doveman

You want to borrow some paragraphs ;) Anyway, from that wall of text I managed to extract that you're using AsrockXFastRAM and don't want to save the RAMDisk to your SSD every time you close it. I suggest you try SoftPerfect RAMDisk (which is free) as that can tell if any files have changed and only save the changed parts, so if nothing's changed then nothing will be written. I use it myself for DCS, albeit only a 8GB RAMDisk as I only have 16GB, so I had to strip some stuff off that isn't important. My process is 1) run the updater from the HDD installation 2) if it shows there's an update available, run JGSME and disable all mods 3) allow the updater to update 4) close DCS and reinstall the mods with JGSME 5) use FreeFileSync to update the RAMDisk with the changed files (sometimes if there's a lot, then I have to delete everything from the RAMDisk and copy the whole lot, minus the excluded files/folders which FreeFileSync remembers, over again as there's insufficient room to copy them otherwise) I've been able to run from the RAMDisk with the swapfile completely disabled but I did get a few errors, even though I still had 2GB available, so I've had to enable it now, even though Process Hacker shows it barely gets used

I think I've concluded that it's better to use an Xbox360 controller to fly with than my Thrustmaster Hotas X :huh: The problem is, with a real stick you'd be making lots of small movements around the centre to balance the aircraft, whereas this doesn't seem possible with the Hotas X, partly because you have to move it a bit out of the deadzone, partly because it's a bit sticky and too spring-loaded. With the Xbox360 "stick", I can make very small and precise movements to balance the aircraft and it also seems easier to use the triggers for rudder than using either the rocker or twist rudder on the Hotas X, giving me much more control and precision. Having a very small radius, I have to be careful not to push the stick too far, thus oversteering and have currently set a curve of 20, a Y translation of 50 and a deadzone of 5 but I've only tried it a couple of time so this might not be even close to ideal. It might be that this stick is too small to work well for both small, precise movements and larger adjustments but for the former it's much better than the Hotas X. I found the same in ArmA2 and 3 recently, where it's a lot better to use my mouse as it gives me the ability to make the necessary small and precise movements to keep in control of the aircraft, which just can't be done with the Hotas X it seems. I still feel more comfortable using the Hotas X when in flight (not saying it's better, just that it's more comfortable to have both hands on the HOTAS) but for landing/take-offs the mouse is so much better. The Xbox360 controller isn't ideal, as there's no analogue slider for Collective/Throttle so I still need to use the Hotas X for that. Using a HOTAS is also more comfortable and provides more easily-accessible buttons. The Xbox360 controller has a fair amount of buttons but they're not so easy to use without letting go of the sticks or triggers. I was thinking the other day that a left/right slider that stays in place would be a good rudder control for those of us who can't afford/haven't got room for pedals (and I'm not sure if there are any that stay in place to simulate being trimmed without modding them to remove the springs anyway). Some sticks have a small slider at the base which is intended as a throttle control and it would probably be confusing anyway as they're orientated in a up/down direction, rather than left/right but that sort of thing would allow us to adjust the pedals quite precisely and leave it set, as if trimmed and we'd be able to clearly see where it's set. I have no idea how other sticks compare to my Hotas X. Obviously they cost more and have more controls and stuff but I've been around enough to know that doesn't necessarily mean the actual stick is anything like a real one or gives the required control but then again, plenty of people are using various HOTAS sticks and not complaining so I guess some of them must be OK but I can't afford to be buying stuff to see if it's any good, so I guess I'll just have to transition to using the Xbox360 controller for now until I can find out if there's a decent stick I can afford. All this time I thought I was just not getting it and it turns out it's my stick that's been trying to kill me :joystick:

Interesting but the lack of hats is a bit disappointing and makes it a bit unsuitable to use with some of our DCS aircraft. Not that I could afford it anyway ;)

I'm only using a Thrustmaster Hotas X at the moment. I was just wondering if there was anything decent on the market to bear in mind for if/when I upgrade.

