NoCarrier

Sounds good, Ilya. And remember, your Kickstarter is already over the finish line. Do some good work with the limited means at your disposal now, and the money will come. Don't lose heart. EDIT: Although I do think Hans-Joachim's reasoning below is sound. And obvious. Be prepared for a whole lot of $1 pledges if you go that way.

Actually, I don't think it's a bad idea at all; to call off the campaign and return half a year or a year later for another attempt. No-one can deny that DCS as a combat flight simulator platform has some issues that need resolving in the following months—EDGE and the current multiplayer instability being just a couple of examples. The hardcore simming crowd knows this, and I have a feeling it's been mostly this crowd that has been pledging.

Come on, Ilya, you have stretch goals set at several hundred thousand dollars. Several hundred thousand dollars worth of pledges for a new product in a genre that has basically become niche, as you yourself pointed out in one of your videos. If you take a look at the most succesful video game Kickstarter to date, you'll notice that the biggest ones raised about two million dollars, three million at the very maximum. All of them by developers with a widely recognized name in the video game industry. All of them in genres that are mainstream—RPGs, adventure games, and space combat games. I took one look at your stretch goals, and I knew your chances of making even one of them were pretty slim. I still pledged, but I'm sorry to say, I don't think you were very realistic in setting them. Honestly, I think at this point you need to be realistic about the fact that you're not going to rake in another several hundred thousand dollars. Start thinking about how to squeeze every development second you can from the dollars that were pledged. Your Kickstarter campaign for a WWII combat flight simulator made it with a comfortable margin. That alone is a great accomplishment, and indicates that your name does carry some weight. It wasn't the promo material that convinced me, and I'm sure that goes for most of us. Oh, and cut back on the number of free aircraft modules. No-one wants to feel like a sucker. But you knew that.

You're kidding, right? Because in my experience, the DCS World dogfighting AI is dumb as a bag of nails. The only saving grace is that the AI is not subject to the same laws of physics that you are (i.e., simplified flight and damage modeling), which allows them to fly at top performance always. Thinking back, Battle of Britain/Mig Alley had some of the best dogfight AI I've ever seen. The flight modeling wasn't up there with DCS now, obviously, but the AI did put up a fight. Falcon 4.0's AI is better too, as it's pretty clueless in the vertical but at least it flies with a purpose. All I see in DCS is AI opponents flailing about. That's probably those "surprise manoeuvres" you're seeing. All in my not so humble opinion, of course.

In the cockpit, there are a couple of tags displaying the serial number 44-84847, which would make this particular Mustang part of Block 25-NT from NAA's Grand Prairie, Texas plant. Contrary to common belief, not all Mustangs produced there were P-51Ks with the Aeroproducts propeller. I'll have to do some further digging in the literature to answer your question on the antennas. I'm not privy to the answer to your first question.

You'd be surprised how much space I have on my harddrive. Besides, how much space would you really need for western Europe? A few gigabytes?

Poor decisions making (like not including a few airbases where Allied air forces can operate from) will slow the Kickstarter down even more. Excuse me that I don't put too much faith in promises for the distant future. I've heard it all before.

Eddie, if you could tell us which texture in particular is missing, we could grab it from an earlier version installation and see whether adding it back in fixes the oroblem.

I did some reading in the English Mi-17 manual, and it might have something to do with the APU being in generator mode. This is done through the STBY GEN switch on the right side panel. I'll have to check.

I can't get the engines to restart after repairing. I have the APU running, all three fuel pumps on, overhead engine stop levers disengaged, engine select switch either to the left or right, and engine crank switch in the upper position for a normal start. The engines just won't spool up—at all. Does anyone know what the issue might be?

You can't. Apparently, ED thinks bullseye calls are too difficult for the FC3 jet jockeys.

I'm super duper confused right now, because I just noticed (after faffing about with the Huey for a few months) that SPI behavior seems to have changed. I seem to remember that you could designate a SPI through the TGP (with TMS Up Long, obviously) and that the SPI would stay on the point you designated no matter where the TGP was looking. You could use China Hat Forward Long to slave your TGP back onto the SPI. Now, this doesn't work anymore, as the SPI moves right along with the TGP to wherever its pointing. When you boresight the TPG with China Hat Aft Short, the SPI is reset back to the steerpoint, just like it would do with the TMS Aft Long (SPI to Steerpoint) command. This means, for example, that when my TGP hits gimbal limits, I'm pretty much ****ed if I haven't put down a markpoint on the target. In the past I could just boresight the TGP and hit Slave All to SPI to get eyes on my target again. I can sorta see the reasoning, as you can now put the TGP on a moving target and the SPI will be on top of it at all times. However, I feel very strongly this is not how it worked in the past. Can anyone confirm I'm not going nuts?

