statrekmike

Military aircraft tend to look worse for wear. Even if they are perfectly maintained, they still will not look all that new simply because it would be a waste of manpower and time to make sure that the paint is always touched up and the cockpit is in showroom condition. If one were to go to a Air force base and look at the active duty aircraft, they would find a lot of fairly "worn in" cockpits. Likewise, if you were to look at aircraft during a cruise on a carrier, you would quickly find that even a well maintained example is going to look rather weathered to say the least. To put it another way. The aircraft textures you saw in the stream ARE what you would find from a "well maintained" aircraft. That is just what these things look like when you actually use them.

In order to fully rule out a hardware issue, you may want to consider plugging the throttle into a powered (very important that it is powered) USB hub. As it stands, the X55 and X56 throttle both draw more power than a typical USB (especially a USB 2.0) can deliver. This causes random "ghost inputs" that can manifest even without the user touching the throttle. When I first got my X56 (functionally identical to the X55 in this specific regard), I found that I was getting odd random inputs. At first, I suspected a faulty throttle but when I plugged it into a powered USB hub, the issues went away entirely. Heck, at one point, Saitek themselves even advised users to go with the powered USB route as it seems to consistently solve the problem.

Is there any chance that we could get official word about the status of this issue from someone at ED? I mean, this is a pretty big issue and entirely prevents realistic mission types in certain aircraft. For example, it is impossible to do realistic on-station CAS stuff in the Harrier or even realistic CAP's in the Mirage. This bug has been around for a good amount of time and while I appreciate that the Hornet has probably placed a lot of demands on ED's attention but this is a kind of bug has a big impact and hurts the experience across a variety of modules. Is there any word on this? Is this fix in the works or is it further down the list at this point?

How high do you typically fly? If you stick to lower altitudes, it takes longer for the freeze to happen but if you fly at around 25,000 feet or higher, the freeze happens much quicker.

Good to hear that the ED team will be working on this. Hopefully it gets fixed soon. Heck, I would even go as far as to say that this is hotfix material due to its severity.

Just finished doing a test where I fly without external tanks at 25,000 feet. I had no freeze at all during the flight. From the looks of things, the external tanks are indeed causing the freeze and how long it takes to freeze depends on altitude. Sadly, this means that until it is fixed, I can't really fly realistic missions since external tanks are absolutely essential for many of its tasks. This is something that I hope can get fixed quickly as it can be called a game-breaking bug without hyperbole.

Did some further testing just now. I was able to have a very long flight in a Hornet that air-started at 10,000 feet. I was able to intercept a enemy aircraft (ruling out any combat related causes) and shoot them down. After that, I continued for a good while at treetop level without any issue. I was even able to maintain exactly 20,000 feet for more than fifteen minutes without any sign of a freeze. So it seems that when I do a air-start (with the same aircraft loadout, enemy forces, etc) at 25,000 feet, I freeze after nine minutes or so pretty reliably. If I stay at around 20,000 feet or lower, I don't have a issue at all. In order to narrow this down and hopefully gather some useful and consistent data, I went ahead and created a mission with three Hornet air starts, two Hornet ground starts, and a Mirage air start (as a control). It might be useful for all of us to try out the various Hornet air starts and try to fly at the starting altitude as long as possible to see if we experience freezes. The mission is attached to this post and while it may be tedious to do this kind of testing, it is the best way we can narrow this down without adding in a bunch of random and potentially distracting variables. crash test.miz

So I have been spending the better part of the day troubleshooting this (in hopes that I can get some information that can actually help solve this issue) and I can't. The DCS.log file is not really producing any meaningful results (that I can see), and there are no tracks produced or crash log to find. What I have noticed is that it seems to happen reliably when I set up a mission in the Caucuses where I am in a F/A-18 (set to client) that air starts at 25,000 feet. I put a Tu-22 (that I can spawn in using the F-10 menu) about 100 nautical miles away and we both head straight for each other. The mission starts fine and performance is very good. I do experience very occasional micro-freezes every now and again but that does not seem to be a issue. Once I get inside 40 nautical miles, (generally takes about nine minutes or so), the game will lock up entirely. It does not crash or quit on its own. It just freezes with audio in the background (probably looping over and over). At that point, I have to use the task manager to force the game to quite via "end task" but since it was a freeze and not a crash, I don't think DCS can generate a meaningful report. It seems to be kinda random. Sometimes I can get more than ten minutes (like last night when I flew the waypoint training mission). In the scenario I just described, it happens 100% of the time. Also, I have tried both the Persian Gulf map and the Caucasus and it freezes in both maps. I have also routinely deleted the metashaders and FXO folder. My graphics driver is up to date, windows is up to date. I have no idea what else to do at this point.