Does anyone actually make a more realistic stick or is DIY the only way to get one?

I understood "smooth and precise". The rest was lost on me I'm afraid as I've never driven ;)

That's interesting. Do you find it has any resistance/friction either getting it out of the deadzone or anywhere else, or is it very smooth and precise in all directions?

I don't know how it compares to other sticks but with my Thrustmaster Hotas X, it has a bit of a physical deadzone, so very tiny movements don't produce any output anyway. It's not massive but I imagine with a real stick the tiniest movements have some effect. It's also somewhat "sticky" around the center, being spring-loaded I guess, so it can tend to stick a bit in places and require a bit more pressure to move it out from one spot to another zone, so for example the smallest movement forward that registers takes it from 32767 to 32703 (but I doubt I could hit that without monitoring the DirectInput output) then pushing it further will take it to 32319, then 31551, 31103, 31039. The point where it might stick a bit tends to vary but it obviously tends to result in moving a bit further than I might have intended. So I suppose to counteract this, I need to use a curve that smoothes out any movements around the centre, so that I can push it more severely to start with and it won't really matter whether I hit 32703 or 31551, rather than dithering about pushing it from the centre and wondering if I've got to the point where it actually starts to output (with the smallest movements of the stick, I guess the effect on the helo shouldn't necessarily be that noticeable straight away so I probably can't rely on observing the aircraft to tell, although perhaps the Controls Indicator will show the smallest inputs clearly) and so that when the stick does stick/jump a bit, it doesn't matter too much as the input is dampened down. With a curve that achieves this, I suppose the flipside is that it will be more sensitive to higher inputs as I move further from the centre but perhaps that doesn't matter if the stick shouldn't be in this area very much and when it is, I'd be wanting to make drastic movements anyway.

I've certainly never heard of setting the collective to slider rather than curve! I'm going to use that for the UH-1H and KA-50 and see if it improves my ability to fly :) I wonder if it's useful for the A10C throttle as well?

Ah I see, thanks. So I guess it uses those default values unless they're overridden by specifying individual values in each section (or specifying values that aren't in the default section at all, such as CockpitLocalPoint and limits6DOF. My default player is setup like this: function default_fighter_player(t) local res = { CameraViewAngleLimits = GlobalCameraViewAngleLimits, CameraAngleRestriction = {false,130.00,0.90}, EyePoint = GlobalEyePoint, Allow360rotation = false, CameraAngleLimits = GlobalCameraAngleLimits, ShoulderSize = 0.2, } if t then for i,o in pairs(t) do res[i] = o end end return res end

Yeah I did fly on 230 (or whatever it was) until it told me to turn left onto the runway heading but the only other number I had at this point was 130 so I assumed this was the heading I was supposed to turn to then.

I don't think the ILS was audible for me either when doing the Landing training mission.

When I do this mission, it tells me to turn towards the runway at Batumi on a heading of 130 but if I follow that, it takes me into the mountains way to the right of the airport! What's up with that?

Still having problems with this in 1.2.5 (I say still, I've only recently bought the Hog, so haven't tested before). I got told to turn to WP3 and did so but before I got half-way there, I got told to turn to WP4, so I did but nothing triggered when I got there, so I flew all the way back to WP3 and turned round and then it triggered on the way back to WP4 and told me to deselect OSB8 and OSB18, which I did but the highlights on the buttons never disappeared (I tried pressing and holding them again for a couple of seconds as sometimes this seems necessary) and it told me to aim for the red smoke but not how to fire and I couldn't fire any rockets or guns, so that was disappointing! Of course it's possible that some mod I'm using causes problems with the mission but even if I disable all mods and try again and it works, it doesn't prove anything and I'd have to play it repeatedly with/without mods to determine for sure and life's too short ;) Most of my mods are for the KA-50 or UH-1H anyway, with the only A10C specific ones being Horse of War (cockpit mod) and Bigger HUD Font. EDIT: Typical, just after posting this I find this thread, which probably explains what I did wrong (failed to raise landing gear) http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=100361 I don't know if that's what happened so it could be something else but I'll try the mission again and make sure I do this to see if it works then.

