will still need to configure your controls. It's is a bit of a pain, but if you print out the A-10 HOTAS part from the manual and equip some patience, you should probably be able to assign everything in a way that it will feel right to remember even with you current stick. My suggestion is, get the sim first. Spend some time doing trainings, with the stick you have, and once you get fairly comfortable with the A-10 and are certain such complicated simulations are something to you fancy (trust me, I have this sim for a year now, and I still just feel like I scratched the surface), then think about getting better toys to fly with. ;) PS Note also, that DCS requires a beast hardware to run properly - the recommended specs on the page are more of a minimum to actually play with a descent framerate.

GPU makers don't care for the simming community. I tested them today with DCS - nothing to report really. Performance did not decrease, so I guess the drivers are ok.

Short answer: NO! Long answer: not everyone likes to play with other people. Some of us actually hate other people. Also, simulators require immersion to feel right, I cannot imagine that on a server where one guy keeps going for gun kills, a few others have a tank race around the airstrip and some goes team-killing with a Shilka, because he is bored. Multiplayer yes, but MMO will mean the death of DCS. If anyone has any doubts I strongly suggest to try out War Thunder and see just how "immersive" it is.

IL-2 in it's current state does not have any new effects. At least the official version. What you see in the movies is either mods, or WIP for the upcoming 4.12 patch. As for the latter one, the people who make official patches now, make every effort so that the system requirements do not change one bit, and they will not release anything until it's fully optimised. ED's last attempt to change the effects resulted in serious slow downs. Also, the old effects in DCS were very subtle, which is actually the more realistic way to go. The explosions seen in the screens in the OP is something Hollywood does by using large amount of gasoline. ;)

ATC works just fine. It gives the vector, runway and says if you are clear or not. Nothing else is needed IMHO. The sim's focus is on combat flying anyway, not chit-chat with the tower.

They murder the framerate, because people kept whining about not enough Hollywood boom-boom stuff. So now we have shaped charge ordnance exploding like an ammo dump and photon torpedo missile launches at 15 FPS. And I won't event comment on the smoke-screen slideshow the Mustang's .50 Cals produce. Good job! ;)

There is a huge market part for the taking with WWII. People still stick to good old IL-2, and some are even mad enough to play Cliffs of Dover. The thing is, noone has ever done a combat study sim of WWII era. The Mustang is a great intro into this. The best part of it, is that compared to other DCS titles it's really easy to learn (at least the basics). You don't need to spend countless hours configuring a HOTAS profile, reading the manual and doing trainings. All it takes, is just about 15 minutes to learn what button in the pit does what, the rest is pure flying action. There's no DISMIS, TACAN, MFD's to learn. It's more about flying, coordination and instincts, than knowing the systems. I personally had a time when I hit a boredom wall with the P-51. I knew how to fire it up, take-off, land, and do some shooting, but what I was missing, was the feel of WWII. So I started to do challenging things - crosswind landing, long flights and keeping my engine from overheating etc. And there is some much emotion to it, it's hard to describe. I felt like soiling my drawers with the first crosswind landing, which is easy as pie to do in an A-10. I must say, that I am having a blast with the Stang. It really feels like a 'manly' thing to fly this. The Mustang is easy to learn and hard to master, which is what a game should be. Now if only we had a proper setting for it, to really take it into proper combat, that would be something. I am sure it would attract a significant crowd. WWII birds take much less effort to get your hands around, while the real challenge comes with flying. The modern jets are all about learning the to operate systems, while flying itself is mostly a piece of cake with all the computer stuff helping you out. I guess what I am trying to say is that, with WWII planes, learning to fly is done more by playing the game, than reading the manual and watching YT videos. I think that this is a great thing when it comes to broadening the player-base, since it opens the door for all those who are put off by a 700-page manual before you even start. That said, having a proper WWII setting, could be the single greatest thing that could happen to DCS.

