mmaruda

Just a few guesses: trim, wind, wrong approach for the K-14... Correct wingspan "more or less" - should be 37 for the Mustang, if I remember. Anyway, I play some IL-2 from time to time still, and the K-14 also isn't accurate there. Maybe it's just a specific way this sight was meant to be used. Anyway, with sims using realistic ballistics and some historical reading, my assumption would be that it was hard to hit anything with the speed and G-load of the fighters of that time. That's why tracers were used as well.

Alt+Tab when launching and check if your firewall isn't blocking anything DCS related. I'm using Comodo and it did block DCS access to some dxfiles. Allowing access helped.

Hi all, it seems that AMD has taken up the gauntlet against Intel once again. http://www.zdnet.com/amd-readies-trio-of-new-eight-core-fx-desktop-processors-for-october-release-7000000952/ What do you think?

I don't want to brag or anything, but I don't get what all the fuss is about. Maybe it's because I got the Mustang past 1.20 when ground handling was improved, but I managed to successfully take off and land on my first flight. Maybe it's due to all the IL-2 hours, or maybe I'm just lucky, but I find landings quite easy, if you do it the proper way. Frankly speaking, I find them a lot easier than IL-2. In Sturmovik, when you are around 160kph with gear and flaps down, the plane is like brick shaking and struggling to stay in the air, while in DCS it's nicely gliding for a three point touchdown. The key thing in my opinion is not to throttle back completely once you are on the ground, but keep it around 1000 RMP and delicately start braking, if you set throttle to idle, the plane starts to swivel (similarly to what happens in RoF). Landing the Black Shark on a farp... now that's challenging! Anyway, congrats on the landing, hope find as much joy in the Mustang as I am getting. :)

Regarding the .50 cal - I am a long term IL2 player, this was discussed many times among the IL-2 community, and all I can say is... noone will ever be happy. With the last IL2 patch some adjustments were made to the ammo type (incendiary, AP rounds, bla, bla, bla), anyway, they seem to have sorted it, at least according to what the "egzperts" say, by properly modelling the ammo configuration in the belt. That said, ED's Mustang does a lot more damage than than the one in IL2. Not sure if ammo type is modelled, but it is pretty deadly. The reason why people might see a problem is convergence. In IL2 it is whatever you set it to, so people can adjust to their preference and it really makes a difference. Now in DCS, we have it fixed at around 300 yards. The K14 minimum distance is 600 yards. So I would assume, people don't get the expected damage, because they fire from too far away and most rounds go past. As for the AI, it is tough because it flies in this perfect fashion. But once you analyse it... it's tough, but kind of boring - too much looping. Some adjustments would be cool, so the AI would start making mistakes on occasion, it would feel more like fighting a human. How it is now, the player is thrown into some deep water. Anyway, the Mustang is great, I was sceptical, but ED has proven that it can make great study sim of a prop plane. Now, we need some proper WWII setting for this. Dogfighting Mustangs 1 on 1 is fine, but not really how air combat was in that day. The best aces would get their kills by exploiting opportunities, like bouncing an unsuspecting sucker at high speed and being gone before he'd realize what happened. Some bomber escort fur-balls would really be awesome.

Some clickable buttons would be nice as it would ease up one the stick configuration and memorising which button does what. Still, dynamic shadows is cool.

I also don't use TrackIR, tried Facetrack but it does not work good. I do ok with the hat switch used to look around, though with no labels it's a pain. Anyway, I tried equal weight on both planes and it's a massacre. AI is by no means uber, it just flies the plane in a very smooth fasion, not to mention it turns way tighter than me (flaps?). No idea how to crack it. How is the AI visibility range? Does it ever lose track of you, or is it 360 all the time?

Any tips on prop pitch management? I could only see you tampered with it at the beginning. Do you adjust for climbing/diving only, or go with the standard combat 3000 RPM? In IL-2 I noticed that keeping in in the "green line" generally makes you faster and less prone to those violent stall rolls when trying to manoeuvre with a lot of slip kicking in. I believe in DCS it does not make a difference, and since the engine does not overheat I generally avoid any fiddling for now. Also, does the AI experience blackouts? I once tried to follow it in a loop and the pilot lost consciousness. Anyway, you blew my bubble with ammo weight fix.