Me too, just updated to the latest 1.2.5 patch and didn't touch it and it looked like that.

Yep, I haven't been able to get a reply from the Tower for the last few versions actually (not sure if it ever worked to be honest as I don't know when I first tried) but it's still not working in 1.2.5. EDIT: To clarify, I should explain that I mean when coming in to land and ATC hands me over to the tower and tells me to contact them, that's when I can't get any response. At startup and when calling Inbound or requesting azimuth, it works fine.

I'm afraid this doesn't make any sense. Perhaps you could share with us what files DCS created on your RAMDisk after doing this because I can't imagine it would do so. I'm actually running DCS from a 8GB RAMDisk and I think it's OK but it might still stutter (I've probably got used to them and don't notice them unless I'm looking). It obviously loads faster than from HDD but only maybe about 2-3x faster (I guess it has to process the data as it loads and it's this that the RAMDisk has to wait for), so I still have to twiddle my thumbs for 30s and considering the RAMDisk is 6x faster than SSD, I'm not sure there's any point in my getting one of those.

That's interesting, mine has As you can see, it doesn't have very much at all defined for player slot 1, unlike yours. The Global settings defined at the top are The settings for the A10C and KA-50 have even less defined. ] EDIT: The Mods\Aircrafts\UH-1H\views.lua has the following, which I suppose gets used if the files in Saved Games\ don't have anything defined to override them. No such file for the A10C or KA-50 though but there is one in FW-190D9 (whatever that is, I still don't know!)

Thanks for you profile imposter71, it seems to work quite well for me, now that I've learnt to unzoom my PS3 Eye as that was making it do funky things! I have a weird issue with FTNoIR where it keeps flashing up images of other parts of the cockpit to where I'm looking in DCS, such as the left MFCD, very briefly like 0.5s. I didn't experience this using Freetrack, so I must have some setting wrong. With Freetrack, I had Freetrack and TrackIR enabled. In FTNoIR I had Start dummy TrackIR.exe enabled and Use TrackIR, Hide Freetrack selected. I do have the headtracker.dll installed in bin\headtracker as well.

FaceTrackNoIR also supports LED tracking now, which is pretty cheap and easy to assemble yourself and is likely to be a lot more reliable than facetrackiing. Not that I'm having much luck with my headset/cap arrangement but plenty of other people are using it happily, so I'm obviously doing something wrong! EDIT: Turned out it didn't like my PS3 Eye being zoomed in! It's working fairly well now but still needs some tweaking.

I've been using this for a while now and it does work. Only thing to be aware of is it results in three mouse states, no pan but click, pan and click, and pan only, whereas normally there's only the first and last so it might take a bit of getting used to. Most of the time it's quite hard to use anyway, as you often need to zoom in on controls and then the cursor isn't in the right position to click on them, so I'm not sure it's actually that useful!

Why have the videos all been taken down/made private?

I added Devrim's ADF switch fix as well to make life a bit easier for others. I hope that's OK with Ricardo, please let me know if not and I'll remove it. http://www.mediafire.com/?4cltgkhdchw8hr8 Ricardo, perhaps you could put a link to something in the first post as it's quite a pain looking through every page to find the correct download (this was also partly why I thought it worth uploading this version, so that there's a download link at/near the end of the thread, of course that won't last for long once a few more posts are made!)

hehe, just call me hound-dog, always sniffing out things people have forgotten about ;) I didn't actually realise that Ricardo had released a Blue Pit (hard to keep track of all the mods!) but I've found it now thanks. Sure, there's no point duplicating each other's work :)

Yep, I found it a useful little touch as well thanks. If it takes a long while, perhaps you don't need to do it when the view is zoomed in on the particular switches that you're flipping as we can see them moving but for anything else, such as when it's not zoomed in or when discussing gauges, etc that you aren't clicking on and so there's no movement to catch our eye, it's really helpful :)