SkateZilla

Why do I feel like it's getting overly technical, and now grasping as straws, over 4-15GB of space, in 2024. I have single movies that take up more space. A. Module selection has nothing to do "preferences", and more to do with available information, it's well known Red For (Migs, Sukoi, etc) are mainly Russian and they have EXTREMELY strict laws regarding information on military equipment. So you cannot blame ED for that. They are working on a Mig-29A, which by one of your later points, would get destroyed by F-16s/F-18s/F-15s, so you likely wouldn't even touch that, for the same reason you wouldn't touch a F-4E, a Modern RedFor aircraft is never going to happen in the current state of western laws on military information, ever, and not just for ED, for everyone. B. When you installed DCS, and Agreed to Terms, and when you click "Update" instead of "Later" You are consenting to drive space being used by said update. C. Texture Resolution has nothing to do with monitor resolution, the higher the resolution of the textures to higher the pixel per inch detail on the aircraft's model. the higher PPI allows more finer details etc etc. You dont need a 4K monitor to see the difference between 2K and 4K textures. E. Aircraft are added to the core, for use as AI, and Multi-Player. If there was an argument for anything, it would be to enable removal of "CoreMods" of aircraft you have no intention of using. That way you can remove the textures footprint as well as the 1GB or so footprint from EDMs, UI Elements, etc. and the updater will not force you to re-download at the next update.

There is no trend to replace your PC every 2-3 years, the ONLY time this would apply, is if someone is intentionally buying 2nd hand, clearance, low spec PCs every 3 years just to keep up with Avg Minimum spec. I rocked a FX8350 (OC'd to oblivion), and 3 R7970 Lightnings, for over a decade, as each 7970 Died due to aged silicon, I eventually replaced my Mainboard, CPU, Ram, and rode out the last R7970 until it started to show IC Failures, then purchased the 6800XT, only because of availability and price, being in the middle of the GPU Price Spike era. So I literally ran DCS on a 15 yr old GPU at this time last year, with minimal issues, and even in VR. There is a trend, that most power users upgrade to the latest GPUs and such, no one is forcing anyone to upgrade to continue to play DCS. The Sim evolves, that's the nature of Software as a Service infrastructure, more graphics and things get added as technology develops. Again, the only argument in there is space, which is easily solved, and if solved w/ a 2+TB drive, would be solved for years. As more aircraft and theaters are added, it's up to the user to determine which theaters they want installed. I have EVERYTHING installed, and it's under 700GB, so 2TB should be enough overhead for several years. If budget is so tight that $150-200 for a drive to last 4+ years isn't feasible, there's always traditional HDDs which range $50 to 100 for 2-4TB. No one is saying SSDs or NVME's are required to run DCS, I run DCS from a WD BLK 7200 Drive fine. This is the era of larger textures, larder LODs, and growing footprints. This is everywhere, even on consoles, games are shipping at 20 GB ISO Disks, and then downloading an additional 40-50 GB to install and expand into 120+ GB per title. Developing the Core infrastructure for picking and choosing aircraft liveries to remove, will only cause further Multiplayer segregation, as now server owners will have custom livery sets that each player will have to download and or delete to pass IC, etc etc. That amount of work to save roughly 4-12 GB in the long run isnt worth it. If your storage situation is to the point where 10-20 GB is the determining factor on whether or not you can download updates and continue to play DCS, then it's clearly a matter of it being time to upgrade.

correct. you don't need dcs.exe in the argument's box, just the command aarguments. using -w "FolderName" will disable launching w/ App Presets, but it will allow you to launch w/ different \Saved Games\ Folder Sources. as for dcs_variant.txt, it's only present on non stable versions, unless manually made by end user.

To echo that, NVMe Drives, even PCIe 3.0 NVMe, are sufficient for gaming, You'll see a marginal difference in loading and none in FPS / Latency between PCIe 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 Drives, Those $500, blistering fast 7,500-15,000mb/second read speed 1TB SSDs that YT and Social media are shoving into your shopping carts, are sustained reads w/ 1 large file, you wont see that we multiple smaller files typical with game texture spooling and loading, you'll likely see ~3,500 - 4,500mb/second read speeds, maybe less. *though it would be a significant step up from Precache HDDs of 90~mb/sec and SATA Limited SSDs at 500mb/sec You can get a 4TB NVMe 2.0 or SATA SSD for $~200 USD. I have DCS on a 2TB Sandisk Extreme eSSD w/ EVERYTHING and it's only ~40% used (~650GB). I still run a copy of DCS on a WD Black Gaming 8TB Drive w/ max read spead of 115 or so MB/Second on the sweet spot of the platters. and there's no FPS / Latency issues, and a bootup / loading time difference of maybe 10-25 seconds. 11 pages of requesting a core infrastructure change, citing "we don't have thousands of dollars to spend on SSDs" is not a valid argument. Even when I ran a 640GB WD Raptor, I Symlinked my _downloads folder to a different drive.