Actually it isn't that hard. If the the AI does not have to worry about ammo weight, then the player is screwed big time. A single 12,7mm round weighs around 117 grams, the Stang carries 1800 rounds, so that makes the AI around 210 kilogram lighter than the player, if fuel amount is equal. That is a lot!

In a desperate act I resorted to cheating - 100% fuel for the AI, 30% for me - now it's a cakewalk. Never would have thought that weight plays that big a part. Anyway, once the AI goes defensive it really starts to suck, keeps going vertical even without the speed and altitude advantage. I'm also very surprised at the .50 cal's power, if I manage to hit that is. Seems the K-14 still requires a fair amount of deflection.

Well I just tried 1vs1 against the AI. All I can say is that all the IL-2 experience I had over the years means nothing. I am always too slow and completely cannot turn with the AI. I tried various things, boom and zoom is useless as the guy manages to face me almost instantly every time and accurately hit head on before I get a chance to aim. Rolling scissors, vertical scissors, spirals, you name it, the AI does not fall for any of these tricks and does not make mistakes. It seems impossible to shake him once he's on your six. I'm not saying this should be easy, but some difficulty options regarding AI skill level would be nice. I've been dogfighting for the last 1.5 hour and I have never felt so exhausted after gaming in my life. Not to mention the feeling of being completely worthless. :(

I can't seem to understand why is this discussion still on... Plain and simple, the Su-25T is a plane for real men with hairy chests, that was always the deal, no questions about it. If you can't handle the lack of of sissy-boy avionics that insta-kill a target from 100 miles away, you may just not be man enough to fly the Toad. :) But jokes aside, Gentlemen, whatever happened to to underdog favouring spirit? I used to fly all the important sims out there, mingle with community etc. and there was always this... thing for crappy planes. Sure, you can own in IL-2 with your Lavochkins and Doras, but nothing beats the thrill of going in a Rata against 109s and living to tell the tale. Again, Rise of Flight, that crappy Neuport you have is no match for the Fokkers, but if you can get back home safely and bring some wingmen with you, it's a day to celebrate. Same goes for the Su-25, sure it's hard, not much fancy computer stuff to do the job for you, if you just come back in one piece with a few tanks added to you tally, that is something! And mind you, the Ka-50 is no better than an outdated piece of '80 hardware itself, yet we still love it! All in all, it's not the plane, it's the pilot, so enough of the talk about F-35s vs Toads, just bite your lip, man up, and do your best. ED has always delivered the best best Russian aircraft experience out there anyway, so have some appreciation and enjoy. And even if the Frogfoot is a turd, it's still a very mean turd, and there's no reason not to love it. PS As for the old school Soviet planes on a modern battlefield they have one major advantage: they don't care for the wind, snow, rain or crappy runways, they operate in any conditions with minimal maintenance, which is something the F-22 and the F-35 can only dream on.

Ok, a couple of thing I do not fully get. I have learned that in order to taxi and take off, you need to lock the tail wheel (pulling on the stick slightly) and use separate brakes for tight turns - now it's all quite easy. But, what is the state of the tail wheel in stick neutral position? I understand it is not 360 unlocked as according to the manual you have to push the stick all the way forward to do that (no idea what would anyone want to do this to themselves). So I take it it's just half locked in neutral? Another thing is the take off trim. I understand that the procedure is to have 5 degrees right rudder and 2 degrees nose heavy? Rudder trim generally works, but it's not always what you'd expect, so is the due to crosswind or am I doing something wrong. Finally, once I get airborne, I'm all over the place, is there a specific moment when I should re-trim during take off (I mean procedure-wise), or should I just "feel it"? I generally hit the reset trim button and start from scratch, but it does not look smooth. Lastly, most people mentioned landings being challenging, but compared to IL-2, this is a cakewalk, not a single crash yet - I must be doing something wrong. Any advice? :)

If you imported your joystick setting from A-10C standalone to DCS World... well, something is screwed here, and thus the keyboard and buttons do not respond in game. I'm afraid you will have to go back to defaults and set up everything from scratch. At least that's what I had to do.

