Cobra847

How hard can it be to model the entire cockpit, exterior, texture it in extremely high fidelity, create the liveries, animate it, create damage models, collision models, crew animations, new visual features... [..insert artist related task here].. and ship all of that in a polished state? :P My obnoxiously sarcastic point is that resources are finite. In a vacuum, adding a pilot cockpit body is easy. With a long laundry list of improvements, corrections and changes to be made - it becomes less trivial. Trust me, we'd love to have it done and dusted already! :) Viggen body not being available yet is a sore spot though. :(

Just because one can see the bug in the wild, does not mean you can identify the cause. :) We understand that it happens. Reproducing it while debugging is another story.

It's correct in strength.

Crashes are quite limited and not really very widespread. Combinations of heavier performance impact, DCS stability, F-14 stability, and random luck of the draw hardware/driver/et al. wise yields frequent crashes on some systems. E.g.; there is not really a PAL crash. We did a distributed heavy load test across 30+ different clients/machines and could not reproduce. Yet- it's consistent for others. We'll obviously work to eliminate all of the crashes emanating from the F-14, but a big stumbling block for us at present is that the ED protection system does not provide us with any crash logs (instead, the application simply quits ("disappears")). ED has been informed and is working on a solution.

Everyone gets double the amount of shirts they ordered.

Time to receive will be somewhat variable due to the post system unfortunately. Please get in touch if you have nothing within the next 14 days (EU).

Our sounds are sounds directly sampled from a running F-14B. In a way it's ironic, because they're the most "authentic" samples we use today.

That's a workaround for a core DCS issue. We have to disable external sounds selectively in order to avoid hitting a hardcoded sound limit. Unfortunately, it takes a while for them to kick in after switching to external view. It's on the list, obviously- but it's non trivial.

You're making a number of pretty egregious assumptions in your post. Particularly, that; The sounds are final. Echo-19 is the ultimate authority on what a "moddable" sound set looks like. (Surprise: different developers implement things differently) Sounds named "flyby" are meant for flyby exclusively. (Gosh, we're so incompetent!) - how could we let something so bad slip by!? Every time I step into this thread things get more ridiculous. Give us a chance to work through our roadmap.

Nothing has changed in the F-14 performance wise (at least in our benchmarks).

I made an error in reading our repository changelog when I was compiling the release changelog. Those changes are in our more experimental branch that has not passed QA yet. I followed up with bad info in the thread just after thread launch- sorry.

We've launched hundreds of bugfixes since launch, in 2 months. We're really trying our best. There is a capacity limit to our team, especially if we take on bigger changes (like the aforementioned input layer restriction change). It then becomes a more stepwise process where you get one patch (like the previous) without any changes, and the next one having more/major changes.

Amongst other things.

Yes

The weight is accounted for directly in the flight model, but won't show up properly in those dialogues since their implementation is "custom".

Fix for this will appear in the May 8th patch.

We are making a very big systemic change to the codebase to disallow this in a future update, but it's still in an experimental branch and needs to go through more QA before we merge it into release.

Thanks for the kind words! :) Setting textures to medium will load the next mipmap in the texture mip pyramid, significantly lowering vram usage, memory bandwidth and cache misses. Beyond that, however, there isn't really a mechanism in DCS for us to deliver a lower detail cockpit through the options. In general, it would also take us a lot of time to create such a cockpit (we'd have to rebake all of our normals). We're pretty happy with performance at present. I know it can be painful on mid-range and in VR, but it was a real challenge to deliver quality while at the same time having it be a big, complex (shape and texture wise) aircraft. That unfortunately pushes hardware requirements up though.

I meant it more as a curiosity. :) The likely primary reason that the F-14 is more CPU bound on the render thread is due to it having a significantly higher object count. The F-14 cockpit in the pilot's position (with manual culling) incurs 130+ drawcalls, while the Hornet is closer to 45. This is due to things like the pilot models and higher actual cockpit complexity (switches, knobs, total size even, et al.) and can't really be optimized away.

If you're curious to see how fps is impacted by CPU throughput (drawcalls): place 50 F-18s on the tarmac, put the camera 500m away, note FPS- and do the same but replace F-14's with Hornets. The F-14 should yield much superior FPS, despite more triangles and heavier textures. Optimization is a complex topic. The F-14 will lose 1:1 with everything else due to geometric complexity and how heavy handed we were on the quality, but at the same time it will win in a scenario where many aircraft are on screen at once.

Thanks! All of these dumps are consistent with a DCS bug that causes a multicrew crash. It's fixed internally, but I have no information whether it will be hotfixed or not.

The cost may be prohibitive to you guys, which would suck. We price things to run exactly even off of the merchandise when it's a pre-order bonus. (which now obviously is a negative since we're doubling up on production) But it's a good idea and something to investigate further.

Right now we're operating under the assumption that this is a DCS bug and it may already have been fixed internally. We're continuing to investigate to ensure that it is in fact so.

We'll make this more unforgiving soon - with hook skip bolters and hook damage.

if you get a non-hard crash (i.e. you get a dialogue box of some kind) can you please upload your crashdump? It would be very helpful!