The Answer is still the same as it was earlier this month, App is developed and worked on daily. The App should be auto detecting whatever the dcs_variant.txt or branch in the autoupdate.cfg file is. if you want to launch and use a different path, then you can use the Custom Write folder or the -w "<foldername> in the arguments line.

Only the prototypes and LRIP1 Units would be accurate, as things changed after LRIP1.

I'd have to confirm, I was told it was a type of ray tracing / active reflection rendering, a cube map does make more sense given the excessive amount of post processing shaders running already. Even then, if it's not actual ray tracing, you'd likely not see anything definitive until Vulkan.

Secondary Lighting On, Global Cockpit Illumination On?

iirc F-16 and F-18C for starters, but it should be on all of them.

AFAIK, Only in the cockpit.

the new Canopy reflections are raytraced.

Different engine, different engine management system, slightly different flight model.

The Wingtips tank mod is self contained, you only need to at the store lines.

ST Binaries are being depreciated, as MT matures and more items are coded for MT.

KOLA_terrain ?

Just letting everyone know, I have not forgotten about ya'll. the app is in daily development on my end, most of the issues with the last public build have been fixed, and other things completely re-vamped. The next public release isnt scheduled until June likely, As the app is also developed and maintained to aid testers, there are some functions that are integrated into the app that are not in the release version of DCS. The change log is extensive between the October build and now. On top of finding a suitable host so I can re-enable the auto update function, I am also looking into 2 separate deployment paths, one for testers and one for the public that way there wont be such a long wait.

Global AI Pathing is prolly not as hard as you think, considering you can export all the roads/railways from Google Earth into a file that can be converted easily to Terrain4 Engine DCS uses now, can also export water layers for ship pathing. The dev time for the global map is likely resource management, and assets. There's already plugins in the interwebz that allow interfacing Google Earth Pro with DCS, though in early stages, a lot of things still didn't work 100% last time I checked on it, Photogrammetry of a lot of things being one of them. Once the Globe is done, wouldnt be surprised if the HQ Area's are put overtop of them, however, for things like historical maps (ww2, korea etc), keeping them separate would likely work better, you don't wanna fly a mission over Europe then magically pass through a barrier into modern Europe.

75% of that explosion in the OP is dirt and concrete and not pyroclastic.

They dont have computers powerful enough to run DCS, we're safe.

Is everyone running their correct Native resolution? or Rendering 1080P and then Fullscreen stretching to their 4K Screen?

It's be interesting to note what everyone's Windows Scaling settings are.

right now there is no way to scan and set the device IDs properly, I'm still looking for the exact formula DCS uses in the LUA file. The app pings WMI/DXGI for the device info, and on my system it returns all the devices, but the Device IDs do not match what DCS Puts in the LUA Files. Down the road maybe, once I figure out how DCS is pinging the system for devices. DCS Uses {Variables}{DSGUID} So far no output option I've seen in Win32_SoundDevice Class outputs the DSGUID.

none, game folders are supposed to be exempt,. otherwise every file loaded into memory is going to be scanned as well as processes.... kills performance.

it wasn't something that made it through that shouldn't have. it was something that was reported, and adjustments were made based on feedback, but as stated already, one setting isn't ideal for everyone, and different displays etc etc, which is why a slider option is being suggested. going off topic and after the testing team wasn't needed, as most of the team also mentioned the initial implementation of the reflections were too strong, and that as well as feedback, led to discovery of the reflections rendered twice (realtime and baked textures). But as stated, it's new, and requires some tweaking based on a wider audience pool

Note: "fixed internally" does not mean "it will be in the next patch". As that fix may or may not be waiting for other elements to be integrated as well. That being said, the real-time ray traced reflections are new, and need time to mature. what looks good on a $5000 CAD Monitor might not always look good on a consumer monitor. P.S. Reflection resolution is set by the user's settings.