I just bought the Mustang yesterday, so I cannot really compare. Taxing, take-offs and landings are doable on the first try with no assists (I'm the bad kind of yeeeehaaaaw! pilot). However, once you do something wrong and start drifting... it's as if you were on ice, I don't believe even the Mustang can go sideways the way it happens in the sim. It's like Ridge Racer or something.

Oh yeah! Gimme that for my Ka-50! :pilotfly:

To be frank, I'm not really good at this, but flying with a non FFB stick is a pain. Even when you do things right, the virtual stick is in a completely different position than you'd expect. Anyway, I use whatever I can to fly smoothly - hold-manouver-release, FD, proper method... But the last is the most demanding. I still don't get why the bump happens - it should be the question of a non FFB stick, but even doing it properly (according to all that was written on it), bumps still occur. It's also very hard to be precise with your manoeuvres with the 20% AP authority. Personally, I think this is just plain stupid, but I blame Kamov, not ED. :D

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/836/beztytuuxuz.png/ As I said earlier on, it's in Polish, so you might have to do a little searching to get there.

Wrong, most people think that because the driver defaults to a multiple screen setup, even when there is only one. With that option, memory is always maxed out. Setting it to single display clocks the memory down in 2d mode (and gets @10C of the temps). I had and ATI 6870 and ground my teeth on it with DCS. Clock should go to 850 as a target set in the screenshot. 500 means that whatever small percentage of the card is used works slower than it could. The way DCS works, it only uses around 50% of the GFX card depending on the model and the situation in the game, this causes the clocks to vary speeds since the driver cannot decide if it's a highly demanding app. This often results in TDR errors (happens with NV cards as well but their drivers are better at handling this if you just turn off adaptive mode). Same goes for CPU - while Intels get maximum clocks constantly in DCS, AMD CPUs bounce up and down not being able to decide if they need the extra juice (since the sim only uses one core at most and not fully). AMD does a good job in general gaming, but with simulation games it's better to stick to Intel/NV or at least get rid of any active power saving options (C1E, speedstepping ect) for AMD stuff. This is actually mentioned in the DCS performance guide though I guess they focused on CPUs since the older engine was CPU intensive only, now it's both. Anyway, this is an issue with the game engine I would assume. Multi-core support is one thing that we all keep asking for, but I think while we wait, ED could try to improve the single core and GFX card utilization somehow (I believe it was a bit better around 1.0.0.8). PS I may be a little wrong in some things mentioned - for two month now I own a beast rig, so I stopped looking into getting DCS to run properly, but I feel the pain of all those with still descent machines that still struggle.

First of all BMS has the upper hand because it focuses on one aircraft, but look at just how many years it took to get there. As for the rest - terrain looks bad, 3d models apart from the Falcon are poor and my biggest pain - training! You really have to learn everything yourself, it's not like you have the nice tutorials of DCS to show you the basics. And the way the manual is written it's really hard to digest. As for dynamic campaign, IMHO it's always been an overrated feature. I'd rather fly a well designed scripted mission than dozens of generated ones, even with all the comms and stuff. Though one has to admit, Falcon really has a good dynamic campaign engine which cannot be said about other sims (IL-2 Sturmovik being perhaps the worse).

Seems like your memory is at full swing, but the GPU isn't. You might want to try going to control panel>power options>edit power plan than edit advanced setting and turn off the option at PCI express (sorry for not being too precise, mine is in Polish). Or just change your power plan to high performance. This helped me get a few FPS.

Check in the CCC if your gfx card clocks are maxed out, if not it, power saving kicks in (due to BS not utilizing your gfx card's resources to the full). Tampering with windows power plan might help. Another problem is that AMD CPUs aren't really good for DCS.

I really want a DCS Flanker/Fulcrum title to be done. And while we're at it, Su-25T clickabe pit maybe? The whole USA plane fest is getting a bit boring. When Flanker was released the main reason a lot of people got into it, was that the market was dominated with US jets. Russian jets are something ED became famous for, I just hope they can get back to the roots one day.

I'm just gonna say one thing here: GOOOO IRELAND!!! :D

For the price of that laptop you can get a beast PC. If you are getting a new computer for flight simulations, a laptop is a waste of money. Let's face it - you still need to place the HOTAS, pedal, TrackIR somewhere, so the latpop's main perk - mobility goes out the window.