Dombl

I suppose it could be entirely possible they could not name it just "Flaming Cliffs" or "Flaming Cliffs 3" because that would end up too similar to the names of the other titles. Trademark laws are quite a thorny hedge to run through from what I've read.

I don't see what makes you guys think the fix is in anyway improper. It is sufficient, and any more seems like overkill to me. Make a fragmentation zone, find targets in the zone, ignore any that would not take fragmentation damage, use their distance from the center of the zone (and maybe some input from height difference or the like) to determine the chance that the object is hit. Optionally, if it is hit, draw a trace from the center of the zone to the object, if nothing else is inbetween, it is hit, otherwise the encountered object is hit. If you want extra detail for aircraft, run a hit trace for individual parts (wings, tail, nose). Simple, keeps traces to a minimum, and good enough to simulate something invisible. Anything more would be like simulating what doors are open or closed inside buildings. Sure, it's more realistic, but completely useless and a waste of resources.

Right when I tab back into DCS, during the pause before the game starts running everything again the game shows the textures it uses to construct the various HUDs, and I think this is where something goes wrong. When you alt+tab or whatever else causes these symptoms (sometimes the screens are wrong right on mission start), the game probably discards the texture from memory or something, and the schkval reset probably makes it reload it again. It looks like the symbols that end up on the schkval before that comes from either an incorrectly sized version of this texture, or the wrong coordinates on it, judging by things like the partial compass (?) bits and such spread around the screen. I'm not sure if this could be the game messing up with mipmaps or something, possibly? Whatever the problem is, it seems the smaller resolutions are less prone to having it happen, or reloaded more readily or something.

I tend to get this problem after alt+tabbing and returning to DCS. It seems to be strongly related to the resolution and framerate of the screens, i.e. at 256 I don't remember it happening at all, at 512 it may or may not happen and can be fixed by resetting targetting or even sometimes just by slewing the schkval, at 1024 it will go away on target reset, and at 1024 every frame it might stick no matter what I do.

Yes, it appears sending data-link targets work again, but something goes wrong when you tell your wingman to attack the specific target you assigned. Haven't done any extensive testing, but I think telling him to attack the target's group works at least, so I suppose that works as a workaround to at least make missions more playable for now. Do orders to attack targets by type also take into account targets assigned through data-link, or only targets the wingman "knows" about? Edit: I restored some graphics tweaks again from before the patch trying to minimize the performance loss I'd noticed in the mission I used to test this and the wingmen seem to attack properly now. I suppose the sim was simply too busy when the wingmen tried to lock targets with the schkval and failed? Might be a fluke, but could be worth checking if lowering your settings makes the problem go away.