doveman

Nonsense I'm afraid. There are no "pathways" laid down to the old data on a formatted drive (in fact it is those very "pathways" that are erased when formatting), wiping/scrubbing are the same thing and doing that before re-using an SSD is only going to cause pointless wear.

Of course it depends on which maps he's using. If he's running 1.5 50GB should be fine. I don't know how big the 2.0 Black Sea map will be or when it will even be available, he might be able to afford another SSD by then.

Certainly if you haven't got room to have both Windows and DCS on the SSD and all you care about is how fast DCS loads and stream-loads the scenery as you're flying, then sure, put DCS on the SSD. Make sure you put the pagefile on it as well though (or if you have 16GB+ try disabling it), otherwise you'll likely get stutters when data is paged out to it. If at all possible I'd recommended putting both Windows and DCS on the SSD though (on two separate partitions). Even 120GB is enough for two roughly 50GB partitions, which should be enough for each (providing you don't want to install all three versions of DCS that are currently available)

There's no reason to wipe a drive before reformatting it to re-use it and if it's a SSD that's just going to cause unnecessary wear. If you're planning to sell it, give it to someone or throw it away then it might be worthwhile but I'd look at whether the manufacturer provides a way to erase the drive rather than overwriting the data with something like Eraser. If the SSD supports encryption, just changing the encryption key should be sufficient to make the data inaccessible.

Congrats ebabil, enjoy :)

Thanks for the extra pics Warhog, they show very nicely what you've done and will be very useful to refer to when I try and knock something up :thumbup:

A FFB stick would be awesome as well. For now I'll be sticking with my FFB2 (I plan to combine two and add a curved extension sometime) for helos as a spring stick is no fun for those. I guess a spring less stick which stays in place through friction might be an alternative, as sometimes I experiment with my FFB2 without blocking the sensor, so the motors are deactivated and the stick moves with the slightest touch, which seems a bit closer to how light helos work compared to the resistance from the motors. The friction is a bit too low like that though and the stick is liable to move by itself or if you knock the table, but something a bit stronger could work well I think. Maybe use magnets to hold it in place, which are deactivated whilst holding the trim button.

Well not everyone already has a Cougar or Warthog (especially new simmers) and even those who do might like to buy a better quality alternative. Many people seem to settle for the Warthog as it's arguably the best option currently available but that doesn't mean they think it's good value or quality. I don't know about licences, maybe if they made a generic western HOTAS which has the right controls but without actually calling it an A10/F16 HOTAS they could avoid this.

I'd definitely buy a VKB HOTAS if they make one with a A10/F16 style grip, with the necessary number of hats/coolies. I refuse to spend hundreds of pounds on the Warthog considering how cheaply it's been built and would love to get something with decent metal gimbals.

I want to go back to my home planet but my spaceship is currently being held in Nevada, so I want to go to Nevada to get it.

Great videos. Looking at how you've utilised that small space got me thinking about building a cockpit with the monitor on the ceiling and the seat lying on the floor, as I have plenty of wasted vertical space in my room. I'd even have the feeling of being pressed back into the seat that way and the fear of being killed when it all collapses on top of me :)

Very inspirational work, thanks for the ideas. For those of us without many tools or CNCs, this looks like a great material to work with. Did you just glue the black fascia onto the back box and leave the back open for access or have you screwed the fascia on? If so, how did you manage that?

It would be great if it was possible for teachers to observe from an in-cockpit view, rather than an external view, even for single-seat aircraft. I wonder if ED could add this?

I read somewhere that just because x amount of VRAM is in use when playing a game, it doesn't mean that game is actually using or needs to use that much. Not sure what they meant, maybe it just doesn't efficiently clear out unused textures if there's free VRAM it can use but if DCS works fine with 2GB you have to ask what is using the extra 5GB on your card and is it actually making a real beneficial difference.

Interesting. Have you got a source for the claim that the page file being on an SSD will cause problems due to trimming, as if that were true I'd think the same would apply to game files being on an SSD and if that were true, there's not much point to them? Certainly I wouldn't be surprised to see problems if DCS was paging to a HDD pagefile, as they're so slow in comparison to RAM. Of course, SSDs are still a lot slower than RAM but much faster than HDDs in both transfer speeds and access times, so I would expect less issues, if any, with the pagefile on them.

I've never had Windows create a swapfile if I disable it. Whilst DCS might not need one, depending on how much RAM you have, other games and programs will have issues even if there's sufficient RAM and it would be a pain to keep enabling/disabling it (especially it requires a reboot) so putting it on an SSD is the best option, so that it's available when needed without running on a relatively slow HDD. With 16GB RAM I run a fixed 8GB swapfile and haven't had any problems.

After updating to the latest OB, I launched DCS and went into the settings to check and reset the controls for each plane. Then I went into the other settings and adjusted some of them. When clicking OK, it just went to a black screen and was still like that a couple of minutes later, so I killed DCS manually. The log appears to show the problem "GUI debug.traceback: stack traceback:". I had successfully OK'd out of the settings after adjusting the controls for a few planes, so that I could check it had saved the changes before I did the rest, so it's probably something to do with the other non-control settings that was the problem. The Customised Cockpit dropdown for the UH1H is completely empty, unlike all the other aircraft which at least show "Default", so maybe it's something to do with that. Having said that, I just re-launched DCS and went and clicked on the Customised Cockpit setting for each aircraft I have installed and it was fine when I clicked OK this time. The dcs.log.old is the one where it crashed/locked up and the dcs.log is where I relaunched it and it didn't. System specs in sig. Logs.zip

That's not the same problem at all.

If you're considering a wired open-back headset I can recommend the Samson SR850. Cost about £30 and reviews have described them as the best cans under £100. You'll need to sort out your own mic though, I used some Velcro to attach one I took from a cheap headset (need to upgrade it really) to the round bit on the side with the logo on and I've attached a gyro tracker and battery on the top but you could fit a TrackIR clip on the side instead. http://www.samsontech.com/samson/products/headphones/sr-series/sr850/

I recall I had the same problem firing the Vikhr in DCS 1.2. Seems to be specific to the Training missions, perhaps caused by the fact they use Space to advance the training. I'll try and find my old thread.

I'm happy about everything you said Capt Zeen[emoji106]

My Asus Z97-A BIOS doesn't even let me disable HPET, so the only options I have are to force it to be used in Windows or not.

AF 16x doesn't really impact performance though does it, I always understood that AA was the troublesome one, so why not max out AF?

If you right click on the DCS icon (or maybe the exe) you should find a "disable/ignore DPI" option which I recall I had to set for my Dad's X-plane, as he increases the font size for desktop use. Give that a go.

Thanks but enabling NET 3.5 didn't help and I'm running as Admin so already have full permissions. I remembered someone said they had to repair VS 2013 after installing it though, so I tried that (both x86 and x64) and that fixed it. So it seems there are two issues, the fact that DCS installs VC 2012 when it needs VC 2013 and the fact that after installing VC 2013 it needs to be repaired before it works. I don't know if there's any way for the DCS installer to automate the second step though.