The DCS: A-10C entry in the list of titles has fallen into disuse, so binding a TrackIR profile to this entry won't do diddly-squat. You'll need to use the Black Shark entry for DCS World and all its modules. No, I don't know why either. Would be nice if NaturalPoint fixed it, but it's no big deal if you're aware of the issue.

I can't think of any other (quasi-)modern jet sim out there with jets that are even easier to land than the F-16 in Falcon 4.0. Green donut on the AOA indexer, 3° glideslope, FPM on the touchdown point (and on the AOA staple), and don't forget to flare. Bob's your uncle. Same goes for the A-10C, save that the HUD doesn't show an AOA staple when the gear's down.

No. At least not at the time Joe Bill Dryden wrote his famous Semper Viper series of articles in Code One magazine. There's an article in there in which Dryden is lamenting the fact that the HUD of the F-16 is not a primary flight instrument, even though it's very suited for that.

Eagle Dyanmics could do padlocking the way Falcon does it, and have the padlock view snap only to objects that are in the center of your view. The players who want it will have their padlocking, and the padlock adverse will have the knowledge the padlock user at least put some effort into it.

I don't think you need to use the laser for ranging at all, seeing that the fire control computer can calculate the slant range just fine by using data from the DTSAS and EGI systems.

Pretty simple. If padlocking hasn't been expressly disabled server-side, people using it are playing by the established rules and thus not cheating. Padlocking may not be to everyone's taste and not very realistic, but the same can be said about respawning, custom loadouts, flawless Teamspeak comms and three minute turnaround times, to name but a few "cheats."

He does that because he can. That's the long and short of it. Ripple those suckers and RTB at Mach 2 for another load of big sticks because, hey, why not? You can bet those Eagle drivers will get a whole lot more selective with their slammers if it would take them an hour just to get on station. But then, I'm enough of a realist to know no pubbie slumming virtual fighter jock would ever play such a mission. For long, anyway.

I don't think inverting the braking axes is what he's talking about. He's talking about axis input sometimes "sticking" when the toe brakes are released: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=100204 http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=95841 I've resorted to using the keyboard wheel brake key ("W") while running up, because otherwise I run the very real risk of careening down the runway with one brake stuck at one-third, to the endless amusement of my multiplayer buddies.

Yup, in the case of the Warthog's two-way switches, only the armed ("up") position of those switches will register as a button press. It seems that the default Warthog profile for the A-10C has some custom Lua scripting in it that allows a switch flipped in any direction to be registered. I would be very interested in knowing how to do something like that. Your first option would be T.A.R.G.E.T., yes. I always found it a little clunky and just resigned myself to the fact that, with my own custom-made profiles, I need to flip a switch twice.

Not a pilot, but I don't think visual approaches and VFR are one and the same. For example, the Wikipedia article on visual approaches states right off the bat that "a visual approach is an approach to a runway at an airport conducted under instrument flight rules (IFR) by which the pilot proceeds by visual reference and clear of clouds to the airport." As far as I can tell, Flamin_Squirrel has it right. The airspace around Schiphol (EHAM) is Class A, for example, which means VFR is just not allowed. ICAO/EASA regulations include a proviso for Special VFR into Class A, but it seems you'll have to have a damn good reason for asking. EDIT: And no, "I'm a VFR pilot and I'll go where I want to!" is not a good reason... ;)

Don't forget to arm both SAS pitch and yaw channels either, as they're also required for EAC/PAC. And yeah, the usual mistake is that people skip the full four minutes of alignment.

In my experience, you can't trust the figures on Wikipedia, at least as far as DCS goes. I can't count the number of times I got zapped by Strelas or Tunguskas at altitudes that Wikipedia says they shouldn't be able to reach.

Thanks, I must've missed that. Seems that with Eagle Dynamics, every patch is two steps forward and one step back.