I won't argue which is more realistic. A2A stuff is really impressive from what I see in the videos, but their Mustang seems easier to handle (this is just an assumption based on their instruction videos), for example, they say you can firewall the throttle on take-off, doing that in DCS will result in a crash. Maybe that's why people get these ideas. Anyway, I would love if A2A moved to DCSW, that would mean more WWII planes (P-40 baby!) and their persistence and hangar management is really something AWESOME! Imagine the necessity to maintain your aircraft in the campaign, talking to the crew chief, getting yelled at because you don't take proper care of the machine, making choices as to what to fix, cutting corenrs... That would truly make DCSW the ultimate simulation for me... That is if we could have an animated ground crew.

The movie ones (Ka-50, Su-25T) are a separate download.

I have a Saitek X52, which i recon to be a very precise stick, and I find it rather hard to fly without modifying the axis curve. Two machines that suffer the most when going standard settings are the Ka-50 and... the Mustang.

The whole ecology regulations are total BS. All it does is increase unemployment, because companies who have to pay higher taxes due to CO2 emission and such simply chose to move their business outside to EU, mostly to India. The general use of power and amount of CO2 planetwide stay's the same or even increases, while people lose jobs and the economy stalls.

SAS Forum is the place where all the latest stuff happens now: http://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php

Flying the Mustang, low over cities and mountains, maxed out I get a solid 60FPS with vsync. That is great. A-10 and Ka-50 cockpits eat more FPS however. And of course this is a combat sim, so AI reduces frame rate and once things start going boom I get a slide show. The new effects are hardly optimised. I also think they are overdone: the .50 CAL hitting ground looks more like a 20mm cannon (tracers too) and Vikhr missiles (shaped charge AT weapon) produce an explosion the size of a bomb. The new explosions just need to go, or be reworked to look more realistic and be less taxing on the hardware. The next logical optimisation should be moving AI to another CPU core.

You must have some autorudder or take-off assist one. Firewalling the throttle?! That results in the plane being all over the place on my end, and adding just 10m/s crosswind = terrible, terrible damage. My current take-off parameters for a smooth run are: trim 5 degrees rudder, slight trim to tail, lock the tailwheel, manifold pressure no more that 30 with a steady and very gentle increase after reaching 50 mph. That requires a lot careful rudder operation. Moving the throttle 50% up, not to mention firewalling it before achieving a significant speed results in Toktyo-drifting all around the runway and eventually crashing. The Mustang is one wild pony!

Not sure if I'm posting this in the right place, but I have noticed that when playing a track and going to F2 view, there is no movement of elevators/ailerons/rudder. This is especially obvious with the Mustang, where you constantly move the stick and pedals. I know the track playback is far from perfect, but can we count on some improvements in the matter?

It really all depends. When high competition is in place, project secrecy is vital, especially in a business like video games, where certain gameplay solutions are not treated as intellectual property and are copied on a daily basis (noticed how every FPS game now has aiming down the sights and CoD mechanich?). However, in a genre like flight simulation, where there is literally no competition (it's a niche genre with niches inside - DSC=jets, RoF=rag planes and Il-2=WWII), some showing off might be a good idea. The genre itself is not really popular, but some promotion and hype building would be highly desirable to get more attention/potential customers. There was a vid called DCS Anthology ( )- it made some some noise on Polish gaming sites after release and while opinions about sims were varying, everyone was admitting one thing: "it's beautiful!". Nothing draws attention and potential customers like some eye-candy. Hell, I would have probably never gone DCS-study sim if it weren't for those lovely screenshots of the Ka-50 and A-10. :) Also, giving proof of constant development and progress reassures the community, that the they are paying for a line of products with a bright future. Not to imply DCS is dying or anything, but PR was never a strong point of ED, and keeping the hype going always proves profitable. Now, can we finally see some videos/screenies?! ;)

Hi all. As the topic says, it would be nice to be able to assign buttons/axis during flight. Getting your config right takes some time and effort, especially with axis tuning and it's really time consuming with the mission load time. It would be great if you could do that during mission.

I voted Su-27, Flanker really needs a comeback - without Flanker, we would not have DCS. However... La-7 would be nice and maybe a fictional 1948-49 campaign. USA versus Soviets.