pocococo

Let's have flyable dragons too! Just kidding. Big ships might be too complex for individual or few players to manage... I would say "Maybe patrol boats?" but how would such little vessels meaningfully relate to helicopters and jets?

I'm getting away with just the stick twist on my X52 Pro. I just completed the first (12-mission) Black Shark campaign this past weekend. I've also flown around a bit in the Huey. I own a set of Saitek rudder pedals, and I've used them with Black Shark before, but I'm not using them now because I've switched to a standing desk for my PC. Having the rudder on stick-twist probably requires more manual dexterity because you've got to control another axis while doing everything else on the stick. And using the pedals is certainly a different feeling due to the larger scale of motion and the need for hand-leg coordination. I'd say invest in a quality stick (like the X52 Pro) with a good twist axis first, and see how that feels to you. It's possible to fly the sims with just a good HOTAS, and then it's always an easy upgrade to add the rudder pedals when you have the cash / want more immersion.

You want control of naval cannons and guided missiles? : )

I just came to the forums to find out how to turn this off (the mission-start zooming). I can't believe it's been this way for years and there isn't a way to turn it off. I use an axis for zoom and cannot interrupt the automatic zoom-out, so I have to sit and wait for the game to "warm up" each time. It's getting VERY annoying.

On the 'Controls' page, I'd like to be able to navigate with down/up/left/right arrow keys rather than having to click each binding with the mouse, and to clear bindings with a keyboard key (like Delete) rather than having to clicking the Clear button. This would make it much faster to undo the default, unused bindings when I were setting up my controller. For example, I would go to Ka-50 Sim and then Ins Cyclic Stick. I would then be able to arrow-key around all the key bindings for all of my controllers, pressing Delete on each one that I didn't want set, and then proceed to set up the bindings that I wanted. Would also be nice to be able to press Enter on a binding to *add* an assignment. This would make it much quicker to get all my controller bindings set up.

The screenshots Wags posted of the new mission selector made me remember that I haven't found a way to go back and play previously completed missions in a campaign. IIUC, I am currently only allowed to play the "next" uncompleted mission. I was wondering if Eagle could fit this feature into the new mission selector (which is looking great!)

I was playing a generated mission just now, and after I died I noticed that one of the NPC trucks spawned on the top of a house : / His apparent coziness on the roof was a great nuisance to the other truck drivers in his unit on the ground behind him, who seemed to want to get a move on. (The truck on the roof didn't move at all while I was browsing through the NPC units) truck-on-roof.trk

+1 has this been fixed yet, or worked on? Either fixing the map to display in the same space as "Center", or allowing us to configure the map viewport like Loophole suggested, would be perfect. EDIT: (This issue is annoying because 40% of my map is offscreen, making it impossible for me to pan the map all the way to the right and see all the terrain. Also whenever I click the "Center on Me" button, the map becomes centered on some point not where I am, which is frustrating when I'm trying to find myself : )

After buying the Huey module and playing the training missions, I gave up on the Huey because I didn't see any new transport-related techniques in training. So I didn't even get as far as the campaign. Then someone in another forum thread reminded me that the Huey module will focus on transport missions, so now I will go back and try out the campaign. But for a while I was thinking that the module was just another heli with some guns (and I already have the Black Shark to fly when I want that). So my request (or reminder; I'm sure there have already been plans to do this) is: please add some transport-related training missions, perhaps once you have added mechanisms to the sim that directly involve transport, such as sling loading. This will help retain people like me who have short attention spans :)

Thanks for the reminder! I've played the Huey beta a bit, and didn't see anything about transporting people. The training missions so far seem to be about flying it and using its weapons. I see that the product page mentions transport missions, but it seems like a rather small bullet point on the page for what I would imagine would be a rather large change in gameplay. The Huey page even says that "coop mode for crew members of the same helicopter" will be saved for "a later update", and I would think that meaningful infantry units and transport gameplay would be a bigger change to the game than "coop mode" would be. You'd also probably need better enemy AI that knows (?) how to respond to infantry transports, and better friendly AI that knows how to clear/defend a LZ. Fastroping would probably be a good bit of work to the game engine, too. So, yeah. I hope that, Huey or otherwise, transport gameplay will be as rich and fulfilling as the blow-stuff-up gameplay that we have today. EDIT: (I should go spend some time on the Huey campaign to see how far they've progressed with this.)

I would like ED to produce a DCS module where the player pilots a military transport helicopter (e.g. the Chinook), with the same level of realism as in the Black Shark module. Rather than the blow-stuff-up campaigns of Black Shark, the transport heli's missions would have the player drop troops off or pick them up out of combat zones. Hopefully missions would variously involve fastroping and parachute drops, and transport at land and at sea (onto or off of ships). Transporting squads of infantrymen would involve a whole different set of gameplay challenges than sniping with missiles. Such missions would add a whole different feel to the DCS world. The transport heli role would also give players in multiplayer games another, different way to contribute to their team's victory. Of course this hinges on having more realistic infantry in the game (what's the point of transporting some guys who would otherwise just stand around on the ground looking stupid?), but maybe this could come after ED has further developed infantry AI.

I was starting to wonder if I was supposed to drive my heli to the next FARP on the wheels... that or get out and start shooting with a pistol ; )

Yay! I just came here for the same reason (no time to take off before right engine fire) and there's a fix already! : ) : ) I agree that Eagle should fix this and push a patch ASAP.

No "massive producer", please. All good companies (including game companies, if you want to consider Eagle one) that decide to become big end up pumping out garbage and marketing it as if it were as good as the stuff they started out making. Let the third party developers create gobs of mediocre aircraft modules. Having said that, I do hope that Eagle is able to make an Apache Longbow module.. : )

OP here. Yellonet, I haven't tried it yet, but your activator seems to be exactly what I was looking for! The 5 required files are 14MB (as opposed to an entire DVD or the 900MB of the BS1 download) and could be included easily in the BS2 upgrade installer, or quickly downloaded separately from eagle.ru. Including this in the BS2 upgrade would enable it to do precisely what I asked for initially: accept and activate both (BS1 and BS2) serials, in sequence, with no hanky-panky. Thanks for showing how it can be done. Now if Eagle will just release an official version so that we won't have to download and run strange files from mediafire... : )

I had this problem yesterday. I had to uninstall and reinstall all of DCS to get the BS2 Upgrade to recognize my BS1 installation. You need to be sure to select the right value ("Upgrade from BS1 international key blahblah") in the drop-down *the first time* you install the BS2 Upgrade setup.exe. If you mess this up the first time you install BS2 Upgrade you're screwed and have to wipe DCS clean and start over (or at least I did). I tried installing BS2 again and selecting a different value in the drop-down but it didn't have any effect until I uninstalled DCS and reinstalled everything. Probably something Eagle could and should fix.

I own both Black Shark 1 and the Black Shark 2 upgrade. I do not currently have BS1 installed. Now I would like to play BS2, but it's a hassle - a waste of my time - to have to install BS1 in order to play BS2, when I have no intention of playing BS1. It also means that I have to hold onto the BS1 DVD or download BS1, which again takes up my time and download bandwidth. I would like Eagle to add to BS2 the capability to accept and activate my BS1 key and then my BS2 key in sequence, without having BS1 on the hard drive. This would be much more user-friendly.