Fishbreath

The target point element is obviously still in the mission file and parsed/displayed by the game, so once I find the lua element that displays the target point, I'll post it in this thread with instructions for how to integrate it into a mission file.

Maybe tonight I'll dig into the instant action mission file and see if I can find how it's defined. It would be handy functionality to have in the Su-25T—a navigational marker in A2G HUD mode that isn't the crazy-effective wingman lighting up the exact location of targets for you.

Easy to test: lase right in front of the tall, narrow apartment building model, overfly it so the laser goes onto the far side, observe and report.

I fired a pair of S-25L rockets, leaving the launch pods behind. They were on the 2 and 10 pylons. On the 3 and 9 pylons, I had a pair of fuel tanks. I hit my key bind for weapons jettison (Ctrl-J), and the fuel tanks, which were inboard of the empty S-25 launchers and not weapons to boot, dropped before the empty S-25 launchers. I tried it again with rocket pods on the outer pylons, and weapons jettison dropped the fuel tanks first again. I feel like the weapons jettison key bind should never drop fuel tanks, or should drop fuel tanks last--there's a key bind already for jettison external tanks.

I mess with PVI waypoints all the time without playing around in the ABRIS, but that's mostly because I didn't put any ABRIS tasks on my avionics cheat sheet when I wrote it a few months ago, and now I've forgotten how to do everything on the ABRIS except for just using it as a moving map. :P One of these days I'll have to go through the interactive tutorial and learn it again.

That will delete waypoints in the ABRIS, but not from the PVI-800. Has anyone tried something like PVI 800 mode to Edit, select waypoint, Reset, Enter? Also, what's the upside of actually deleting waypoints, anyway? You can edit over top of existing ones, and you can set waypoint order to skip points you don't want to visit.

I haven't given this a try yet (if I get some Ka-50 time in tonight I will), but I'm considering a full-on autopilot approach: use route mode to line up on a Shkval target, and use altitude and onto the target.speed to control range of release. It would only be good for one pass at a time, but it would mostly take away the difficulties in flying the aiming pipper onto the target.

That's amazing. I wonder if it can be done with a PVI-800 target point instead of just a target datalinked to self.

Some quick testing last night suggested that a waypoint set to 'Fly over point' in the ME yields a point that doesn't show up in ENR mode in the Su-25T. A waypoint set to 'Turning point' does. Is this expected behavior?

I guess I'll try the mission with an AI wingman tonight or tomorrow night—if I get target diamonds then, that should be pretty reliable confirmation.

The one in the Instant Action mission doesn't seem to be directly over an enemy. It looks like it's just a cue for the waypoint, but IIRC it didn't change when I selected the next waypoint. (I'll have to investigate more later.) If there's a way to mark target areas ahead of time, that would make the aircraft a whole lot easier (for me) to use.

There's a diamond on the air-to-ground HUD at the start of the Instant Action ground attack mission, before any radio calls of targets from the wingman, and I've been trying to replicate that in the mission editor. I have no idea what's causing it to appear—the steerpoint in my mission is the same as the one in the Instant Action mission, but I don't see anything in my mission. Does anyone know how to make it show up?

I only own BS2, but a few of my friends own A-10C, and in making missions for them, I find that I don't have any of the options for placing non-steerpoints that I do for the Ka-50 (the Target Point tab on Ka-50 groups, for instance). Would there be a tab for A-10C mark points if I owned the sim, or is there a way to make such a tab show up for me, or to place such points in some other way?

I had the same problem with BS2 after updating to 1.2.4. I had to uninstall and reinstall everything to get it working again.

