Angbor

Congratulations on reaching this major milestone! I am very excited to give this plane a go. It's going to be something special for sure.

I'm thinking this also. OP, your concern seems very broad, do you have some specific concern? Cause, aside from the few helping Heatblur, none of us have this plane and none of us have used Jester or something like it in DCS. I mean no offense, but your post is maybes stacked upon maybes. Maybe Jester will have some advantage, maybe that advantage could be leveraged to gain an advantage in a fight, maybe people will pick up on that potential, and maybe people will begin to exploit it, and maybe that exploit will degrade everyone else's experience. And all these maybes assume a person sitting in that position would not also offer that same advantage in a more meaningful way. And frankly, if this does all play out true, then it would be better that Heatblur improved Jester, to bring it more inline with what a person is able to do, instead of developing a server authoritative disable.

You are right, we don't have a release date until Heatblur or ED comes around and gives us an exact date. Having these videos simply means we're getting that much closer, which I don't think anyone doubts at this point. However, I also disagree with you too. Cobra has said we'll have it by late March. Emphasis on BY. Which means we could get it any time between now and then. So Jan 16th isn't ruled out by anything Cobra has said to this point. And as for the CEII, I doubt that factors into the F-14's release at all. The F-14 has been up for pre-order for a longer period of time and is an 80 dollar module. The CEII is a 30 dollar module that only just went up for pre-order. It seems really odd to me that they'd preempt the release of a more anticipated and more expensive module. Simply put, the F-14 will release when it's ready. I highly doubt they'd delay it for some arbitrary reason and I highly doubt it'll take all the way into March to complete either. We'll get an exact date when we're super close.

Yeah, I have to agree. Thinking about the bigger picture, we definitely have a culture of subtle hinting and hidden clues. Which, naturally, leads to trying to guess out these clues into some greater meaning, even when there's nothing there to divine. And all of this stems from pure excitement. Heatblur has to be super excited to finally share this multi-year long labor of love with us, and it shows in all the materials they've released to us and how they've released them so far. And we have to be super excited to finally fly this bird, or people wouldn't get so worked up about it. But we need to have more patience. I think we're well beyond all the secrecy and hint hiding. We're just in the final run to "completion" and historically we've always had warning that a pre-order discount period was about to end. It'll come. In the mean time we can enjoy a new stream of videos detailing systems and what not. I think the next will be start-up procedures.

You kind of just proved Dino Might's point though. I don't believe Heatblur ever said they wanted to release on the 21st. I'm not even sure they brought it up. The significance of that date for us was 100% contrived by us, and we built ourselves up that it was a release date. And once it passed, we got mad nothing happened. Just because that date happened to be near, is irrelevant. We assumed it had significance, but they never state such significance.

I know, right? I'm wondering what's left on their checklist before it's ready for prime time. I'm starting to suspect the RIO pit is holding us back. Lack of videos and screen shots lead me to that. But I have no idea, and curiosity is killing me. But release speculations aside, that demonstration was outstanding. Haven't watched any virtual airshows in the past. Definitely will in the future though. I didn't get a chance to watch every show live, but I'm looking forward to watching the recordings in the coming week.

If Heatblur was actually making a Blackhawk, that would be a dream come true for me. If they did one of the DAP versions, it would be even more so. We'd get a pretty good gunship with a lot of weapon types, good electronics and a helicopter that could do aerial refueling. I hope it's not too classified to make and we see one some day.

If it helps, I have been able to access it here https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/shop/modules/tomcat/

This is probably a question that can only be answered by ED. There's a lot that could have either player count larger. On one hand, buying direct from ED gives you earlier access to new planes, like the Viggen. Which has only very recently been added to Steam. It also has more money find its way to the developers instead of paying Valve a gatekeeper fee. On the other hand, Steam has millions of people exposed to a game discovery engine. This could lead people, who wouldn't look up ED's site, discover DCS and think what's available on Steam was it. Never thinking to look further into it. Then you have people on both platforms, either because they don't care or because they bought modules that don't transfer. I, for one, used to use Steam back for BlackShark and the A-10C, before DCS World was a thing. Once I learned that I could get earlier access to new stuff, stuff I was very excited for, I switched. But the Harrier hit Steam without much delay. So perhaps the trend of seeing planes take months before hitting Steam is a thing of the past. I suppose time will tell with 2.5, the Hornet and the Tomcat.

Thanks for the info OStateBandit. When reading those check lists, one thing really stuck out to me. And the answer to this will probably painfully obvious once it's stated. But, why is "Visor Down" one of the checklist items?

This. It's very nice to just launch steam and have it figure out which of your games received a random update. Not to mention that I rarely see downloads take advantage of my full down speed, but steam is one of the few places I've seen it happen. That being said I have always used the standalone DCS. But the last time I came back from a break flying, I had to wait 3 hours for patches and my game window closed before it finished. Had to wait until the next day to try the Viggen out.

While I think maps are great, I personally don't think they're the most important of our three content types. You buy a jet and you can have a ton of fun learning it and mastering its systems. You buy a map and it's basically a different sandbox than our free sandbox. An amazing looking sandbox, but still a sandbox. You can fly around and look at it, but if you're like me, you either don't have the creativity, knowledge, or the time to make something compelling to do on it. In my mind, new maps are basically like game consoles. They're an expensive, upfront cost that opens the door to what you actually want, Missions and Campaigns. I don't think a map is worth much without something to do on it and that the financial success of any map is ultimately tied to the amount of content that is generated for it. Not to mention that these extras also increase the value of the planes they are made for.

I don't think this was addressed yet, but don't lower your resolution to make things easier to see. That's working the wrong direction. Getting a larger screen will help if your dots per inch is too high on your current screen, but ultimately this is a resolution problem. There is a point where a bigger screen of the same resolution won't have added benefits. If you really want to make that little tank easier to spot on the ground you'll need to upgrade from 1080p. The main problem is that as the tank approaches a size smaller than the pixels on your screen, all the parts of him that occupy a fraction of a pixel will be blended with everything around it, removing that contrast that we use to make out different objects. Barring higher resolution screen, smart scaling and labels are a great way to fix that problem, but introduce their own problems, which has been discussed here a lot already. Another thing worth trying is perhaps disabling anti-aliasing. I haven't experimented with this in DCS, but I've noticed in other games that too much AA can cause things to look blurry, killing off the contrast between objects. Which can make a tank the size of a handful of pixels disappear into the background.

I'm not an actual pilot, so I understand that there's a slight possibility this is how it normally is. But, when adjusting throttle (Pg Up, Pg Down or using the axis) the Co-Pilots throttle doesn't rotate like the pilots does. I didn't try grabbing it with the mouse. This is when sitting in the co-pilots chair. At first I thought that perhaps it was a messed up key bind as I just reinstalled my OS and DCS along with it, but looking over to the pilots collective his throttle would move and I was able to get flying. PS. Thanks for all the hard work you guys have done putting this thing together, it's amazing.

I gotta ask, am I the only one who would buy that helicopter first day if BST made it? I guess that's how opinions go though. While I would love to see something like the Apache or Pavlow produced, any helicopter made is an immediate want for me. Hopefully "first half of 2014" doesn't end up being the last half of the first half. Cause I've saved away money for the cobra and it's going to burn a hole in my pocket once another module comes out.