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all good points, and things that would be nice to see in order to flesh out the 'game' side of the sim. two flight sims that i used to play that did this very well were falcon 4's dynamic campaign (of course) and eurofighter typhoon (where you could hop between pilots) though it seems to me that most of the components for a dynamic campaign are there. wouldn't it be relatively simple to achieve, eg: set up all the friendly and enemy units, and then just let things play out?

this might help? https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/111154/

it'd be nice to see this implemented realistically: introduce two-seater training variants (where they exist) for the planes. also the training version (second seat only perhaps?) could be offered for free as part of DCS:W which might be a nice way to tempt people to buy the full module, if they can get a feel for it first :-)

heh yeah for years now i've wanted to see a full digital simulator world - not just combat vehicles - a massive amalgamation of DCS and all its planes, territory control and logistics similar to Planetside 1, trains from Train Simulator, ground vehicles and deformable terrain from Spintyres, trucks from Euro Truck Simulator, commercial flights and ATC, infantry combat from Arma... a massive simulation spanning the globe, with multiple teams occupying, defending, and attacking territory... controlling resources, organising logistics, creating and breaking alliances... maybe it'll exist in twenty years? ;-)

personally i would like some sensible defaults, because mapping the x/y axes of my warthog throttle to the same axes as the stick is not a sensible default. no mapping at all would be better. still, i realise that ED's time would be better spent working on the game features, and this is something that could be easily provided by the community. i've googled for and found input lua scripts which other users have been kind enough to share, and they've been a great help to me, but these files are scattered across different sites and not immediately obvious for a person new to DCS. i'm not sure what the best solution is, but it seems to me that this is something where DCS players can help each other out. for instance, i'm sure that many of us would like to use your personal TM Warthog configuration for their FC3 planes, i know i would :-) at the very least to kickstart my own configuration efforts. i've been playing for years, but am not active in any online community (apart from refreshing the DCS World forums every day hoping to see the release of EDGE!) so i don't know, but does a DCS wiki exist? a wiki would be a great place for people to share information like this that might take a newbie several hours of trawling the forums to find out...

i think that circumventing directinput would mean needing to effectively rewrite directinput, which is probably highly impractical. you can tell TARGET to start with windows - create a shortcut to targetgui.exe and modify its properties. change the 'run' dropdown to 'minimized' and append the follow parameter to the 'target' textbox: -r path/to/profile you can also call targetgui.exe with the -help switch to see other available commandline parameters.

The reason these switches aren't being detected is because these states are all 'off' states for the switches. This can be seen if you use the Windows game controllers control panel and double-click "Throttle - HOTAS Warthog" and look at the button states. There are limits with the number of inputs per device allowed by DirectInput - I think it's 6 axes, 1 PoV hat, and 32 buttons - so to allow for more than 32 button inputs on the controller DCS have to let commands be mapped to the 'switched off' state of a button as well as the 'switched on' state. Eg. the 3-way autopilot switch is actually two buttons: switch up = button 27 on; switch down = button 28 on; and switch centre = buttons 27 and 28 off. The flaps switch works the same way. DCS's way of getting around this limitation of DirectX seems to be limited to A-10C only at the moment, but it's definitely something that they *could* implement for other aircraft. It's not likely that it's a priority though, because a lot of people will use TARGET to achieve what they want. Sensible defaults should be provided for other planes. Whenever I want to fly I end up flying the A-10C every time because I still haven't gotten around to mapping the controls for my FC3 planes. It would be good to have default mappings for the TM Warthog (and other popular sticks) for the other planes, and to have the functions mapped as closely as possible to the equivalent function in the A-10C. Doesn't need to have every control on the HOTAS mapped, just the important things. Or even a way to speed up the slow process of mapping commands: allow plane profiles to be copied. Eg. I copy my A-10C profile to my Su-27 profile. Any shared commands (all control axes, brakes, NWS, etc) get copied over, leaving me to set up only those commands which are unique to the aircraft I'm configuring.

omg I had no idea! nice one - thank you! FYI I've had decent results recently with the latest facetracknoir and DCS world, using a separate laptop as the facetracknoir client that's doing the processing and sending the data to facetracknoir running on the DCS computer. I have both computers plugged into a little gigabit switch so the network latency is down to 1ms max. The laptop webcam is only 30Hz, so it's nowhere near as good as my previous setup that used freetrack and a wii remote, but with facetrack you're up and running much more quickly. Here's how it looks (also have helios running on lower two screens - both are touchscreens):

Won't that data have changed the second you started the mission the first time? All the unit states, the weather fronts will have moved, etc. It'll need to reset all of these things to the way they were at the start of the mission, and the easiest way to do that is to unload everything from memory and reload it all from scratch. Regarding loading times, I fired up my old Steam copy of DCS:A-10C standalone last night, and was surprised to find that loading times were worse. Now this could have a lot to do with Windows optimising frequently-used programs, of course, but I found performance of DCS: World to be better than the same mission in DCS:A-10C. Once you've started the simulator once or twice, subsequent load times are faster I find. I have Windows on SSD and DCS installed on standard HDD and the simulator loads in about 30 seconds. Also performance (slightly off-topic) is something I've seen people say is worse in World compared to the original standalone. The only time performance is better for me in the original standalone compared to World is in single screen mode with all graphics settings at low or off. With the current build of World I get a 1 - 2 FPS difference between each of the three graphics presets. System specs: Q9550 @ 3.7GHz, HD 6950 2GB @ 6970 clocks, 6GB RAM, 1920x2280 screen res, SoftTH, Helios, TM Warthog

Just experienced a very strange problem. I launch DCS World Multiplayer from the start menu, choose a server and connect, and then the game starts loading. After a little while loading I see the map appear behind my Helios overlay, and then, Arma 2 launches and DCS World exits! How is this even possible?! :-D My Arma 2 is a Steam version, and my DCS World is not a Steam version. I also have a lot of crap running in the background - I just wanted to take a break from work and have a little fly around :-) I'm also running Helios and SoftTH. Using a 1x2 monitor layout. I updated DCS World to the latest version yesterday. Stranger still, when I right-click the Steam icon in the system tray, it thinks the last game I played is "Borderlands DLC: Claptrap's New Robot Revolution" - which I do not own (I do own Borderlands though). Is there something strange going on with the new Steam integration? A potential buffer overflow due to my low available RAM, causing a random Steam call to occur? I'm sure this will sort itself out if I close some programs or reboot, but I thought I should notify you of it because it could be a potential security issue if the game can launch other processes in low memory conditions. (Full system specs: Q9550 @ 3.6GHz, HD 6950 2GB with unlocked shaders, 6GB RAM, SB X-fi platinum, HOTAS Warthog, Logitech G19, Logitech Formula Force EX (I use pedals for rudder and wheel buttons for electrical panel switches), two monitors in 1x2 layout - resolution 1920x2280)