I have a non-FFB stick, and I get the same problem. I suspect it's something along these lines: 1) I fly the helicopter onto a new attitude, 'fighting' the autopilot to get there. 2) I blip the trimmer. 3) The game logic, rather than holding the new yaw/pitch/bank attitude, holds my new yaw/pitch/bank control inputs. 4) My control inputs are ~20% greater than necessary, because I had to override the autopilot's old attitude hold inputs to get there. 5) The new inputs push the helicopter further in the direction I was maneuvering, because they're stronger than they should be, thanks to #4. Holding the trimmer down disables the attitude hold functionality and gives you something like flight director mode, so you don't get the 'bump' when you fly onto a new attitude and hold it there—the controls are nearly where they should be for the new attitude, so the autopilot's authority is sufficient to hold it. There's another, unrelated jolt I get when I release the trimmer in the middle of dynamic maneuver. That one, I think, is something like this: 1) I'm pushing the nose forward, using more control input than necessary to hold the nose at my desired attitude. 2) I release the trimmer. 3) The helicopter jolts to the nose-down attitude where my control input would be stable, rather than attempting to hold the pitch angle attained when the trimmer was released. In short, it seems to me like the trimmer is functioning exactly as a helicopter trimmer should, sans the autopilot (which is to say, I expect it to function like it seems to in Flight Director mode). The problem is, it seems to be functioning in the same way when the attitude hold autopilot is on (when Flight Director mode is disabled)—as a naive system to hold control inputs at their current positions, rather than as a true attitude hold system. I'm not sure if this is how it's supposed to work or not. If it is, I'll just have to stick with the decidedly non-Russian method of holding the trimmer down through maneuvers.

Give us Crossfire support and better performance.

To be clear, when the procedure says to press the auto-turn and ground-moving-target buttons, it means to turn those off, right?

It could be a couple of things. Potentially the A-10 cockpit is better optimized than the Black Shark 2 cockpit; I notice a framerate hit of a good 10-15fps when looking at a given scene through the cockpit compared to looking at it from an external view. In the Ka-50, you're also usually messing around at levels that the A-10 rarely visits. If you can, maybe benchmark both sitting on the ramp at an airfield?

My final update: turning mirrors off bought me an easy 10-15% improvement in framerates. I cracked 40 fps in my artificial benchmark, stayed in the 27-30 range flying over Sukhumi, and never went lower than 25fps with the Shkval on and pointed at a column of smoke.

I can't recommend those training missions highly enough. The interactivity is simply fantastic.

Or about 125 stone. :P

For price/performance for Black Shark 2, at least, I don't think you can do much better than an overclocked i5 2500k, 8Gb of whichever RAM you prefer, and a Geforce 560 Ti 448 (similar benchmarks to my 6970, cheaper, runs BS2 better if performance threads are to be believed). Honestly, if I were building my PC again, I would have gone with Nvidia cards, not least because SLI seems to actually improve framerates for people.

Well, that's is the best I can do without sacrificing visual quality. Water and civvy traffic to low and HDR off, 4x MSAA, no TSSAA, and everything else to High/On. Tesselation in the Catalyst Control Center is off, and most other things are set to the performance end of the slider. My benchmark is Sukhumi free flight, quickly diving diving down at the factories dead ahead, then flying at 50m over the city and turning on the Shkval. I get 30fps at the top of the dive, 34 in the dive, 25 over the city, and about 23 with the Shkval on. Here's hoping DCS: Nevada brings some of the Crossfire improvements it might.

Obviously you'd know better than me, but from my games-consumer perspective, Nvidia's better dev support and AMD/ATI's usual performance well below what the hardware ought to be capable of is kind of a common factor. The comparative performance thread suggests that if I had an Nvidia card which benchmarked about the same in other games as my 6970, I'd get an easy 10 extra FPS over my current setup. Unfortunately, since I'm not about to go buy an Nvidia card to prove myself right, I'll just have to deal with it. I'm not exactly swimming in helo sim choices here. :P

I've got a pair of 6970s, and right now I'm trying to squeeze more performance out. So far as I can tell, I'm not CPU-limited, Crossfire is indeed worse than a single card, and 30-35fps is what I can expect out of an ATI card of that generation, with less around trees and buildings. The Black Shark 2 relative performance thread seems to suggest the same thing. I suspect that the DCS engine has a ton of Nvidia-specific optimizations that aren't getting ATI equivalents, which is unfair but unsurprising. Most games are that way.