Same exact issue after today's patch.

Nope, I thought it was fixed last night but I just tried a basic scenario this morning (a player flown F/A-18 and a AI Tu-22 flying towards each other) and after about ten or so minutes in the air, it just froze dead. Again, this does not happen in other modules so there is something going on specifically with the Hornet here. It does not crash but it hard freezes and I need to end the task to quit the game.

Not using a anti-virus beyond the basic Windows 10 setup. Oddly enough, I went ahead and deleted just the "metashaders2" folder just now and was able to do a couple of long flights without incident. I will go ahead and do some more testing tomorrow but if things go as they are, it seems to be fixed.

I actually just tried that after posting my last message. I renamed the entire DCS World Open beta folder in the user/saved games folder and started up the game from scratch. It still froze in the Hornet.

I will include what I can but keep in mind that it is not crashing so there is no crash log at all. Here is everything, I put the DCS.log file in a zip since it would not let me upload it otherwise. server-20180531-122313.trk DxDiag.txt dcs.zip

I have been experiencing a rather severe issue with the Hornet. Every time I fly the plane, the game will freeze up tight (have to close it via task manager) after somewhere around ten or fifteen minutes of play. There does not seem to be any particular event or condition that brings it on (tried in a variety of missions/maps) but it happens consistently. The odd thing is that this does not happen at all with other modules. I have no troubles with them. It is only the Hornet that causes these freezes. Sadly, this does not seem to produce anything in the log that I can see. It does not create a crash report. I tried to do some troubleshooting. I updated my video drivers, updated windows, ran a repair on DCS word, and even uninstalled and reinstalled the Hornet module itself. Nothing seems to do anything. Just for reference, I am running a i7 6700K, 16 gigs of RAM, GTX 1070, and a 1080p monitor. Nothing is going wrong with the parts, the temps are fine and everything works as it should. Since this is only happening with the Hornet and nobody else seems to be reporting problems, I have to surmise that I am a fringe case.

I really hope that ED fixes this soon, it is the kind of bug that prevents realistic missions and for a sim like DCS, that is a huge bummer. The Hornet's fuel situation will be difficult to manage if this does not get fixed.

I encountered this bug last night. I had a scenario set up in the Persian Gulf map and my buddy and I both had two smaller drop tanks on the wings and the large centerline tank. The centerline tank seemed fine but the wing tanks showed empty when I turned them on via the fuel panel. Once I landed and replaced the tanks, it seemed to work properly. Not a big deal but something none the less.

I can see where you are coming from and I agree that there are a lot of in-service aircraft that would be very good in DCS but at the same time, that list is always going to be large. DCS modules take years to make and there are only so many developers making them at any given time. There is never going to be a point where the list of "needed" aircraft ends and "would be nice" aircraft begins. As I said before, DCS is in a interesting place because it is not beholden to a particular theater, era, or conflict. A third party or ED itself does not really need to go very far to justify just about any aircraft at this point. They don't really follow any sort of "master list" of required aircraft that they need to go through before experimenting with other, more niche aircraft. In reality, the third parties and even ED themselves are going to make what is interesting to them and we should want it that way because if they are interested in the aircraft (any aircraft), the module will be better for it. If ED or a third party were to get excited about making a F-20, I would want them to do so because there is really no reason for them not to do it. We only benefit in the end. I mean. In the end, where is the point where ED or a third party could start experimenting with aircraft like the F-20? Some will say that they need to do a F-16 first and when that is done, now we need to do a F-104, F-100, F-105, MiG-23, MiG-25, F-106, A-6, F-8, and the list can go on and on and on again. The player-generated list of "required" aircraft in DCS will never end. There is never going to be a point where they are done and can move on to stuff that never saw service. Why bother even following that list to begin with if it means you can never really branch out when a completely viable and interesting aircraft (like the F-20) presents itself as a opportunity.

The F-20 represents a interesting opportunity for DCS as a platform. As has been stated already, the Tigershark was (for all intents and purposes) a complete and combat ready aircraft. It is only because of the military procurement bureaucracy that it never really saw service. Its inclusion in DCS could potentially open the doors for more combat ready but never really mass-produced aircraft to make their appearance in the future. Since DCS is not really beholden to any specific theater, conflict, or era of air warfare, they have the opportunity to explore aircraft that COULD have seen conflict but never did. The Tigershark is a great example of this. It was essentially a little F-16 and since it was aimed at the export market as well, it could be used by a variety of DCS's included nations in hypothetical scenarios. This aircraft never saw service but maybe the DCS version of it could be a way to celebrate that clever aircraft in another way.

At this point, I would be happy with some sort of stickied post that kinda outlines their basic plan when it comes to adding in missing systems and functionality. No dates, just let us know what we can expect during the process and where certain things sit on the priority list. To be brutally honest, it is hard to really do much with the Harrier. A lot of stuff is missing and some of that stuff is core functionality of the plane itself. I am kinda in a "holding pattern" of sorts when it comes to really spending time with it simply because some of the features it is missing are very important to realistic mission execution.

While it seems that some other modules also seem to have issues, I figure that it would be useful to point out here that the MiG-21's front panel lights (the ones that illuminate the gauges, gunsight range indicator, etc) do not work properly at all. At the moment, they illuminate needles but you cannot read the gauges themselves at all as you once could in prior builds.

Nobody is really going to debate that DCS's current IR implementation is incorrect. I mean, we know it is just inverted colors and a filter. What is more, Eagle Dynamics did not say or even indicate that FLIR would be revamped for the release of 2.5. What they did indicate is that they would revamp the FLIR when they work on the Hornet's ATFLIR targeting pod.

The flood light issue seems to be sporadic. Some modules (like the Harrier and the Mirage) seem to be okay while others have issues (like the A-10C and the MiG-21's red floods for example). The problem being highlighted here goes beyond the flood light issue. The main instrument panel lights for the gauges and indicators are also bugged. From the looks of things, this seems to be a issue that every module developer will need to look into. It seems that most modules have some kind of interior or exterior lighting issue of some kind or another. Either way, this really does need to get fixed, the aircraft can only do day missions until it is.

To be honest, DCS is not really built to be a balanced multiplayer experience. Some in the community have tried to craft a semi-balanced experience from that and doing so is certainly possible on a mission making level but it will involve making some tough decisions about what kinds of restrictions a server should put in place. Here is the thing. As we get more modern aircraft (like the Hornet especially) with more and more modern weapons, it is going to get really difficult to fit them into "balanced" multiplayer scenarios without HEAVILY restricting loadouts. This is fine but those restrictions have to stay on a server owner/mission creation level. If they go any further than that, you start restricting DCS's ability to provide good, realistic scenarios for those who want to make them. In the end, the Tomcat needs to have a AIM-54 and it needs to be as capable as the realism in DCS allows. It falls on mission makers and server owners to restrict it if it bothers people. This is not a issue that ED or its third parties really should be dealing with.

After the recent 1.5.8 update, I have noticed that the grey/silver livery option is entirely gone (only leaving the mostly green camo option with some variations). I am not sure if this was intentional but I thought I would point it out. On top of that. There also are some texture problems on the skins that we do have. If you look at the plane in external view, you can see that the pylons and parts of the underside of the plane have a strange "digital camo" look. This is after recently running a repair of my install and a friend of mine also saw these same errors on his end as well.

So first and foremost, there are not a whole lot of reasons to use the Saitek/Mad Catz profile software for DCS as it will only over-complicate things for you. It is easier and more efficient to bind all your controls in the DCS controls menu itself. Now, here is the part you may not want to hear. It is generally a good idea to just simply sit down and bind your own controls for DCS. I know that it can be a daunting process for someone who is not experienced but once you do it, you will see that not only is it easier for you to remember the controls (since you don't need to memorize someone else's controls setup) but it also allows you to develop your own methods to binding controls that work well for you in particular. Here is one tip, look at what is bound on the actual stick and throttle (via the manual). Use that as a general guide to what you should bind on your X55. Again, remember that this all can be done in the DCS controls menu itself, you don't need to make a profile with the Mad Catz/Saitek profile software itself.